Writing this out of my love for you.. Microsoft!!

Yeah! I am saying it. I don't mind saying this because as far as i can remember, a good part of my computer experience has been on windows operating systems.

And I love these guys. For what people appreciate Apple for their iDevices, was the same love i share for Microsoft when it comes to their operating system.

Beg or steal.. these guys pretty much set the standard for what the graphical UI you and i know that is today.

Of course, they are commercial and they are not open as Linux.. but that doesn't make them evil. But i do know instances where these guys showed their dark side (killing Netscape.. which again i think is back in a different avatar as FireFox) for which i hate them a lot.

Most of their products right from Windows OS, Office Suite, Exchange/Outlook, etc. (hope this not the entire list :)) ) have set a different standard for usability and convenience.

Ok.. So why am i telling all this.. its because i am concerned about the direction in which they are heading. But again, what am i concerned about here.

The concern is that i am not sure if I am ready for any other products apart from the ones mentioned above, for my day to day use. Comeon folks, Apple iPad is much more closed than Windows, Google wants me to use web a lot and Linux is still not ready for mainstream retail use.

I have been techie enough to be branded as a geek. I have built my own distros of Linux and hacked stuff. But still i love Microsoft's products for the sheer pleasure of using them. The difference is that of being a TV Electronics repair guy and the same guy watching TV at the end of the day sipping hot coffee!

You might be wondering what the hell is wrong with me while Microsoft is still here doing just fine. Believe me.. Microsoft is still here.. but i am not sure if they are ready for tomorrow.

Well the trigger for this post was this post here by Russell Beattie - The end of WIMP and rise of Touch. This trigger was backed by a slow build up of frustration on Microsoft's misfirings with their products' strategy.

These guys have lost focus on some of their products. The most important of them of all was Internet Explorer. Having killed Netscape, it was the end of fun and of course business. With literally no competition until FireFox and Chrome actually munched away a good portion of the browser pie. This was too much of a oversight on Microsoft's part.

Browser is the window to a whole new world of connectedness. Children of this generation take this one product/application for granted.

How could you lose sight of a product so important and waiting until guys like Google and Apple to actually catch up with you!!

There has been a steady downfall in terms of their product quality and usability since IE6. I guess a bit of branding change with a serious effort to revamp their technology should do the trick of winning back customers.

With Companies like Apple and Google who are changing the rules of the game by winning customers over by bringing in disruptive technologies (examples: search and iPhone) which have great usability and performance, its time for Microsoft to start taking its products seriously.

The next most important product of all, Microsoft Windows Operating System. Windows has not been doing well since XP. Vista has been good for me though, but a lot of things had gone wrong in Vista too. Customer Expectations, bad PR and negative press/blog coverage did take its toll. Though i haven't used Windows 7 myself, i do hear great reviews from the blogosphere and that its usability is same as, if not better than, Apple Mac OS.

But as Russell Beattie has mentioned in his post, the future is moving towards Tablets which obviously will use touch as the preferred (or the only) interface. I am not confident that Windows is ready as a tablet OS.

Again, I don't think its too late for Microsoft. If it can regroup and focus correct, it can do a great job of coming with a tablet version of its OS. Look at the Apple. I came up with a totally different UI and Usability for its iPad. That should be the approach for Microsoft as well.

The next biggest goof up was with Windows Mobile. In all practical sense, there is no way Microsoft can do anything about it now, unless and until it was do something as drastic as giving away its Mobile OS to OEMs for free and think of a different business model around it.

Guys @ Microsoft.. you are making mistake after mistake and I hope you correct yourself soon. Again i am big fan of your remaining products (though I stopped using IE for many years now).

I know you guys are doing a lot to get things back on track. You are doing good with your Office suite. can see that you are regrouping in terms of your developer languages and tools. But do it fast and get your products back on track.

How many of you know about Knol (Google's Wikipedia)?

I knew about this site many months back. In spite of this being a Google site/service, it never was compelling enough to be remembered/revisited.

You can check - Introduction to Knol - to know more about it.

Gmail's New Feature - Sounded like a April Fool prank

This new feature from Google called Mail Goggles apparently will ask you solve math questions before letting you send an email.


Read Google's blog post to know more.

I read lot of other blogs to confirm if this was some kindof a joke. But since every believes (some think its very cool) that its a new feature.. I've started believing too.. :)

What new in Internet Explorer 8 beta?

I had written about IE8 beta1 long time back. But never really had time to try it out until now. By now, IE8 Beta2 is out. I am not going to focus on intricacies of web standards supported by IE8 beta and I am also not going to talk about the performance improvements. So here is a layman's review of IE8 beta. In this review, I am going to revisit all the features released since beta1

I finally had the time to tryout IE8. So let me give you the verdict first and then get on explain whats news in IE8.

IE7 + Not so great features appearing to be great at first + Few good usability enhancements borrowed from others = IE8

Initial Configuration:

So below are the screenshots of the initial configuration that you would get after you finish installing IE8 and restarting the PC.



I decided to use custom settings to have more control over the configuration.



Wondering what would have been this option in case of express installation. Maybe Microsoft might have wanted to change the default search provider to anything but Google :).



Ok.. I wasn't very sure on what Accelerator providers were, so I choose the second option.



I really dint want to turn on this option due to privacy concerns. But with words like "recommended" and "malicious software"!!, Microsoft did influence me to turn this option on.



Default Browser - No thanks! for now. Now you can see something interesting here. I don't remember Microsoft ever trying to import settings from other browsers (very stubborn). The last I vaguely remember was during the Netscape days. Now I can see that Microsoft seems to have gone a bit soft or maybe going defensive. Trying to import whatever it can from my Firefox installation.







And finally I get the first page that gives me options to getting started with some of its highlight features like Accelerator and InPrivate Browsing.




And below is how the Add-ons user interface looks. From here, you can manage your toolbars, extensions, Accelerators, etc.



Webslices:

Webslices are a new feature in IE8, which allows you to subscribe to a portion of a web page. This has interesting use cases. For instance, in the below example, I can track the status of my friends in Facebook.

Similarly, in ebay for example, I can track the bidding of a particular product that I am interested in.

Webslices require the website to use special tags. And once a particular website supports the webslice syntax, you will notice a green button in the toolbar (as shown below).



And on clicking this button, a special button (more like a bookmark) appears on the toolbar. Clicking that will bring up a drop down mini windows like the one shown below.




Now for users in India and especially for folks from the state of AndraPradesh, you must by proud of Eenadu (you online local daily) because of the fact that they were the only one of the 10 or so webslices currently available in the internet. I appreciate the fact that the guys running Eenadu are very advanced in trying on new stuff. Good going guys. But sad part is when I went to the Eenadu website, the green icon never glowed/appeared, so IE8 could not detect any webslice in their web site. Never mind! I anyways do not know Telugu :)



Personally speaking, this is a great idea.. but it depends on the extent to which web developers intend to support this feature. Say for example, most my favorite sites are with Google and Yahoo.. now I don't expect Google and Yahoo to support webslices. But if W3C comes with some similar standard that can be widely adopted by both web developers and browsers, then nothing like it.

For web developers and techies, you can get to know more about webslices in this MSDN link.

Accelerators:

These are context sensitive options that appear in the right-click menu option. And based on the content displayed/selected in the web page, the accelerator will display the relevant information.

For example, one of the highlighted use case is when you hover your mouse on top a address that appears in the website, a blue marker appears. Clicking that marker will show a list of accelerators. Assuming you have the Live map accelerator and you click on it, a small window appears showing the address on a map.




In the below example, I installed the wikipedia accelerator and when I select/highlight a word and launch wikipedia accelerator, a small window appears showcasing the article by that word(s). Look at the below screenshot.



Microsoft initially called this feature "Activities" and later on changed the name to its present state.

Again, web developers and techies can find more information about this feature in this MSDN link.

InPrivate Browsing:

Now that's interesting. Google's Chrome has a similar feature called Incognito.

Well, what "InPrivate Browsing" means is, when you create a new browser tab/window by selecting the "InPrivate Browsing" option, then IE8 creates a tab/windows in which you can browse as usual, but when you are finished browsing and close the tab/window, IE8 ensures to cleanup any trace of that session.. like browsing history, cookies, form data, passwords, etc.

This feature is extremely useful especially when you browse in public places like internet kiosks or in other scenarios where you share your PCs.






Now, one additional facility in IE8's private browsing option compared to Google's Chrome browser is this feature called as InPrivate Blocking. With this option, IE8 blocks content in a particular web page that is being pulled from other places and does not belong to that particular website/webserver. That does not mean that all external content is blocked. IE8 has some level intelligence in detecting which of these external content is used in your browsing behavior and to get other analytics about your usage.

What I mean by external content is that, say for example, the widgets in this blog pull contents from other web services like Google Reader, ClustrMaps, etc. Note that the examples I've quoted here are good examples of external content and these may not be necessarily blocked by "InPrivate Blocking".

IE8 also gives you better control over Deleting Browsing history in that, it lets you retain cookies and temporary internet files to a trusted website so that these sites can remember who you are are and that they load faster.



InPrivate features are a right step in the right direction for IE8. This is one of the (maybe the only one too) features that I really found useful.

But what surprises me is the fact that how come both Google and Microsoft thought of a similar feature for their browsers. Too much of a coincidence!!

You can get to know more about InPrivate features here.

Visual Search:

This is again a feature which I found very useful, where you can see images related to a particular search result while searching through the search bar. For example, the below screenshot shows the results from the New York Times site when I searched for the term Obama.



Below is another example where I change my search provider to be amazon and when i search for a particular book, I get front cover photo of the book along with the name of the book.




Suggestions:

While browsing through a particular website, if you click on the "Suggested Sites", it shows a list of similar sites. Now the suggestions were not that great. These were pretty straight forward suggestions of similar web sites. For example, while I was browsing amazon.com, the "Suggested Sites" gave the below recommendations. You are better off finding similar sites of your interest in Google than going with IE8's suggestions.




Miscellaneous:

This not so great feature of IE8 which I personally found to be very useful is the "Caret Browsing" option. There is nothing great about this feature. Its just than you enable Caret Browsing, a cursor appears in the web page which lets you scroll through the page as you would do in a word document.

This feature is very useful while copying snippets from a particular web page. You don't have to use your mouse at all. Just use Ctrl+Shift+Left/Right Arrow to select the text (as you would do in your word processor). Then just copy it (Ctrl+C) and then quickly do a Alt+Tab to choose your favorite editor that you have kept opened to paste the copied text.






IE8 has definitely taken cues from Firefox on some usability aspects and features.

For example, "Find in page" has improved. Instead of displaying a very outdated search pop-up, you get a toolbar which is less intrusive. The search matches are highlighted in yellow.

Similarly, you can reopen a tab that was closed during your current browsing session. Useful in case you want to revisit a page that you closed some time back.

IE8 also can remember you last browsing session and can reopen all the pages that you had left open during your previous session.

All of the above of very small but very important usability features borrowed from Firefox and Opera. Again, no harm and not to shy in copying such features which users take it for granted.

On a whole, the IE8 team and its product manager(s) have done a great job in terms of bringing in small usability enhancements. But in terms of new features, not many new features which will give you a Wow! feeling.

IE8 still lacks a strong platform where developers from around the world can develop rich addons. That's where Firefox scores compared to any other browser currently available. I use lot of addons which I cannot do away with. This is the kind of stickyness that IE8 and other browsers need to develop. They need to cash in on the creativity of thousands of developers around the world.

So thats about it..

And finally I manage to complete this post after 4 days.. :)

Chrome - Proof that it is much more than a browser for Google

As I had guessed in my earlier post, Google must have had a very good reason to bring out a new browser.

And today as I read Tim O'Reilly's insightful post on how and why Microsoft is losing ground to Apple and Google, the below words were ringing in my ears throughout the day.. much of a realization for me on why Google must have released Chrome.

Let me be absolutely clear: Chrome is not a Web browser, it's an application runtime. Chrome is really Google Gears with a browser facade.

Thats a very interesting and thought provoking description - Application Runtime. Aahaa! So thats it. Google wants to build a runtime that is independent of an operating system. And of course you cannot rely on other browsers when your web application demands much more than what a browser can provide.

I can prove that Chrome is intended to be runtime for web application. One very good demostration of this fact is the "Create application shortcuts.." option in the menu.

What this option lets you do is that you can create a shortcut to particular web page and place it on your desktop, quick launch bar and even the start menu !!

And the next time you click on one of these shortcuts, it opens the web page inside Chrome. But as you see from the screenshot below, none of the browser related aspects are visible. It just appears to be like a normal application windows. Now thats interesting, because, for me, I essentially have a Gmail client (as it appears for me) which I can launch anytime.

Though creating shortcut for webpages and launching browser window disabling menu and other toolbars is not something new, but the way Chrome does this gives us a clue about the bigger plans Google might have in mind.

Just imagine, tomorrow you have an office suite from Google (Google docs) which launches inside the Chrome "runtime". The web app may look so rich that you would be unable to distinguish it from a local application residing in your hard disk.

And this article in Cnet - Chrome's JavaScript challenge to Silverlight, convinces me more about the fact that Google Chrome is much more than a browser and is something close to a runtime.

Google Chrome - Some interesting links and information

Its been a long time since I have blogged. Was heavily loaded with work. I think my only link to the web is through my Nokia E61, which I use extensively to browse my favorite sites.

As soon as I saw the news about Chrome - Google's new web browser, I was so exited. I could think of qualities like light-weight, fast, simple, elegant, etc. associated with most of Google's other Apps.

I am finally using Chrome in my laptop.. right now.. as I write :)

But I was also confused on why Google would want to create its own browser when it could have collaborated with one of the famous open source browsers avaiable today - Firefox. But I guess Google must be having some mega plans and a good reason to come up with its own browser. Especially, given the fact that most of the Google's applications are web-based.

My take is, what would differentiate Google Chrome from the rest of the pack is innovative ways of bringing web pages and web applications to the user, through their browser.

For those of you who haven't been tracking news, Google announced Chrome through a comic book released to Google Blogoscoped which a famous blog tracking Google's activities. A much faster loading copy of this comic is available here.

You may want to read Google's official announcement here. Below is also the official video introducing the browser.

Read Write Web's post says that Google Chrome has already got a browser market share of 1%, referring to the stats being tracked by Market Share.

My experience with the browser seems to be OK. I did find some problems like it inability to support Microsoft's silverlight plugin (similar to Flash plugin). I also noticed that you can only scroll down using the laptop's touch pad. You cannot scroll up.

I am sure Google is going to fix these minor issues very soon. What remains to be seen is how Google to going to compete with heavy weights IE and Firefox in the coming months.

UPDATE (Sept 7th, 2008): You can also view the comic book now hosted in google's website.

I also found this video useful.

Is Sun getting desparate not to lose mobile JVM market?

After Apple announced last Thurday of its intention to release the long awaited SDK for iPhone*, Sun has unveiled its intention to port JVM onto the iPhone.

Its looks like Sun does not want to waste any time bringing the mobile version of JVM (J2ME) onto the iPhone. Obviously this sense of urgency should be due to the fact that iPhone provides a very good platform for mobile applications and also because of the impending threat from Google's Android. Sun should already feel frustrated by Google's clever coup of replacing Sun's JVM with their own.

The way I see the future is that Apple and Google may be in a direct collision course towards mobile dominance. And Sun may want to be present in one of the camps.

What also remains to be seen is how would Sun JVM affect Apple's business model of trying to sell iPhone applications through their iTunes store (App Store as it may be called). With the JVM present on the iPhone, would mobile application developers like to leverage it or will they rather choose to directly use iPhone SDK. With Apple bringing in restrictions on the development platform (only Mac can be used has the host to develop and debug iPhone applications), it gives a point of leverage for Sun.

And what about performance! iPhone SDK is already a layer on top of the native iPhone OS APIs. Now JVM would be one more layer on top of it. Will the java applications written for iPhone in future have the same performance as other platforms?

The war for a mobile computing platform is going to get interesting as days go by. Keep watching this blog to see how this unfolds.

Useful Links:
* You may be interested in reading this coverage of the iPhone SDK Press Release by Ryan Block of Engadget.
- You can also watch Apple's official video on the iPhone SDK Press Release here. Note: You need quicktime player.


[Article imported from Mobile Computing Trends]

Gmail Tips: Reducing Spam with Email Alias

Well, I always want an option of creating alias for reducing spam. For example, if my mail id is syed.mohasin.zaki@gmail.com then I also want an option to create an alias such as subscriptions.mohasin@gmail.com. The idea is, whenever I need to provide an email id for subscribing/registering in any website, I can always use my email alias. And when I see that I am getting lot of spams for a particular alias, then I can just go ahead and delete it. My original mail id is still unknown to spammers.

I could never find any support for email alias in gmail.

Sometime back, I read this post from Amit, where he explains how to generate email alias in gmail.

From his post, what i learnt is that, all our gmail ids have 2 domain names, one is "gmail.com" and other is "googlemail.com". For example, I would be having 2 mails address both pointing to my same gmail inbox - syed.mohasin.zaki@gmail.com and syed.mohasin.zaki@googlemail.com

So the idea is that we can use one gmail id (for example, syed.mohasin.zaki@googlemail.com) as an alias for our public domain and use the other one for close friends and family. Then I can filter mails from one of the mail domains and do whatever I want (archive it or delete it.. etc.)

But this concept is not useful when you want to have multiple aliases. Referring to Amit's earlier post, I found that we can have multiple aliases as well. All you need to do it that you add a '+' at the end of your gmail id followed by some meaningful tag. For example, if I want to subscribe to news alerts from The New York Times, then I would use an email alias such as this - syed.mohasin.zaki+newyorktimes@gmail.com.

Gmail basically ignores any that comes after the '+' symbol (including it). But the search inside gmail is capable of detecting this '+' and the tag that follows it. So you can filter mails coming to a particular alias and take action accrodingly.

Also read through the comments on Amit's post and you can see other suggestions on how to create email aliases for gmail. Most of the users were suggesting that gmail basically ignores the dot '.' in the user id. So basically, syed.mohasin.zaki@gmail.com is same as syedmohasinzaki@gmail.com or syedmohasin.zaki@gmail.com. So you can use this option also a way of creating aliases.

So go ahead and use email aliases and control the spam that comes to your inbox.

Note: Gmail in itself is good at detecting spam.

PS: syed.mohasin.zaki@gmail.com is not my real mail id :).

Are you writing Java Apps for Android ? Maybe and Maybe not

Lot of people who are aware of Android think that they actually write mobile applications using Java. This is only partly correct.

What many people miss out is the fact Google Android uses ONLY Java Syntax. The java code that one develops for Android is converted in to standard Java bytecode. This again is converted in a different bytecode format (which Google claims that is an optimized, minimum memory footprint bytecode).

Basically, Android does not use a standard JVM (it uses a non-standard JVM called Dalvik) . The SDK also contains android.* packages apart from the usual java packages.

I found this post from Stefano Mazzocchi very interesting. He claims that the reason for Google using a non-standard JVM is not really for just optimization sake, but instead to get around any licensing issues with Sun for using J2ME. Wow! I never thought of that.

Its natural. If I were to run the Android project (instead of Andy Rubin), then I would start using J2ME as a preferred virtual machine for obvious reasons that we have a huge group of developers who can be readily moved/attracted to developing applications on Android. And then when it comes to licensing, I would think of someway to circumvent the problem and the one smart way is to make sure the final bytecode is not the same of the one generated by the standard java compiler. Thats exactly what Google engineers have done by developing Dalvik.


Other interesting links:
http://wireless.itworld.com/4269/071116googlesun/page_1.html
http://www.oreillynet.com/onjava/blog/2007/11/dalvik_googles_tweaked_nonstan.html

Wow!! Android Phone is a reality!!

Wow... I read this news at Phonemag.com about a Chinese company called E28 (haven't heard of it.. me neither) showcasing a real quad-band phone with wifi that runs on Android. Its available for sale.

Look at the video below to believe it :).

Android is going to give big mobile OS players like Symbian and Microsoft a run for their money. As I can see, smaller and unknown mobile phone manufacturers from around the world are going to benefit from open-source and freeware mobile phone operating system stacks. They will not have to worry about paying royalties/licensing fee for running a proprietary mobile operating system.

And last but not the least... WOW!!

Videos about Android!!

I was surprised to find very good videos in Youtube explaining about Android. Most of these official videos could be found under the username androiddevelopers.

Here is my favorite video from Sergey Brin and Steve Borowitz where they give a nice demo of Android features.

Did you know that The Wall Street Journal was free from Google News!!

Wow!!.. never knew this.

But before.. Whenever I used open a WSJ article that was listed in Techmeme, it only used to give a abstract about the whole story. The WSJ page always says that I have to be a paid subscriber in order to access the whole story. For this reason, I never used to open a WSJ post from Techmeme.

Then I read this post by Danny Sullivan where he explores the options of accessing WSJ for free. Thats' where I came to know that clicking WSJ news listed in Google News actually fetches the entire article. As Danny points out, WSJ has a special provision/login/subscriber id for Google. Either Google should be paying WSJ for this or WSJ should be allowing Google to index its contents entirly in order to drive more traffic to its site.

Judgement Day ?

Oh.. don't worry.. I am neither John Conor nor am I Terminator Model TX-101 :)

I was referring to Michael Arrington's post where he says that today could be the day when the Yahoo board would be taking decision on the company's fate.

There are hundereds of post about the deal.. but very few post provide an interesting insight about the possible merger.. and this post is one of them.

I also found this post on PBS by Robert X. Cringely about this deal. The post is interesting because this is one of the few posts' which tells as to what led Yahoo! to its present sad state.

Google's Social Graph API - Making a social application really social!!

Google recently released a new web API called the Social Graph API.

Now, this I feel is really cool.. because it lets social networks "understand" eachother. Yes.. it lets social network only understand each other and NOT communicate with each other (thats what I have understood from their blog.. please correct me if i am wrong).

So, whats the big deal about social networks understanding eachother. Well, rather than me trying hard to explain to you.. i suggest you see this video below where this Google Engineer (Brad Fitzpatrick) explains very clear what this is all about.


If you don't have a good broadband connection, then please read this Google blog post on Social Graph API.

Would be great one day when social networks also talk to each other. But why would that happen.. if I were to develop a social network site, I would rather use the Social Graph API, the way it is today to invite more friends to my social network.

Social networking is the current vogue and it is no brainer that Google would want to ensure that social network related search is also taken care of.

Btw, I also found this post from Dare Obasanjo on his thoughts on Google Social Graph API. Who the hell is Dare Obasanjo.. :) ??!!

I just found out that he is product manager at Microsoft. Interesting to see a guy from Microsoft appreciating the useful of Google's social graph API.

What is more interesting is the fact that he is the son of former President of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo :)

Is Google getting scared about MSFT-YHOO deal ?

It sure looks that way :)

Here is Google's official statement about the proposed MSFT-YHOO deal. As you can see from the statement, Google is warning users of unethical and closed practices of Microsoft to creep into the internet world as well.

Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies -- and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.

The statement also clearly tells you what Google is so scared about.. you guessed it - Email & IM.

In addition, Microsoft plus Yahoo! equals an overwhelming share of instant messaging and web email accounts. And between them, the two companies operate the two most heavily trafficked portals on the Internet. Could a combination of the two take advantage of a PC software monopoly to unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors' email, IM, and web-based services? Policymakers around the world need to ask these questions -- and consumers deserve satisfying answers.

Now why would Microsoft keep quite when they see that Google is creating a negative PR for them. So here is Microsoft's official statement against Google. But its not entirely intended against Google. Also, the statement is a bit gentle.

Today, Google is the dominant search engine and advertising company on the Web. Google has amassed about 75 percent of paid search revenues worldwide and its share continues to grow. According to published reports, Google currently has more than 65 percent search query share in the U.S. and more than 85 percent in Europe. Microsoft and Yahoo! on the other hand have roughly 30 percent combined in the U.S. and approximately 10 percent combined in Europe.

Here is a post from Michael Arrington about Google's stand on the proposed deal.

Google & Microsoft - Fight for the browser's default search engine

Very interesting and funny.. the way Google and Microsoft fight over whose search engine should be used by default.

I am installing Windows Live utilities to try them out. The only windows live utility that I've tried earlier is the Windows Live Writer - an offline blog editor which lets you type, format and post the message onto most of the famous blogging services like Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, etc.

Its a very impressive tool, especially for people who want to compose their thought offline and then post them when they are connected.

So, while installing Windows Live utilities, I got this conflict (see the image below) where Google was preventing MS from changing the default search engine settings.

Very thoughtful of Google to anticipate that someone (oh.. come on they know its MS) would change the default search engine settings and Its nice on Microsoft's part to not force Windows Live Search onto users even though Internet Explorer belongs to them.

War of Two Gaints - Microsoft vs Google

I would highly recommend you reading this article in The New York Times which explains in detail the different dimensions of the cold war going on between Microsoft and Google.

Both are loaded with cash and both trying to venture into each others space. While Microsoft is trying to make it big in Search and Advertising (but still without success), Google is attacking right in the heart of Microsoft's strong holds - their Operating System (OS) and Office Suite.

Article explains as to who Google is trying to venture in the OS domain by recently announcing the Android platform which directly competes with Windows Mobile OS and how Google Docs may threaten MS-Office.

Article, very informative and gives lot of insight on what the top execs at both the companies might be worried about each other.

Want to know what Google Intranet looks like!!

Then read this article in Google Blogoscoped.

It tells you about all those tools that you would use in a Company Intranet like their home page, the employee tools, their development tools, etc.

Reading through the article gave me a feeling as if I got appointed in Google for a day :) (I can hear you saying.. "in your dreams")

So, if you get appointed in Google.. you already know where to look for information in their intranet :)))

How does Google benefit from Android?

This was the question my friend and office colleague was asking me when we were, in general, discussing about technology.

I explained to him that Android will speed up innovation on the mobile computing front thus ensuring that users have a better and more PC-like web browsing experience on their mobile devices. This ensures that more and more users will starting browsing the net from their phones and thus ensuring that more and more traffic is driven to one of Google's many services where they serve Ads and also not to forget that Google Ads are scattered all over the world wide web.

Basically, Google believes in increasing size of the pie rather than increasing size of the slice in the existing pie. Interesting quote isn't it :). Well, I read about this quote in this news article by Financial Post which questions Google's business model on going the open source way with OpenSocial and Android.

Though I told my friend about the above, I wanted to confirm again if this is how Google really was hoping to benefit out of Android platform. So I did a little bit of Google'ing and and came across this interview given by Eric Schmidt and Andy Rubin, Director of mobile platforms at Google (the brain behind Android)

This is what Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, has to say in his interview at PBS.

SPENCER MICHELS: Now you say you're almost giving this away, why?

ERIC SCHMIDT: We're giving Android away because we benefit when the Web is better. We benefit when more people are using the internet, especially on mobile devices. And we benefit because when more people use Google, more people use Google search and every once in a while those people will use our ads. So eventually we think an Android mobile user is pretty likely to use Google advertising and our studies indicate that mobile ads are going to be worth a lot more than the traditional ads that we sell.

SPENCER MICHELS: Why?

ERIC SCHMIDT: The easiest example to think about is how personal your phone is. Everyone here, everyone in our audience has a mobile phone, very hard to get away from them. That phone is with them, it knows where they are. Imagine how we can use that information to provide a more targeted ad, if it were appropriate.

By the way, it is a very good interview and would recommend reading it if you want to know Google's plan for Android and mobile computing.

Google forming the Open Handset Alliance and defining a new mobile platform called Android once again proves my point that there is this race to establish a linux-based mobile operating system/platform (Oh yeah.. Android is based on Linux. On top of Linux, they have a Virtual Machine which offers APIs similar to Java VM but is supposed to be much more advanced than Java VM).

But with Google intelligently forming an alliance which includes telephone operators to handset manufacturers to chip manufacturers, they are better poised to take over the Mobile Operating System space much to the dislikes of giants like Symbian and Microsoft.

Google not just stops there. They even have a announced a $ 10 million prize money for users who develop useful and compelling applications using Android. This is to ensure that more and more developers get involved in this effort.

The advantage, I could perceive, from Android could be the following:

Handset Manufacturers: They would not have to pay hefty licensing fees to proprietary mobile operating systems like Symbian and Microsoft. So the cost of the handset goes down thus boosting the handset sales.

Developers: Because it is an open platform and almost everything is available for free, you can pretty much write any application you want. Imagination (of course the phone's capabilities) if your limit.

Consumers/End Users: Because handset prices go down, consumers can afford to easily buy them and they also get to install and use thousands of applications that were developed by the open source community.

Telephone Operators: They get to benefit because consumers start using these web-enabled/web-based applications on their Android phones and thus the data traffic is going to increase drastically. Operators are going to charge for this data traffic.

Of course, not to forget Google (and others).. they would be benefiting as well from Ads clicked by users on their mobile phones.

I am not sure how successful Android is going to be. But my gut feeling says that it will take off well. But, I believe, for the mobile web to pick up really well, the network speeds have to improve a lot. They sure will. Its just a matter of time.

-----------------

For those read this post till this point, scratching your heads, wondering as to what Android was all about, please read below.

Google, earlier this month (Nov 5th, 2007) announced that it was forming the Open Handset Alliance which is going to drive the development of Android. Android is an open platform for mobile phones which consist of an operating system, a set of software modules for performing some of the common tasks on the phone (middleware, as we call it in software terminology) and a user interface. You also can download the software development kit (SDK) for developing your own applications that run on the Android platform.

Feedburner bought by Google!! Man I din't know this..

Man... How come I never knew this news ? Am I going into some kind of suspended animation sometimes and all this happens. This is really news to me and I got to know this from the Feedburner home page. I have logged in through the feedburner home page a zillion times and how come I missed seeing this announcement!! Gosh, my observation power has gone really bad :(.

I was not active online before the month of August due to my project deadlines and I spent very little time browsing the web. I guess this acquisition happened in July. Unfortunately, I could not (and cannot still) browse the internet from my office network due to security reasons. And believe me, I have never seen or heard of so much security restrictions until I joined my current organization. I don't want to crib out it.. I am used to it right now.

Coming back to this news.. the guys at Google who are spotting and acquiring such companies are really good. As a layman user, whatever web sites which I thought were good have been acquired by Google.. recent one was Jaiku (Jaiku.. as I've mentioned before.. is a really cool web service and better than twitter).

Hmm.. but also thinking about all these acquisitions.. I hope Google does not become monopolistic. And again, I see that all the best services that I use are coming under Google's umbrella. I am not comfortable with that.