thomas fitzgerald.net

Credit where credit is due, Microsoft have done a good job with Windows Phone 7. It has to be one of the most original interfaces for a Phone I’ve ever seen. What’s more, they resisted the urge to blatantly copy the iPhone  like everyone else. It certainly looks a hell of a lot better than most of the Android Phones out there. While I’d never give up my iPhone I think Microsoft have taken a good step in the right direction. Of course by the time this is released, Apple will have released iPhone OS 4 and the goal posts will have moved again, but it’s good to see someone else thinking outside of the box for once.

One of the things that annoys the life out of me is that frequently technology pundits who have a strong leaning towards Windows will, every time Apple does anything remotely questionable, claim that Apple is getting a free pass and use is the stupid argument that “If Microsoft did anything like this there’d be outrage”. Well, here’s one: it turns out that Microsoft’s new twitter client for Zune HD (as well as having poor performance) is censoring swear words. Apple got a lot of stick from plenty of people on the web for rejecting Apps over censorship, so now that Microsoft is doing something similarly distasteful where’s the outrage we were promised? All we had was “this is stupid but whatever” type reports instead of the usual “this is a travesty” one comes to expect when Apple does anything App related.

From an interview in PCR:

One of the things that people say an awful lot about the Apple Mac is that the OS is fantastic, that it’s very graphical and easy to use. What we’ve tried to do with Windows 7 – whether it’s traditional format or in a touch format – is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics. We’ve significantly improved the graphical user interface, but it’s built on that very stable core Vista technology, which is far more stable than the current Mac platform, for instance.

Something occurred to me today as I was reading a piece about Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. Sometimes it seems like Microsoft acts like the bitter older brother or sister who can’t stand its siblings having anything that it doesn’t have. When someone makes something successful, Microsoft has to have it. Then I began thinking about how this contrasts with the way Apple does things. If you look at the way both companies develop new products, or bring new technologies to the market you see a stark difference in approach.

For all those people who think Apple shouldn’t be running competitive ads against the Windows 7 launch because it’s bad taste, here’s what Microsoft pulled when Sony launched the PS3. Or how about setting up a windows 7 booth across the road from the Japan Linux Symposium ? So, I really don’t think Microsoft needs defending from “big bad Apple” over a few ads when they’re mild compared to the stunts Microsoft has pulled over the years when its competitors launched products.

I’m not really a Windows person so I’m not one of those eagerly queuing up to get my copy of redmond’s latest, but what happens in the Windows universe effects the whole of the computing landscape whether die hard mac fans like to admit it or not. I had played around with the beta version for a while, and it does seem like a considerable improvement over windows vista. Unfortunately, all the things that make Windows, well, Windows are still there. If I had to use a PC for my day to day tasks then I would certainly want that PC to be running windows 7, but thankfully I don’t. Still people are generally positive about it (unless you were planning to upgrade from XP) and good for them. I think at the end of the day the launch of Windows 7 shows what happens when you set expectations incredibly low. If the bar for success is “better than vista” then it shouldn’t be a hard goal to achieve.

Microsoft have announced the next version of Microsoft Office, scheduled for December 2010. Well, it certainly gives you plenty of warning any way. Most interesting though, is the announcement that Entourage is going away (great cheers rise up from the crowds) to be replaced by Outlook for mac. Hopefully they won’t cripple it, and it will be fully compatible with the PC version, because that’s been a heavily requested feature by many users.

Macworld has more.

Unbelievably this is an actual commercial for IE8. It really makes you wonder who is responsible for microsoft’s advertising. Don’t be surprised if this is gone soon.