- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Letters posted here are associated with the following article:
The letters thread is now closed.
This MS shopping search engine gimmick shows the usual MS response. Buy companies out. Now trying to buy customers out. Rather than be innovative, create a better search engine, bribe people to use an inferior product.
The only MS products that I use are those which MS has in effect created a near monopoly (WORD, Excel, PowerPoint) and you have to use it. Vista, for instance, is a resource hog, and no one who has a choice will upgrade from XP. I cannot think of a single MS project which is the best of its class. (MS Project maybe?) I am so totally sick of crappy MS products gumming up my computer! I simply cannot get a laptop running Windows to run smoothly for more than a few months. The gunk just builds and builds.
When MS develops software the first question they seem to ask is how can we engineer this to make MS money? The marketing angle comes first in their minds. Google at least appears to first of all ask, how can we make something that people will find useful? - realizing if they do that they'll make money. It's a different approach.
If you buy enough stuff online (assumming Microsoft's method of disbursing payment to us consumers) this is more incentive than using Google, unless you own stock.
Interesting market mechanism...the Internet is still forcing the private sector to make constant adjustments.
