IE7’s Default Search: Department of Justice Officials Agree That Google Should Quit Whining

According to marketwatch:

Microsoft’s new search tool ‘respects’ users’ choices: DOJ

Microsoft’s new search feature in the latest version of its Internet Explorer Web browser was reviewed and cleared by Department of Justice officials, regulators said late Friday. Following their review of Internet Explorer 7, officials concluded that Microsoft’s search feature "respects users’ and OEM’s [original equipment manufacturers] default choices and is easily changed." The DOJ has concluded its work on the matter, they said in a court filing made by regulators overseeing the DOJ’s 2001 antitrust settlement with the Redmond, Wash.-based company. Justice workers had also received a complaint about the ability to customize the "first-boot" experience in the upcoming new version of Windows, called Vista. However, Microsoft addressed that issue and "resolved any possible issue" related to Vista, they said.

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Okay, I love you so much Google, you are the first huge web company that thought of putting us first, but this is just lame whining. Especially considering you are locking users into your search with contracts with OEMs and with Firefox downloads, that do not even let users easily select live.com, Ask.com or MSN search as the search provider.

 

Microsoft should be allowed to set defaults in its own operating system and its own browser as long as it doesn’t lock folks into their choice, and makes it easy to change. You don’t have to pay attention to Microsoft anti-trust compliance, the whole world already is, including less talented companies who can’t compete, but try to win the battle in the court room.

 

You will lose the admiration of the influential people if you act like a Novel or a SUN. After all, you are Google, the mighty Google, whining is for girls, if it was your new CEOs idea to whine, kick him in the rear a few times and tell him to relax, you’re not at Novell anymore Todo.

 

Just a note to my 14 regular readers, Google doesn’t usually behave this way, but they are paranoid about the birth and growth of the live.com platform.

The Microsoft Hyper Release Schedule is Speeding Up

First of all, great job to everyone on the Live.com, both Windows and Xbox, we are starting to see some major output from both teams, and more importantly, it’s all coming at faster release cycles and is forward thinking than some other offerings. (not to mention the delays in some units.)

 

Crossing the two messenger services together are a logical but very important step for the Live Network to be the social networks. By combining messenger and xbox live you’re making a nice gimick for gameplay (finish the game on the cell phone later) and by leveraging two existing services, you’re adding value to both future customers and only doing a bit of work.

 

The Social network of tomorrow consists of people paying a monthly fee to Microsoft for premium live services which has so much cross platform value propositions, making it more attractive. SOE is going to be dwarfed by the Microsoft Platnium service of tomorrow. I always hear about how leveraging products together with a monopoly proven product is illegal, but never the logic behind it–that ads value to the customer. The important part here is that by combining two services together you are creating twofold value which is convient to the customer

 

All inegrated in one account you will get:

Xbox Platnium: An all Access service package.  Think SOE Premium Station pass.

Xbox Live: Access to the core services and many free upgrades.

Messenger Live: Connected with Xbox Live

Conferencing and social network enhancements for the personal and work from home type. (VPN support someday?)

Xbox is going to have some Cross platform MMO offerings. Vanguard just left, most likely because they were going to force Sigil to launch Vanguard Saga of Heros on Vista only machines. (not good, Microsoft should be thinking MMO station type pass that ads value to it’s live chane, and not worried about adding more value to Vista which–let’s face it–is going to fly off shelves and be the top dollar maker for you next year. Office will be next padding pockets.

Xbox-MTV-WMP offering. I don’t know much about Urge yet but this will be wrapped up with Xbox at some point and WMP on the desktop.

 

/o, this is Microsoft’s answer to Google-Apple Ipod/Itunes-Sony-SOE

 

Two quick words of advice:

Make a light version of live for older laptops that some of use still have. Load time freezes my browser some times.

First easy step for Xbox-Windows service merge is to get my user pic’s combined. I still have the dog face on Windows and the Xbox live service has my Oblivion hero logo as my user pic. (I know you don’t want to undercut web cam sales but do it after.)

 

Back to the good stuff, the web cam is not the perfect tool that adds value especially for the work at home types who might have a low key conference they want to have with a possible business partner or customer. These Dad’s will be "getting their kids" an 360 for Christmas.At any rate, get the darn Vista on time and looking great, get live.com tweaked out more in time for it’s vistor boom and keep it up. HD-DVD will defintely be on my list if it’s at 200. At 250, you’ll be losing my business in new games.

 

Time to get back to work!

 

 

Google Ships new product Betas

First let’s start of google trends. This gives the user visual insight into what people are seaching from and the ability to find out what local regrion are interesting in certaint topics.

 

For instance: If you sell widgets, you can find out what regions are searching for widgets and then you understand where your target customers are by region.

 

 

Now we have Google gadgets (upgrade to Google Desktop 4). They’ve got a headstart with gadgets on the desktop against Microsof’ts Vista Operating system sidebar gadgets which which  is at the least 3/4ths a year away. Having said that Microsoft Gadgets is getting help from developers already with the live platform and as of right now, there are 274 Microsoft Gadgets which can only be consumed on the live.com website for now

 

Google Gapminder is a bit different. I don’t understand it completely yet as I haven’t had time to really look but it seems to be a visualized chart of developement trends in each country. I’ll look more into this later and if there are some interesting or useful aspect out there, I’ll certainly post about them.

Google Gapminder – Visualize World Development

 

Google co-op

 

Google Co-op looks to be doing what Zimbio is doing, creating user expertise into certain subjects. Web2.0 is all about user content and the user in general so this is past being an emerging theme. Certainly worth a look, I’ll have to post more as I know more.

 

Patent office will ask the public to “peer review” inventions

From: http://www.boingboing.net/2006/05/08/patent_office_will_a.html

 

"The US Patent and Trademark Office has launched "Peer to Patent," a community patent peer review project. The USPTO is overloaded with patent filings, so it does little or no investigation into patnets before rubber-stamping them, expecting that the courts will sort out who invented what. This changes the patent system from something that promotes invention to something that rewards companies who aggressively sue inventors. "

 

As someone working on my first invention for my company. I have mixed feelings on this one. First of all, the patent system is as slow as growing hair, and there is some opinion that anything gets through. I however think that it will turn companies against each other, and each company will spend millions trying to disprove a patent before it even has it’s fair chance to breath air.

 

This can’t be good for the little guys trying to patent stuff. We’ll see.

 

Microsoft will enter Q&A online market

According to the brand new Microsoft Live QnA blog, Microsoft will soon launch–you guessed it–QNA beta. If you’re interested in signing up, head over to ideas.live.com and then click on QNA, then click on sign me up. Someone they had shared the project’s scope and access to the project posted images and information about the service, and so Microsoft turned on the blog service, and put did an announcement about the service. Dirty rats!! =)

 

From the site:

OOPS!  We hadn’t planned to talk about this yet but some Web pages went live overnight and well, we decided we might as well turn on the blog and give you the straight scoop. You’ll be seeing more on this blog about our team and our product as the days go by. In the meantime here are some more details about what we are doing.

 

And so now we will have a Google Answers, with paid experts, a free Yahoo! Answers, and now a Microsoft QnA. The first two forgot to mention that questions were a part of the equation as well! =) At any rate, according to the QnA blog, this answers engine has been floating around campus for a while, no word on if it was before Google answers or what ever.

From their blog:

A little background…
Once upon a time, there was an intern at Microsoft who had an idea for getting people answers to the questions they needed. He nicknamed it the “hyperengine” and everyone in Web Search used it for internal projects; it was way cool. Then, when he went back to college, the internal discussions started. Shouldn’t we be building a real one?

Grassroots momentum continued and eventually Windows Live QnA was born. We hired the intern back (yes,he graduated) and got another college hire to be core developers of this new idea  — creating a question-answer engine driven by the people.

While, it almost sounds like they are denying they are building a 100 percent carbon copy of all of Google’s offerings while holding a strait face and not even busting up laughing. Very talented indeed!

That dog above looks 100 percent like my dog… If you don’t beleive me, check out my photo album.

 

From the site:

Topics will range from business, health, arts, sports, technology and more.
• Does ivy kill trees?
•  What’s a good, inexpensive moving company in Seattle?
• Any great ideas on getting motivated to exercise?
• What’s the best chocolate chip cookie recipe?
• Can I hook up an Xbox to a PC monitor instead of a TV?

I’ll do a better review once I get my beta account set up.

 

 

360voice.com lets you blog from your Xbox 360! Sweet!!

Just an update on this, Microsoft’s most read blogger, Robert scoble blogged about me calling him, and it’s a shame I was blogging too late at night, because if I would have investigated the service a bit more, I would have noticed that the blogging is limited to just a log of what you have done on your 360. Technically, it’s a web log directly from the 360, but it’s not a great way to discribe what’s happening.  I’d love to see the ability to do Podcasts from your 360 and then link them from your blog, or on it’s own blog, or voice-text engine would be sweet. I’ll keep an eye on future improvements and hopefully there are some nice announcements around the xbox 360 starting Monday. (E3 starts) 

 

 

Who cares if Vista is going to be delayed, I’m going to be blogging with my feet kicked up on the couch soon!! I just now found this:  I’ll do a lenthy review once I learn more. I am so pumped about this! This is going to take podcasting to the next level! Or maybe we can call it 360casting! I am pretty sure Scoble hasn’t seen this yet, so I am going to drop him a line and see what he thinks!

 

Here is my 360blog. I have been wanting to blog about gaming for quite some time, now I will.  This falls in line with some stuff I suggested the live team a while ago. I can’t wait for the ability to consume RSS on the 360, without MCE 2K5. Imagine learning that Scoble or another favorite blogger of yours just posted a new message when your 360 gives you a popup letting you know, much like it currently lets you know about friends signing on. The possibilities go even further if you give it thought..

 

Get the feed to my 360 blog here: http://www.360voice.com/rss.asp?tag=mystopas

 

Update: I just called Robert Scoble to let him know about this, I told him I was waiting on a reason to actually call him.  (I think it’s cool that he has his phone number on his blog) He didn’t know about this ability yet so I am glad I did! He says he will be blogging about it when he gets home (iin an hour)

 

One last thing… I can’t wait to see what will be born at xbox.live.com. If you combine the talents of these two teams I think you come up with something so great, you have to turn your computer off.

 

Update 2. Oh, the service doesn’t look like a full blown blogger–more like an activity log-I am really sleepy so I’ll check it out tomorrow.

Google Rumored To Be Improving it’s Health Offering Next Week

Google is rumored to be improving its ability at organizing–quite possibly–the most important information to mankind–information on personal health. We should look for the product or an announcement next week during Google’s annual press conference. Marissa Mayer reportedly dropped a hint about this to Kevin Maney of USA TODAY–where he has written about it in his blog.

 

Kevin Maney: Not long after, I asked her why Google doesn’t have more vertical offerings, like for health. Those tend to give users better results in a specific area.

 

I am not sure if he knows, but Google already offers a health portal of sorts in the form of their directory.

 

Kevin continued with: "Anyway, Marissa then said, "Health is an interesting one — keep your eye out for that next week." But that was about it. Considering that hint, though, an announcement of a Google Health site seems a good bet. Rumors about just such a site have been bouncing around the Web on sites such as SearchEngineWatch."

 

Marissa is not only brilliant, but easy on the eyes as well! 😉

 

 

Unless there is an emerging relationship with WebMd. What I mean is: Is Google Linking to this info, or creating its own version of Web MD. Even Web MD doesn’t the funds to match the hyper production of Google. If they are creating their own portal for users to exchange thoughts and remedies, I expect all Internet based health Information company stocks to take a dive tomorrow or as soon as the details become obvious.

 

So far, they have a health directory, with a "healthy" amount of information:

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Addictions (3060) Aging (134) Alternative (6308) Animal (3201) Beauty (661) Child Health (815) Conditions and Diseases (18745) Dentistry (644) Directories (21) Disabilities (1306) Education (182) Employment (605) Environmental Health (399) Fitness (1240) Healthcare Industry (6959)

History (9) Home Health (404) Insurance (175) Medicine (13452) Men’s Health (342) Mental Health (6256) News and Media (263) Nursing (1655) Nutrition (663) Occupational Health and Safety (749) Organizations (180) Pharmacy (6610) Products and Shopping (60) Professions (1492) Public Health and Safety (3805)

Publications (205) Regional (11) Reproductive Health (2521) Resources (318) Search Engines (11) Senior Health (1021) Senses (338) Services (83) Specific Substances (873) Support Groups (514) Teen Health (82) Travel Health (110) Weight Loss (383) Women’s

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With the aging portion of my family still aging, I am definitely looking forward to this. I look forward to your thoughts!