S-o-o-o-o, US TV broadcasters aren’t alone pulling the plug on their analog channels. Microsoft is closing down channels 8 and 10 and folding some of their content into Channel 9. Someone at Microsoft thinks this is good marketing? It’s a great idea if the goal is for existing and potential customers to start switching channels.
The most surprising thing about today’s Windows 7 pricing announcement isn’t the pricing, but how Microsoft directly delivered news about it. While Microsoft issued a press release, the most substantive information comes from the Windows Blog, which the release links to. For anyone still clinging to the fantasy that there is some magical separation between Microsoft public relations teams and its bloggers, wake up! There really is none.
Perhaps there shouldn’t be, and that should concern Microsoft’s outside public relations agencies and what their future role will be. People naturally are more interested in other people and what they have to say. Surely a blogger, an identifiable human being, with posted picture and personality, is more believable and memorable than a germane press release.
Microsoft has abandoned the fundamental principles that made it the most successful software company of the last decade and ensured its software would be the most widely used everywhere. But in just three years, since 2006, startups and Apple have set a new course for technology and how societies use it.
For Microsoft, this change is scarier than movie “Quarantine.” Without a course correction, Microsoft in the 2010s will be very much like IBM was in the 1990s. That’s no place Microsoft should want to be.
Microsoft has reached a surprising, and quite unexpected, fork in the road to its future. Choices the company makes today and over the next 12 months will determine whether computing relevance shifts away from its products.
The company has abandoned the fundamental principles that made it the most successful software company of the last decade and ensured its software would be the most widely used everywhere. Understanding those principles, and how they shaped Microsoft’s past, are important for understanding what the future might be.
My immediate reaction is “yes,” after reading Dare Obasanjo’s post “Why Twitter’s Engineers Hate the @replies feature.” OK, so maybe CNN and Oprah, also members of the “million-followers club,” share the blame.
Like many other Twitter users, I’m unhappy with the Twitter @replies change announced earlier this week, later half-backed off by the social broadcasting service. You know what I’m talking about.Twitter completely than partially pulled the plug on @replies to people you don’t follow. I found the feature exceptionally useful for finding new people to follow. Isn’t making new relationships the whole point of a social networking service?
I agree with Betanews founder Nate Mook, who tweeted on Tuesday: “The Twitter founders are so far removed from the product at this point they had no idea why a useful feature was removed? That’s kinda sad.”
Graduates are hitting the job market and New York Times has a warning: Nothing public you post online is private, and potential employers are scouring your Facebook, MySpace or Xanga to see who you really are.
CNN has a story claiming MySpace helped foil a school shooting. Last week I said that MySpace isn’t the problem the news media has made it out to be. Heck, any place high schoolers can […]
Now this is what social networking should be for: High school students use MySpace to organize a walkout over proposed immigration changes. The kids are right. It’s wrong to make illegal immigration a felony. The […]
I simply couldn’t find time to blog this week, on my personal site. Busy week at the office, with the Consumer Electronics Show—and I didn’t even attend! I feel for my boss, who traveled to Las Vegas and soon goes onto San Francisco for Macworld.
My first catchup post is followup to my two posts, “What Kids Reveal Online” and “Minimizing Kids’ Online Risks“. Jan. 16, 2006, Business Week has a story about new online social network, Yfly.com, which opens on February 1. Apparently, Jessica Simpson’s soon-to-be ex-spouse Nick Lachey is behind the venture, which seeks to provide teens a safe place to socialize online.
As the parent of an 11 year-old that is active online, I’m concerned about the risks she might encounter there. I also realize that my daughter is fairly insulated from many dangers, because of simple rules she willingly agrees to follow. Risks remain, as they would anywhere, walking along Capitol Hill at night, driving fast on the highway, or climbing a ladder to change a light bulb. Living is about taking risks. But taking unnecessary online risks, particularly when there are predators online hunting teenagers, is another matter. Adult content websites such as hdpornvideo are widely available and accessible all over the internet, but should only be viewed by those of us that are fully mature enough to understand what they represent.
Yesterday, a friend asked me to check out her eldest daughter’s Xanga site, to look for privacy or security problems. The teenager hadn’t posted anything compromising her identity. But her friends were another matter. Many of the teenagers revealed quite a bit of personal information, such as IM handles, that could be misused by predators.