[Image source]

There are only two ways to catch up a “market leader”:

1. the leader makes very bad decisions that eventually comes back to haunt him and leaves him vulnerable.

or

2. you buy a startup or small company that has the innovation, but lacks the resources, giving you a better possibility of catching up.

Either is very hard, just look at Microsoft. Vista really sucked, but still they are the “market leader” operating systems. Or see at Google, they bought Android and see where they are today, still on the hunt for iPhone and trying to be the dominant mobile platform.

So, what to do? Stop playing the game of others and play your own. The catch game is like gambling in a Vegas casino, you will win enough to continue betting, but will never win against the house or break even. Do something different, which makes you the leader since you are the first to come up with it.

For example, Asus and the netbooks (eventually everybody was able to catch up). More interesting, instead of trying to play catch-up, Apple did something different, the iPad, which is a device that is between the tablet, eBook reader and netbook.

Another example is the Puma Phone, just freaking cool stuff.

At the end of the day is like convincing people to not follow the conventional patch and follow, therefore making you the leader.

Some hours ago Gmail was down and everybody started to complain. Now is up and running and people are still complaining. This made me think that how can business and organizations rely on Gmail for business, if it goes down for around 6 hours as it did today.

Google today provides 99.99% of uptime for Gmail for Business, which translate into approximately of 53 minutes of down time. However this outage wasn’t of an hour, it was more than 6 times the guarantee they offer. This pain the current customer suffer and others don’t wish to suffer, has a partial solution: configure your account of offline use using gears, but still we have the problem of sending. Here is the thing: it is impossible for a service like Gmail to be up 100%, the whole internet and systems are to complicated, there is always a point of failure somewhere. However we could mitigate this points of failure by “not having all our eggs in one basket”, which translates to:

A third party providing a solution (generally in a server hosted by the consumer) that serves as backup for the services. For example company XYZ will host in their server room, a backup of Gmail. So ,if we have the outage we had today, the business can still read and send emails, because it doesn’t fully depend on Gmail. The same principle applies to all services that reside “in the cloud” i.e CRM, Office Suite.

[source]

Now, this is not an easy task: to develop such backup servers, especially when the providers (such as Salesforce, Google, Microsoft) don’t have  support for such services through a API. Also, In the case of email, a third party will have to implement a spam filter and SMTP server for the Backup for Business Gmail to work. Then we have the issue of support to the backup and how to seamlessly change the customers from the web based.  And then there is, of how much to see such solution and if a there is actually a demand for such products.

Still, like Travis (a Ausie I met at the Laundry room) said: lack of resources can lead to an opportunity. Right now, we lack the resources to have 100% uptime in our services on the cloud, and the need (or pain) is there, since we now started to depend on them and get outraged when is not fixed at the moment we snap our fingers. The question is: How? Certainly I will love to find out.

Every time I put my laptop (with Windows Vista Business) on hibernation, sleep or just lose internet connection, my MSN live messenger will not connect. Sometimes I will fix this by just killing the process and restarting the program. Still, is just big a pain to the point that I will go days without using it.

Like most of you visiting me from google or yahoo, I started by searching Error 80040200. While reading many results I found the following instructions from this blog post:

1) Close Messenger. Go into Task Manager and ensure that the “msnmsgr.exe” process is not there. If it is, kill the process.

2.) Navigate to C:\Users\<YourUserName>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live Contacts and delete the entire contents of the folder.

For XP go to: C:\Documents and Settings\Users\Local Settings\AppData\Microsoft\Windows Live Contacts (thanks to Mary for bringing this up)

3.) Restart Windows Live Messenger.

If that works… great!!!, no more error 80040200 for you. However, if you are stuck in step two trying to delete all files without success, then continue reading.

The reason we got stuck is because another process was using the files you can’t delete, one of them being contacts.edb. Just try to find the process wlcomm.exe in the Task Manager. This might be the process stoping you from deleting the file. So, if you can’t find it, proceed to download the Process Explorer. Once you go it, run it and press Ctrl+F or go to “Find” in the main menu and click on “Find Handle or DLL” button. Then you will have a pop up where you write the name of the file contacts.edb (which is the one you can’t delete), as shown in the image bellow. (If you think this is a bit advance for you or need any help, please write a comment and I will gladly help you)

Once you find the process kill it, delete all the files and restart the MSN live Messenger. Again, if you got any questions drop them in the comments and I will be back to you.

The question I have been asking myself is “where are the software companies, whose cracked software can be found on the p2p networks?”. Software companies figure out long ago, that they can fight these phenomenon. Slowly, they had changed, now big companies offer basic free versions of their products, understanding that $$$ is “Business to Business”, and not with consumers. You see, if Microsoft gives out free software to students, is because they know that when this students graduate and get a job, they will ask for the software they know how to use. As a result Microsoft now offers “Express” version (in other words basic version) of many developing tools. Future developers ask for this tools when they join the workforce (or can earn enough money to buy them).

The story is different for Media companies, because they think that they depend on consumers they do anything possible to charge consumers. That dear readers is just being lazy and comfortable. They been like this for such a long time, to the point of forgetting other life than selling to consumers. For example, why don’t they focus on merchandise, spectacles, limited edition products and concerts. Let people hardcore fans by feeding the thirst for music. That is no the case, instead they turn into bulling down, any wave of change.

Wonder why the Soundcloud is not in trial? They even charge for you to upload and share music on their site. Yeah I forgot they are a new company that provides a service.

Like they used to say: lead, follow and get of the way. So I get out of the way for the recap by Torrent Freak Day Four and Five. They do a better job than most of us.

If your touchpad or mouse stop working after windows update of IdeaCom Technology Inc. – Input – IdeaCom HID Touch Screen (PS/2) update, then your not alone. I have Vista Business 64 bits and I have seen reports on the net that the problem occurred to XP and 32 bits versions. My hardware is a
Dell Notebook XPS 1330. However this is applicable to other laptops and computers that have the same problem (that is trusting Microsoft).

To solve it you need to uninstall it, however you can’t do it from the Remove Software, it has to be done from the device Manager. Go to the device manager and look for the IdeaCom HID Touch Screen (PS/2) in either Human Interface Devices or in Mice or other pointing devices as shown bellow:

(I apologize for not having screen shots from when I have the problems, I just forgot.)

Once you have found the IdeaCom device, right click on it and Click on Device Uninstall. Your will get a confirmation windows, there check on the option Delete the driver software for this device.

If you also find the Dell Touchpad,  uninstall it and delete the drivers as you did with the IdeaCom. The reason is because we want to have no conflicts and windows loading drivers that “compete”. In my case this happened because I tried to Install the Synaptic drivers for the Dell Touch Pad (that I download from support page). If didn’t reinstall the drivers, I don’t know if you have that will be your case. However to be sure double check and uninstall the all IdeaCom and Dell Touchpad devices.

You may have to reboot after each uninstall of devices (in the case of being more than one) instead of doing both at the same time. Remember ONLY to uninstall the touch pad drivers and IdeaCom, forget about the other USB Human Interface Devices.

Download the drivers for the Touchpad (in my case if was from Dell). If you have another laptop or computer then download the corresponding drivers and Install, then reboot. Everything should work after this.

There is another approach to look for the driver file in the C:\WINDWOS\system32\drivers\ folder and delete it. I don’t like and recommend this approach because windows doesn’t know the device is not on the system, it just messing. Although Windows has it problems, it will have less if it’s well inform. Think about it with your Linux distro, it’s better to use the package manager to install programs, instead of download the sources and compiling. In the case you do an update it the package manager will update the dependencies. However if it doesn’t know the program is installed, then it will not update the dependencies. Or vice versa, other programs may depend on it and not get the corresponding update.

Finally, to avoid future problems DON’T download device drivers from Microsoft. Its better to download them from the manufacturer. Although they should be generic, manufactures sometimes tweak them or test them better than Microsoft.

Yesterday, I was looking for some information regarding the “Shrink Volume” Windows Vista utility, and found an article in Lifehacker on dual boot Vista and Windows 7. There in the Opinions section, is a post titled “In 2009, Microsoft Still Underestimates the Web”. The post is a constructive criticism, on Microsoft failure in distributing the Windows 7 public beta Sunday mourning. The author attributes the failure, to Microsoft not taking the web more seriously and being clueless about “how to do stuff online”. That might be true, however lets look it from a different perspective, how about the cause being that Microsoft doesn’t understand its customers and thinks is still 1999.

Microsoft is a Juggernaut in the Software space, like it or not, and can do whatever they want. If they want to waste millions on trying to overtake Google in search, they can do it because they are Microsoft. Their ad campaigns are nothing compare to Apple, but they can spend the millions, get criticized and at the end it creates the buzz they are looking for. And if they want to release a beta of Windows 7 on such date, we will download it, even if we don’t like Microsoft.

This Software Juggernaut failed to understand the Windows 7 customers. I’m not talking about those that have Windows in their machines, or average the user that just wants thing to work, but the ones that want to go with the trouble of trying and testing Windows 7. We are not in those days when you can release a crappy OS like Windows Me and not get a backlash that might generate an effect on revenue. This is not 1999, when people voice wasn’t loud enough to be heard all over the planet. Now with broadband, mobile internet, Social Media and all Web 2.0, nobody is safe.

People that download Windows 7 Beta are early adopters and innovators that want to try Windows 7. They want to test it and see if they can find cool features or report a bug. While in this process, they will start a conversation by blogging, tweeting, recording videos and even distribute the copy they got on torrent sites. Microsoft failed to understand who these crowd is and why they want (and need) to download Windows 7. This are the customers of Windows 7 right now and right now, the number is bigger than it was 10 years ago.

By stating that Microsoft doesn’t understand the Internet is like saying “we” don’t understand China. The internet is not just a bunch of look a likes, in front of the computer, connected 24/7. We are people, with different feelings, ideas, ambitions and goals. We connect with each other, based on sociological patterns, using  the Internet as a tool. Western world looks at Chinese in the same way, we think they are the same because they look similar and act similar (the irony is that hey also think we all look the same). However they are a culturally rich and diverse country, with various languages and ethnic groups, with different ideas and dreams. Yes, they all live in China as most of us “live” on the Web, but that doesn’t make us all the same.

Any company that wants to reach its customers through the Internet, has to understand that the dynamics are the same if they wanted to reach a community in flesh and bones. How many times a has the power of a community, country, city or group of people has been underestimated ? How many times, have we been surprised on how people behave in unexpected ways, in regards to specific products, services and events? The social interaction that is natural to us, magnifies and accelerates on the Internet, which is still sociological in nature. That is why, by trying to “understand the Internet” as a whole companies, already have lost the battle, instead they have to look at it granularly.

Neither Microsoft or Google understand this, however they where both lucky to become dominant players in their spaces. Most people have limited choices for operating systems, as well as advertising platform on the net. That doesn’t mean one understands its customers better than the other. Google is less hierocratical than Microsoft, that is why it looks like they are more upbeat with trends and setting the tone. Also that Google’s rise to fame, was part of the “Web 2.0 era” and are seen as more “cool”.

The cause of Microsoft problems is Microsoft itself, from their leadership to their culture. In the case of Google, Google itself will be the cause of their future problems.

Failure to Launch Serve

Microsoft got some heat because weren’t prepared to handle the spike of downloads.  Yes, its Microsoft fault because they initially created the scarcity by announcing that only 2.5 million downloads will be available, however they got their act together, fixed the problem and extended the period of availability until the 24th of January.

My question is how do you prepare for such demand.. or event? How do you know how much your current setup can handle it? Its kind of difficult if you don’t have the right tools and money to find out (in the case of Microsoft is their culture). Some people might suggest, “hey why not use BitTorrent?” The issue with using BitTorrent is that Microsoft are against those networks and have shown their feelings toward trackers and index sites. So, uploading it to Mininova or The Pirate Bay is out of the question. They could use Mininova distribution service, which requires the content to be free. The other alternative is to setup up their own trackers and apparently, they don’t have the competence or interest in using Bit Torrent as a distribution tool. That will be interesting, however their culture will not permit it. So they are stuck with using the traditional way, hosting and managing themselves. Maybe, like I said before, Microsoft is jut to old and doesn’t get it.

All this problems aren’t that bad for Microsoft, they create some buzz, people get interested and they get feedback for free. Also, is not a new thing, its documented that other companies had their problems in the past i.e. Paramount with the launch of the Ironman Blueray live, Apple with their Mobile Me downtime. Even Salesforce which is a company that core business is to “serve” and offer reliable cloud CRM, had some downtime.

The bottom line is that “Serving” is not an easy task and shouldn’t be taken for granted. We will continue to see more service outages, failures, etc. because they think it just takes to put a server online and viola. Companies need to realize that they need to understand the customers they are targeting and communicated with them. You will be surprise how responsive and understating people are, if you provide constant communication to them. They know problems will rise once in a while and will forgive that. However what they will not forgive is that the company that “Serves”, doesn’t prepare for such p
ossible problems and doesn’t communicate efficiently.

Its similar to a relationship with your partner or spouse… communication, communication, communication.

We will not have history lesson or fact listing of these three big companies, Wikipedia can serve this purpose. However, I’m here to point something out: Microsoft did it to IBM and Google is doing it (or did it) to Microsoft. Therefore somebody will do it to Google, yes it might be hard to imagine, but 10 years we never thought Google will be.. Google.

You see, IBM was the leader in the computer industry for about three decades. Then there was a shift to the personal computer, mainly on the need of having computers in our desktops, helping us with our daily tasks. Microsoft took over the PC business since anybody, with the capacity to manufacture hardware, could “clone” the IBM PC and use the Intel chips. Apple on the other hand targeted designers, therefore leaving Microsoft as defacto OS in desktops computers.

When the Internet came to play and Microsoft “was doing all that talk and no walking”. At that point it didn’t matter, until Google took over search supremacy and search has become the killer Internet App. Fast forward to today and Google is the king of the Internet. Microsoft is now  trying to battle the “monopoly” of Google and being careless of Windows and Office products.

IBM has its place in the IT Industry and Apple has it place in the consumer electronic Industry as well as it “niche” in the Computer Industry. Microsoft has its place in the Software Industry and is a dominant player in the Business sector. However, for some reason they think that the only way to grow is to challenge Google. Will see what happens with Microsoft and if they will ever realize, that they are looking themselves at the mirror, when looking at Google (in a twisted and interesting way).

How does history repeat itself? Well it repeats when a dominant player wants to get into a industry that is not his core competence. This is mainly related to a main trend or a shift in a focus toward other technologies. It also repeats it self because,( well at least I am) getting tired of Google being a bully, having advertising on everything and buying wasting all that money on unproven companies. Remember the days when we started to get tired of Microsoft?

Google is now a bully, trying to be everywhere and strengthening their monopoly. Maybe now Microsoft knows how everybody felt about them. I’m kind off getting tired of Google search, there are too much adds and I don’t feel I’m getting the best results. Now they are becoming a bit “too big” that they are crowdsourcing search.

Who will do to Google, what they did to Microsoft?

Well, not a search engine, or software company, nor Apple. Apple is happy on being seen as a “niche” company, although they are pretty dominant. Also, there are rumors going around Jobs health and it might be end of an Era. The answer to the question is in the BitTorrents. To be more specify I put my money on The Pirate Bay or Mininova. This is mainly based on their increase in popularity (see here and here) and since they are a integral part of satisfy a need hunger for any kind of media (especially The Pirate Bay by being a Index and Tracker).

What makes Mininova and The Pirate Bay interesting is the trend to deliver media over the Internet and in different mediums. They are the dominant players today, even if they don’t make the millions made by iTunes Store. In addition you can see how they are diversifying and growing organically, by creating new “project” or services. Some of them are:

• Vio Mobile Video Convertor
• Baywords (uncensored blogging Plataform)
• Slopsbox (email address for sites that ask registration to deliver content)
• Bayimg (uncensored image hosting)
• Snotr (online video)
• Mininova Content Distribution

Will see what happens, however I’m excited by the possibilities by this companies. They are challenging the status quo, being a reminder that we shouldn’t be taking everything for granted. I guess they haven’t reach their potential thanks to the bad aura surrounding BitTorrent. However there is nothing Google can do right now to counter them, if Google does anything this just signs of trouble for Google?

A couple of weeks ago, I receive an email from Microsoft asking me to “help” them fight junk mail. After being in the program for three weeks, I got to the conclusion that this whole program is junk . Junk E-mail Protection Team is a cheap attempt to “crowd source” spam detection. They don’t have clear opt out options, includes address that are part of my contact list and I send emails too and there is no reference in the help or official page of the program. Finally, is not that different from when you tell Hotmail, which emails that get to your inbox are spam and when emails that go to the Junk folder and are not spam: plain redundancy.

All started when I received an email from “preventjunk@live.com that stated the following:

We hate junk e-mail as much as you do. As part of our effort to fight junk e-mail, we’re asking for a little help from our friends (that’s you!).

If you sign up to help, here’s what we’ll do: Every once in a while, we will resend one of your e-mail messages and ask you to categorize it as either junk or not junk. That’s it-one click and you’re done!

This helps us fine-tune our junk e-mail filters and protect you better. The messages that we send are your real e-mail messages; they were addressed to you, and may already have been sent to you earlier.

If you are wondering (like some people on the out there) if these is legit here is a print screen of the original message:

You may think that spammers and hackers can make emails look real, and spoof the address preventjunk@live.com, well here is an image of the header:

As you can see, Microsoft shows kind of a status bar on the top that tells you that its legit. So far, so good. The “inconvenience” starts when you sign up and start receiving emails, asking you to identify emails from people in you contact list, as spam or not. Spoofing is not an excuse for Microsoft not being able to verify if an email from the hotmail.com or msn.com domains are spam or not. The worst thing, is that if you say that is not junk, then you expect the email to appear in the inbox. That is not the case, they just put the email somewhere that it could not be found. With that one time Microsoft “miss placed” my email, I was through with the program.

I start to look for a way to opt out, the problem is that there is no option in the [options] menu. So, I went to the original email (see image above) and the only thing I see is the following:

To stop receiving messages about this program, click here.

The reason I didn’t click on there is because, at that point it wasn’t clear to me what it will happen, since they use the term “this program”. What program, there features program, hotmail or the Junk program. Also, I didn’t find any reference about this “Junk E-mail Protection Team” on the Microsoft Site or Hotmail Help. All these, added to feeling  of uncertainty. At the end I received another notification email asking me to identify if the email is junk or not. Again this email was from a trusted source, which I had wrote to before and was a reply to the initial email I sent the contact!!! It included the following message:

You’re receiving this e-mail message because you volunteered to help us stop junk e-mail. If you’ve changed your mind, you can stop participating. This is an unmonitored e-mail address.

This one seem that it will do what I expected, so I clicked on it and all was good. Tried to verify what will happened if I clicked on “Not receiving messages about this program” link and apparently it was for opting out.

Now, back to receiving emails from trusted sources. When I was searching for more information on the program, I found this funny report where an Italian blogger, enrolled on the program and shortly afterward received an email. The email asked him to identify if an email from Microsoft was junk or not. If this is not enough to label this program as “junk”, I don’t know what more they can do.

I wonder how many emails is Steve Ballmer is not receiving because they are identify as junk.

Chrome “leaked”, the early adopters download Chrome to check it out, the world gasped in amassment, apocalyptic blog posts were written regarding the dominance of Google and the threat to Microsoft and suddenly everything went back to normal (see graph 1), turning our attention to our daily lives and waiting for the next big thing).

Graph 1

source: getclicky.com

As you can see in the Graph 2 bellow, 1.7% market share is not a big deal, however is start and not a bad one. But what people tend to forget about Chrome is a beta release and regular users like mom a dads or even [social network] teens will not jump the ship of Google that yet. Remember that Chrome doesn’t offer nothing that will make us change our habit, yeah it looks nice and may load pages faster, still its yet another browser. If you ask me I’m happy with Firefox and I still think Firefox is the better browser out there, just because the ecosystem around it rules, in other works the add-on rock.

Graph 2

source: getclicky.com

There are three things to keep in mind regarding chrome:

• first, chrome will not replace windows because it still needs a operating system to run, so the analogy Google is to Microsoft as Chrome is to Windows will take a while and a lot but lot of effort. Also for this to happened everybody will need the kind Internet you get here in Sweden, Asia, etc.
• second, for Google “Failure is cheap”[1], in comparison to other companies. If they fail with chrome there is no problem, so why not give it a shot
• third and final and to wrap up the previous two: “don’t mistake a clear view with a short distance”.

[1] Paragraph five of The Omnigoogle by Nicholas Carr

Called the Microhoo merger, is the name given to Microsoft hostile takeover [intentions] of Yahoo. This is old new right? Well apparently it has reached very complex levels (well not that complex just like WTF levels), but you get the picture. If you don’t get the picture here is one created by News.com:

Source News.com (click on the picture if you want to see a bigger version)

When I see all the drama and players involved, a movie comes to my mind: She’s the man. If you don’t believe me, here is a video based and inspired on the trailer of the movie:

[Sorry if the video made you dizzy.]

Yes the IT companies in USA are just to bored to just figure out things in the fast and quiet way. Not like Sun acquisition of MySQL, which was short and sweet, and the best of all it was a surprise, no speculation, no drama. But the most interesting thing about this is what Kieth McFarland pointed out in his blog post “The Pestilence Called Microsoft Vista”:

Better stop worrying so much about how to buy Yahoo and start thinking about boring stuff like building products that work. Microsoft has always been able to talk (and spend) its way out of a jam in the past, but this Vista thing is different. Time for a wake up call.

Kieth is right and it makes all the sense of the world. Why try to add more stuff to fix when you can’t fix your own? The worst is that companies get caught up and “hyper concentrate” in this deal and in Google. And think “all unite against the big bad monster Google”. They say that history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes, well some years ago companies were looking at Microsoft with the same eye.

The worst thing is that Microsoft still has a monopoly, like Kieth points out in his most recent blog post “Vista Still Sucks”. What other option does regular non Mac owners have? Ubuntu? Suse? Mandriva? My brother is tech savvy and still uses Windows (Vista on his new XPS desktop). Hell I still use Windows XP, but have Ubuntu in dual boot and a Bad Vista sicker on the back of notebook screen .

If Microsoft has a monopoly in the OS market and now wants to control the market that Google controls, but doesn’t know how to. So, the brightest idea they got is to buy Yahoo (who used to control the market) but is teasing everybody and just wants it shares to go up or thinks AOL will save them. Also, Microsoft buys stake of Facebook, in case Facebook becomes the next Google, but every body in the world knows that will never happen. Sometimes I think that Ballmer is just creating a smoke screen so people don’t see the real story about Microsoft. It’s similar tactic politics use in Honduras and other Latin America countries to distract the attention from their corruption scandals. (I’m from Honduras and don’t have any proof of it, but doesn’t mean its not true.)

At the end is just Microsoft not accepting that there is a bigger bully in the playground, doesn’t want to share the it (at any cost). One word: greed.

Forget about Google, let Google worry about Google, mind your own business and more important ,mind your own customers. Most companies don’t need to merger or buy with others to improve sales or grow, just need to think outside the box and take care of their customers (and monopolies). Then again that is what USA likes to do, “hyper concentrate” on stuff, create drama from everything (their politics is great example of it), be greedy and move on like nothing happened. Still they have some entertaining stuff going around (e.g NBA playoffs).

I wonder where Apple is in this whole mess? I guess they are the smart hottie that realizes they should mind their own business.