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The reports of Windows death are greatly exaggerated

Dear Skeptical,

I think what you’re reading is mostly based on sales figures for all end-user devices and relative numbers of page reads by different browsers and operating systems. If IT’s responsibilities were based on the number of end-user devices sold and on browser page reads, this would be interesting information.

IT’s responsibilities, though, have a lot more to do with applications business users rely on to get work done. When you look in this direction, you get a very different bead on things.

So let’s examine the intersection of where IT lives and Microsoft plays, and we’ll see where that takes us. Ultimately, that means infrastructure and the end-user computing environment.

Let’s check out infrastructure first — in particular, the server OS, DBMS, app server, Web server, development kit, email, and content/document management solution. While IT has choices for all of these, Microsoft doesn’t just continue to matter here; rather, it’s probably the most innovative force in the industry in this space right now — except in its ability to explain itself. The infrastructure story for Microsoft is excellent products coupled with incoherent storytelling.

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Then there’s the end-user computing environment (what’s usually mislabeled the “client”).

What a lot of analysts miss is quite simple and basic: Microsoft Office file formats are the industry de facto standard, and no amount of de jure standards setting will change that any time soon. Thus, any business that has to exchange documents with other companies has to use Microsoft Office, because the best any competitor can say is that its product can read and write Microsoft Office files.

That isn’t the same thing as rendering them properly, and the fact of the matter is, no matter which Office competitor you use, it will scramble Word documents that do any serious formatting at all. As for PowerPoint, you have no idea just how bizarre the results can be until you try running a PowerPoint animation in a competitor’s piece of software.

There is a work-around that lets you provide Microsoft Office to employees using other platforms: You can run Windows on a server in the data center and use VDI to push it out to client devices. Think that makes Windows less important as a client platform? Of course it doesn’t — Windows is still the client platform, but you’ll run it in a virtual machine instead of natively.

Microsoft gets a lot of dings because it just can’t seem to get things right in the mobile space. It’s an eminently fair criticism — every version of Windows Mobile so far has been at least one step behind the industry, and there’s no hint yet that Microsoft has the ability to leapfrog its competition. It’s natural to figure Microsoft’s presence in mobile computing is and will be limited to laptops, which will remain the portable devices of choice for those who plan to do serious work that requires a keyboard for quite a while.

For those who think they’ll be happy with a tablet/keyboard combo, perhaps they will. If they’re working with business documents, they’ll do so by running a Citrix or VMWare client on their iPad or Xoom.

Here’s your take-away: The increased importance of other platforms represents an expansion of what you’ll be responsible for, not a substitution. Windows and Microsoft will be important for a number of years yet — but so will other platforms and players.

–Bob

This story, “The reports of Windows’ death are greatly exaggerated,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bob Lewis’s Advice Line blog on InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.

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Microsoft Vista is Dead Officially. Does anyone Care?

Microsoft has declared it. And For anyone still burning a candle for Windows Vista, in the dark, its time is rapidly approaching. Buy now or forever hold your Rest in Peace, Windows 7 is coming to the rescue.

I’m not surprised that this has turned out. After all, it was all buggy. When it first arrived just in 2006, it was late, bloated. It may have looked pretty on the outside, but critics quickly pounced on it for driver incompatibility, sluggish performance on mainstream and  even high-end hardware was left unfelt. And not to forget, enough bugs to fill a family-sized tent on a weekend camping expedition. Microsoft didn’t help matters with its ill-fated “Vista Capable” designation, a public relations debacle that convinced buyers who were too lazy to read the fine print that Vista would run just as well on hardware barely suited for XP.

It’s Hardest to change the first impression

Since first impressions are often the only things that matter in today’s attention-deficit world, Vista got stuck with a reputation it’s never quite been able to shake. Which is somewhat unfortunate given how nicely Vista has padded Microsoft’s bottom line since then. It’s sold hundreds of millions of copies and it runs on the vast majority of laptops on display at the average big box electronics retailer. Service Packs and updates have fixed most of the major bugs and security gaps and more devices than ever are Vista-friendly now that hardware manufacturers have gotten into the driver game. Vista hasn’t been the failure its detractors long said it was.

 

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But memories are funny things, and despite its market performance over the past two-and-a-half years, no one seems willing to forgive Vista for being inadequately baked and improperly messaged when it first arrived. So Microsoft, recognizing that the era of the operating system is past middle age, is killing Vista. There’s been no press release, of course, no official announcement that it’s ending production — because it’s still churning out retail boxes and pre-loaded builds for OEMs just as it always has. But last week’s announcement of the Windows 7 Upgrade Option Program signals the likely death knell for Vista.

Free, cheap, and desperate

The Windows 7 Upgrade Option Program is a promotion under which customers who buy a PC equipped with Vista Premium, Business, or Ultimate between now and October will be eligible for a free upgrade when Windows 7 ships. It’s designed to prevent the usual drop in demand for a current OS that precedes the launch of the next generation — a critical move in the middle of a recession, when no one’s buying anyway. To further stoke interest among folks not interested in picking up new hardware anytime soon, Microsoft is pricing pre-orders for Windows 7 Home Premium at $49 and Professional at $99 — as close to fire sale pricing as we’ve ever seen on a Windows product.

“Microsoft has always managed the Windows sub-brands in a chaotic, ever-evolving manner, grazing over naming conventions as casually as most of us would cruise the buffet table at a distant cousin’s wedding.” a typical Frustrated user

Microsoft needs to move fast, because the age of selling a full-featured OS that fetches a triple-digit price is drawing to a close. We run applications, not operating systems, and Apple’s $29 upgrade for Snow Leopard signals just how commoditized the OS has become, and how little the average cash-strapped consumer or business owner is willing to pay for it. While you still need an OS to run the hardware that allows you to get online and run the applications you need, the slow evolution of increasingly network-centric computing points toward a future where what’s powering our hardware is less important than it is today.

Tomorrow’s operating system won’t be the headline-grabbing, Mick Jagger-attracting retail superstar that Windows once was. As long as it connects all the underlying pieces together (and stays out of our way while doing it) that will be enough. A leaner, meaner, cheaper Windows 7 bridges Microsoft toward this somewhat uncertain future. Likewise, big and brash Vista no longer has a place in the line-up, hence Microsoft’s all-hands effort to make us forget it ever existed.

Windows 7 Evolution

Call it anything you want, as long as you call it Windows. That’ll be good enough for Microsoft as it figures out how to make money in a post-Windows, post-Office landscape. With Vista out of the way, the company at least stands a fighting chance of convincing jaded consumers and enterprises alike that the OS is still relevant. Windows 7 is indeed a leaner and better product than Vista. The question on everyone’s mind is whether that’s enough to sustain the franchise. Will windows 7 be a big success? Our Earlier Benchmarks and solid proofs had shown +ve results. Will Windows 7 will it live upto the mark ?

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10 Tips That Make Windows 7 Simpler

Windows 7 features loads of improvements to streamline workflow and avert many of the headaches found in Windows Vista. But you can make Windows 7 even easier to use by taking advantage of a few enhancements you might not have heard about. We’ve already shown you 21 Ways to Customize Windows 7 to your personal taste, now we present ten tips that can save time, make navigating your system easier, and give you quick access to commonly used programs and actions.

 

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Tip #1
Handy Keyboard shortcuts
Windows 7 includes many new keyboard shortcuts that put frequently used actions at your fingertips. Learn these keystroke combinations and you’ll soon be saving a few seconds of mousing time here and there throughout the day. It adds up. Note: For those who don’t know, “Windows Logo” refers to the key with the Windows flag on it, generally located between the Ctrl and Alt keys, to the left of the space bar.

# Display or hide the Explorer preview pane: Alt-P
# Display gadgets in front of other windows: Windows Logo-G
# Zoom in: Windows Logo-+[plus sign]
# Zoom out: Windows Logo- –[minus sign]
# Maximize window: Windows Logo-Up Arrow
# Minimize window: Windows Logo-Down Arrow
# Snap to the left-hand side of the screen: Windows Logo-Left Arrow
# Snap to the right-hand side of the screen: Windows Logo-Right Arrow

Tip #2
Create Keyboard Shortcuts for Programs
In addition to using Windows 7’s default shortcuts, you can also create your own shortcuts to launch your favorite programs. First, right-click on the program icon, choose Properties to open the Properties dialog. Click on the dialog’s Shortcut tab, click in the Shortcut key text box, and press the key you want to use for that program. Your shortcut will use Alt-Ctrl plus your key—you can’t overrule standard system shortcuts. Also, you can’t use the Esc, Enter, Tab, Spacebar, PrtScn, Shift, or Backspace keys for obvious reasons.

Tip #3
Jump Lists
Windows 7’s new Jump Lists appear in the Start menu and Taskbar buttons for programs that support the feature. They give you instant access to frequently used commands such as opening recent files or performing program actions. To access Jump Lists you can either click on the right arrow in program’s Start menu entry, or right-click an icon in the task bar or left-click and drag the list open. If there’s a document you want always accessible from the jump list, you can just click on the pushpin icon in the right of the document’s entry.

Tip #4
Clean Up Your Screen
Focusing on one window when you have multiple windows open can be distracting. But instead of having to minimize every window one-by-one you can quickly unclutter your screen using Aero Shake. Simply click and hold the title bar of the window you want to leave open, give it a quick shake, and your screen will be cleared of all windows except the one you’re working in.

Tip #5
Aero Peek
Another option for navigating a screen cluttered with windows is Aero Peek. Hover the mouse over the lower-right corner of the screen. Click the button if you want to keep this view, showing only the desktop. This takes the place of previous Windows versions’ Show Desktop icon in the vanished Quick Launch toolbar. If you’ve moved your Taskbar to the top or sides of the screen, this button will be at the top right or bottom of the taskbar, respectively.

Tip #6
Search the Web from Your Desktop
You can use Windows 7’s built-in search as an online search tool without having to launch a Web browser, by using search connectors. For instance, if you wanted to search YouTube videos from your desktop, just download and install the YouTube search connector. This adds a “YouTube Search” option to your Searches folder, which lets you browse YouTube from your desktop.

Note the searches won’t be added to the Start menu’s search box. If you search on something in there first, and then click Enter, you’ll get to an Explorer window that now includes, for example, a YouTube search entry under Favorites. Click on this to get results at YouTube right in the Explorer window. Drag the icon with the right mouse button to create a desktop icon for the search provider.You can find search connectors at sevenforums.com, which also teaches you how to create your own.

Tip #7
Make Internet Explorer 8 Load Faster
You can make IE8 load faster by disabling add-ons that slow it down. To find which add-ons you need to eliminate go to Tools > Manage Add-ons, check the load time listed here for each, and delete accordingly.

Tip #8
Combine Taskbar Icons
When you have a ton of windows or apps opened at once, it can be hard to navigate among them all. Luckily, Windows 7 let you combine icons to keep your taskbar neat and organized. To combine taskbar icons, right-click the Start button, go to Properties > Taskbar, and under Taskbar Buttons and choose “Always Combine, Hide Labels” or “Combine when taskbar is full.” Alternatively, if you want to see everything with labels, you can choose Never combine.

Tip #9
Troubleshoot and Document System Problems
Windows 7’s new Problem Steps Recorder comes in handy when you’re looking to troubleshoot and document problems with your system. Typing psr into the Instant Search launches a recorder that can document what shows up on your screen as you recreate the problem step by step. You can even add comments. When you’re done, the recorder compiles the footage into a zip file you can then e-mail to a tech expert.

Tip #10
Add Videos to Your Start Menu
You can make your video library easy to access by adding it to your Start Menu. To do so, right-click the Start button, go to Properties > Start Menu > Customize and set the Videos to “Display as a link.” There are plenty more options for what you want displayed in the Start menu here, so browse through the list to see what would work for you. Choosing “Display as a Link” puts a text choice on the right side of the Start menu, and choosing “Display as a menu” will add a flyout menu to the link with subchoices. One particularly useful entry here is Recent Items, to help you quickly get to documents you’ve been working on.

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The 10 Best GPS Devices

The death of the dedicated GPS device has been greatly exaggerated. Sure, today’s mobile devices integrate talented—and sometimes free—navigation apps, but not everyone wants to use a phone or a huge tablet for driving directions. With a standalone GPS, you can just leave it in the car and forget about it, until, of course, you’re lost in an unfamiliar place, driving around in circles. Or you’re on a road trip, it’s 1AM, and you’re desperately searching for the nearest Taco Bell. Or you want to avoid sitting in an hour of turnpike traffic.


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With goodies like free traffic reporting, lifetime map updates, and local search becoming more and more common, today’s GPS devices can do a lot more than they ever have, and they’ve never been less expensive—thanks in part to stiff competition from those aforementioned nav-enabled smartphones and tablets.

If you’re searching for the right GPS, the list below includes the 10 best devices we’ve reviewed along with current street prices, which in most cases are well below list.

Need more directions? Check out How to Buy a GPS, which steps through the details of what to look for when you’re shopping.

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The 10 Best Apps for Android 3.0 Honeycomb

BARCELONA—This year’s Mobile World Congress is the first big coming-out party for tablets running Google’s Android Honeycomb operating system, and Google’s huge booth was crammed full of Honeycomb apps. I was impressed by how some of the apps leveraged tablets’ big screens to offer new experiences that are impossible on phones. That’s the kind of thinking the platform will need to succeed.

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I picked 10 of the top Honeycomb apps for this slideshow. They include a multi-party video conferencing app from Fuze Meeting which spawns way too many windows for a phone; Great Battles Medieval, a strategy game that would look impossibly cramped on a phone; and Pulse News, which uses the big screen to provide a broad view of news feeds from many different Web sites.

Most phone apps will absolutely run on Android Honeycomb, and they’ll run better than iPhone apps do on the iPad. I saw several top Gingerbread apps, including Facebook and Pandora, running on Honeycomb tablets. Generally, the user interfaces get a lot of blank space in them. But the fonts are still sharp, and the UIs work. There wasn’t any of the graininess you see in “blown up” iPhone apps on the iPad.

Honeycomb tablets are coming soon, with the first one, the Motorola Xoom, rumored for arrival later this month on Verizon Wireless. Take a look at my 10 best Honeycomb apps (in no particular order) in this slideshow.

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Microsoft and Nokia Partner on Smartphone Future

Microsoft and Nokia on Friday announced an alliance that pairs the world’s largest phone maker with the software giant in a marriage of convenience as the two combine forces to compete more effectively again Apple and Google in the fight for smartphone dominance.

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Nokia says it will build high-end smartphones based on the new Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system from Microsoft.

The news comes just days after Nokia’s CEO admitted defeat in the face of Apple iOS and Google Android in a leaked memo to employees, the struggling world leader in mobile phones unveiled a new strategy to bring Nokia to its former smartphone glory.

At a press event Stephen Elop (pictured left), a former Microsoft executive, took to the stage in London with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer (pictured right) saying: “Nokia is at a critical juncture, where significant change is necessary and inevitable in our journey forward.”

Why Nokia Didn’t Go For Android

Elop suggested that there are too many phone manufacturers using Android for their flagship devices (Motorola, Samsung, LG, HTC, to name a few), so Nokia would not be able to differentiate itself enough with its offerings. For more than a year Nokia has been rumored to adopt Android for its smartphones, instead of the aging Symbian OS or the slow-to-develop MeeGo Intel joint venture. Nokia has repeatedly denied these rumors.

Nokia Goes Windows Mobile

In a press release Nokia said it would adopt Windows Phone as its “principal smartphone strategy,” hoping bring Windows Phone to a larger range of price points, market segments, and geographies. Nokia and Microsoft would also collaborate in marketing the new devices, while Microsoft’s search engine Bing would power Nokia’s search services.

Nokia will also integrate its Maps software with Microsoft’s mapping services. For example, Maps will be integrated with Microsoft’s Bing search engine and adCenter advertising platform. Nokia would leverage its vast operator billing agreements to allow purchase of Nokia Windows Phone services in countries where credit card use is low. Nokia’s app store will also be merged with Microsoft’s app store, the company says.

Nokia did not give specific dates of when its first Windows Phone 7 smartphones would arrive, only saying that there will be more news in the “next weeks and months.” Meanwhile, HTC, Samsung, LG and Dell have available devices running Windows Phone 7 software.

MeeGo Goes, Jobs Go Too

Nokia also said that its OS collaboration with Intel called MeeGo would become a long-term open-source project, or, in other words, will take a back seat (perhaps a tablet version), along with Symbian, which would be used on mid-range Nokia phones.

In another big shake-up, Nokia will also reshuffle its divisions, in a new company structure, which features two distinct business units: Smart Devices and Mobile Phones. Smart Devices will include Windows Phone, Symbian and MeeGo devices, while Mobile Phones will concentrate on Nokia’s feature and lower-end phones. Unsurprisingly, Reuters also reports that Nokia will cut a “substantial” number of jobs in its homeland Finland and elsewhere.

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10 hot areas of expertise for IT specialists

My recent article 10 Ways to become an IT superstar generated a lot of feedback. Quite a few IT pros out there apparently want to increase their visibility (and paychecks). One thing that drew a lot of attention in the piece was the advice to specialize. Okay, readers replied, but what area should I specialize in? They wanted to know which subsets of skills are the easiest to master and/or which ones will deliver the most bang for the buck. So in this follow-up, I’ll look at some of the IT specialties that are likely to be in demand in the near future.

Note: This article is also available as a PDF download.

1: To the cloud
You saw this one coming, didn’t you? All the major technology companies seem to be “all in” with cloud computing — Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Dell, CA Technologies, and more. According to recent surveys, at least 50% of organizations are already using some form of cloud computing, and Gartner says the adoption rate is increasing by about 17% per year. According to Dice.com, the number of ads for cloud computing jobs has grown by 344% over the last two years.

2: Virtually speaking
Virtualization has been hot for a while, as companies jumped in to reap the cost and management benefits of consolidating their servers and delivering virtualized desktops and applications to their users. Virtualization is also the foundation of cloud computing, so those with expertise in deploying virtualized IT environments will be in demand both in the public cloud arena and with those organizations that plan to stick with private clouds for now. Dice.com’s data showed a 78% growth in the number of jobs related to server virtualization.

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3: Mobile computing and consumerization integration
Everyone knows mobile computing is hot. Smartphones and tablets, along with laptops and netbooks, are the driving forces behind the increasing consumerization of enterprise IT. There are plenty of advantages for the company: Because employees are willing to buy their own devices, the organization saves money. Because those employees can stay in touch with work, read and respond to email, view attachments, and create documents no matter where they are, they become more productive.

But when employees purchase their own equipment, the downside is that you lose the standardization that comes with company-issued devices. You end up with many types of devices, made by different hardware vendors, running different operating systems and different apps, configured differently. Getting them to seamlessly connect to the company network can be a challenge. Getting them all connected to the company network without putting the network at risk is even more of a challenge. IT pros who have expertise in integrating these new devices into the network and managing them once they’re connected are likely to be in demand by many companies.

Application lifecycle management (ALM) will become increasingly important as the environment becomes more complex with some functions in the cloud and some onsite. Bob Aiello believes configuration management (CM) will evolve into ALM, and the outlook is bright for those with these expanded skills.

4: It’s all about the apps
As Toni Bowers reported in a recent blog post, the hottest job category for 2011 (according to CareerCast.com) is that of software engineer. But it’s a position that’s a bit different from the programmer of yesteryear. On the programming side of the fence, it’s all about apps these days. As smartphones and tablets become ubiquitous, companies will need to develop their own specialized apps for those devices — just as they’ve needed to develop proprietary software for desktop systems.

In addition, cloud-based applications will be big in the coming years, and that means software engineers will need new skills to design, develop, and implement programs that run in the cloud environment. Those who are familiar with Windows Azure, Google App Engine, VMware’s Spring Framework, Force.com, and other cloud development platforms will be a step ahead of the game.

5: Security and compliance
With cybercrime on the rise and increasing concern over the possibility of cyber terrorism and/or cyber warfare, security specialists are likely to continue to be in demand for the foreseeable future. There is a saying in the law enforcement community regarding job security: Thanks to human nature, there will always be criminals — and thus, there will always be a need for the police. That same dark side of human nature ensures that there will always be those who misuse computer technology to attack, intrude, and otherwise attempt to do harm to computer systems. That means there will always be a need for computer and network security specialists.

In addition, more and more government regulation of the Internet and networks, as well as regulatory provisions concerning data privacy, mean security is no longer optional for most organizations. Those who specialize in regulatory compliance are likely to see their job prospects increase as more industries come under the regulatory umbrella.

6: Four to six
When the IPv4 address pool was created in the 1980s, it was thought that the more than 4.2 billion unique addresses possible under the system would be enough. However, the creators didn’t foresee the Internet boom or the possibility that one day, we would be connecting not just multiple computers per person, but printers, phones, and even household appliances to the Internet. This month (February 2011), IANA announced that it has allocated the last batch of remaining IPv4 addresses.

The solution to the problem has been around for a while: IPv6. The new version of the Internet Protocol supports a whopping 340 undecillion (2 to the 128th power) addresses. But IPv6 deployment is not an easy task; working with it requires learning a whole new IP language. IPv6 addresses don’t even look like their IPv4 counterparts; they’re notated in hexadecimal instead of dotted quad. IPv6 is also much more sophisticated than IPv4, with many new features (including built-in security mechanisms). Most important, IPv6 does not interoperate with IPv4, so transition technologies are required to get IPv4 networks to communicate with IPv6 networks.

Obviously, now that we’ve reached the end of the available IPv4 addresses, more and more organizations will be forced to migrate to IPv6. Because of the complexity, there is a shortage of IT personnel who have mastered and really understand IPv6. If you’re one of the few, the proud, who specializes in this area, you’re likely to have plenty of business in the upcoming years.

7: Business intelligence
Business intelligence (BI) refers to technologies that are used for reporting and analyzing data, including recognizing trends and patterns, to make better strategic business decisions. BI uses techniques such as data mining to extract and identify patterns and correlations in large amounts of data.

According to a recent study of midsize organizations that was done by IBM, BI/analytics is the second most popular IT investment (after infrastructure) that companies have planned for 2011. This indicates that specializing in the BI field can be a lucrative strategy and a good investment in your future.

8: The social network
Social networking started as a consumer-driven technology, but the use of social media is now being embraced in a big way by businesses. It can be used to connect with customers, colleagues, and partners to build solid business relationships. That doesn’t mean you’ll automatically be a hot property on the job market just because you tweet and update your Facebook page regularly. But it does mean organizations are looking for people who know how to integrate social media into the business environment in a way that furthers the goals of the organization.

Many companies are looking to develop their own social sites that give them more control and let them target their audiences more precisely. Specialists in social media are sure to find many opportunities as more and more companies stop seeing social sites as just time-wasters that should be blocked and start to recognize the potential for business use. This article offers more information about exactly what a social media specialist does.

9: Public sector computing
On the one hand, many state and local governments are cutting back on their budgets and laying off personnel. On the other hand, governmental agencies are depending more and more on technology to perform their functions more efficiently with fewer personnel. That means specialists in public sector computing can likely find a home in one of the many thousands of town, city, county, state, or federal government agencies that exist in the United States alone.

Although salaries for government jobs are often smaller than those in the private sector, they sometimes offer better benefits, more time off, and a less pressured work environment. There are a number of IT subspecialties in the public sector, as well. These include computer forensics investigators, criminalistics analysts, and personnel who specialize in secure mobile communications technologies for public service agencies.

10: To your health
The healthcare industry is in a state of flux in the United States. Government mandates are predicted to result in cost reduction measures that may result in personnel cuts and/or discourage young people from entering medicine. At the same time, the baby boomer generation is aging and requiring health care. Technology may be one way to fill the gap.

An IDC report published late last year showed that the U.S. healthcare market for IT was valued at $34 billion and was predicted to increase by 24% over the next three years. That translates into a demand for software developers and IT professionals who understand the healthcare industry and its special needs and who know how to integrate technology into the caregiver’s world without dumping a steep learning curve onto people already working in an understaffed and overworked environment.

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Facebook’s E-Mail Flop

As I watched Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg yammer on and on yesterday about Facebook’s new messaging service, which he claimed really and truly wasn’t e-mail, I kept thinking: “Yawn. It’s e-mail, and it’s bad e-mail at that.”

Oh sure, it includes SMS and IM as well, but so what? Other Web-based e-mail systems, like my Gmail account sitting in another window as I write this, have been all-in-one communication centers for years. Heck, back when I was using Lotus Notes and Sametime on a regular basis years ago I could do this. Come on guys, unified e-mail is sooo 1995.

So what does Facebook Messages really bring to the table? I don’t see anything. To quote my wife Clara Boza, a legal marketing consultant, “Why would I want to use Facebook messaging?” Why, indeed. It’s just another damn e-mail account to check.

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I don’t know about you, but I already have had more than enough of them. These days, I only use two: my own vna1.com domain and Gmail. But, I still have half-a-dozen others, and as a former e-mail administrator, I’ve had dozens. I don’t need another one. Do you?

Gallery
To see the updated Messages unified inbox, including screenshots of how to get it working and how it operates, head on over to the gallery.

In particular, do you need one that a “social inbox” hodgepodge of e-mails, IMs and anything else that Facebook thinks is a message. I’m already shuddering at the thought of getting Farmville spam from my friends.

I’ve already seen one system that tried to throw all my communications into one large pot. It was called Google Wave. I never could figure out what to do with Google Wave. Almost no one could.

You see I think there’s a reason why we use different means of communications: They’re not all the same thing. When I send an e-mail, it’s because I had thought about something and I want to convey some information or make a point. When I send an IM, it’s a quick, dashed-off thought. If I do a social network update, I’m seldom talking about anything that’s important. For me social networking is the online equivalent of the old water-cooler chatter of the 60s and 70s.

Sure, maybe younger people use social networking to talk to each other more than I do, but I’ll bet when they want to make say a formal work proposal or tell someone privately in detail about what happened to them last night, they still use e-mail. Or, if not an actual e-mail message, something that looks a lot like one.

Facebook wants to mix all these kinds of messages together into one message mess. Making this mess even less appetizing, it’s getting rid of such fundamentals as subject lines. Guys, the subject line is there for a reason! It’s so I can tell at a glance if I want to read more of a message.

I’m also supposed to trust Facebook-Facebook!?–with messages from outside my Facebook friend circle? I don’t think so! Historically, Facebook is in-secure by design. As my comrade David d Gewirtz puts it so well, “Geez! Now email, too? Do we really want Facebook to know even more about us?” I don’t. And, I certainly don’t what Facebook knowing about my bank accounts!

It’s not just us old guys who still prefer e-mail to group chat on a social network. As iGeneration blogger Zack Whittaker puts it, “An argument between what is more personal for the user ranges on: the email inbox or the social network? Ultimately it doesn’t matter, because regardless of either of these being breached is the possibility that some varying degree of breach will cause you to suffer either personally or professionally.”

And, when it comes to protecting you, do you really think Facebook is going to do a good job at that? If you do I have a nice bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you. As for me, if want to write to me, say with an offer on that bridge, you can reach me at any of my usual e-mail addresses or IM accounts; don’t bother trying me at sjvn1@facebook.com.

Google

The Absolute Best Google Sniper 2.0 Bonus

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If you are probing a Google Sniper 2.0 Bonus then this is going to be the most important bulletin you ever read. Why exactly do I say that? Simply because I am going to announce some meaningful facts that you don’t want to miss at no possible cost.

Before I get to the fact, let me give you the absolute rationalization for this article.

What really happens in the internet marketing association is that a lot of gurus or experienced marketers tend to release courses that they believe will help others to make money online. Almost every week a new course is released. So you can imagine that most of these programs are either rehashed crap which are filled with rehashed stuff from previous courses. I know this may sound a bit harsh but it’s the truth.


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However, all hope is not lost because every story has two sides. So although there are a lot of crappy new products hitting the market place, once is a while new courses are also distributed that are of very high quality and can really help in taking your business to the next level.

Google Sniper was one such course. This course is a complete blueprint internet marketing course that was launched by George Brown who developed an amazing method for getting top search engine rankings for websites with relatively few backlinks which resulted in a ton of sales in all different kinds of niches. This way was fully laid out in his course. After the course was launched, it instantly became a top seller in the clickbank marketplace and it had a positive impact on a lot of person lives. If you visit most of the online forums, you’ll see that a lot of regular folks achieved great success by following George’s Sniping method.

Google Sniper 2.0 Set to be released on February 14th 2011!
Now you should see why I create this google sniper 2.0 bonus website! I am about to give you all the details below:

When every internet marketing course is released, there are also a ton of affiliates who want to make some cash from the launches. And that’s for good reason…. Absolutely nothing is wrong with doing that! So these affiliates will create some incentives or bonuses so that prospective buyers can buy the product through their affiliate link so they make a commission.

Google Sniper 2.0 – What Exactly Is It?
Some of you reading this may have some idea about what exactly is google sniper 2.0 however, for those of you who have no idea, here’s a brief overview of what the course is:

The original version of the google sniper course is about affiliate marketing. The method or technique was about ranking small niche websites in to search engine positions using only a few or sometimes no backlinks at all. These sniper sites will rank for keywords that gets a lot of searches per month and so they go on to make several hundred dollars monthly. Now the true success would be creating tons of these little sniper sites that makes several hundreds per month and then the number ads up.

What’s Different With Google Sniper 2.0?
Since the release of version one, lots of things have changed. As you may or may not know, concepts on the internet are ever changing thus techniques that use to work incredibly well in the past may no longer work that efficient today. So George has found it fit to update the course with new found material.

* Brand new, revised and in many cases totally transformed for 2011
* Step by step videos updated and re filmed for the new version
* Shocking new keyword research method to find some super nice niches
* Never before released case studies with lots of success stories and much more

So let Us Get back To The Google Sniper 2.0 Bonus
Why should you consider a Google Sniper 2.0 bonus? The simple answer would be because you will get much more value for your money. That is of course depending of which bonus offer you go with. I mentioned earlier that there will be numerous affiliates on board preparing bonus packages for the Google Sniper 2.0 launch. That in itself is a technique to make more sales. You offer an irresistible incentive to get people to buy from you. That means instead of you going directly to the product owners site to but the product, you can buy from an affiliate and get a valuable bonus pack to go with it.

Google, Microsoft

HTC Committed to Microsoft, Google OSes

BARCELONA, Feb 18 (Reuters) – Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC will stick with phone software from both Microsoft and rival Google for the long term, Chief Executive Peter Chou told Reuters on Thursday.

HTC, which specialises in smartphones that run computer-like functions such as Web browsing and email, has long been a staunch partner of Microsoft, and is also the maker of Google’s first own-branded phone, based on Google’s Android software.

“Our commitment to Microsoft has never changed,” Chou said in a meeting at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the world’s biggest wireless industry fair.

“Of course, we are very committed to Android as well. We are very long-term committed to those two.”

Earlier in the week at the show Microsoft launched Windows Phone 7, a revamped version of its mobile phone operating software, while Google’s chief executive Eric Schmidt made his first appearance at the fair and gave a keynote speech.

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HTC announced two Android phones and one Microsoft phone thie week as well as a budget smartphone, the Smart, based on neither Microsoft nor Google software but a chipset from Qualcomm that will likely sell at about half the price.

HTC, the world’s fourth-largest maker of smartphones, said last month that gross profit margins would fall to about 30 percent this quarter from 32 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, but Chou said investor concern was overdone.

“I think there’s some misunderstanding that we’re sacrificing our margin tremendously,” he said. “We’re adding overall absolute profit to the company, making HTC competitive, much stronger over time,” he said.

“Our margins just changed 1-2 percent. It’s not a big deal,” he said. “We think we are doing the right thing for our future, our competitiveness and we are very confident on our strategy.” (Editing by Greg Mahlich)

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