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Another Obligatory Microsoft Rant

September 13th, 2007

You know, lots of companies have “corporate communications” departments, where they examine the public impact of a policy or product, and choose the best way to handle it. This may be difficult where the news is unfavorable, because they have to somehow spin a bad story into a good one.

But it all-too-often seems as if Microsoft, despite listing corporate communications people on their employee roster, doesn’t have a working department to determine and control the fallout of the moves they make. How else can you explain some of the utter stupidities that emerge from their executives and actions?

It wasn’t so long ago that outgoing Chairman Bill Gates pronounced spam dead within two years. Of course, that was more than two years ago, and nothing has changed. Then again, most of the prognostications that emerge from Gates have been equally wrong. If he charged a fee for his guesses, he’d be a poor man now.

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A Memo to Professional Users: Stop Waiting!

December 29th, 2006

You’ve heard the claim: Mac users who crave the most powerful models have been waiting on the sidelines until their favorite image editing program, Adobe Photoshop, becomes Universal. At the same time, although a public beta is available now, the final version of the CS3 package won’t be out until spring.

Now it’s perfectly true that the beta version of Photoshop CS3 seems to work pretty well in many respects. Published benchmarks on Mac Pros show stellar performance, faster than any G5 you can point to. But it is a beta, and therefore it’s not suited for production work, and you wouldn’t want to depend on a product of this sort as a tool to make a living.

So it would seem, then, to make perfect sense to wait until spring before you buy a brand, spanking new Mac powerhouse. Maybe that’s true, but perhaps shouldn’t just sit and wait, as many have done, witness the reportedly stagnant sales of the Mac Pro.

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Apple: Please Stop the Silent Notifications!

July 7th, 2006

Some months back, a new iTunes feature caused havoc. When you clicked on the name of a track on your playlist, tunes of a similar genre appeared at the bottom of the iTunes window in a so-called “mini store.” Talk about havoc, because, in order to accomplish this magic, information about that selected song had to be sent to Apple.

You can imagine what happened next. The critics charged Apple with sending us spyware, so changes were soon made. While you could delete the mini store’s display, an update altered the approach. Now you had to turn on the feature before it became active. Moreover, Apple protested that it really wasn’t collecting any secret information from you, just the name of the song you selected. It didn’t even track the song you actually played.

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