In January 2010, I spent far too much time trying to find the "Official" Zune Facebook fan page. There were three Fan pages, two of which had almost 30,000 fans. However, I wanted to be join the official Microsoft owned/run/sponsored Fan page. Sadly, there was no way to tell which of the three was created by Microsoft. I had been a fan of the two larger fan pages, but they had pretty much stagnated at 25-30k fans for many months. So, while I was working at Microsoft, I …
Back in the mid-1990’s when I was working on the MSN Engineering team at Microsoft, one of the projects we started to work on was a tool that would allow people to post comments about web pages "on" the webpage. That is, it was a feature in Internet Explorer very similar to the "Comment" feature in Microsoft Word. As with far too many Microsoft products, they started it, then shelved it. I was really excited about it back then because of the great potential for true customer service …
For those who even remember it, Windows Me (Millennium Edition) was a stinker. Even internally at Microsoft no one (at least the people I worked with on various engineering teams) liked it. There’s plenty of websites dedicated to why it was a stinker, so I don’t need to go into those details. But, with Windows Vista, there was a lot of the same vibes… which made me think, will Vista be the next ‘Me’? Like with ‘Win Me’, Vista was plagued with issues of all kinds, but the …
Yes, I’m particular… but I LOVE the Microsoft Laser Mouse 6000 USB WIRED mouse. But, Microsoft has quit selling it! :( I use the wheel mouse a lot, but mine has been acting up for well over a year now, and it’s driving me a bit nuts. I’ve taken it apart several times and cleaned it, but it’s a mechanism problem, not dirt. I love it because it’s a 5-button mouse, and since I do so much on the web, I use the side buttons for "back" and …
Although 2D barcodes (also called QR codes – short for Quick Response) aren’t new, but they still haven’t caught on in the US. I’ve been asked by a lot of people “What is that?” when they see a QR code. To answer those people, they are postage stamp size or larger mathematical image that smartphones (with a high enough resolution camera) can read and convert to characters. Those characters can be a web address or a block of text or just about any input that a smartphone can …
I’ve been saying for quite a while that YouTube should have a “charge-for-play” model, where they get a cut of each transaction… just like PayPal or eBay or Amazon or any number of other companies… Yes, I know they are working on the advertising model, but it would be so easy for them to put together a package for content creators who want to SELL their videos to consumers. There are plenty of content creators out there who would LOVE to have a charge model via YouTube. No, …
