by Veit on January 30, 2007
Quickly: Look at the two email screenshots on the right. What’s the difference between the two?
a: Nothing
b: 7 years
c: Linux
d: Google
If your answer was 7 years, you were correct. The shot on the left is from Outlook 2007, the shot on the right is from Outlook 2000. In other words, Outlook users will be stepping back in time, if they upgrade to Outlook 2007.
According to many industry watchers, Office 2007 seems to be the much more upgrade-worthy of today’s two big releases (see also my rant on Windows Vista below). And while they give praise to the new features in Word, Excel and Powerpoint, especially the new ribbon user interface, the bloggers and many web development sites such as Sitepoint or Campaign Monitors are zeroing in on the under-reported big change in Outlook 2007: Microsoft’s switch from Internet Explorer as the Outlook rendering engine to Microsoft Word’s crummy rendering engine. Do you like spruced up emails with background images, some CSS formatting, forms, animated GIFs or even some Flash movies? Forget about it! They are gone in Outlook 2007! Do you get lots of news articles emailed to you? Don’t expect them to look that pretty any longer after you upgraded.
Why the change? According to Microsoft, the Word rendering engine provides improved security (does this imply that IE7 is not secure enough?) and consistent rendering, since most corporate users use Word as their email text editor. That’s enough of a reason for them to make such a big change. My comment: None, otherwise I’ll be accused of Microsoft-bashing again.
So what should you do? If you are a corporate user, you are stuck. But fortunately, there’s a quick fix for all home users: Convert to Mozilla Thunderbird or some other 3rd party email reader before the upgrade and then install Office 2007 sans Outlook. I switched to Thunderbird in 2005 and have not regretted the switch for one single minute!
by Veit on January 30, 2007
So I got up at 5:15am this morning, got in the car, drove to my local Best Buy, but no luck — there were quite a number of people camped out already, but everyone was in a great mood and full of anticipation to finally get their hands on what they had waited so long for. Some of them had even shown up before the store closed the previous day. Well, I got back in the car and took off to go to work instead…
Nope, not a dream. This happened the day the Sony Playstation 3 launched. What about the Windows Vista launch? Not a chance!
These days, almost nobody gets excited by an upgrade to Windows any longer. Most people don’t care. They know they will eventually get it once they buy their next PC or they wait until the first service pack (SP1) is out and the most annoying bugs are fixed. Add to that the dearth of features that Vista brings to the table (most of the improvements are under the hood and not that visible) plus the ridiculously high pricing (anyone ever notice at Microsoft that a new DELL desktop with Vista Home Premium runs you only slightly more than you pay for just the same Vista in retail), it’s no wonder that the users, bloggers and the press think there’s no immediate need for purchasing an upgrade.
If you ever wonder why that is the case, read the book “The Change Function” by Pip Coburn. In the book he argues that users adopt technology, if the perceived crisis they need to solve outweighs the total perceived pain of adoption. In the case of Vista, a crisis does hardly exist, since Windows XP works fine for most users, while the total perceived pain of adoption is HUGE (if you ever upgraded an OS, you probably experienced what can go wrong during the process). Applying this theory to Vista, would you upgrade? I would not!
Which makes this upgrade a snoozer to me..
p.s.
Applying Pip Coburn’s thesis to other technologies, you can easily see why the iPod, Enterprise email and Flatscreen TVs are winners, the PicturePhone, iTV, Webvan and the Iridium phone are failures, while I’m still on the fence regarding some of Pip’s predicted future winners (Satellite Radio) and losers (entertainment PC, RFID)
by Veit on January 28, 2007
Do you have any evidence of Global Cooling? If so, I’d like to hear about it.
As reported by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Spiegel and some blogs, after some parents protested the screening of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” based on religious beliefs, the school board ruled that the film can only be shown, if an opposing view is presented as well. While the controversy is still raging, Kay Walls, the teacher who planned to show the movie in the school in Federal Way, a suburb of Seattle, has to deal with a new problem at hand: Where to find evidence about Global Cooling? So far, she has only found one Newsweek article called “The world is cooling” which was published 37 years ago. Do you have any additional evidence? We need to help Kay Walls, since this move is a must-see for a generation that will have to deal with Global Warming as one of its top challenges during its lifetime.
by Veit on January 27, 2007
Not too often do you hear about new tech initiatives that might sound boring initially, but then become more intriguing and exiting the longer you think about them. Such was the case with the announcement of SanDisk’s USB TV initiative, which was pretty much drowned out in the noise of CES and MacWorld. The initial list of members include LG, Mitsubishi and Pioneer, among others.
How does it work? In short, rather than connect your TV to your PC through a network and a DMA (digitial media adapter, such as Netgear’s Digital Entertainer or even an Xbox360), do it the old-fashioned way: Copy the digital files to a memory card, stick the card into a cradle connected to your TV or even memory card slots built into the TV and fire up the content on the screen. Sounds easy? That’s exactly the point!
So why would you need a Sneakernet TV in the age of wireless home networks and DMAs/Xbox360’s that can stream content from your PC to your TV? I can think of many potential reasons, from portability (can take it to my Mom’s house where there is no wireless network and certainly no DMA), reliability (has your neighbor’s pre-N Wi-Fi router taken down your network again?), flexibility (no hassle for the occasional user), ease of use (”copying” files manually between machines typically works) to price (I hope USB TV compatible devices will be less expensive than a DMA). However, my biggest hope is for support of DRM (Digital Rights Management). Being able to take about any digital media file to my TV might be a huge selling point for USB TV compatible devices. Not only do I expect that I can play back unprotected media files, but I also hope for broad support of DRM implementations and speedy upgrades to enable support for new DRMs as they become available.
We will see over the next 12 months whether this initiative fizzles or rocks, but it certainly is one to watch (pun intended)!
