Is Windows 7 just Vista rebranded?
My thoughts and experiences are that I have never seen any OS released by Microsoft, server or workstation (and I’ve been watching and using them since MS-DOS) that was “customer” ready upon its release. After the release of Vista my skeptical opinion on Microsoft’s new OS releases was reaffirmed in a big way. Microsoft made major and wide sweeping changes to how their operating systems work in the shift from XP to Vista. In addition to these fundamental and broad changes to the OS, Microsoft prior to Vista had a “hand-in-hand” type relationship with major software and hardware manufactures. If there was a compatibility or functionality issue with a piece of software or hardware the creation of a fix would most of the time be a collaborative process between the manufactures of that product and Microsoft (directly or indirectly). This all changed with the release of Vista.
Without going into too much detail, Microsoft changed the game on all the companies that make products for their desktop OSs with the release of Vista, from HP all the way to Cisco. Unfortunately they forgot to these companies that they were changing the game. This caused major compatibility problems for users who made the switch to Vista during the first year(s) of its release. More importantly Microsoft lost ϋber amounts of brand trust in their Windows OS Microsoft OS. Windows customers had working hardware and software prior to the upgrade to Vista, but not after the upgrade. When users would look for support for the non-working hardware and software they would naturally go to the company that was representing the change, Microsoft. Microsoft foolishly took the hard line stance of “Vista isn’t the problem; your hardware/software is the problem. Contact its manufacturer and get support from them for these issues.” This sparked bitter feelings between customers, manufactures and Microsoft, making many users and IT admins long for the good old days of Windows XP.
To exacerbate the problems users were experiencing Microsoft would continually disrupt the status quo. After hardware and software manufactures would patch and update their products to be compatible with Vista, Microsoft would (automatically and without warning) rollout a security and operating system updates that would break software and hardware. What had been working just fine prior to the update would possibly not be working after the update. It was entirely possible for a company that had, say 15 Dell desktops in an office space running the Vista OS to be working when everyone left for the evening and to not be functioning the following morning due to the patch Microsoft installed the previous night. As you can imagine, this could range from bad to catastrophic to a company depending on its reliance on computers.
I have spoken with friends and customers who work with or for large companies the size of Coke or Boeing and it is interesting to hear what their IT department’s stance is on the adoption of Windows Vista. If you ask the CIO “Are you running Vista?” or “Are you planning on moving your desktops and laptops to Vista?” it normally sparks one of the following responses: A) laughter B) an incredulous look and a shaking of the head in to the negative C) both A and B combined.
You can imagine the horror a response of this sort would generate to the Microsoft corporate sales rep when they approach Fortune 500 companies and try to sell them on the adoption of Vista on their 10,000+ workstations and laptops. After having been shown the door numerous times buy CIOs all around the world, Microsoft started to learn that they were paying a disservice to their customers with the whole “Vista experience”. Granted, it did take 2 years for this to sink in, but it did finally and thankfully register with them.
Once Microsoft accepted that they had made a major boneheaded mistake with their whole Vista product and campaign they decided to focus on producing a product their customers would actually want, need and adopt. You may be surprised to hear this but Windows 7 is actually built on the same structure as……….Vista. The big difference is that it is built on the Vista platform with the intent to fix the all of the short comings Vista had. To better figure out what the short comings users and IT admins were having with Vista, Microsoft did a really uncharacteristic and downright strange thing: They asked their customers what their problems were AND they actually listened. But what is even more shocking is they didn’t just listen, they listened and acted on the feedback from those customers. I guess fear is in fact a great motivator.
The end result of this two-way communication and interaction between Microsoft and their customers is Windows 7. In one form or another, Windows 7 has been running on IT geeks computers around the world for almost a year now. They have worked with it, found issues, made suggestions and given feed back in an open forum. Microsoft would take that feedback, make changes, fix problems and release those changes back to the geeks so they could start the process over again. This went on for months and it was an entirely open process. The purpose of this development transparency was to help build and reestablish trust in Microsoft by the geek and IT admin communities. Microsoft showed its dirty laundry to them and then asked computer users, geeks and gurus to point out where its laundry needed cleaning. Microsoft would clean the laundry. This process then repeated over and over again.
What we are left with is an operating system that was designed to meet the needs of Microsoft’s customers.
All of this boils down to a few things:
- Windows 7 is not Vista (thank God).
- Microsoft is scared, no terrified of Windows 7 flopping like Vista with corporate customers.
- For the time being Microsoft realizes that they need to listen to and serve their customers.
- Windows 7 is an OS that is truly like nothing Microsoft has produce before. It was built with customer collaboration and feedback in an open forum.
- Windows Vista, much like Windows ME will be treated and viewed as the “red-headed stepchild” of operating systems.
Is FACEBOOK the answer to effective advertising on YouTube?…..Part 6
Enter Facebook.com. I’m going to assume that you have a basic knowledge of what Facebook is, but I will go into a little bit of detail as to what Facebook means to companies like Microsoft and Google from the standpoint of aggregating information about its users.
The “low down” on Facebook users as per: http://www.facebookmarketingforprofessionals.com/practice_areas/facebook-usage-statistics.cfm
- More than 100 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day
- More than two-thirds of Facebook users are not college students
- The fastest growing demographic of Facebook users is those who are 35 years old and older
- The average user has 120 Friends on the site
- More than 1 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared via Facebook each week
- There are more than 30 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
These numbers and statistics are rather staggering in some cases but what is even more important to keep in mind is that the average user puts information on Facebook about themselves that even their mother doesn’t know. It is safe to say that they have probably never put this information voluntarily anywhere else on the web before. In the FaceBook forums people discuss relationships, friends and family, things they love to do and even more importantly what they are doing at that moment. This is not to say that the information is totally accurate. The things placed on Facebook by the users about themselves could by definition be considered propaganda in its truest sense.
(This was pointed out to me by a podcast done by the StuffYouShouldKnow team http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/category/stuff-you-should-know/ )
The user has total control and puts on Facebook only information about themselves they want and choose to share with others. Taking the propaganda factor into account, there is most likely more information about that person on Facebook than on any other site or aggregator of “user specific information” on the web to date.
Facebook represents the ideal, indexed and categorized repository of user specific information that Google could use to match-up content with advertising for the users of YouTube. Allowing it to show ads that the logged in users would be interested in and thereby increasing the revenue those ads generate by untold percentages. Maybe even allowing them to make a profit with YouTube.com.
And there you have it, all that just to say Facebook has got the stuff Google needs to make YouTube profitable. I guess the big question is how much would Facebook.com cost Google and if you divide that by the number of days in a 4 year period is it worth it?
Can Google afford to wait to leave a door open for a competitor such as Microsoft and the new yet unproven search engine Bing.com?
I don’t think so.
Is FACEBOOK the answer to effective advertising on YouTube?…..Part 5
Now if you will, let us take a step back from the “1984” paranoid view of Google to the charges of it making money. Sometime ago Google bought YouTube.com for $1.65 billion. http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/google_youtube.html
Google did this and in true Google fashion chose not to charge for people using YouTube to view, upload and store videos. It was free for everyone and it was good for everyone, except the video hosting websites that charged money. After some time analysts started to crunch numbers to see just how much YouTube.com was costing Google to maintain? Estimates came to an astounding $1.5 million per day.
http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=715&doc_id=175123
If we think of YouTube as nothing more than an expansion of the “Google Funnel”, an effective one but an expensive one nonetheless, then the Google- YouTube matchup is ideal regardless of what any analyst says. It is safe to say that Google’s cost to maintain YouTube will only diminish in accordance with Moore’s Law as time and usage goes on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore’s_law
A $1.5 million loss per day is nothing to just brush off though, this realistically equates to the sinking of 12-15 small businesses per day, every day and that makes my skin crawl. So the question is how does Google make money from YouTube? Simple, they make money the way they do best……they advertise. The really big fly in the ointment is that the $1.5million loss per day already accounts for their advertising. They have not been able to effectively pair up advertising with content searches on YouTube like they do for searches done directly through Google.com. This poor pairing of content and ads is caused by numerous reasons but the primary one is that Google doesn’t know enough about us or why we are searching for videos to accurately match up video content to our personal preferences for products and services. Google is slowly building a database of this information based on our Gmail/Google accounts in conjunction with our Google searches and general web usage, but that takes time and when you’re talking a loss of $1.5 million per day, time definitely costs money. Google needs specific information about who we are, what we do, who we like, what we like and how often we like it AND they need it now not 4-5 years from now.
To be continued…..
Is FACEBOOK the answer to effective advertising on YouTube?…..Part 4
What Google truly is
Picture if you will yourself standing in a blank field with no grass just a white, shiny linoleum floor below your feet. Now picture yourself looking up into the sky and seeing floating there above you, everything, and I mean everything…cats, books, people, bottled water, stinky cheese….everything you can possibly imagine. Don’t worry, it won’t fall on you, it is out of your reach and you aren’t quite sure how to get to it. Now picture a funnel like the ones people use to put oil in their cars but really, really big floating there right above you. You smile when you see the brand name Google in multicolored letters on its side. It’s floating in between you and everything you can imagine. That is the place where Google wants to be, in between you and everything else in the world. Why? So as they index everything in the world and effectively provided it to you through searches……they can also provide advertising that matches up well to what you’re looking for so it doesn’t bother you and you find value in it. Since it doesn’t bother you there is a much higher likelihood that you’ll click on the ads to purchase the a desired product or service, making Google money.
Okay that explains where Google wants to be and how we help them make money to sustain their efforts of indexing and categorizing all of the world’s information but it doesn’t clearly explain why they give away all that really good free stuff. Think back to that situation where you’re in the blank field everything in the world is up in the air above you and Google is a funnel allowing you to reach all those things. In my mind the funnels big but doesn’t cover everything. We have to aim the funnel correctly to find some of the things we would be looking for (this would be akin to changing the words you search with to find exactly what you are looking for). Google understands that it is not a big enough funnel to encompass everything and that it is up to the user of the Google to tailor their search (aim the funnel) to find exactly what they want.
But what if that funnel was constantly growing in size? Would the person searching with it not have to be quite as accurate with their “aiming” of the funnel? I think so, and I think Google thinks so as well. So now let’s picture the funnel growing in size, representing Google becoming more aware of the information and content that is on the web. Google still has to go out and learn or find new things on the web constantly in order to become more aware of newly created data. It is arguable that Google is simply the best thing known to man at finding new information on the web but it still has its work cut out for it.
Now imagine if the information and content that is created and placed on the Web is done through one of Google’s many, MANY, outstanding applications (that happen to be free). People would not just be creating content on the web with really good free tools but at the same time making Google aware of that content and thereby helping Google to index and catalog that new content allowing it to grow at an astounding rate. So to answer the question “Why does Google give away incredibly good software and tools?” I would have to say it is so Google can increase its awareness of existing and newly created information on the web at an exponential rate.
The Good: We not only get better results from our searches on the web but we get really good free tools to create and place new information on the web. In a lot of cases we would have spent money in the past for the types of tools Google is providing to us at little or no cost. The information that is put up on the web using these tools is structured to be easily indexed and categorized by Google because it was placed there via Google.
The Bad: To start with, if I owned a software company that made its billions by providing software packages to my customers for hundreds and thousands of dollars per user /per company and suddenly someone (Google) was giving away for free the same tools I charged money for, I would have to imagine my business would change or maybe even go away. This would no doubt have some substantial impact on the economy good or bad. Secondly, if you follow this process out for 10 or 20 years, you would start to see Google having what some might call an unhealthy level of awareness/interaction with the world’s information. The saying “With great power, comes great responsibility” comes to mind. And while Google has a policy of “don’t be evil” it is in fact run by humans and as of yet no social structure is immune to corruption. Last but not least, at what point do we start thinking of Google like we thought of a “Ma Bell” or a “Standard Oil”? And when we do, how would we break up a company that spans the globe in such a ubiquitous manner and still allow it to do the thing it does best that we so heavily rely on?
To be continued…
Is FACEBOOK the answer to effective advertising on YouTube?…..Part 3
“So you’re telling me that the best search engine in the world and all of these free pieces of software like email, word processing, spreadsheets, phone directories, blog engines, to just name a few ARE free??!! Right…….do I look like a sucker to you?”
As described earlier Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information. No one would argue that this will and has cost a boatload of money, and that it maybe a philosophically unobtainable goal. But Google isn’t going to let a little thing like impossible slow them down. We have seen that Google has the drive to relentlessly pursue this goal of indexing all of the world’s information, but there is that other small piece of the equation…..MONEY( or as we like to refer to here in eastern PA … MONIES). So you may be asking yourself, how on God’s green earth can Google afford to perform the indexing/cataloging/organizing of the world’s data and on top of that give away all that really cool stuff for free?
I would call that an excellent question and I am not sure I have the complete answer, but I’ll take a swing at it to try to explain the point of Google’s Freemium business model. We already discussed that the main form of income for Google is advertising. They arguably do it better than anyone else on the web to date and earn literally billions of dollars a year in profit from it. This allows them to give away for free the thing they do best, search the web. If free searching of the internet was not enough, they also give away topnotch services and products for free or very little cost to anyone who wants them. They do this not because they have altruistic motives like a Craig’s List, but because their core mission is to: Index (aka organize) all the worlds’ information and make it searchable. They do it because in order to index the world’s information they need to be aware of that information and what better way to be aware of it than to take part in the creation, sharing and recording of it.
To be continued….
Is FACEBOOK the answer to effective advertising on YouTube?…..Part 2
The search you never knew you made
Our experience with Google searches up until recently has been pretty simple. Go to the Google home page and then type in the search words you think will show you the results you want. Google only knows what we want based on the information and words we type into the search field. Undeniably Google has provided us with answers to these searches better than any other search engine on the planet. So well that most people do not bother to look for answers on any other search engines such as Yahoo or Microsoft Live (Now called BING) because the answers they find on Google are meeting or exceeding our expectations. Google’s ability to be our “one stop shop” for internet searches has sparked numerous new industries focusing on getting companies to the digital version of the “holy land”……the first page of a Google search related to what product and services a company offers.
What you probably didn’t know is that Google is starting to tailor or change search results from user to user based on who they are, where they are and what they have searched for in the past. Google does this by tracking your web habits through your Google login. If you have a Gmail account and you stay logged into Gmail or Google throughout the day, you are in essence helping Google build a profile about you that they will use to help them provide more relevant search results for you specifically.
You can read a little more on this topic at: http://searchenginewatch.com/3631746
The Good: You may just get more of what you are looking for from Google. In the long run this personalized search process may in fact increase the accuracy of your search and every other person’s search on the planet. It could change the dynamics of Google’s overall search algorithm to a point where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies are no longer effective at getting their clients to the “holy” page 1 of a Google search because there are far too many variables for them to control or influence. This will mean that the content that shows up on a Google search is much more likely to be real, valid and desired content for the Google user.
The Bad: Small business owners will no longer be able to effectively utilize companies such as Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) firms to increase their presence or level of awareness to their customers on the Web. They are going to have to manage the process themselves through the valid creation of content, information and or answers to whatever their customers may be searching for related to their company. I can’t say that this is necessarily a bad thing but it is definitely a dramatic shift in how companies will market themselves on the Web. SEO companies will fade away or migrate to different service offerings, costing countless jobs to be lost in the technology industry…… or perhaps these companies will find a new niche and creating countless new jobs. I didn’t sleep at a Holiday Inn Express last night so I don’t know what will happen but time will tell and it will surely be interesting.
To be continued….
Is FACEBOOK the answer to effective advertising on YouTube?…..Part 1
There is no argument that Google is the 800lb gorilla on the Web, but there has been some talk that they might be challenged and given a really good run for their money by a company such as Facebook or Microsoft.
Take a look at this article that appeared in Wired Magazine in June of 2009 showing some of the strengths and weaknesses between Google and Facebook.
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-07/ff_facebookwall
While I don’t particularly agree with the author on some major points made, I do think there are reasons Google should make a serious effort to buy Facebook if even for the sole purpose of customized advertising.
To get one’s arms around the whole of this issue we should really bring up some history and major points leading up to now.
Background on the challenges facing Google and YouTube:
-How Google makes $$
Google makes money by paring up advertising with the keywords a user inputs to create a search. If I search for “stinky cheese” on Google I will not only get information about smelly cheeses but I will also see keyword based advertising on the right side of my screen for Land O Lake and Cracker Barrel cheeses.
The Good: I will not only learn about Gouda cheese from informative cheese fanatics and their blogs but I will be presented with places that sell stinky cheese locally and over the web. Essentially I get all I could ever hope to learn about stinky cheese and where I can buy it from around the world.
The Bad: Well I really can’t think of anything bad about Google’s process of giving both information and a place to purchase what I searched on. In the past this practice of paring up information with ads would be a bad thing and a frowned upon practice for printed media. For example if I was reading an article in the Sunday news about smelly cheese and its life extending effects on humans only to see a half page ad for a local cheese monger at the end of the article telling me about a huge sale going on NOW! In this context I have to admit I would view the article I had just read with some skepticism and question if its information was truly unbiased or just an elaborate ad created by the news paper. When the same pairing of content and advertising appears in a Google search result I have no issue with it. Why we have shifted our perspectives this way I am not sure. I have not read anything that conclusively defines the cause behind our not trusting printed media paring content with ads but trusting Google when it does the exact same thing.
To be continued….
What does Google fear about Bing.com?
About 3 months ago I was in the deep bowels of Google’s “even more” section and found a question based search engine that was being developed. This was not your grandmother’s search engine, oh no, this was a search engine that would allow you to ask a question and have Google come up with a smart answer. Think of climbing the mountain to ask the wise monk the meaning of life or maybe why Twinkies are so popular.
Its purpose was to give you an answer that was insightful and based on all the data Google had indexed and a “thought process” algorithm applied to that data. It is important to understand that this is the theoretical “Holy Grail” of search engines. Why? Imagine a team of scientists working on finding a way to improve the effectiveness of solar panels. They are stumped with a particular problem so what do they do? They ask Google what the answer is to the problem that has them stumped and like a really, really smart person Google answers the question or gives major insight into the answer. Talk about standing on the shoulders of giants! We will one day be able to stand on not just the insights and information of a few, but of all information contained on the web.
I thought this answer based search experiment of Google’s was pretty neat stuff but obviously needed more work. That must have been why it was buried in the Labs section of Google’s tools. I toyed with the search and then moved on to other things that were on my mind, like work and paying bills.
Enter…..Bing.com. Weeks after I stumbled upon the question based search engine of Google’s, Microsoft launched Bing.com. It was touted as a new kind of search engine that was smart and able to “think” of answers for your questions and searches. This made me think of the question based search engine I had found on Google a few weeks earlier. So I went back to look and compare Google’s engine to Bing’s engine. To my surprise Google’s question based search engine was gone! Nothing, nada, zip. Not even evidence that it had ever been there just a few weeks earlier.
I don’t know what to think about this other than this is Google pulling their cards closer to their chest so their competitors can’t gauge their progress on the next generation of search engines. This does make me wonder what Bing has that Google fears though.
**Please note that this was not Google Answers at Answers.google.com, which was retired back in 2006.
Is FREE good?
I am, currently reading the book Free: The Future of a Radical Price.
Check it out on Amazon for about $25
Or get it for ……Free (that’s right) from Audible.com
I have read many reviews on this book from the main stream media and I have to say I find them to be slanted in a cynical way against the Free business model. I suggest you check out what the author has to say for yourself and discard the mainstream “anti Free” sentiments.