Utah Open Source Planet

So apparently its only a monolopy at 90% share if its against Microsoft according Brad Smith one of Microsof’t’s top lawyer (according to the article)  So Microsoft is all up in arms that it isn’t fair that Google and Yahoo can have a deal that would supposedly give them 90% market share.

This leaves me wondering.  So, typically people claim well Microsoft it the better product why else would they have ~90% market share.  References you ask…  Well you’re in luck.

(Some dates are old)

Wikipedia ~90%

WindowsITPro  ~93%

OneStat.com ~97.5%

Market Share by Net Applicatoins ~91%

Yes I know this isn’t the greatest list or maybe even a good list, but well you get the idea.  If you have better links or to the contri then post them in a comment.

This is a picture of my very first computer. It was my very first glimpse into the world of Microsoft that would soon bring interest to the brilliant career as a software developer that I am now able to fulfill. That computer, an IBM PC compatible (of some sort), is what matured my experience as a developer. I remember the days of MS Dos before we even had color and windowing systems, and this computer even booted to BASIC! I remember my Dad getting a pirated copy of Microsoft Windows version 1 on 5″ floppies (as we were living in Indonesia at the time and this was all you could get out there), and trying it out, thinking there was no way he’d ever want to use a system like that. If you notice in the picture, we didn’t even have a mouse! The closest input device was the Joystick you see, which I used to play ironically, my first glimpses of the Microsoft Brand, in the game, Flight Simulator. Back then, Microsoft was simply just another brand you saw on a piece of software. Next to the likes of Broderbund, Activision, Lotus, and Wordperfect, Microsoft was just another software manufacturer that you saw alongside the likes of games and DOS.

Over the years, we began to see the gradual creeping of Microsoft into our daily lives. My first notices of Microsoft after the gaming and DOS days that I can remember would probably be the emergence of Microsoft Office, which, ironically, would not work on the computer I picture above. I had to wait to get a new computer before I could use it at home. Most of my memories of that came from Junior High School lab computers. It was actually rare back then for students to have a computer at home, yet alone one with a Word Processor!

At some point, we ended up installing Windows 3.1. I think it was the beginning of High School. It was there that I learned what a driver was and how hard it was to get any external hardware to really work with Windows 3.1. I really gained an appreciation of DOS in those days and learned how to write my own Batch files, configure my autoexec.bat and config.sys files to get everything I needed working properly. Frankly, back then there wasn’t much to get working properly. 3.5″ floppies were the new thing, few computers had sound cards, and there was no such thing as a CD ROM drive (at least not that we could afford!).

In High School, I remember getting a summer job my Senior Year at Computer City, a Tandy company, the company that also owned Radio Shack. While there, Windows 95 launched, and I remember trying to explain to customers the differences between Windows 95 and OS 2 Warp. We also sold Mac machines and Apple software in our stores back then! I remember beta testing Windows 95 with my friend and remembering all the cool new features it brought over Windows 3.1, and thinking it was so weird I didn’t have to install DOS before installing Windows 95!

I ended up going from there to work in Tech Support for Gateway computers. It was at that time that Microsoft Bob came out and I was forced to support it. I can’t tell you the number of times I remember just encouraging users to format and reinstall - it was actually standard protocol for the company back then!

Not long after that, Windows 98 came out, and shortly before I remember the IE/Netscape wars, the Novell Wordperfect/Microsoft Office wars (that was right here in Utah!), and somehow Microsoft continued to prevail. I think it was at that time I began to use Microsoft Office over Wordperfect products regularly for the first time. It was my only choice!

When Windows 2000 came out I remember how stable it was! Finally, a version of the Microsoft OS that the average Joe could use, based on Enterprise technology! (NTFS) I think it was at that point that I started seeing Microsoft as “evil”, and began venturing towards Open Source and other technologies to break free of the Microsoft trenches. It was also at that time that Netscape was no longer the dominant browser and web developers were very quickly forced to change their ways.

Since then we’ve seen Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Me (choke!), Xbox 360, MSN, Windows Live, Windows Media Center, and even Microsoft Surface! From games and DOS to programmable furniture, Microsoft has come a long way over the years. Yet, one man has stood at the center of it all, a quiet, but very, very, rich man, Bill Gates. He has been the quiet identity behind Microsoft for probably most of my life. Friday, Bill Gates had his last day at Microsoft. He has brought me many great years, and much of the reason I am a developer today. As he leaves I feel a piece of me bidding farewell, yet, at the same time, that company that I have both loved and hated over the years will still continue on in his legacy. Mr. Gates, thanks for the Memories!

Harry Shum (click to enlarge)

The Web can be divided into three components: content (pages, images, videos, blogs, feeds), people (readers, writers, creators, commenters), and actions (queries, clicks, pageviews). Current search engines have taken advantages of "keywords" to link those three components together. But the keyword model has reach it's limits.

One phenomenon that's challenging keywords is the explosive growth of content. Multimedia content is especially difficult The scale requirements are huge. Another challenge is that the Web is becoming more dynamic: people want to interact. Search engines have a long way to go to satisfy user needs. To make progress, we have to stop worrying about just the content. We need to consider the context.

Users are not anonymous, but they form a community with specific interests. Actions are not random, but are driven by intent. Semantics is important. Extracting semantics is difficult.

There is a practical approach to semantics: understand->extract->expose. It should be data-driven, incremental, and interactive. We need to derive concepts from content, people from users, and intent from actions.

Understanding content has three vectors: intra-page intelligence, inter-page intelligence, and temporal understanding.

The technologies more useful for understanding users as people have been personalization, collaborative filtering, and analyzing social graphs. Personalization has failed to live up to it's promise. Harry demos Gianxi, a Microsoft Research project that searches the social network. This isn't online yet as far as I could see. Reminds me of something Rohit Khare shoed me at the last WWW in Banff.

Harry Shum (right) and his demo partner Graham (left) (click to enlarge)

Deriving intent requires contextual intelligence, mobile awareness, and intent refinement. The better we d with query classification, the better we do with user intent. Is there commercial intent? Is it location sensitive? Harry shows a demo (actually it was his trusty sidekick "Graham") where user action (dragging a particular picture to a special zone on the page) reorders the search results and filters them according to additional user action. This is a great example of how understanding intent give much better results than mere keywords. "Give me things that look like this..." This demo actually generated applause from the audience.

One of the demos was actually hobbled by the "Great Firewall of China" according to Graham. Interestingly it was searches of video from Hillary Clinton. The demo extracted the most relevant portions of long videos and showed just the relevant snippets. Seeing the relevant portion, viewers could then select the whole video.

In order to get more out of search, we have to understand semantics, extract it, and then expose it to the user for further refinement.

Tags: www2008 microsoft search

Microsoft has been all over the news lately with their “Mesh” announcement. It really sounds like Ray Ozzie is getting the idea of “being open”. I’ll share my notes from the keynote here:

Microsoft has “a big announcement” we’re told. Here are the notes from their keynote:

“Unified Data Management” - what if all your devices could share and sync all of their data and feeds? “Applications Everywhere” - what if all your devices were completely cognisant of the apps that were running on them. Making sure all of your machines all over work the way you want them?

Introducing “Live Mesh” - showing a video… Showed a guy with a macbook (interesting), cell phones, laptops, xbox, cameras…

Demo available to anyone in the audience. Today, available for the Windows PC. Next few months, support for mac and other devices. Future many more devices.

Very easy to create a folder to give access anywhere.

“Mesh Bar” - provides consolidated view of all devices, members of folder, views and events that are happening in the folder. Automated consolidated view of everything in the mesh.

All devices work together. Data and applications are always accessible. People are always collaborating, always up-to-date with info needed.

Just “the tip of the iceberg”. Speaker’s team is a “Platform Team”. There will be a Platform Focus. It will be very easy for developers to take advantage of the web and these devices. Platform will provide open access to data and APIs. “yeah right - this is M$ - prove it!”. Showing code… You can choose between ATOM, JSON, POTS, RSS, XML, WXML… you choose language, protocol, etc. to interact with Live Mesh.

Tomorrow, attend sessions and visit mesh.com and visit booth for more…

For the non-tech-heads visiting my blog you can probably ignore this one, although it might provide some useful insight if you’re having issues with upgrading to Vista SP1. I have had the biggest headache recently trying to get Vista Service Pack 1 installed on my Windows Vista Ultimate, 64-bit Edition PC. The new Vista SP1 is stated to have many bug improvements, and since Hulu would occasionally crash my machine during my wife’s viewing of old “Major Dad” episodes (yes, they even have that on there!), I finally got fed up with it.

The problem with Vista SP1 is if for some reason you thought you needed every single update out there and installed all the language packs (I actually do have a fascination with foreign languages), SP1 refuses to install, and won’t even show up in your list of automatic updates to install under Windows Update. So, I figured, why not just remove them? Well, it appears that that, too seems to be a bug in Vista. Despite the fact that it would take 30 minutes each (at least) to remove each language pack, eventually, I started getting errors on the last few language packs I was trying to install. Vista was fighting back with me, avoiding with a vengeance not to be upgraded.

So I searched all around the internet trying to find a solution - I wanted to fix all these bugs, but the bugs were keeping me from upgrading Vista to fix the bugs that were preventing the upgrade! (Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?) After a week of waiting for things to be resolved in various threads on Google with people that were experiencing the same issue, I came across this forum post from Saad Siddiqui on this thread on VistaHeads:

There is a workaround but it requires dealing with the registery so backup registery first.

1. press Windows Logo Key + R to open Run Dialog
2. Type regedit
3. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHEINE\SYSTEM\CONTROSET001\MUI

there will be an entry for romanian language DELETE it. [for english the key is “en-US” in the navigation tree].

Repeat step three for

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHEINE\SYSTEM\CONTROSET003\MUI

this will make SP1 installer to see only English Language there.

hence it will continue installation.

and

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHEINE\SYSTEM\CURRENTCONTROSET\MUI

It was corrected that instead of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CONTROLSET001 it was really HKLM\SYSTEM\CONTROLSET001\Control\MUI\UILanguages, repeated for CONTROLSET003 and CURRENTCONTROLSET. Backup your registry first!!!

I tried this, removed all languages except US from the listed languages under my registry, and voila - all of the sudden Vista SP1 was appearing in my list of Automatic Updates! I installed it, and now my wife can watch her “Major Dad” episodes on Hulu just fine. It should be noted that even the Microsoft employee in that thread was unable to diagnose this.

So if you’re looking for a quick shortcut to get rid of all the pesky language packs so you can install Vista SP1, hopefully this provides a solution that works for you. Good luck!

Update: Its really Office 2008...

Microsoft Office 2007 on OS X is a complete pig. I was so looking forward to finally having an Intel native version of Office so I wouldn't have to put up with long start times and the SBOD (spinning beach ball of death). With Office 2007, they're worse! I've rarely been as disappointed in a software product. Office 2004 is a better Office--even in Rosetta. Heck, Office on XP running in Parallels is a better Office. I'm glad BYU has a site license because I'd be really mad if I'd actually paid for this.

Tags: microsoft osx software

Miscrosofts World Wide Telescope (click to visit)

Scoble says that when he visited Microsoft a few weeks ago he was blown away by the World Wide Telescope. Actually he said it made him cry.

The WWT isn't available yet, but you can see a demo in this TED talk. My impression after viewing the TED talk is that it's like a Google Earth for the sky, seemlessly integrating pictures and information in a single platform.

I'm just hoping there's an OS X version--but if not, there's always Parallels or Fusion.

Tags: astronomy science microsoft

Today Microsoft announced they were putting in a bid to buy Yahoo, Inc.  I am torn on this one, and slightly confused on what may happen if this actually takes place.  Like, will I now have to sign in with Microsoft Passport on all of the Yahoo sites?  Will OpenId still be in Yahoo’s plans?  What about yui?  And what will happen with all of the Linux developers and sysadmins there?

The biggest part of this announcement I think, which hasn’t really been mentioned, is this will mean Microsoft will now own Zimbra, perhaps Exchange’s biggest Open Source competitor in the E-mail/Groupware server market.  Yahoo has been all about Open Source.  Microsoft shuns it, and encourages their employees to look away from it.  How in the world is Microsoft set up to handle such an acquisition?

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Gizmondo has a hands on report about Office 2008 for the Mac. The good news: it's Intel native, as you'd expect. The bad news: they've "updated" the user interface, as you'd expect.

The old Office running under Rosetta is definitely a pig, but having used Office 2007 on Windows, I shudder at what's going to change in the interface. Office 2004 is by no means perfect, but it's the devil I know. Fortunately the screenshots for O'08 don't seem to be as radical a departure from the old scheme as O'07 was. I'm crossing my fingers.

Tags: osx microsoft

Microsoft release the next Zune to very little fanfare compared with what Jobs generated with even the most recent iPod refresh.

For all the crap Microsoft took over the Zune ("oh look! it comes in brown!"), you have to admire the perseverance. The fact is that this is how Microsoft wins lots of battles: "release, watch, redesign, lather, repeat." Office, Outlook/Exchange, and the XBox are all examples of Microsoft powerhouses that were less than exciting in version one. Heck, can you remember Windows 1.0? What a dog.

Microsoft has the affluence and smarts to have a long range attitude about new products and in the end, it's one of the company's biggest assets.

Scoble makes a nice distinction between products where you have to win and defensive products. I'd add that many of Microsoft's defensive products do become winners simply because the product people refuse to just mark time.

Tags: microsoft osx apple iphone ipod

Given that MS is cracking down on poor Russians (which is weird since rampant piracy of their products only serves to promote their monopoly), I would've thought that some open source vendor would jump in to rescue Mr. Ponosov (head of school mas