It’s a Windows 7 Love Fest

On the fence as to whether or not you should install Windows 7? If you’re hesitating, let me help you get up on this here bandwagon. I love Windows 7, yes it’s true, but remember that I was someone who didn’t entirely hate Vista – it had its quirks, mind you -  but nothing was entirely broken for me except for some lousy Nvidia drivers. However, I never really blamed that on Windows. I blamed that on Nvidia. Still, I suggest people take my opinion with a grain of salt.

Of course she likes Windows…she works over there. And I do, but believe me, I don’t get paid to blog on sarahintampa.com. If I did, there would be a lot more content here.

So anyway, for the folks that need a little more convincing, I offer you up some more impartial insights from around the web:

1. Walt Mossberg, Wall Street Journal: “I do have some first impressions, and they are all pretty positive.” Video:

See also, Even in Test Form, Windows 7 Leaves Vista in the Dust

2. Gizmodo: Why the Windows 7 Taskbar Beats Mac OS X’s Dock

3. Ubuntu’s Shuttleworth praises Windows 7, welcomes fight

4. Information Week: Windows 7 ‘Incredibly Stable,’ Intel Expert Says

5. Plus, as I pointed out on Twitter earlier, even a couple of die-hard Mac fans commented on how they “didn’t dislike” Windows 7:

• Oh My God, I Actually Like Windows 7 (So Far): “… I honestly would not mind using Windows 7 on a daily basis, which is something I haven’t been able to say about a Microsoft OS since when the early days of Windows XP”
• Windows 7 on the HP 2710p:  “… Let me say at the outset that the installation and the amazing experience I have had with Windows 7 had me seriously thinking if I should stay with Mac OS X.”

6. But why should you try Windows 7? Well, sometimes, things are great not because there is one big revolutionary change, but because every little thing has been improved.

7. Oh and because things “just work.” (Hey now, we get to say it too!)

Here’s a great example of things just working, from anand iyer’s blog – his Lenovo T60P running Windows 7 waking up from sleep:

…Yeah, it works that way for me too.

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

I got my hands on Windows 7 at last, fresh off one of the PDC hard drives. I haven’t even used it for a whole day yet, so I can’t tell you much more than what you already know just now. I know there are a lot of things to like about this OS, and as I explore them, I’ll go into more detail over on at Channel 10.

I did, however, experience one driver issue that I think is worth noting. Given that this is a pre-beta developer’s copy of an operating system, I’m sure this will be resolved by the time it goes gold. But for the sake of those googling to find the solution, I figured it’s worth putting this out there in case anyone has the same problem.

Problem

I installed the OS on my Dell Inspiron 1520 laptop as an upgrade from Vista Ultimate. The driver that Windows 7 selected for my network adapter was no good. Internet connections were slow and pages loading would time out. Ping tests revealed dropped packets. The problem was easily solved through a driver update, though – and I didn’t even have to go download a new driver from the internet – a good driver was already available on my computer.

Solution

This laptop has an Intel® Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN network adapter. By default, Windows 7 had installed the Intel driver, but it was the one was causing problems. Instead, go into Device Manger, go to the Properties of the adapter, then the Driver tab. Choose “update driver.”  When asked, choose “browse my computer for driver software,” then “Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer.” The driver I ended up using was the Microsoft driver, version 12.1.0.10. Once that was installed, I was back in action.

Courtesy of Channel 10, my home away from home (on the web, that is):

The wait is up! Today at PDC, we finally got to see a demo of the next OS from Microsoft: Windows 7. One of the biggest improvements in Windows 7 is the new taskbar, but there have also been other improvements like better networking features and a less noisy UAC. We’ll go into these in more detail later, but first, here’s what you really want, Windows 7 screenshots! Want to see them? Click here or just launch the Flickr slideshow below:

A recent post on the Windows Vista Blog led me to a New York Times article: Echoing the Campaign of a Rival, Microsoft Aims to Redefine ‘I’m a PC’. It’s worth the read. The Microsoft ads weren’t being “cancelled” and the campaign isn’t a failure…they were just icebreakers…like they said.

About the new ads, via the NYT article:

What follows is an audacious embrace of the disdainful label that Apple, Microsoft’s rival, has gleefully — and successfully — affixed onto users of Microsoft products: “I’m a PC.”

One new Microsoft commercial even begins with a company engineer who resembles John Hodgman, the comedian portraying the loser PC character in the Apple campaign. “Hello, I’m a PC,” the engineer says, echoing Mr. Hodgman’s recurring line, “and I’ve been made into a stereotype.”

The strategy to use the Apple attack as the basis for a counterstrike is typical for the agency behind the campaign, Crispin Porter & Bogusky.

Crispin Porter, part of MDC Partners, relishes efforts to transform perceived negatives into positives. For another client, Burger King, the calorie-stuffed menu is portrayed to a target audience of young men as a rebellious personal choice to “Have it your way.”

Mr. Gates makes a cameo appearance in the new Microsoft spots, along with celebrities like the actress Eva Longoria, the author Deepak Chopra and the singer Pharrell Williams. (Mr. Seinfeld is gone, at least for now.)

But the stars are everyday PC users, from scientists and fashion designers to shark hunters and teachers, all of whom affirm, in fast-paced, upbeat vignettes, their pride in using the computers that run on Microsoft operating systems and software.

Among them are more than 60 Microsoft employees, who are accompanied in the ads by e-mail addresses — even Mr. Gates’s (bill@windows.com)

I would just like to point out that I thought the first set of ads were funny and I wasn’t afraid to say so. But you guys were absolutely off your rockers if you thought that was how they spent the $300 million. Seriously.

By now, you probably have heard the news about the Microsoft Sphere. From the same researchers who developed Surface, the Sphere is a similar multi-touch device except instead of being a table, it’s shaped like a globe. The sphere was built as a collaborative effort between Global Imagination, makers of a digital globe known as the “Magic Planet” and Microsoft R&D, who added the sphere’s multi-touch capabilities. The big question everyone wanted to know was what can the Sphere do? The obvious answer is that it can be used as a globe. With the Sphere, you can view a spinning globe that displays different views from Microsoft Virtual Earth. The Sphere can also be used to play games – like a unique spin on “Pong,” for example. It also lets you do other “Surface-like” things such as resizing photos, dragging photos across the sphere in real-time, or sending them to the other person across the sphere by pressing down on them.

For a closer look at what Sphere can do, check out this video:

The Office Labs site has released their first community prototype project: Speed Launch. (Community Prototypes are projects that Microsoft employees work on in their spare time.) Speed Launch is an application launcher, similar to Launchy, which I reviewed earlier here. 

With Speed Launch, you can quickly launch programs, documents, even frequently accessed websites. What makes Speed Launch different though, is that you can add items to it via drag-and-drop. For example, if you want to type “DVD” in order to launch Windows Media Player, you can just drag the Media Player icon to the Speed Launch app. Similar to how Launchy works (by pressing Alt+Spacebar), Speed Launch is accessed by typing Windows+C. Using some of its built-in functions, you can also use Speed Launch to do comparative web searches, Wikipedia searches, check weather, or check stocks, and more.

Speed Launch is available as a free download from here.

Today, Microsoft’s new viral campaign, “The Mojave Experiment” launched. The site, designed to help combat the negative perception of Windows Vista, shows videos of real people being shown a brand-new OS code-named “Mojave.” Of course, what they don’t know is that “Mojave” is really Vista. After the 10-minute demo, the computer users, a collection of 120 folks who ran either Mac, Linux, or another version of Windows, are asked for their opinions. Not surprisingly, they liked what they saw.

The point of the “Mojave Experiment,” of course, is to show how negative marketing tactics (cough Apple cough) have affected people’s opinions of Vista…perhaps unfairly so. Vista, especially now after SP1 and numerous driver updates from manufacturers, is just not that bad. Does it have its issues? Yes. And let’s be honest, XP was a darned good OS – maybe even one that didn’t need improving. That made it hard for people to want to upgrade. Vista also embraced change, sometimes seemingly for the sake of change, and that wasn’t always a popular choice. Still, it did not deserve the incredible bashing it took in the tech community. It was far from perfect, mind you, but the hatred expelled towards Vista was not in proportion to its faults.

What’s even more interesting than the Mojave Experiment itself, are the new Microsoft defenders now coming out of the woodworks. Take, for example, this post on Engadget. It’s a somewhat hateful take on the whole “Mojave” endeavor that ended with the question: “What are you trying to say, Microsoft? That people heard really bad things from their friends and co-workers, but a slick 10 minute sales presentation showed them the light?”

Apparently, Engadget commenters on the post didn’t like the post’s negative tone since it was soon updated with an explanation: “We’re hearing you guys loud and clear in comments. We’ll admit, we hate senseless Microsoft / Vista bashing just as much as the next guy, and that’s not what this is about.”

What? Apologies for Microsoft-bashing? I thought that was the tech blogosphere’s favorite pastime?

As far as what I think about the new Microsoft campaign – well, it’s about time. Microsoft should have never let those “Mac guy” ads continue on as long as they did with no response. It got so bad that people actually started to feel sorry for the poor, sad PC guy who was constantly picked on. Yet, in many ways, both the Mac and PC guys were representative of those they used them. Maligned PC users who care about spreadsheets vs. the smug contingent of Apple fanboys. (OK, Mary Jo doesn’t think it’s a direct response to the Apple ads, but I think it’s the beginning of one). 

But no reaction is just of typical of Microsoft – the company has never really gotten a grip on the importance of marketing in forming consumer opinion. Yes, on one hand, we know we’re being marketed to, but on the other, let’s face it, we’re a sucker for a shiny ad and a pretty package. If Microsoft dropped the ball at all, it was not acknowledging the mistakes they made with Vista’s launch by using marketing as a tool to counteract them.

The takeaway from this new campaign, and the $300 million plus one yet to be revealed, is that Microsoft is finally learning their lesson. And yes, there is a small portion of the community that will still rally behind their efforts. Believe it or not, the community as a whole doesn’t hate Vista. We just never loved it. As Tim Anderson says, “there’s not much wrong with the core of Vista, as demonstrated by the generally solid performance of Server 2008, and now by Mojave.”

And when I refer to “the community,” you need to understand that I speak of the people who exist outside this blogosphere, too. This, the poorly named “tech blogosphere,”  is not a “tech” blogosphere at all, actually, but one that is simply the social media blogosphere, the internet startup blogosphere, the web 2.0 blogosphere, and the “whatever’s next” blogosphere. Don’t be fooled into thinking that we’re all that matters when it comes to “tech.” Real tech happens everyday beyond these walls. As far as I.T. goes, yes, I know Vista’s enterprise adoption is low, but I also know there are a myriad of reasons for this, too. But the bottom line there was cost and no compelling reason to upgrade. No compelling reason. Again, we didn’t hate it, we just didn’t love it.

How exciting! I just blogged this news over on ReadWriteWeb:

Windows Live Mesh is Microsoft’s software+services data synchronization platform. Because of its complex nature, most people assume that file synchronization is all there is to Live Mesh, but in reality, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Microsoft has big plans for the service and syncing files between computers and the cloud is just the start. When Live Mesh launched, it was currently a closed “technical preview” (that’s Microsoft for “beta.”) But now it appears the Mesh guys have quietly opened up the platform for all of the U.S.

Keep Reading…

The Microsoft Zune is definitely the underdog when it comes to MP3 music players. In this market, there is only one king and everyone knows it’s the iPod. It’s hard for anyone offering an alternative MP3 player to get ahead, even when they have the marketing budget of a company like Microsoft. 

And the Zune – it’s not all bad, you know? The team knew they had to do something a little different to set it apart when they built it, so the Zune offers some unique features like wireless sync and wi-fi sharing of music, pictures, videos, etc. There’s also an all-you-can-eat subscription service (the Zune Pass) available and the Zune marketplace contains over a million DRM-free tracks (and not at jacked-up rates, either).

The features alone weren’t enough to convert the legions of Apple fans, but at least the Zune was making waves. Zune was establishing itself as an alternative…and that’s a good place to start.

Then came the quirky television commercials. Some people loved them, some just thought they were odd. Whichever side you took, you have to at least admit they were memorable. They were different. They were artistic and they didn’t look anything like the iPod commercials. (I personally thought they were cool…and I hate most commercials.)

Zune TV Ad

But where the Zune marketing efforts veered off course was in sponsoring Diggnation. Although Alex claims to really like the Zune, listening to Kevin Rose discuss the device, like in this recent paid advertisement (see below) reeks of disingenuity. Everyone knows Kevin is a hardcore Apple fan and the only reason he’s sitting on the couch is to make some money.

Alex & Kevin Talk Zune 

It’s like the Zune marketing team wanted to buy their way to the top by purchasing a bit of Alex & Kevin’s geek cred, but that’s just not how it works anymore. Yes, there was a time when a famous spokesperson could sell a product, but today’s youngest generation of consumers, Gen Y, is wary of being marketed to and not quite that gullible.

They want to know what the people they admire, be them famous singers, actors, or even internet stars really believe in. They don’t want an infomercial.  This generation can tell the difference between a pitch and a conversation and they can smell a marketing stunt from a mile away. And Kevin Rose talking Zune? That one is so obvious it’s just sad.

And what kills me is that it was unnecessary, too. Zune was building a brand for themselves as something unique. Something different. From its very launch when one of the color choices was a controversial chocolate brown, Zune was standing up and saying – “hey, look at us, we’re not an iPod. We’re different!” 

That “uniqueness” is the brand - the TV commercials mirrored this sentiment as did the other marketing efforts like the site Zune Originals, which lets you customize your Zune by having it engraved with select artwork. And it’s not cheesy stuff either – there’s a huge selection to choose from and it’s all that same weird, quirky stuff from real, honest-to-goodness artists.

Plus, there’s the occasional extra-hip Zune available there, like the current Joy Division Zune which is, in fact, so hip that it doesn’t even have mass market appeal.

And let’s not forget the latest addition, Zune Arts, which I recently blogged about here. The site features content (desktops, wallpapers, buddy icons, etc.) from several visual artists, all of which is downloadable for the Zune.

Their latest offering is what even may be a first – a graphic novel made just for the small screen. Does anyone else even offer that? Is that the start of a whole new form of media? Who knows, but it’s definitely interesting…and it works.

So, the Zune marketing team should stick with appealing to the indie crowd and whatever notoriety they achieve there will trickle down to the masses over time. (It’s why bands like “Death Cab for Cutie” are now getting airplay.) Going the indie route takes time, but it can worth the effort in the long run.

What doesn’t work, though, is buying 8 minutes of time to have the one guy who can’t stand any Microsoft product sit on a sofa and pretend to be interested. And seeing that the video has only achieved 1000+ views, the entire audience seems to agree.

This article is from Channel 10, a Microsoft blog for tech enthusiasts. To subscribe to Channel 10, the link is http://on10.net/Feeds/RSS/. To subscribe just to my posts, the link is: http://on10.net/blogs/sarahintampa/RSS/.

A company called Seriosity has introduced a new tool for email productivity, Attent, which attacks what they say is the main source of information overload: SENDERS! Yes, it’s the people sending email that are the real problem that need to be addressed, according to Attent, so they’ve come up with a system for businesses to implement which is supposed to make people stop and consider if something is worth emailing. 

With Attent, each employee is given a set amount of “Serios” per week, which are basically like virtual dollars. For each email you send, you can attach a certain number of Serios to it, depending on importance. More important emails are sent using more Serios. The system works as an Outlook plugin, and, since it only works with other people who also use Attent, the company would have to roll this out to everyone to make it an effective tool.

While this is an interesting idea, the reasoning behind this idea is that you can force people to email less by forcing them to calculate how much they can “afford” to email, and that seems to me a pretty much a knee-jerk reaction to dealing with info overload.

For one thing, Attent can’t stop people outside the company from emailing, so it only forces internal employees to turn to phone calls and face-to-face requests which may be even more disruptive than emails.

From personal experience, I found that a lot of people chose to email simply because email was the absolute fastest way to send out a request for help, a question, or to share a message with a large number of people. When this became a burden, such as it was at one of my I.T. jobs, the real cause that should have been addressed was why were people turning to email instead of using the tools to them at hand? Why were people sending emails instead of logging help desk tickets? Why were people sending emails instead of referring to online documentation? Why were people sending emails instead of doing the job themselves – which they had the ability and permissions to do, but not the know-how?

The problem that must be addressed in every company are the underlying causes that lead some people to use email far more than necessary – and use it first, without thinking things through. This tool, Attent, aims to do that, but without  deeper understanding about what’s wrong in the particular company.

For example, in my situation, implementing a I.T. support email address that directly posted items to the helpdesk instead of arriving in my inbox would have been a big help. Training people where to find the answers they need and how to use the tools we had in house would also have cut down on the emails. (Unfortunately, I didn’t have the authority to implement changes, because believe me, I would have!)

At another job of mine, where I did have authority to make changes, I spent a good part of a day out of the new hires’ week of training teaching the new employees about our in-house web resources – one of which was a SharePoint site. Even for those who had never been exposed to SharePoint, the majority were able to understand pretty quickly how they could use it and it definitely helped cut down on requests in the future as people weren’t emailing in basic questions like where to find a certain file or bit of information. They already knew where it was online.

Often businesses tend to overlook the value of training, but then they end up working harder due to the lack of training of their new employees. The value of real, instructor-led training is something every business needs to understand because, once in the thick of things, employees will never find the time to study user manuals or do research – everything becomes “I need an answer now.” The best time to reach employees and set out what the expectations are for them is at the very beginning of employment before they become reliant on using their preferred tools and processes that result in increased efficiency for them, but that decrease the overall efficiency of the company as a whole since they put the burden on other people who have mastered the use of the company’s informational systems.

Of course, training isn’t a panacea for the entirety of the information overload problem, but it’s certainly a better use of a company’s money that setting up a virtual economy where emails have a price tag associated with them, in my opinion.

For dealing with the remainder of the email, tools that add efficiency to the process of sorting through your inbox - like my business email add-on of choice, ClearContext - are really the way to go. Heavy use of filters, rules, and informational auto-responders can also help cut down on the flood. However, real solutions to today’s information overload problem are going to much more in-depth and complex than an Outlook plugin. Maybe IORG will come up with some answers for us.

(Image courtesy of Seriosity)