Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Can Seinfeld save Vista?

THERE’S something a bit desperate about the way Microsoft is pushing Windows Vista. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Microsoft is spending $300 million on an advertising campaign featuring comedian Jerry Seinfeld as the key pitchman. Starting September, TV ads featuring Seinfeld and Microsoft chairman Bill Gates will seek to address what the company’s chief executive, Steve Ballmer, calls “lingering doubts” among its customers about Windows Vista. That such doubts persist even after Microsoft has spent $450 million to launch and market the product since its introduction more than a year ago can’t be too good.

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Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Digital newsstand

WHY would anyone want to emulate the iPhone on his desktop computer? That question crossed my mind when I heard that some people were using a Firefox add-on called User Agent Switcher to do just that. You’d think the only people who would want to shrink a beautiful wide-screen display to a fraction of its size would be developers who were writing software for the iPhone. Think again. The Phone’s popularity has created so much content designed specifically for it that even PC users want a piece of the action. The digital newsstand Zinio (http://www.zinio.com), for example, lets iPhone users browse many of its best-selling magazine titles for free. Don’t have an iPhone? Then pretend you’re using one.

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Monday, August 11, 2008

Ubuntu netbook

ACER’s Aspire One is a solid netbook, but it can be much more. In the last two weeks, I’ve been using it as a full notebook, running office applications, editing digital photos, surfing the Web and watching videos on a robust, full-featured system. The remarkable thing is, I’m doing it on a such a small, lightweight computer (less than a kilo) that has only 8 gigabytes (GB) of storage and 1GB of memory. The key to unlocking the Aspire One’s power was to replace the Linpus Lite Linux operating system that comes installed with the netbook with Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron).

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Monday, August 04, 2008

More than search

Zimbra Desktop accommodates multiple e-mail accounts on one screen, using Prism, an open source, site-specific browser for Web applications.

IN the kerfuffle over the failed Microsoft takeover bid, people tend to forget that Yahoo is about much more than online search. Sure, Google is far ahead of Yahoo and Microsoft in search, but those who believe putting No. 2 and No.3 together will miraculously change the equation are ignoring some inconvenient facts. For example, shareholders who simply want a quick way to bump up Yahoo’s declining stock price are turning a blind eye to—or simply don’t care about—the likelihood that selling the company to Microsoft would hurt, not help the company’s long-term prospects. The reason is simple: Microsoft has no record of turning a profit online. The folks at Yahoo do.

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