Lessons to be learned

Windows 8 adoption rate is poor

March 10, 2013

ZDNet created a nice graph comparing Windows 8 adoption rate with that of Windows Vista. If the figures are true, they spell big trouble. Windows Vista was far from being popular comparing to other Windows OSes, but Windows 8 is setting a new record of unpopularity. ZDNet offers a list of five reasons about what’s wrong with Windows 8. However, it all boils down to a single issue: the Intel based PCs is the core Windows 8 market and Windows 8 doesn’t offer enough innovation for that market. Instead, it breaks good things with the new interface.

More interesting numbers to come out in the nearest months for sure.

3 Comments | Metrics | Tagged: Microsoft, Windows 8 | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin

Microsoft Office to be released on Linux?

February 10, 2013

In a surprising news, apparently Microsoft is looking at releasing a Linux version of Office in 2014. With all due respect to Linux and its fans, the platform is hardly a lucrative market for Microsoft today. There are however some significant changes to come. Many governments throughout the world are pushing the open-source software to be used in public and quasi-public sectors. There is an official plan to move to the open source software in Russian Federation by 2015. There are initiatives like this in other countries as well. I am not going to argue whether it’s a good decision or bad, but it will definitely have a tremendous impact on the software sales by Microsoft in the years to come. After we take this movement into account, the decision to migrate Office to Linux might not be weird after all. There is one little problem though. Simply migrating Office to Linux won’t be enough. The Microsoft Office has to be open-sourced in order to be eligible. Open-sourced Microsoft Office? I said it was a surprising news…

Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: Linux, Microsoft Office | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin

Yandex beats Bing to become 4th largest search engine

February 9, 2013

Wow, nobody saw that coming!

Yandex surpassed Bing on the number of monthly search queries in November and December 2012. You might think (as I first did) that it happened in some local market, say ex-USSR territory or something. However, the figures are for the worldwide number of queries.

Now that’s just embarrassing. You would think with all the money Microsoft throws to buy users, they’d get higher in the online search game, not lower. Congratulations to the Yandex team though!

4 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: Bing, Microsoft, Yandex | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin

Microsoft shuts down Live Mesh

January 27, 2013

Microsoft is set to kill Live Mesh in two weeks. I’ve been using Live Mesh for years. It’s been a great tool, even though it didn’t make an appearance on the mobile platform. It seems that things are not that bad for Live Mesh users, because Microsoft offers to migrate them to Skydrive. The problem is that Skydrive has been seriously dumbed down compared to Live Mesh, to the point of being unusable. Several advanced features are absent from Skydrive, including direct PC-to-PC sync and ability to sync any folder on the computer. Microsoft is well aware of this problem and of the fact that the users are revolting. Count me as one of those users. I removed Live Mesh, but didn’t install Skydrive. I installed SugarSync, and it is an awesome product.

I use it to sync my Onenote files between PCs and an Android phone, and use MobileNoter to work with the notes. It all works like a charm.

2 Comments | OneNote on Android | Tagged: Live Mesh, Microsoft, Skydrive, SugarSync | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin

Farewell HTML5

December 16, 2012

So much for the “new hope of mobile app development” – Facebook released an updated app for Android, which replaces the webview/HTML5 architecture with a totally native implementation. The remake significantly improves the speed and overall slickness of the app, finally making it usable on Android. While we learned that HTML5 is bad for mobile a long time ago, it’s nice to see Facebook thinking the same. Also, in case you are wondering: yes, MobileNoter for Android is totally native too.