More on the Google Books Settlement

The Google Books settlement is generating a lot of ink over the past few days, with Microsoft wading into the waters.  According to PC Magazine, Microsoft filed objections with the Southern District of New York, arguing that Google had no right to “restructure copyright,” and that any changes should be handled by Congress.  (Microsoft posted a copy of its brief on its “Microsoft on the Issues” blog.)

Microsoft joins a fairly heavy-hitting group which objects to the settlement, including the American Law Institute (which is responsible for the various Restatements), Amazon, DC Comics, and the American Society of Media Photographers, just to name a few.

Yeah, it’s ironic that Microsoft is complaining about competition given its track record, but don’t discount its sway.  (And also don’t discount it’s probably ticked that Google is stirring things up in Europe.  Speaking of Europe, Europe isn’t so thrilled with the settlement, either…)  As Wired magazine pointed out a few months ago, Microsoft has the DOJ’s ear to a certain degree.  And given that the DOJ is investigating the settlement for competitive harm, I’m not so certain that the settlement is completely safe.

(As for whether Congress should be the ones deciding this topic, perhaps Microsoft and the others are right, but it’s not like I trust Congress to keep consumer interests in mind.  The DMCA should be proof enough of that….)

Bing!

I’m not entirely sure I like the name of Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing.  Actually, I’m pretty sure I don’t.  But, whatever, it’s new and shiny, and everyone’s playing with it.

My first impression is that it’s fine, generally no worse than Yahoo!, but probably not quite as “accurate” as Google.  (For what it’s worth, I’m beginning to feel that Google’s accuracy is leaving a lot to be desired.)

However, there’s one thing that I think really needs a little tweaking.  The interface is really pretty, with lots of pictures and interactive features (which makes it all the more impressive that it loads so quickly), but the froufrou aspects do have the potential to get in the way of the stated function, which is searching.  For example, using Firefox, if you go to bing.com, and just click on Images, you get a list of things that are similar to the background image.  All well and good.  But say you don’t want your results filtered, so you click on the safe search moderate “change” link, and this is what you get:

It seems to work properly, however, in IE7:

Will Bing become my search engine of choice?  I doubt it, but not because of its functionality.  Indeed, I very strongly want there to be search competition against Google, because of what that monolith has done to the advertising market.  No, I’ll be sticking with Yahoo! for my searches because I have been feeling ill at ease about using Google so much, what with their data retention policies.  According to this Lifehacker post, it looks like Yahoo! is the clear winner, retaining data for only 90 days, while Google holds on to it for 9 months, and Microsoft holds on to it for 18 months(!!).  (I should note, that the 18 months figure comes from MS’s statements vis-a-vis Live.com, which Bing replaces.  I doubt that MS will change that policy just because they’re launching a rebranded search engine.)

Windows 7 RC1

So I finally downloaded and installed the release candidate of Windows 7 Ultimate.  (Gizmodo has a bunch of resources on how to get it and make it work for you.)

Anyway, after a couple of hours of playing with it, these are my initial impressions:

1.  It was nice to be able to dual-boot Windows 7, rather than have it replace my Vista install altogether, a decision I am very glad I made, which I’ll get to in a moment.

2.  The included wallpapers are quite nice, especially the infamous “trippy” ones.  And the ability to have the desktop images rotate in a slideshow is something that I have always wanted to have implemented.  Still not included, however, is the ability to have different desktop images on each of your monitors.  This is something, by the way, that is possible when using DisplayFusion, which is a very nice piece of software.

3.  I’m not used to the new taskbar, but I’m sure I’ll get there eventually.

4.  For the moment, my internet connection is through a Netgear WG111v3 USB adapter, which didn’t work quite right even after installing the latest drivers from CD-ROM.  (I like how Netgear offered to let me download the latest ones rather than install off the CD-ROM, but isn’t that rather difficult if the adapter is your only method of connecting?)  But there is a nifty little up-arrow icon on the bottom right hand of the screen, that lets you take a look at all your connected devices.  Windows 7 recognized that the adapter wasn’t working correctly, and right-clicking on the icon gave me the option of having Windows figure it out.  Which it did.  No problem.  Definitely +1 on that.  

5.  Netflix doesn’t recognize Windows 7 as a valid operating system, and as such, you can’t stream movies.  Massive fail on Netflix’s part, if you ask me, because I suspect that it’s probably just a bit of code that says, essentially (and it’ll become quite apparent that I’m not a programmer here), “IF NOT Windows Vista; Windows XP; or OS X –>THEN FAIL.”  There is no reason, from everything I’ve read about Windows 7, that would make it incompatible with Netflix, because the guts of 7 are apparently the same guts as Vista, just tweaked to be more efficient.  I checked online for some solutions, but if there’s a solution that makes sense to me, I don’t see it.  One thing I thought about before falling asleep last night, however, is making use of the virtual XP environment to try Netflix that way.  Probably won’t work, though, as it seems that is the weakest feature of the whole bunch.

6.  Watching video on Hulu seemed to be slightly choppier than I had experienced through Vista.  There’s no real way to quantify this, it just seemed just a tidge more jittery.

7.  And, finally, somehow I have sound in Windows 7 but not in Windows Vista anymore.  (I use the HDMI-out from my computer’s nVidia card to provide video and sound to one of my monitors.)  Usually, a reboot solves the problem when the sound isn’t working right in Vista, but not for right now.  When I have more time, I’ll play with it some.

All in all, it isn’t the life-changing experience I expected, given the fawning reaction of the geeklords on the internets.  It’s nice, sure, but as I’m not terribly displeased with Vista, it’s not that big a deal to me.  Maybe after a little more playing, my song will change.

What I do find compelling is what Microsoft is doing here.  Vista is not a bad OS, but its reputation was slaughtered by the press.  (Okay, okay, there were a lot of problems at launch, but those problems have largely been rectified.)  Microsoft could have just let things stand and added improvements to Vista incrementally, as it did with XP, and left well enough alone.  But facing pressures from Apple and even Linux (to a small extent, and mostly in the Netbook arena) it didn’t do that.  Instead it announced a new OS, and let everyone in the world, pretty much, play with it.  It’s like Christmas in May.  Those who play with it seem to like it an awful lot, and will likely be willing to shell out whatever upgrade fees will apply to update their machines by the time the release candidate finally dies in June of 2010.  (Actually, beginning in March, the machines running the release candidate will begin to shut down every two hours, which is going to drive people nuts.)  

My only concern, and it is the concern that I think will determine whether Microsoft has really “changed,” is that we’re playing with the Ultimate edition, and it’s already been announced that the virtual XP mode won’t be available in the Home Premium flavor.  What else will be stripped?  Hopefully not the rotating desktops and sound themes.  But we’ll see.

Battle Royale, Part the First

I just wrapped up a response to the USPTO on a trademark registration I’m working on, and to celebrate, I thought I’d do a little thought experiment.  I’ve noticed how Microsoft’s latest ads are getting the Apple-ites all riled up, which is funny in itself.

If you haven’t been paying attention, Microsoft has been running “Laptop Hunters” ads (where are Grant and Jason?) which show that laptops running Windows are cheaper than Apple’s laptops.  First, there was Laurena, and then the Giampaolo guy, and most recently, an 11-year-old kid with his mother (Lisa and Jackson).  (Am I the only one who thinks of Amy Sedaris when I look at her?)

To counter the obvious differential in up-front cost, Apple fans like to say something to the effect of “Look what you get built in with OSX, though!  To get your crappy Windows machine up to speed with my beautiful Mac, you need to spend more money, and then your cost savings are non-existent!  So, nyah!”

It’s not a bad argument to make.  After all, people buying cars are urged to take “total cost of ownership” into account when making purchasing decisions.  (Edmunds.com has a nice little tool called “True Cost to Own”, for example.)  After all, that $15,590 Mazda3 may cost less up front than this $16,260 Honda Fit, but after all is said and done, over five years, you come out just about even.   (See also, the Total Quality Index issued by Strategic Vision.)

So Apple has a point.  Maybe OSX comes bundled with so many goodies that the price differential disappears.  Of course, there’s one very noisy contingent that gets ignored in all these comparisons: all the various flavors of Linux distros: Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, Linux Mint, OpenSuse, et cetera et cetera.  There are hundreds of variants, and almost none of them cost one penny.  What’s more, the software that works in that environment also costs nothing.  With Linux, generally speaking, your hardware is your only cost of ownership; it’s almost as if you bought a car, and your gas and repair bills were covered.

So this got me thinking about the economy and small business owners, about the true cost of getting a computer (or computers) for the workplace, and about what really makes the most sense.  Is it the general familiarity of Windows, warts and all?  Or is it the cool insouciance of OSX?  Or maybe it’s a nice solid Linux distro.  Over the next few weeks, I’ll be taking time here and there to look into this question, and at the end of the process, I hope to have come up with some sort of answer.

A few obligatory qualifications:  I currently run Windows Vista, generally like it, and haven’t had any problems with it whatsoever.  I also have family members who swear by OSX, and also have played around with it extensively since the time Jobs was there before he wandered in the wilderness for a few years.  And I have played with Linux on a once-awesome, now-sluggish laptop, didn’t especially like the experience, but will pick up the mantle once again.  So I really don’t have a dog in the fight.

And with that, this post ends.  My next post will be on the difficulties of establishing a baseline for comparing the many options available to consumers.

That Was Quick

Well, after saying earlier in the week that only a select few Mac users would be able to stream movies via Netflix, it looks like all of ‘em (that have an Intel chip, anyway) are welcome to play.  So sayeth their blog.  (Also, check out cnet, which is where I found out about it.)  Sounds good, other than having to use Silverlight.

Silverlight isn’t so bad in itself.  It’s good to have competition against Flash, though Flash is so ubiquitous.  But Adobe’s little spat with Apple vis-a-vis the iPhone is getting a little old, and it seems to be delaying deployment of Flash to smartphones in any meaningful way; yes, Adobe Lite is being used as interfaces on lots of cellphones, but getting sites like Youtube to work is a royal pain in the butt; surely, if I can watch television on my Treo 800w, and the Japanese can watch HD television on their cellphones, surely there can be a painless way to get Youtube to work properly.  And while they’re at it, how about getting Java to work on ‘em too?

Anyway, this wasn’t really supposed to be a slam against Adobe; I was talking about Silverlight.  I played with Silverlight, and it does interesting things, I suppose. My main criticism of it is that it seems to have a habit of creating all sorts of bogus directories on your hard drive (and your external hard drives) and then placing copies of the Silverlight install package in ‘em.  Huh?  How’s that a good thing?  I mean, they may only be five or six megs in size, each one, but it makes no sense to me.  Maybe it’s isolated to just me, and I didn’t bother looking for what else is out there about it before just uninstalling Silverlight and deleting all the folders, but, like my criticism of Chrome, I hate it when programs just do stupid stuff for no reason.  Hopefully, installing Silverlight on Macs won’t lead to the same issues, because we all know how Mac users are about Microsoft products, and Netflix isn’t really going to want to have to deal with a bunch of angries.

The Redmond Underdogs?

Well, I guess it’s happened.  The conventional wisdom in the OS world appears to be that Apple has truly won the OS wars.  Not from a distribution standpoint, of course, but from a “who makes the best OS?” standpoint.  (Of course, Apple fans will say that this has been the case since before OSX came about, but I would definitely not agree with that.  In fact, I would say that it was only after Apple decided to use Intel that the true power of OSX was apparent; PowerPC chips were pretty pitiful.  Would I have preferred Apple use AMD?  Yup, but you can’t have everything you want in life.)

Anyway, my point was that Vista has been a marketing failure, and a technological disappointment.  There are things under the hood in Vista that make it more than Windows XP SP4, but they are incremental changes that didn’t really change the way that people interact with the computer, the way that using OSX is such a change.  And the new “features” in Vista, such as always asking if you really want to do that, are just annoying as hell.  (Of course, if you’re running an aggressive firewall on your machine, you essentially get asked that question all the time, too, so….)  So, Vista as a brand is gone:  “Microsoft introduced what it said would be a slimmer and more responsive version of its Windows operating system on Tuesday, while unceremoniously dropping the brand name Vista for the new product.”  So sayeth the New York Times.  And the tone of the article definitely suggests the folks in Redmond have essentially conceded the best-OS argument, and now see themselves as the underdogs:

Mr. Sinofsky took the stage and issued an apology of sorts for the problems and frustrations associated with Windows Vista. He said the company had listened to and was responding to the feedback.

“We got feedback from reviews, from the press, a few bloggers here and there, oh, and some commercials,” he said, with a nod to a lengthy Apple advertising campaign that has mercilessly poked fun at Microsoft’s woes.

I don’t know if Windows 7 is going to be any good.  I happen to not mind Vista all that much, where I’ve worked with it, but it isn’t very interesting.  By the same token, I’m not that big a fan of OSX–it’s pretty and all, but there’s just something about it that doesn’t satisfy me, though if the OS were sold on its own, without being tied to the hardware, I might be tempted because of BootCamp and/or Parallels.  I’d be really interested in Linux distros–and since I don’t really do much gaming on my PC, that’s an option that could work for me–but there’s one thing that would be much more difficult if I went that route: having to use OpenOffice, which is a really good program in so many respects, but there’s one crucial flaw.  Do you know how difficult it is to make a Table of Authorities in OpenOffice, and how easy it is in Word?  From what I’ve seen, there may be a way to do it using the bibliographic function, but I don’t think it’s the same thing.  The best thing would be a triple-boot system where I could play with all three whenever I wanted.

Update:  I figured out how to do a Table of Authorities in OpenOffice. The How-To is here.

Azure Not Registered

A little glee out there in the world, as it appears that Microsoft hadn’t gotten ’round to registering “Azure” with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.  “According to searches conducted by Computerworld, Microsoft has not applied for a trademark for either ‘Windows Azure’ or ‘Azure Services Platform’ with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.”  There aren’t any details, though, as to how Computerworld did its search.  If it simply went to TESS and entered “Azure” in the search box, it won’t find registrations that were filed after October 16, 2008.  As the USPTO states on its News page:

Last complete paper filing date: 13 Oct, loaded 21 Oct.

Last complete electronic filing date (TEAS): 16 Oct, loaded 22 Oct.

These dates should be used as guides and do not imply that all Trademark applications carrying these filing dates are available in the system as of the load dates. Updates are scheduled to occur Tuesday through Saturday prior to 5:30 AM.

Now, I’m not going to quibble with the notion that Microsoft probably should have already secured trademark registration for Azure before having it hit the market, but I think it speaks to a larger point here: one should not assume that registration does not exist on a mark simply because it isn’t found in TESS.  There is a lag, of about a week or two.

Microsoft Wants Some of the Cloud

The Wall Street Journal, among other sources, tell me that Microsoft is jumping on the “Cloud” bandwagon, trying mightily to tap into a market that Amazon, Google and others think will lead to BIG! BIG! stuff.

FTA:

Dubbed Azure Services Platform, the new technology is designed to allow large and small corporate customers to dramatically cut their information technology costs by centralizing their IT infrastructure on Microsoft’s “cloud.”

Microsoft is that latest tech giant to join this trend – and attempt to capitalize on it – by building huge data centers that will provide computing services to customers on a pay-as-you-go subscription basis.

I dunno, though.  I’ve talked about Cloud concerns before, especially about data sensitivity, and I can vouch for the fact that drafting briefs and motions is very difficult, formatting-wise, using GoogleApps.  Furthermore, given Microsoft’s massive target on its back, and its notorious security problems, I have a hard time thinking this is ultimately going to be successful for Microsoft.