Microsoft Just Doesn’t Get It

John Gruber at Daring Fireball recently posted a quote from Steve Ballmer of Microsoft.

“Apple gained about one point, but now I think the tide has really turned back the other direction. The economy is helpful. Paying an extra $500 for a computer in this environment — same piece of hardware — paying $500 more to get a logo on it? I think that’s a more challenging proposition for the average person than it used to be.”

What Ballmer doesn’t understand is that is not the only reason people buy Apple products. If you could (legally) buy any PC and run OSX on it flawlessly for the same price as a PC with Windows, I’d be willing to be that Microsoft would see Windows’ OS share drop dramatically. People aren’t buying Apple products for the logo. They aren’t spending more money on hardware. They are spending more money on a great OS, great support from the manufacturer, and an all-around great computing experience. That is what Microsoft doesn’t get.

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What Bugs Me About Twitter

I am not an “expert on all things web 2.0.” Nor am I a “social media expert.” Heck, I’m not even a “social media enthusiast.” I’m just a regular person who finds value in various things on the internet. One of them is Twitter. I fear it could fail because of certain things that bug me about the Twitter phenomenon. When I say they might fail I mean that users may stop using it, not because it doesn’t have a business model (although, that’s probably a problem as well).

There’s always going to be someone who will try to duplicate what Twitter did in a new way. Plurk tried, and last I checked they had quite a community but I don’t know anyone who actually uses it (at least not anymore). Even if something better comes along, that doesn’t mean users are going to jump ship. They’ve already invested time in Twitter. It will be hard to leave. How else do you explain how MySpace is still popular? I’m betting it’s because that’s where the cool kids were, then it became popular and that’s where people have set up homes. Twitter is the same way. That could change though. If you use Twitter you might have noticed that as each month passes the amount of spam followers seems to increase. Some days these spam bots follow you as soon as you post an update. Twitter needs to do something about this problem if they want to continue to grow. MySpace used to have the same problem. It has been several months since I deleted my MySpace profile so I don’t know if the problem is still as rampant as it once was. The point is, it may eventually drive users away, or make the move easier when something bigger and better does come along.

Another problem I have with Twitter is now that it’s popular it’s being inundated with another type of spam. The new spam are not pre-programmed robots, though one could argue differently when you look at their updates. I’m talking about the so-called social media experts, mavens, and enthusiasts. These are the people who do nothing but post links to their site/product/service and retweet other more famous people. They bring almost no value to Twitter and actually, in my opinion, lower people’s opinions about social media and what it can and should be. Social Media Experts are to today as SEO Experts were to a few years ago. Yeah, there might be a few people who honestly “get” it and can actually help you, but most are trying to peddle their goods and services that you don’t need. Just because you’re on LinkedIn, Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter doesn’t mean you’re an expert. It means you use the internet. In fact, I’m betting there are 14 year olds that know more about social media than you. I’ve actually had many of these human spammers follow me then when I don’t follow them after a day or so they quit following me. 7 times out of 10 they are back following me the next day. Is that because my updates are so great? Not at all. It’s because they follow anyone and everyone to try to pump themselves up more.

Along with the so-called experts, you have real companies on Twitter. Some of the accounts are good. There are some that try to help customers out and provide valuable information. There are also some that will jump all over you because they are watching if anyone says something bad about their company or product. Then you have something else entirely. I think everyone remembers the Skittles mistake. Skittles decided to make Skittles.com pull in anything anyone was saying about Skittles from Twitter and display it. Of course obscenities were rampant once it launched. It was funny for a few minutes, then it got old. It also made Skittles abandon Twitter for their homepage to Youtube. I bet they will actually think before they implement something like that in the future.

The last thing that bugs me and might not cause Twitter to fail, but it’s not helping. These are users that use Twitter as a lifestream. Now, it is your account and I can’t tell you how to use it because Twitter is what you make of it, but do you really need to use it as a lifestream? Twitter wasn’t meant to be a lifestream. That’s what Friendfeed and other applications are for. I do not need to know where you are every 5 minutes, so stop posting your brightkite status. I also don’t need to know every time you’re listening to a new song, so please don’t update me with your blip.fm status. It’s cool if you want to post these things every once in a while, such as when you find a great new song or if you need other Twitter users to know where you are for a meetup or if you have a new blog post, but when that’s all your updates are then chances are you won’t have many followers for long.

To leave on a more positive note I’ll tell you one thing that I love since Twitter hit the mainstream. Celebrities. I’m not talking about Britney Spears or Barack Obama and I’m not talking about celebrity gossip. I’m talking about the celebrities that are actually fun to follow on Twitter. People like Michael Ian Black, Rob Corddry, Jimmy Fallon, ?uestlove (of The Roots), Demitri Martin, etc. are great because their real life personalities transform so well onto Twitter. Even Shaq has some of the funniest updates on Twitter.

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Charter Communications Still Sucks

In case you haven’t noticed, I am not a fan of Charter Communications. They have horrible customer service and high prices. If you haven’t gotten screwed by them yet, you’re about to. Over the weekend several sites broke stories about how Charter Communications will put a cap on bandwidth at 100gb a month starting on February 9th. Of course there was no announcement or anything on Charter’s website, and up to this point, there still isn’t. If you drill into the TOS, you will find that the terms have changed. If you look at number 13 you see how they added the cap to the terms of service.

So, if you are someone who likes to download a lot from iTunes, Amazon.com, watch movies and TV on Hulu and Netflix, play online games like World of Warcraft, do offsite backups with services like Mozy or Jungledisk, don’t be surprised if you use up your allotted bandwidth quickly. And of course Charter does not provide any sort of bandwidth meter tool to see how much you are using. At least Comcast provides a more reasonable 250gb a month cap. I really can’t wait to be done with Charter.

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Please Stop Using Internet Explorer

Dear Internet Users Across the World,

Please stop using the horrible piece of software that came pre-installed on your PC known as Internet Explorer. Not only do you make the job of web designers a lot harder each and every day you use it, but you also leave yourself more open to attacks from malicious websites. I recently spent several hours over a few nights fixing a computer for my sister and brother-in-law because they were infected with a nasty bug that they got while using Internet Explorer. If they were using Firefox they would not have installed the ActiveX and gotten the bug, but they weren’t so they did. IE fails at security and fails at complying with web standards.

My beef used to be with the people who still use Internet Explorer 6, even though 7 has been out for well over a year now. Now my beef is with anyone who continues to use IE at all. I’ll tell you why. Microsoft had the chance to make IE7 standards compliant. What that means is it would properly render pages that were coded to the standards and rules set forth by the web development community to make the best looking and most usable websites possible. They didn’t. While it was better than 6, it was far from the other web browsers, such as Firefox or Safari. The first release candidate of IE8 recently came out. Again, they had the chance to make it standards compliant. They failed again. That makes the job of web developers harder. Now they have to support 3 versions of IE, each one supporting different standards that Microsoft decided it wanted to follow, and not true web standards. Please do yourself a favor and see the web the way it was meant to be seen. Use Firefox (or Safari, Google Chrome, Opera, etc). Thanks.

Your friendly neighborhood Web Developer and Family Computer Help Desk,
Mike Schepker

Windows 7

Microsoft is releasing a beta version of Windows 7 for public download today, but this post isn’t about that. This post is about what Microsoft needs to do when Windows 7 is officially launched.

It is no secret that Vista was a failure. Businesses have held off on installing Vista, so much that the big PC manufacturers have gotten Microsoft to extend the life of XP several times. Consumers, many of whom only got Vista because it was preinstalled on their new PCs, have been unhappy with Vista’s performance. It has turned me off of Windows so much that my next desktop computer will be an iMac, and I already have a MacBook. Microsoft needs to do something to please the customers or many more will jump ship.

Since Microsoft has said that Windows 7 will fix all the complaints with Vista, Windows 7 should be an extremely cheap (less than $100), if not free, upgrade for Vista users. Really, when you see how terrible of an OS Vista is compared to XP, Microsoft should look at all Vista users as beta-testers for Windows 7, because essentially, Vista was no better than a beta product. So, when Microsoft releases the “best version of Windows ever” (which they also said about Vista), they need to hand it out as a free upgrade to all Vista users. If they don’t do something to save the public image of Windows, they are going to create many more Mac users.