Less than a month ago, MSN released a new version of its desktop search toolbar that added tabbed browsing to IE6. The general consensus: it sucked.
Yesterday, they pushed out a new version (02.05.0000.1082) that fixes most of the bugs in the original version, at least based on my very quick and dirty testing. And the desktop search capability still rocks.
Now, this is a user interface glitch.
This is a follow-up to my earlier post about the rumor that Microsoft is negotiating to buy Claria. Claria actually has five product lines:
The two ad networks are obviously profitable, but they’d be a toxic acquisition for Microsoft and would undo every bit of goodwill they’ve built up over the past few years. The security and privacy communities would have plenty to scream about. Feedback Research can at least stay behind the scenes, but the source of their data is ethically questionable, making it difficult to see how Microsoft could continue to gather it and still maintain that it was not a spyware vendor. Ben Edelman agrees:
A November 2003 eWeek article reported that Claria’s then-12.1 terabyte database was already the seventh largest in the world — bigger than Federal Express, and rivaling Amazon and Kmart. Claria recently told Release 1.0 its database is now 120 terabytes, the fifth-largest commercial Oracle database in the world. All very interesting, and perhaps troubling to those who worry about illicit use of such detailed data. But why would Microsoft invite this unnecessary privacy firestorm?
The most interesting asset, in my opinion, is the oldest one of all: the Gator eWallet program. This is actually a tremendously useful program (although I prefer RoboForm). The paid version of Gator works well and doesn’t serve any ads at all. If it were free and ad-free, it could be an excellent tool for helping Windows and Internet Explorer users navigate the maze of passwords and forms on Web sites and thereby increase the likelihood that people will choose secure passwords. But the MSN toolbar already has some form-filling capabilities, and adding Gator-like features to IE can’t be that difficult.
Ultimately, though, as Ben points out, the question comes down to the rumored $500 million price tag. What does Claria have that’s worth that much money and can’t be developed either in-house or through a less tainted source? Nothing. Which is why I seriously hope the deal will fall apart.
From the New York Times comes a report that Microsoft is negotiating to buy Claria:
For the last two weeks, Microsoft has been in talks to buy a private Silicon Valley company, a move that underscores just how eager Microsoft is to catch up with Google, the search and advertising giant.
The company that Microsoft has pursued is controversial: Claria, an adware marketer formerly called Gator, and best known for its pop-up ads and software that tracks people visiting Web sites. The Gator adware has frequently been denounced by privacy advocates for its intrusiveness.
The offer price on the table as recently as yesterday was $500 million, according to people who have been briefed on the talks. But a person close to Microsoft said last night that the negotiations were on the verge of breaking off.
One person briefed on the deal said there was opposition within Microsoft to the acquisition.
Yikes. If you want to read more about this company, go to the Gator Information Center, run by my friends at PC Pitstop:
PC Pitstop believes that Gator products can degrade the quality of a user’s PC experience, and the applications themselves are not a good value. This belief is based on our hands-on use of Gator products, surveys of users that have Gator on their systems, and visitor feedback from our forums. Most Gator “users” are not aware of what Gator is doing on their PC behind the scenes, and even many advertisers are not aware their ads are being shown by Gator’s ad network through third-party contracts or Gator’s connection with Overture.
What is Microsoft thinking? This deal would be a P.R. disaster. The only way it makes sense is if Microsoft buys the company, fires everyone involved with it, has their buildings exorcised, and rewrites every line of code in their product.
Update: The deal’s dead. But it was still a stupid idea. Really, really stupid.
Microsoft has a new home page for RSS in Longhorn. Here’s a reasonably simplified explanation of RSS Support in Longhorn. The specification itself is here.
This license information appears at the bottom of the specification page:
Microsoft’s copyrights in this specification are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License (version 2.5). To view a copy of this license, please visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/. As to software implementations, Microsoft is not aware of any patent claims it owns or controls that would be necessarily infringed by a software implementation that conforms to the specification’s extensions. If Microsoft later becomes aware of any such necessary patent claims, Microsoft also agrees to offer a royalty-free patent license on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms and conditions to any such patent claims for the purpose of publishing and consuming the extensions set out in the specification.
Dean Hachamovich has some comments here.
Oh, and those who were wondering whether XML support in Office 12 will be a big deal can now put their skepticism to rest. Yes, this will have huge implications for Office 12, and I think you can safely assume that the ability to create and consume RSS will be a big part of the next version of Office.
Joe Wilcox at Microsoft Monitor has a series of three posts on Microsoft’s RSS Platform. (Part 2 is here and Part 3 is here.) They’re well worth reading, with some interesting insights and a nice historical overview. It’s too bad the first post in the series starts with a big mistake:
Microsoft will introduce proprietary tags to RSS, which it will make available under a Creative Commons license.
Proprietary means the format is owned by one company, and if anyone wants to use it they have to pay a royalty, or reverse-engineer it, or reinvent the wheel. These extensions are being released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, whose terms read:
You are free:
- to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
- to make derivative works
- to make commercial use of the work
The extensions Microsoft announced today are not “proprietary.” Exactly the opposite, in fact.
I’m listening to the live stream of Dean Hachamovitch’s keynote at Gnomedex, where Larry Lessig just gave a public thank you to Microsoft for its decision to make its new list extension to the RSS standard available under a Creative Commons license. For those who don’t remember, Lessig was the special master appointed by Judge Jackson in the Microsoft antitrust trial. For him to give a shout-out to the folks in Redmond is a very big deal.
The press release has some details:
Microsoft Corp. today announced support for RSS (Really Simple Syndication) in the next version of the Microsoft® Windows® operating system, code-named “Longhorn.” The RSS functionality in “Longhorn” is being designed to make it simple for end users to discover, view and subscribe to RSS feeds, as well as make it easier for developers to incorporate the rich capabilities of RSS into their applications. In addition, Microsoft announced Simple List Extensions, a set of extensions to RSS that can be used to enable Web sites to publish lists such as of photo albums, music playlists and top 10 lists as RSS feeds. Microsoft is making the specification freely available via the Creative Commons license, the same license under which the RSS 2.0 specification was released. …
The RSS support in the “Longhorn” platform includes the following:
- Common RSS Feed List. This core feature of Windows maintains a common list of the user’s subscriptions across all applications. This allows the user to subscribe to a feed once and have all RSS-enabled applications able to access the common list to view the subscriptions.
- Common RSS Data Store. A common data store will provide a single location where applications can access content that has been downloaded to the PC via RSS, including text, pictures, audio, calendar events, documents and just about anything else. All applications will have access to this content for creating rich user experiences.
- RSS Platform Sync Engine. The sync engine will automatically download data and enclosures for use by any application. The engine is designed for efficiency, using idle network bandwidth whenever possible to limit the effect on the user’s Internet experience. Developers can use the platform to get RSS data without having to manage details such as synchronization schedules or subscriptions.
What does all this mean? The unexciting opportunity is for publishers to deliver more Top 10 lists that can be updated regularly in an RSS-enabled client. The more exciting opportunity is that you can build your own list – your favorite restaurants, photos, performers, writers, technology analysts. Using RSS, you can have those lists updated automatically and share them with other people.
Exciting.
Channel 9 video with first public demo of IE7 is here.
Denise Ho, a Microsoft product manager working on the MSN Search Toolbar, has this update on tabs:
Our goal in delivering this feature was to give IE users a tabbed browsing solution to enhance overall online search and browse experiences prior to the official release of IE7 without them having to install a completely new browser.
Many of you have reported a flicker when you switch tabs. We understand that this is bothersome and are actively working on improvements to reduce the tab flicker. There have also been reports of issues associated with tabs and using F11 in IE to get to full screen mode. We are also looking into a fix for this.
Give MSN credit for linking to at least five posts criticizing the performance and implementation of the tabbed browsing feature in the latest MSN Desktop Search toolbar (including mine, but not this one, to no one’s surprise). An improved version of the toolbar should be available soon, they promise.
When a Windows program crashes, Windows XP gives you the opportunity to send an error report to Microsoft. The process is called Online Crash Analysis. My advice: Do it. Here’s a perfect example of why it’s good for you and for your fellow PC users.
For years, I’ve encountered a sporadic problem with Word. The conditions that lead to the error are easy to identify, although I’ve never been able to reliably reproduce it. Basically, if I cut large blocks of text from a specific type of document (something I do fairly often when writing a book), I run a serious risk that Word will crash with an error message that points to “stamp 424d964d.” I’ve Googled the error and found that other people have it too. But I’ve never found an answer, and I’ve learned to be extra careful when doing mass cut-and-paste jobs. (The good news is that Word always recovers my documents perfectly, and I don’t lose any data – only some time as I reopen and repair each one.)
Today I encountered this error several times, and on the last time I decided to send in an error report. I’ve done this a hundred times or more before, but this time the response I got was different. After the error report finished sending, I was greeted with this Web page:
[Click image to see a larger view.]
Some engineer, using the great big bucket of error reports sent in from all sorts of people all over the world, found the problem, which turns out to be a bug in Word 2003. A fix is in the works. When the fix is ready, the Online Crash Analysis page will offer to install it for me when I bump into this error and send in a report. Imagine that!
Update: Turns out others have been talking about this lately as well. Read this, and this, and this, for instance (thanks, Nicholas). And this informative post from Chris Pratley (thanks, Zaine).
I just got an e-mail from an organization that calls itself SPAMIS (Strategic Partnership Against Microsoft Illegal Spam). The message consisted of an article that was apparently written by Graham Lea of The Register, complaining that Microsoft is abusing some of its mailing lists and sending out unwelcome, unsolicited e-mail.
Ironically, the mailing from SPAMIS …
In short, this group sent me spam complaining about someone else’s spam.
Even more ironically, the domain from which the mailing was sent has apparently been suspended by its hosting company.
Funny, isn’t it?
Ed Bott 