Brilliant Ideas That Found a Welcome
I like Dave Pogue’s reflection on clever ideas that weren’t processed out of the market. Good ol’ Microsoft gets two kudos (one for the Zune’s music beaming feature…with some reservations about the 3 day limit business and an other for Vista’s “Show Numbers” feature in its voice recognition app.
Network marketing in the 21st Century. Move over Amway!
http://www.adrants.com/2006/10/microsoft-to-embed-viral-growth-into-zune.php
In what could be a masterful viral approach to growing a business that goes far beyond viral marketing, Microsoft is embedding viral expansion into its new iPod competitor, Zune. Users of the Zune MP3 player can send songs to friends over the devices Wifi who have three days to listen to them before they disable. If the recipient of the song decides to buy the song within the three day period, the sender of the song will receive a portion of the song’s purchase price in the form of credits to be used towards purchasing music and other items from the Zune Marketplace.
There’s a been heaps of buzz here in Seattle about the Zune (I go by at least two billboards on my daily commute). I just watched a little vblog post by Robert Scoble and came away with the following thoughts.
I just upgraded to IE 7 on my home machine; I just love being on the cutting edge. I’ve been using the beta for several months, and was interested in seeing what differences there would be. A quick note: this article was written in Google Docs in the new IE version.
Upgrade process surprised me. It was surprisingly long, and not running in the background. I was wondering why the process needed to be so dominating of my system. I guess I had forgotten how tightly integrated IE is with Windows. The install required two reboots, which is surprising since installing Firefox from scratch doesn’t even need a single reboot. And takes far less time.
The first thing I noticed different about the release version versus the beta is the speed at which the tabs load. Not as quickly as Firefox, nor as cleanly, but much faster than the beta or the IE 6 with MSN Toolbar (OK, infinitely faster than that dog).
One other tab issue is that IE doesn’t always open new pages in a tab in the existing window. I occasionally have this problem with Firefox (opening messages in Hotmail, for instance), but it is very rare.
It annoys me how slowly new tabs open, and how slowly they close. Plus, there’s a system lag as they open/close. I’ve also noticed that, as I write this, there are some lags where the cursor takes a long time to catch up with my typing. I haven’t’ seen this in Firefox.
One nice thing was that all my toolbars seemed to update nicely after the install. Google gave me a little heads up that it had done so. Yahoo needed a more formal process (clicking on the “upgrade here” button), including restarting IE.
This is, probably, one of the better updates for IE (especially considering all the security issues of late). However, it’s not enough to catch it up to Firefox. Internet Explorer will be, as it’s been for sometime now, the browser I pull up for those sites that won’t work in Firefox (or that are a bit twitchy). For me, most of those sites are banking related. Oddly, I’ve found several sites that don’t work well on IE but fine on Firefox. More on that another time.
