Usually it’s been pretty difficult to take Microsoft’s search ventures seriously. Between the constant rebrandings and the stench of desperation, Microsoft was easy to dismiss as a former monopoly scrambling to seize a piece of every market without having a clue how to do it. And there’s some truth to that. About the only thing Microsoft has not tried to do is launch its own YouTube (ironic because with Windows Movie Maker, there would be a built in market for it). But Bing is proving more resilient than previous efforts. Between an aggressive ad and PR campaign, better search algorithms, and the Yahoo deal, Bing has managed to grab 10 percent of the search market. And while Google is still in charge, Bing’s gains suggest that there are growing pockets of dissatisfaction and discontent with Google search. And it’s not hard to see why. While Google has spun off a lot of projects, some good, its search engine has gotten worse. Google has begun making recent improvements to search, but some of those improvements have only made things worse. For example its search inuitive features make results less accurate by treating users like morons. Case in point, googling Ames, brings up page after page of information about Games. Caffeine is coming, and it’s an attempt by Google to take up some of the slack, but Caffeine doesn’t really bring any dramatic improvements to the table. Neither does Bing, which is really Google’s best defense. But enough people have gotten tired of Google to be willing to switch to an even slightly better search engine, rather than put up with Google any longer.

It’s no secret at this point that Apple seems to be pushing forward with an internet tablet, a seemingly reasonable halfway point between the Macbook and the iTouch. But do people really want internet tablets? Sure we’ve all seen them carried around by crewmembers on the Enterprise, and as a linear descendant of the PDA and the laptop crossbred and shrunk down, the tablet is supposed to be perfect for the new mobile environment. But that might be exactly the problem. Internet tablets are great in concept, but they’re not exactly big sellers. Now why would that be? Tablets give you way less functionality than an actual laptop, often at a higher price, and they’re not all that superior to the new generation of smartphones and genuine portables, which you can tuck away in your pocket. That may be one reason why Nokia which helped push the tablet, is bucking the tablet trend, by shrinking down to smart phone size and avoiding the internet tablet label. Apple is obviously hoping to tap into its trendy mass consumption market, but deploying an expensive item during a recession that people aren’t so sure they need, may not be the smartest move yet.

With the Zune HD set to get a generally positive if shrugworthy reception, the question becomes what Microsoft’s next step will be. Microsoft may not have many grown up fans in the hardware crowd, but they’ve demonstrated that they can produce passable technology with the XBox 360 and the Zune HD. Apple has made the next step very obvious, a mobile phone. But that temptation may be a very bad idea. Microsoft’s strength has been selling operating systems, not selling hardware. Apple on the other hand has always been the fancy upsold hardware company. But with the Zune, Microsoft tried to grab the market from Apple, and arguably went the wrong route. Microsoft sabotaged its own efforts to sell an MP3 OS to rival manufacturers that could have posed a serious threat to iTunes and done to Apple’s iPod, what the Windows PC did to the Mac. Instead Microsoft tried to compete on hardware and lost. Now if Microsoft goes down the rumored Pink road to a Zune phone or a Windows phone, Microsoft will not only alienate manufacturers, already looking toward Google, and uneasy with Microsoft peddling Windows Mobile 6.5 while toying with Windows Mobile 7, it will take another step away from its core OS sales, to peddling hardware. Which is not a smart or safe business model for Microsoft at all.

Who really needs a mouse that can track on glass? You’d have to assume it’s someone who has a glass table, and who really has clear glass computer tables anyway except CEO’s from the 80’s and mad scientists. Well if you happen to meet that demographic of mad scientists, CEO’s from the 80’s or Mad Scientist CEO’s from the 80’s, Logitech has good news for you. Logitech whose product quality has been slipping lately, will bring you the Darkfield Mouse for only a 100 bucks. The appropriately ominous sounding Darkfield Mouse will help crazy evil geniuses track the mouse across their glass desk. Sure they could get a mousepad or a trackball, but when you’re out to destroy the world, you need to be able to see your knees while you’re typing. Microsoft, which would normally be an ideal market for optical mice that can track on glass what with all those commercials in which everything in the future is made of glass and children from India and America exchange obscene gestures through giant video screens, has responded with something called BlueTrack, which is surprisingly not a way to track Windows Blue Screen crashes, but is an optical mouse that glows blue instead of red, and can work on just about any surface… except glass.

The Ribbon UI isn’t Clippy, it isn’t Microsoft Bob, but it’s not one of Microsoft’s real winners either. It should be recognized as a worthwhile attempt to streamline the often clunky Windows interface, but like Clippy and Bob, the Ribbon UI is geared to simplifying through dumbing down in a way that obstructs productivity workflow. The Ribbon UI has its professional fans, but mostly it hides your workflow behind unnecessary tabs. There’s nothing like hunting through 5 different Ribbon UI menu tabs to find a function that used to be front and center and didn’t require you to do anything but click on it, before Ribbon UI came along. It’s nice that Microsoft is at least trying to update the clunky Windows setup, but Ribbon UI is really not the solution. Offices like it because it’s neatly categorized, but while it’s easier to teach to new employees, it obstructs workflow and causes more trouble than it’s worth. The office aspect of Ribbon UI will probably help keep it around, but even Clippy survived a whole lot of abuse, before Microsoft finally retired him. The Zune HD suggests that at least someone at Microsoft is getting UI’s. Maybe they’re the ones who should be working on the next version of Windows.

Yes the Zune HD seems set to be pretty cool. A statement that would have been hard to believe before we caught sight of Windows 7 and Natal. Sure it follows along behind Apple’s iTouch, with its touch screen, gestures, WiFi browsing and a lot of other stuff too. There’s the HD Radio which Apple doesn’t have, depending on Apple’s next mysterious announcement, but basically the Zune HD is set to be the best alternative to the iTouch yet. Which is legit, especially now that Apple’s App store dictatorship is creeping everyone out. But does the Zune HD really matter? Unless Microsoft’s XBox 360 integration is meaningful, the Zune is set to battle what even Apple admits is a dying market segment. Most of the functions of a media player have been kicked over to cell phones. That leaves the demographic for people who don’t have any cell phone options, or would for some reason spend 200 something on a media player, rather than upgrade to a better cell phone, or people who don’t use cell phones. The problem is pretty obvious. Microsoft’s Windows CE platform keeps it from launching its own cell phone, for now. But instead it’s made the best entry yet in an area that most people don’t really need anymore.

The controversy over Apple’s App Store banning Google Voice and Ninjawords, a dictionary app, has brought the problem of Apple’s totalitarian control over its products into harsh light. And as Apple is moving to blur the lines between its increasingly sophisticated array of mobile products and its core computer business, the anti-trust are sure to start coming. The explosion is likely to be the theoretical Tablet that is likely to be Apple’s next big offering. If Apple sticks to the App store model for the tablet, that will be almost certainly the match that torches the whole Apple monopoly powder keg.

Apple has been given a mess over its App Store monopoly when it comes to the iTouch and the iPhone, but that can’t last forever. Apple’s excuses are not good enough, and its rejection of Google Voice highlights the reality that buying Apple products means buying into a gated community that exists purely for the profit of Apple and its partners such as AT&T and is meant to keep any outside innovation at bay. That is a dangerous precedent particularly in the light of a situation in which on the Windows side, there is finally a ray light as the Microsoft monopoly is being made irrelevant, only to have a much harsher monopoly emerge on the mobile side that holds the key to the future of mobile computing.

Apple has already discovered that its attempts at absolute control have pitted it in a war with its own users. The constant back and forth tennis match of jailbreaking and bricking have already demonstrated that such control is illusory. The price of moving your product beyond the Mac cult is dealing with a user base that will not simply do what it’s told just because Uncle Steve said so. This hasn’t troubled Apple too much, because of its longstanding contempt for its own customers. But Microsoft’s fate could easily teach Apple some lessons about where that kind of attitude gets you in the long. After a series of disastrous setbacks, Microsoft has begun actually listening to its users. Apple could do worse than copy that change in attitude.

Google’s promised new Chromium OS would matter more, if Google Chrome actually did. So far Google hasn’t shown much ability to even move a Browser up to the 2 percent market share range. That’s barely beating Opera and nowhere in Firefox territory. And that’s an easily downloadable browser add on. What the adoption rates would be for a Linux based Google branded browser that exists mainly to push Google’s own internet apps is best left to the imagination. As with Google Chrome, the OS would be stuck competing with other Linux distros for market share, a situation that would not be to Google’s advantage. The Google name might convince some small businesses to give it a try, but that’s about it. Still Google isn’t pegging this as a desktop OS war, but a way to sell some netbooks that would be oriented around Google apps. Which is not a bad move, albeit unimaginative and a bit pointless since the netbooks market is underwhelming and cell phones would seem to be where it’s at.

Apple striking down the Google Voice app for the iPhone is an obvious blow to Google’s plans, but it’s also one more demonstration that an Apple device will always be crippled and monopolized, a treehouse with no girls or rival applications allowed. Given the power Apple has proven itself to be every bit as ruthless and monopolistic as Microsoft, without learning Microsoft’s lesson, that a monopoly only exists until it goes out of date. Apple has made its bet once again on hardware, on being able to lock in people into its devices. Google meanwhile continues to bet on web applications. To fight Google, Apple will have to cripple its own hardware, but doing that will reduce the appeal of the hardware itself. A monopoly requires that you control everything that matters, while letting other people develop the baby shaking apps. But Apple only needs to make one mistake, to shatter its monopoly. And that mistake is building too much barbed wire, when what its customers want is freedom.

There’s an inevitable outcome to cost cutting prices on one hand and raising executive compensation on the other, the middle gets squeezed and that means cutting costs some more. Even while Netflix has managed to beat Blockbuster, the established market leader, in part by focusing on customer service, more and more companies are trashing their customer service through outsourcing. Outsourcing brings on board call centers that are little more than waiting rooms where customers call, receive no useful answers and then get processed out the other end in under the targeted allotment of 15 minutes.

This isn’t a complete break with the reality of what customer service used to be, but it is an end point, a point at which calling customer service or technical support no longer makes any sense because the people on the other end are Indians with poor English skills working from a script who don’t understand your problem, may not even understand your language and couldn’t care less because it’s 1 AM over there and they’re waiting to get done so they can go party.

Companies who outsource customer service might as well simply terminate customer service. Outsourced customer service can occasionally help people whose problems fit within a simple script but mostly frustrate and annoy customers. It’s better for a company to put its cards on the table the way that ING Direct has and simply explain that maintaining their prices requires the end of any effective customer service. After all it doesn’t really make a difference anymore.

Sure you thought Apple was evil before, what with it being a ruthless monopoly, aggressively suing its own fan websites out of business for reporting on its products and running its own cult based around trust fund hoodie wearing morons who don’t understand how to install Linux. But now Apple can lay claim to its own Guantanamo Bay. That’s right, Apple branded Gitmo. I picture it as being white with lots of translucent stuff and bright lighting. You might have known that Apple relies on its own Chinese slave labor corps to make all those iPods and iPhones you love. Well now those fun slave factory folks tortured an employee and might have driven him to suicide, or outright murdered him.

As first reported by ND Daily, the man, Sun Danyong, reportedly had his property seized and was held in solitary confinement after one of 16 prototype iPhones he was responsible for went missing. The man jumped from a 12-story building last week. According to Shanghaiist, the section chief of the Central Security division “may have used ‘inappropriate interrogation methods’ such as searching Sun’s house, holding Sun in solitary confinement and possibly beatings.” In addition, a Foxconn spokesperson reportedly said the incident is an example of the company’s “internal management deficiencies.”

I’m sure the Apple cult will find a way to spin it, or say he deserved it for losing a sacred iPhone prototype, which they would personally stand in line to jump off a building just to get their hands on. But the Apple cult’s local equivalent, a 25 year old college grad and tech employee, was psychologically and physically abused, and committed suicide. I’m sure somewhere Steve Jobs is chuckling while rubbing a white Siamese cat.

It may be no real coincidence that the areas in which digital piracy is most rampant are also the areas in which companies hold that buyers don’t own a product, but only license it. That was the case with the music industry which tightly regulated anything and everything customers could do with their music, treating people as music renters, rather than music owners. Music piracy quickly became mainstream. Computer software companies did the same thing, selling a license rather than software, never mind that most customers thought they were buying software. Apple pulled the same stunt with the iPhone. Bricking quickly followed, and jailbreaking, and more bricking, and more jailbreaking. The problem is that companies want violations of their copyright to be treated as theft of private property, but aren’t willing to treat the purchases of their customers as private property owners, but licensees. The average user does not respect a license. We’re an ownership society, and the average person sees things as either theirs or not. The license culture that digital media owners have tried to breed, has instead created the perception that digital media is ownerless. Amazon’s treatment of Kindle books as licensed rather than sold, will serve to create that same digital piracy culture with ebooks as well.

With PC sales falling for the first time in 8 years, we may be seeing the first twinges of the death of the PC. Mobile devices had always been considered supplementary to the desktop environment. Serious work was done on a PC mainly because mobile devices weren’t good for all that much. Latops helped change that, but they were still basically bulky mini-pc’s. The laptop culture has taken off in part thanks to free wi-fi in coffee shops and cafes, but more than that the mobile phone is coming into its own.

The average consumer wasn’t likely to buy a PDA, but is eager to buy smartphones, and the smartphones are getting smarter. App stores enable far more open costumer centered development, and the boom is less on the PC side and more on the mobile side, whether it’s netbooks or the iPhone. And as more people live and work on the go, the mobile solution encompasses more and more of what people used to do on the desktop. PDA’s were seen as unsexy and business oriented. Besides they were a frivolous expense. But it’s easy for consumers to justify spending four times as much on an iPhone, because smartphones are sexy and because most people need a cell phone.

A big part of getting people to accept a technology, is to upsell it into their lives, which smartphones and higher end media players like the Zune and the iTouch have done. With prices dropping and the technology improving, there are fewer reasons to be rooted to a desktop. As people spend a larger percentage of their time on the internet on social networking sites, the cell phone becomes a logical substitute for the desktop, because it’s a better social networking tool. Social networking makes more sense when you go mobile, it becomes an extension of your life, and the growth of social networking will help contribute to the death of the desktop.

I’m sure it’s what the executives wanted to hear, that the internet is a cesspool and the way out is by spending ad money to develop brands with credibility, but Eric Schmidt’s comments are a predictably deceptive load of crap. Yes brand names are probably going to be more trusted, but they aren’t in any way inherently more trustworthy.

The internet is fast becoming a “cesspool” where false information thrives, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday. Speaking with an audience of magazine executives visiting the Google campus here as part of their annual industry conference, he said their brands were increasingly important signals that content can be trusted.

The internet was always a “cesspool”. Yes it’s gotten worse lately, especially with organized groups operating out of places like 4chan but brands don’t have much of a track record as the solution. Gawker Media is one of the best known blog brands, but it frequently and casually prints things that are completely inaccurate or untrue, just to bring in traffic. And when it comes to mainstream media brands, should we really count the kind of hoaxes that have been printed and distributed that way? Is the New Republic a brand that has any credibility?

And when it comes to using brands as trusted messages, should we really go into the whole viral video area which involves trusted brands planting unbranded advertising content on video sharing sites, especially Google’s own YouTube?

It is way too easy to fake something on the internet. On the other hand the counterpunch to that is that the internet makes it a lot easier to bring people together to expose the fakes. Something a lot of the brands aren’t too happy with. Without the internet, the CBS evening news brand might be a lot stronger and Dan Rather might still have his job. So brands are overrated, transparency is underrated. The internet is a cesspool but out of that cesspool you also have the potential for creating transparency and it’s transparency not branding that provides credibility. And you can’t buy transparency with AdSense ad buys.

One of the RIAA’s more pointlessly insane projects has been fighting a long drawn out legal battle with Jammie Thomas, which it finally seems to have won thanks to one of those mentally retarded juries that isn’t capable of evaluating claims with practical wisdom. Not that it matters much for anyone but Jammie Thomas. The RIAA has gone from being the terror of the internet to a dinosaur snapping at homo sapiens racing past it with their digital spears. In a time when the RIAA is prepared to settle for just giving away music in exchange for an internet isp tax, when Apple’s iTunes effectively controls its distribution and pricing structure, DRM has been dismantled and file sharing networks have moved on, the RIAA is fighting 2003’s war, and celebrating an expensive victory while the actual music industry itself is sinking into the tar pits. The RIAA’s legal tactics became futile a while back. The biggest threat to the music industry long ago stopped being music pirates and became Apple’s control over its catalog and pricing and distribution models. The RIAA has won an outdated battle and long ago lost the war.

Just when the air was filled with sneering and parodies of Twitter and the whole Twitter culture, the Iranian revolution or student uprisings or whatever the hell it all is, came along, complete with Iranian twitter updates and a Twitter war between Ahmadinejad loyalists and Mosavi supporters, not to mention bots and all sorts of random wackiness, to make sure that Twitter’s claim to relevance could no longer be denied. Is Twitter actually relevant? Not really. Any system that’s based around 140 character updates is going to be fundamentally silly, even if it isn’t fronted by a bluebird and Ashton Kutcher. But none of that really matters, because relevant people actually began making use of it for something relevant, and the silly tool proved useful for quick updates of a mini-war. Which now defacto makes it relevant.

Having just rebranded Live search as Bing, Microsoft is determined to keep showing off why it’s a hopeless loser when it comes to search. Live itself was part of a Vista era branding that included renaming Windows Messenger, or was it Microsoft Messenger, to Live Messenger. (Maybe it’s going to be Bing Messenger now.) Much like Microsoft’s long forgotten attempt at forcing everyone to use Passport, or trying to, a tactic that all but doomed the once popular Hotmail webmail service, this too proved to be a dead end. Now Microsoft has decided that the secret to having a winning search engine is to give it a goofy impractical name, and the best they could come up with was, Bing! Aside from getting 5 more minutes of attention, Bing seems to be a whole lot like Live. The problem with both Bing and Live, isn’t that they’re worse than Google. Though Bing and Live may be marginally slower, though that might be due to the shiny background image. The problem is that there are few ways to improve on Google, except through better search results, and better search results aren’t coming anytime soon. Not when everyone’s business model depends on search ads. So Live and Bing and anything Microsoft turns out are doomed to be also rans, still also running.

Not that long ago it was pretty safe to write off Microsoft as a dinosaur monopoly, a case of the clueless getting even more clueless. Sure Microsoft had money and a limited monopoly, but it had been shut out of the future. It was like Western Union chuckling over its telegraph monopoly, but unable to get into the telephone business. With Windows 7, Microsoft proved that there’s life in Redmond yet. Not so much through its soggy commercials or even the fairly decent Windows 7, but its willingness to hear a wake up call and take action. Handing out free evaluation copies of Windows 7 Ultimate to everyone that are good until next year is not Microsoft’s usual way of doing business. Nor is actually listening and fixing people’s complaints usually part of the game plan. What might be a small step for smaller companies is a big one for Microsoft, because unlike most dinosaurs, Microsoft realized what was wrong and what it had to do to fix it. If Windows 7 gets the dominant market share over XP, Microsoft will have shown that it can’t be ignored after all.

Probably not. Ask.com already bet its stake on natural language searching, but as it turns out most people don’t know the difference and don’t care. Sure Google’s results are famously bad, but there’s so many of them that most people can just muddle on through on their own, narrowing them down and finding the gold in all that lead and spam portals. Not too long ago Wikia was supposed to destroy Google. Slightly less long ago, Wikia folded its tent and went home. That’s because beating Google requires being simpler and easier to use than Google, or actually reliably producing better results. Wolfram Alpha is supposed to do that, but it doesn’t seem to be any better at it than Google itself. Sure there’s a Gee Whiz element to it, but when you brush aside the tech, you wind up with just more search.

Take a blog, reduce each post to only 150 characters and leave only the comments, which can only be 150 characters in size, and which will cross appear on the commenter’s blog as well. There you’ve pretty much got Twitter, the perfect tool for the Attention Deficit Disorder internet, for people who want to promote themselves without having anything real to say, and who want the illusion of interaction without the personal commitment or the depth. Taking together the people centered appeal of Facebook and the promotional appeal of Digg, Twitter discards all the content, leaving only the links and the virtual soundbites. Naturally Facebook is worried and so is Digg. Half the point of Facebook were the brief updates that let people keep track of each other’s pointless minutia. Twitter does that with much less effort or content. 99 percent of the reason for Digg’s existence was as a way of filtering the internet to find interesting content and for other people to make snarky remarks about it (the other 1 percent were Ron Paul, Alex Jones, Obama, Marijuana legalization, Blogspam spam). Twitter does all that without all the infrastructure. Twitter is the minimalist digital revolution of personal trivia eating its own children. Sure it’s completely pointless and non-productive, but so was Facebook and Digg. Twitter is just more honest about it.

It’s blogging without the blog, facebooking without the facebook and digging without the digg. Is Twitter the future? Probably not, mainly because the future changes and gets shinier, more Web 2.0ey and more pointless every 5 months. I don’t know what slimmed down shiny beast will slither down the Silicon Valley pipeline next waiting to be born, but I’m sure it’s already available as an iPhone app.

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