Lessons to be learned

Windows 8 adoption rate is poor

Oleg Kokorin — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 13:19:50 +0000

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.

Microsoft Office to be released on Linux?

Oleg Kokorin — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 13:54:24 +0000

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…

Yandex beats Bing to become 4th largest search engine

Oleg Kokorin — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 10:23:36 +0000

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!

Microsoft shuts down Live Mesh

Oleg Kokorin — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 10:28:42 +0000

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.

Farewell HTML5

Oleg Kokorin — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 14:41:59 +0000

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.

Wintel cliff

Oleg Kokorin — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 11:37:46 +0000

The new Mary Meeker’s Presentation On The State Of The Web contains a slide that’s basically a snapshot of a gigantic landslide.

It took Microsoft 10 years to go from zero to 80% of the market and it will take even fewer years to go from 95% to 15% or less.

Windows 8

Oleg Kokorin — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 18:02:30 +0000

This headline says it all…

MobileNoter for BlackBerry released

Oleg Kokorin — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 14:00:59 +0000

Finally, MobileNoter has been released for the BlackBerry platform! It works on BlackBerry PlayBook tablets. We don’t have plans to migrate it to BlackBerry phones as of now, but anything is possible in the future. Needless to say, MobileNoter is the only solution available for BlackBerry users, who need to be able to work with their Onenote notebooks.

Concept of OneNote dedicated phone

Oleg Kokorin — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 09:27:33 +0000

Another day, another cool concept of a phone. This time it is a 5.5 inch “phablet“, a phone-tablet hybrid, dedicated specifically to OneNote MX. The phone would be obviously manufactured by Nokia, carry Windows 8, and compete with Samsung Galaxy Note family. BTW, Samsung sold over 10 millions of those, which is a number Nokia can only envy of. The source of this and other nice phone concepts is here.

MobileNoter SE HD 4.2 for Android released

Oleg Kokorin — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 04:32:54 +0000

As promised, we released a new update for Android tablets. This is the best version of MobileNoter ever, and the best way to work with OneNote on Android.