Microsoft's Colossal Strategic Mistake: "We Need to Be in Advertising"
alleyinsider.com
alleyinsider.com
Microsoft looks at Google and thinks: "These guys are a threat, so we have to get into their business. Google's business is advertising, so we have to get better at that." But the source of Google's power is not what they deliver to advertisers; it's what they deliver to users. Advertising is just how they monetize it. But because treating users well is so alien to Microsoft, they can't grasp something like that.
I think Microsoft should try to change the game rather than beat Google on it's home turf. Surely if it focused on technical excellence for once and stopped following everyone else around, it could probably leverage it's desktop dominance into something. Of course, Microsoft has never been apt to do that.
What happened to Windows being good at what it does? It feels like its overextending on every front. Windows = Next GE?
I'm not really trying to criticize microsoft, I just felt that I should point out that Microsoft seems to be overreaching in terms of the things its trying to do and pushing "ahead" when many aren't really ready or willing to deal with the changes they make. Are they listening to their customers anymore or are they simply assuming that people will use their stuff because thats all they know to use?
Seems to me its the latter, and that they're going ahead to be a jack-of-all-trades instead of doing what they do well.
As for the default font, I believe it's actually Calibri, which is a great sans serif font. Personal preference will dictate whether it's appropriate for your uses, but that's why it's a dropdown menu and not a hardcoded value. If I had to guess why they left Times New Roman, I would guess because based on their collected statistics more people use sans serif fonts, or maybe just that it's more readable. Also, TNR is pretty ugly.
At any rate, yeah I guess it makes sense to me now. I still maintain that I feel like I'm drowning in the new interface for office though. Thanks for the insight.
As it turns out, we had to custom-register our SMTP server with hotmail administrators. It took us about 20 emails back-and-fro and about two weeks, but they finally started accepting our messages.
Not only this violates SMTP standard, it also demonstrates their "f'ck you all, Internet" attitude: they are saving on spam filtering at expense of everybody else: their users, our users, etc.