Microsoft

Launched nine months ago, the Google Chrome browser already has over 30 million people using it regularly – people who live on the web – searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. (Gee, I wonder who Google is talking about?! LOL)

Google has just announced a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at Netbook computers first, but will eventually port the operating system onto other computers such as laptops and desktop systems. This sort of computing is often referred to as ‘cloud-based computing‘ – meaning that your applications (and files) are not internal, but running virtually online. That means less upgrading, less software purchases. The draw-back is less control and ownership.

This new OS runs within a new ‘windowing system’ using Linux, with its key aspects being speed, simplicity and security. The software architecture is simple:

• For application developers, the web is the platform.
• All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies.
• And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.
• Designed to be fast, lightweight, you can launch and get onto the web in a few seconds.

Computers need to get better. They should just work. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files.

Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates. And any time our users have a better computing experience, Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet.

For some fun, have a look at this Graphic Novel
http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/small_00.html

Excerpts for this post taken from an article posted by Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management and Linus Upson, Engineering Director for Google. Joyce Jones also contributed.

We were wondering how the new bing.com web search would affect our business once it was released. So far, one result has been that we’re turning into a third-party sounding board. Here are some of the comments we’ve received through OUR web contact form at bingdesign.com…

I constantly mistype weather making it weatehr or something similar, when I search for the word it suggests weather even if it was mistyped in the search results but if you could show on the suggested pull down list correctly spelled words if its not a recognized word to help me catch the typos before waiting on the search you could speed up my search time.

When a subject is typed into the search space and the enter is hit, one does not like to have to do it twice becuae someone programed the computer to make it happen that way. I could care less about the first group of crap that po’s up, I want the subject and do not want to have to hunt for it. That is why I do not, and my friends who come over and use my computers will no longer do so. Thank you so much for that one. Try Harder Please.

nice job, found out about this site in business week, search brings up different sites that I really do appreciate you finding for me, nice to see microsoft kicking some butt.

I attempted to use Bing to do two simple searches. First, the names and contact information of Motels, Hotels etc in Gladwin, Michigan. It produce what I would call garbage information. One of the facilities that it came up with is for sale and is not even open. Second, I asked for Multuple Sclerosis and known recognized treatments. I was looking to see if you had the material that i could get from my local library. The library has access to articles and medical journals from all over the world. The material that I saw listed did not include very much data from outside the United States. The British have a great deal of data and studies done over the past 50 years that do not even mention. Some of it includes studies done on things like Greek Extra Virgin Olive oil done in the 1960’s which turned out to be quite effective. Best of luck with the site. It appears today that some tweeking is in order.

is Pakistan not a country to live.com name was cooler bing is kool but not cooler ur website is cooler but why is no name of pakistan in ur countries list we r better than india plz put Pakistans name on it we r better than middle eastern countries as well google has a pakistani google why not bing

Hello, I just want to thank you all for creating an awesome online seach engine – bing.com. I have been a big Google fan for many years, but ever since I discovered bing.com a while ago I have transfered over – making Bing my #1 online seach engine. I discovered bing.com through a friend and now I have all my family, friends, and co-workers hooked on this site. It has gotten so bad at work that now we all have it as our Internet homepage. I love everything about Bing. It is easy, quick, better results, and has other cool features, which include the \”Popular now\” links. And the best thing about it all – I can access it at any time and still get great results, without error messages. As a student and as an employee, I definately appreciate this site. Great job guys! I will definately speak to my friends at school and work to give Bing.com a try. But I am most convinced that once they try it – they too will be hooked. Keep up the good job. I look forward to this site\’s future success. As I tell my friends, GO BING.COM!!

I’m a programmer and the search on your site doesn’t work. I typed in ‘What color is a blue car’ and the results were complicated and didn’t make sense.

I HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO DOWNLOAD THE BING TOOL BAR. I HAVE TRIED 3 TIMES

Please forward to the president or marketing director. I\’m a producer and have a cool song called BING  DING, it would be great for marketing your co. contact me for a licensing deal please. check the song out at cdbaby.com/cd/joeswampdawghenry

A broad spectrum of suggestions can spark some interesting conversations around the water cooler. Join the crowd and let us know what YOU think of the new search engine too.

You might be looking at the logo to the right and thinking, “Did Bing Design re-brand their logo again!?” No, we are happy with the way our logo turned out. But what you’re seeing is Microsoft’s identity for Bing, a new search engine.

To stay competitive with Google’s dominance in online searching, Microsoft has positioned Bing as a “Decision Engine”.

We have all heard when you need to look something up, to “google” it. In fact, google was added a few years ago to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as a verb. Interesting point #1: I wonder why it’s not included as a noun too – isn’t a google a one with a hundred zeros after it? Interesting point #2: I see that Microsoft is already trying to verb-ilize ‘bing’ also.

Microsoft’s marketing gurus hope that Bing will evoke the same feeling as the sound – the ringing of a bell that signals the eureka moment when a search leads to an answer. The name is meant to conjure “the sound of found” as Bing helps people solve complex tasks.

Bing (the other one) seems to be focusing on searches related to:

• Making a purchase decision
• Planning a trip
• Researching a health condition
• Finding a local business

A “cherries-to-cherries” comparison of that Bing and this Bing shows a few similarities:

• We help clients make marketing decisions that meet their needs and fit their budget.
• We assist you with team outings. Yellow Springs is great place for a trip.
• We provide communication audits that help determine the health of your marketing efforts.
• We can localize your message in the new sense of the word – through social media communities.

So there you have it. The skinny about the Bing that’s been around for years, and that new startup from Microsoft…

One of our clients uses a lot of Microsoft PowerPoint (PPT) presentations that need to be updated by their sales force, which are then sent to us to tidy up and put on brand. For several years this has been done on PPT 2004 on a Mac, and reviewed on a PC depending on the complexity of the graphics.

When PPT 2008 for the Mac was released, we toyed with the idea of using it as our standard. But once we got a little more familiar with it, we felt that the new version does little more than stir up the user interface a bit. There may be some new bells and whistles, but for the power user nothing much was improved in the way of functionality or efficiency.

One function that I was hoping would be improved was the animation interface. This component has always been inferior on the Mac compared with the PC version. On the PC, you can change elements of an animated group without ungrouping and subsequently losing the animation. But this isn’t possible on the Mac, even in the newest release. To change just one item in a group, you have to ungroup it and lose any animation effect the group had. If there are several animations, it’s quite time consuming to recreate them all.

This inefficiency is compounded (but just on the Mac!) by the fact that animations have to be done in a dialog box rather than a palette. So as you compare old and new versions of the animation to recreate it, you must continually open and close the dialog box to make alterations to the animation sequence, options and/or effects. If we had a palette that always stays open for edits, it would be a huge time saver.

Another area that’s a problem is text wraps in a bulleted list. When we opened existing files in Mac PPT 2008, extra spaces would sometimes appear at the beginning of random lines. This discussion thread illustrates the problem and a Microsoft representative acknowledges that it’s a known issue.

With these issues we wondered if it would be better to switch to PPT 2007 for the PC. This version is supposedly the equivalent of 2008 for Mac, but its interface is radically different. The new release seems odd and harder to use. That alone would not keep us from using it, but we’ve also encountered glitches that prevent us from relying on it. Again, an example is text that’s incorrectly spaced and aligned in presentations that were created in previous versions. Because of the large number of older presentations we work with, we weren’t comfortable with this uncertainty.

Other wildcards are the process for adding new colors is glitchy, and gradients created in earlier versions may reverse direction in 2007 for PC. In addition, there are issues with using multiple master slides – if you have a large number of people (like a sales force) that needs to be able to apply master slide layouts, they must be on this version to access them.

So for now, we’ll just stick with our tried and true process of editing in PPT 2004 for the Mac and reviewing on the PPT 2003 and 2007 on the PC. If you have expererienced any of this yourself and have found a good solution, let me know!

You may remember this video showing a tongue-in-cheek look at how Microsoft would redesign Apple’s iPod packaging:

Apple has always been admired for its design, all the way from the products themselves, to the packaging and advertising. Basically every bit of Apple you see has the same clean, spare design that still manages to provoke an emotional response.

In the November issue of PC Magazine, John Dvorak writes that Microsoft, on the other hand, is perceived as being perpetually in “bad taste”, even though they use good design firms, and a lot of what they do looks great. Their downfall is that they don’t have a single vision of what their brand should look like. And that is something that Apple does better than any company on the planet. It helps that Apple has one guy at the helm: Steve Jobs, a “dictator” who ensures that every step of the way, the product reflects his own vision. Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia is another company that does an incredible job of maintaining its brand identity through myriad product lines. And we all know who runs that place with an iron fist.

At Microsoft, there is a committee of individuals who pool together all their ideas and end up with an “agreeable soulless product.”  There’s no payoff for being different or adventurous – making something safe is the most important thing. Doing something too radical might alienate the other members of the committee or worse. As a result, they never get in the news for doing anything exciting or crazy that captures the public’s imagination. Sure, not everything that Apple’s done has been a huge success, but for every Newton and PowerMac Cube (which I own and love, by the way), you get an iPod or an iPhone – products which outshine all competitors and have redefined the market.

Reading this, I immediately drew a parallel to the graphic design world. It’s a commonly repeated adage that “design by committee” is anathema to good design. With a single vision, you do have the possibility of winding up with something completely hideous, but by the same token, you could easily end up with something sublime. Without a bunch of different opinions needing to be taken into consideration, an artist with a single vision can create a work that has soul, consistency and beauty. Of course, this is not always possible with the constraints of business, needing to adhere to company policies set by lawyers and executives (see video above). Most of us can only imagine what it would be like to work for a benevolent dictator with an eye for design. Challenging, sure. But what beautiful things you could create.