Alex Gomes >> Blog

But this time Microsoft is going to fail. And here are 10 good reasons why.

1. This isn’t the 90’s. Moderate product does not cut it anymore. Vista maybe nice but really nothing to look forward for, no giant step.
2. Win 3.1 was a leader, Win 95 eliminated DOS, Win 98 was about browser war, Win ME was for Y2K, Win XP just eliminated years of software bugs that Microsoft promised for a long time. What can you say about Vista.
3. XP works pretty well, too well sometimes. A stable system, worthy of praise.
4. With Vista, you can only reinstall once. So when your system corrupts in six months, good luck.
5. You need a supper computer to run vista. Oh well, thats how you going to feel with your pocket book.
6. The anti-piracy features for DVD and digital media locks you out of your own box/dvds.
7. The $5-10 billion dollar MSN Live search engine is broken. That fact itself tells you what you need to know about Microsoft.
8. There will be another Windows in 2-3 years, its not worth upgrading now, you have waited so long.
9. Black Friday, Christmas, New Year, tax season gone. Now you release Vista. Is there any worse time?
10. What extra feature from XP are you going to really enjoy for that amount of money? Is some fancy menus, worth forking so much money?

For the record: I haven’t used Vista yet, and probably won’t buy one. I will however get free legal copy to play with. I will keep XP for a long time.

How will I remember 2006?

1) Out of all the things that happened this year, 2006 will be remembered for Vince Young.

Vince Young provided a performance of lifetime in Rose Bowl, Texas Vs USC at National Football Championship. One of the best sports moment in my life.

Followed by the NFL rookie of the year performance for Tennessee Titans. He took 0-5 Titans to 8-8 season end, with playoff contention. What an achiever, for so called retard (Wonderlick) and three year project. Haha.

I know lot of other things happened, but in scale of history this will be long lived.

Notable Mention:

2) Zinadine Zidan’s head butt in World Cup(Soccer/ Football).
3) Saddam Hanging.
4) Making Money - Expanding Business (Shhh).

I am mad with MSN Live. Not only is it ugly with nonsense GUI, but the search feature is now useless. MSN live just dropped two of my largest network from there index, and they were non spam, under Alexa 100k rank. Its just not only me, but whole bunch of websites have disappeared from MSN Live. How can you take a decent product and make it worse?

Microsoft, please hire some professional, even a 10 year old can write better search engine than you.

Now I don’t generally care about MSN traffic, if there is any. But I do care about my brand. I care when somebody searches for mybrand.com and it does not come up on MSN Live. I do care for customers who will be using Vista next year and use MSN Live via there IE default toolbar(Conveniently provided by Microsoft). I care when mydomain.com does not come up for “My Domain”.

Please clean up your act for everyone’s sake.

Lot of websites have reported ranking problems. The problem started on December 7th, 2006. I had one website affected by this rank change. I think I have figured it out.

What if this winter, there has been growth in internet while no significant growth in capacity for Google?

What if people are shopping a lot this Christmas, and Google has to justify its 4th quarter earning?

Becuase of AdSense and increase in the number of people shopping or accesing the internet, Google must have been in demand for more servers. We know from Google CEO’s own words, they have a server capacity problem.

Now they could spend some money and take care of the problem. However, the increase in cost would not look great on 4th quarted earnings, specially so close to year end.

So what they did was shift data centers from Search to AdSense and Checkout.
Now, where’s my proof?

1) I just checked some of my large sites, and all of them report decrease in number of page indexed.
2) Also googlebot has significantly slowed down last few weeks.
3) Google shows 9 billion web pages indexed opposed to 25 billion pages earlier this year.

With the reduction of storage per site, Google has more servers. Which in turn can be used to serve AdSense and Checkout.

Another shameless promotion of the Google brand. Adsense is serving Google’s G logo on random publisher sites. Its on the right, beside “Advertise on Google” text. As if they weren’t hyped already.