Earlier this week, Microsoft unveiled a new promotion that tries to encourage more people to use Microsoft Live Search instead of Google. Here’s the way it works: Each time you search on Live Search, you receive “tickets” — think of them as airline miles. After a certain number of tickets, you get various goodies. With 525, you get five music downloads, 1,100 tickets gets you a T-shirt, and 1,800 tickets gets you airline miles, and so forth. This comes on the heels of a similar promotion five months ago where users who purchased certain products through the search engine could get some of the purchase price back. Oh, and you have to be one of the first million to participate in order to get the tickets.
Is anyone honestly going to be swayed by this really lame marketing campaign? Seriously, this reeks of desperation from Redmond. I’m beginning to wonder if, in fact, anyone cares that Microsoft’s recent major product campaigns — perhaps with the lone exception of the XBox — have all been major flops. Put another way, Microsoft doesn’t matter anymore.
Let’s take Exhibit A: Microsoft Live Search. Launched in 2006, this search engine has been, for the two years of its existence, way behind the serious players here, Google and Yahoo. The most current data from comScore show that Microsoft only hold’s 8.3 percent of market share, less than half of Yahoo, and way, way way less than Google’s commanding 63 percent. Microsoft had gotten as high as 13 percent last summer, but lately the company has been hovering around 8 percent.
Last year, Microsoft’s own corporate bloggers touted the fact that the company was “committed to win,” and that the company was “going back to basics.” This post was quickly and roundly ridiculed by former Microsoft employee and Internet personality Robert Scoble, who rightly pointed out that between Google, Live.com, Ask and Yahoo, only Google could provide the location of a notary in Palo Alto. I’m going to bet that most of you out there, like me, in nearly all cases stick almost exclusively with Google for your day-to-day search needs. There’s a reason why this company is so profitable (recent economic activity notwithstanding).
Exhibit B: the Zune. Also in 2006 (November to be specific) Redmond launched the Zune, Microsoft’s answer to the iPod. As of May 2008, the company had sold 2 million of the little guys. The company likely retains its single-digit market share in the portable digital music player sector. As MacUser’s David Dahlquist put it at the time:
Apple, in the meantime, has sold 10.6 million iPods in its latest quarter. If one does the math, that means that Apple has moved more than five times the amount of MP3 players in the last quarter than Microsoft has moved in the last year and a half. Coffee break’s over, boys; time to learn how to innovate.
Last month, Microsoft decided that it could improve on the first generation by releasing new versions of the players along with new software to go with it. The New York Times’ David Pogue wrote:
The new Zunes haven’t changed at all except in color: blue, pink, red or black for the Nano-like model (4 to 16 gigs, $130 to $200 ) and black for the 120-gigabyte model ($250). But next to the sleek, shiny iPods, Zunes still look like dark, Soviet-made bricks.
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Earlier this year, the Zune Guy (he got a tattoo with the Zune logo!) went iPod, and the major American electronics retailer GameStop decided to stop selling them entirely. Among my gadget-toting friends, I’ve only seen one in the wild. And I’ve seen more iPods than I can count.
Exhibit C: Vista. Even before it was called Vista (it used to be called Longhorn), there was a lot of rumbling that Microsoft’s major OS upgrade would flat-out suck. There were delays as early as 2004. Upon its release in 2007, it was largely panned — the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg called it “a worthy, but largely unexciting, product.” More recently, major companies like Intel have advised against upgrading to Vista because there was, according to an anonymous Intel source quoted by the New York Times, “no compelling case for adopting Vista.” Hell, even Microsoft now admits that it sucks. You guys spent $6 billion on a product that you admit sucks?
Yes, Microsoft has made a truckload of money on smart business decisions in the past. But these days, it seems like its just pissing its future away by releasing products that no one is actually interested in. If this is the brilliant strategy that Steve Ballmer is planning on using to take on Apple and Google as Gates fades into the sunset, he might want to reconsider.
Update on yesterday’s Skype story: Skype spokeswoman Jennifer Caukin didn’t answer my questions directly, but rather pointed me to a blog post by Josh Silverman, the president of Skype. In the post, Silverman acknowledges the monitoring program, and wrote: “It was our understanding that it was not TOM’s protocol to upload and store chat messages with certain keywords, and we are now inquiring with TOM to find out why the protocol changed.”
This election has been full of superlatives and firsts. I’ve never been prouder to be an American abroad than right now. The historic rise of this unlikely candidate, in the unlikely story that is America, fueled by this unlikely swelling of the online masses donating in unprecedented numbers, is nothing short of historic and astonishing.
But there were also a few troubling episodes on the technological front, with text messages and e-mails being used as a way to perpetuate false information.
Wired reported late last night that voters in Florida and New Mexico received a fake text message from 505-507-6041 that says things like: “Due to long lines if you are voting for Barack Obama you can vote tomorrow,” or “Due to the long lines today, all Obama voters are asked to vote on Wednesday.”
The AP adds that there have been reports of similar “robo-calls” and fake texts in Missouri and that the Missouri secretary of state and U.S. Attorney’s Office have been notified. I’m glad that this wasn’t widespread enough to have made a difference, but it’s still a troubling development.
But that’s not all. Thousands of students at George Mason University received an e-mailspoofed to look like it was from Provost Peter N. Stearns saying that “election day has been moved to November 5th. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.” Apparently the FBI is on the case.
Still, we as a country really need to have a single standard for federal elections, get rid of these awful e-voting machines, and streamline this whole process so we don’t have to deal with this kind of crap anymore.
On a more personal and professional note, I share with you the news that this is my last post in Machinist, which is going on hiatus beginning tomorrow.
I thank all of you for reading and for your thoughtful and critical comments. If you’d like to follow me and/or any of my other work on public radio or elsewhere, you can do so on my blog: cyrusfarivar.com (where I’ll be announcing the result of our little trial voter-verified election), and/or you can email me at cfarivar [at] cfarivar [dot] org.
Among the wackiest technologies that I’ve seen during this election night is CNN’s hologram technology — something that was predicted back in the Star Wars era.
There’s not much info as to exactly how this stuff works, other than what USA Today has reported:
CNN will have 44 cameras and 20 computers in each remote location to capture 360-degree imaging data of the person being interviewed. Images are processed and projected by computers and cameras in New York. There’ll also be plasma TVs in Chicago and Phoenix that will let the people being interviewed see Blitzer and other CNN correspondents. Bohrman says the network can project two different views from each city so Blitzer can appear to be in the studio with two holograms.
Jessica Yellin was the first CNN reporter to be “beamed” to the New York newsroom, where Wolf Blitzer interviewed her — and she reported that there were only 35 cameras pointed at her, and that “talk to the cameras in New York.” Apparently representatives in the Obama campaign in Chicago and the McCain campaign in Phoenix will be interviewed as holograms later in the evening.
It’s still unclear who makes this hologram technology, nor how much it costs, nor how exactly it works — nor when I’m going to get it in my house. Man, and I was just getting used to Skype video chat. Still, scope out the video below.
At the risk of being a bit premature, I decided to poke around the Internet to find what tunes I could spin to spice up my Obama victory party tonight. After consulting Wired, About.com and this massive list on YouTube, I’ve come up with my Top 10 Obama songs:
This is without a doubt the best Obama song that I’ve seen so far. It’s got catchy lyrics — Viva Obama! — snappy outfits, a line about healthcare, and that female violin player? Muy caliente!
Jamaican reggae star Coco Tea recorded this tune earlier this year, earning a small writeup in the Jamaica Observer at the time.
As he told the newspaper:
“If you notice, Obama is getting a lot of support from the young people, and when the younger generation begin to call for change, it usually comes, as they and the future, and Obama’s future is in their hands. Support for Obama is also coming from other quarters including the Kennedy family, as he is seen as the man with a plan, therefore I was guided by Jah on this one.”
This tune comes to us from Cameroon, and if you believe what the Docta says on his Web site: “The video has quickly becomed a big hit on Youtube.” Indeed.
Mighty Sparrow is the world’s leading calypso singer, hailing from the island of Grenada. Cop a read on the lyrics over here — I’m sure this is the first time that the phrase “Foreign Relations Committee” has worked its way into a calypso song.
This song debuted just two days ago at a rally in Cleveland, so if you drop this joint at your fiesta, you’ll definitely be about 75 percent as cool as the Boss himself.
Although college a capella may get mocked on Stuff White People Like, this cover of the famed will.i.am song is perfectly pulled off by Barackapella, a group from Lewis and Clark College in Oregon. (Also, don’t forget the parody, by john.he.is!)
If you’re like me, you’re going to spend Election Night pretty much glued to the Internet, waiting for news to pop up wherever it might — on Twitter, blogs, YouTube and, yes, that good ol’ stalwart, the mainstreammedia. Usually I don’t watch television, but there are a few instances — like today — when I actually do want to watch something like CNN with the graphics, the analysis, the whole shebang. Further, I’m abroad, so it’s not like I can simply hop over to my local bar to watch election results (here’s a handy map showing when the polls close). So where can I go to watch live coverage online?
CNN is offering live coverage here and here. I’ve also found CBS‘s coverage to be working well so far — as of this writing, CBS has a camera trained (sans commentary) on a gym in Chicago where Obama is voting. (See photo at top.)
Oh yeah, and don’t forget about the ever-reliable C-SPAN.
Apparently ABC and MSNBC will be offering live coverage online as well, but I haven’t been able to find the respective sites yet.
There’s also this gray-market online streaming site, Channel Chooser, which offers both American channels and foreign ones, including BBC, France 24, Al Jazeera English and Sky News Australia.
Alley Insider has a bunch of live feeds from the McCain and Obama camps and some conservative Christian groups as well.
The New York Times has built a neat little election dashboard that updates every two minutes, and Google has gotten in on the action with its own map-based results page.
The French seem to be all over all kinds of new, far-reaching digital policy.
First, the French Senate “voted overwhelmingly” (297-15) late last week to create a sort of digital three strikes law, which after the third strike, would cut people off from the Internet. It’s not entirely clear how a law like this would be enforced, especially considering the fact that people can access the Internet from home, from their workplace, and also from free, public Wi-Fi hot spots, not to mention at other locations such as a public library.
The bill now heads to the French National Assembly for final approval.
If enacted, the law will put France on a collision course with Brussels, which rejected a call to impose such “three strikes” laws across Europe in April 2008.
Throwing people offline, it said, conflicted with “civil liberties and human rights”.
Second, late last month Eric Besson, a Sarkozy cabinet minister in charge of the “development of the digital economy,” presented a new 81-page Digital Plan 2012 for France, which apparently was one of Sarkozy’s presidential campaign promises.
If enacted, this would be one of the most ambitious technological policy plans in Western Europe in recent years. (And while I don’t mean to harp on Estonia, the Baltic powerhouse has had a few of these items, like digital ID cards and health records, for some time now.)
Among other things, the report says that “high-speed Internet,” like water and electricity , is “essential.” And as such, 2 million to 4 million French citizens are without it — and the government needs to work such that by 2010, every single citizen has 512 kbps that costs no more than 35 euros per month. Further, every French citizen should have access to high-speed mobile Internet as well, which only covers 85 percent of the citizenry as of today.
Other proposals include:
- allowing the old analog television signals to be opened up to wireless and mobile Internet access.
- an electronic national identity card for each citizen starting in 2009 (Estonia already has this).
- a doubling of cyber-crime law enforcement agents by 2012
- the promotion of telecommuting in the public sector
- a digital medical file for each citizen by 2012
- a Green IT and Cleantech prize
- a migration away from the American-dominated ICANN toward a more multilateral and international organization to run the infrastructure of the Internet.
As of yet, this remains but a proposal — but an interesting and ambitious one — and if Sarkozy is serious about keeping his campaign promise, especially while France holds the the Presidency of the Council of the European Union until the end of the year, it could be a boon to France.
