I’ve been using Outlook for about two years now. It has done an excellent job at sorting my life out, whether it’s been keeping up with my calendar appointments, making sure my contact details stay upto date or I always have a copy of my current task list. In addition every mobile phone manufacturer supports synchronisation out of the box so setup seems to be relatively painless.

It’s only after the end of the honeymoon do you realise Outlook’s shortcomings. Like most software built by Microsoft, it’s highly functional. But the functionality comes at the cost of bloat. While most people get used to the sluggish nature, you really realise the difference when you try an alternate solution such as Thunderbird for email. Outlook crawls to its knees when using IMAP, presumably because Microsoft wants to push Exchange usage. However this is inexcusable when a relatively newer software like Thunderbird is lightning fast. Scrolling through contacts, adding calendar appointments do seem to have a considerable lag. All of this on a fairly decent machine (2GHz, 2GB Ram).

It’s a shame Outlook has had no real competition in terms of an alternative that would offer the entire PIM solution. Calendar and Contacts are only basic in Thunderbird when compared to that of Outlook. In addition there is no solution for synchronisation between Nokia and Thunderbird. Such a shame considering Nokia is the world’s largest consumer mobile phone manufacturer.

It’s almost a year since Thunderbird branched out as a seperate company and we’ve seen just two alpha releases of Thunderbird 3, which isn’t exactly impressive as their roadmap suggests we should’ve seen a beta release by Q3 and it’s only two weeks ago that a second alpha was released. However all this is secondary as Thunderbird has miles to cover in order to be a true alternative to Outlook. And until that day arrives, Outlook is king and will continue to rest on it’s laurels for a long time. And like all Microsoft’s products, innovation will only start when some real competition starts to kick in.

Microsoft has had ‘mixed’ success with Windows Vista. I say mixed because even though the newest operating system in the Windows family is the best so far, the company has fallen well short of reaching its target. The ‘credit’ for a large part of this can be given to Apple’s marketing team whose relentless bashing through the Windows v/s Mac ads have been tremendously successful in instilling fear, uncertainty and doubt in the minds of the average consumer. Websites like PCWorld with their less than neutral coverage of Windows Vista haven’t made things any better. I’m in Mumbai at the moment and I happened to speak to a cousin of mine - whose geekometer clocks just a tad bit higher than the average consumer - and we got talking about Windows Vista and XP. He told me he didn’t really like Vista and preferred XP as an operating system. I asked him why this was the case and he told me he had “heard from someone” that Vista had a lot of problems. I immediately questioned him on whether he had used the OS himself before making the judgement to which he defensively reacted he had, however for less than a day. He had seen a demo machine somewhere and spent a while tinkering with it. His biggest complaint was that he didn’t quite understand it. I told him him to come speak to me when he had given Vista a real chance.

I’ve personally been using Windows Vista since RTM and the number of crashes I’ve had since are less than the number of fingers on my hands, literally. While some early adopters may have been plagued with instability issues - mainly caused because of immature drivers - I have been considerably luckier. And with the arrival of the first Service Pack the system has become as solid as a rock. I keep my laptop on for days altogether and the uptime counter only stops increasing when I restart the machine myself to complete an installation or something of that sort. Add to that many of the simple improvements in user experience - breadcrumb navigation and search to name a few - and you have a brilliant operating system on its hands.

Microsoft has made attempts to lift Vista’s image with the Mojave Experiment which is part of the 300 million dollar budget it has allocated to promotion and advertisement. In my opinion this move is long overdue especially if it has to compete with a company whose strongest asset is its brilliant marketing and PR team. Should Microsoft be able to formulate a marketing strategy / campaign that does indeed cleanup the undeserved Vista mess, it can most certainly see itself winning back the market share it may have lost.

Tags: apple, microsoft, vista

Steve ‘Sweaty’ Ballmer and Bill Gates showcased one of the major features of Windows 7. They use the Dell Latitude XT (which is already available in the market) to showcase the operating system which looked a lot like Surface, except (obviously on a smaller surface). The usage was quite fluid and refreshing and one can see this being useful in a variety of situations. This is brilliant work building on the already mature tablet PC platform perfected by Windows over XP and Vista. It’s interesting to note at this point Micorosft has been in the touch screen sector since 2000 with Windows Mobile and since 2002 with Windows XP Tablet Edition.

Video: Multi-Touch in Windows 7

Windows users often get a lot of flak from Apple fanboys about lack of the Operating systems’s ability to do shiny 3D UI stuff. However what most people (including Windows users) fail to understand is that Microsoft really wants the user to take control of the system and use it the way they want it. Which is why there exists such a vast 3rd party application library to do tasks from the most minute to the extremely complex ones. And the same applies to the UI aspect too; 3rd party applications give users an incredible amount of control so they can personalise anything from their wallpaper to the logon and boot screens.

I found these screenshots floating around on the internet with some claiming them to be that of Windows 7. But it doesn’t take a computer scientist to figure out the fake. However a lot of them are real interfaces built on 3rd party applications and they’re just what’s needed to prove my point. Windows is customisable to such an extent where you can completely change the look and feel of it beyond recognition. I’ll stop babbling right about here and let you have a look at them.

After months of bickering, Microsoft and Yahoo did not tie the knot. The decision while celebrated by some, disappointed others, including Yahoo. Aw Yahoo I understand what is to be broken hearted.

Adding insult to injury is the news from WSJ reporting Microsoft’s bankers have informally approached Facebook over a possible acquisiton. Flashback time: Microsoft invested $240m for a 1.6% stake (which valued Facebook at $15bn) and was an all advertisement deal.

Knowing that, what Microsoft stands to gain from this deal is unimaginable. The affair with Yahoo was to try and build up a stronghold in the search and ad market (to compete with Google), and Facebook hasn’t (yet) been a strong ad platform as one would’ve thought it out to be. In fact, it is yet to present a sustainable source of revenue (1$ gifts can’t do it all). And if Microsoft has already locked up the pageviews, where do they go from there ?

I have to say as much as I love and respect Microsoft, Livebook doesn’t sound appealing to me.

I guess we’ll only have to see if Microsoft updates it’s relationship status from ‘It’s complicated’ to ‘In a relationship’, and at what point will Yahoo update its ‘Looking for’ ?