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Microsoft Feared Mac Vs. Vista In '05
CWmike writes "Gregg Keizer sifted through many threads of e-mails released under the 'Vista Capable' lawsuit to dig up this jewel...More than a year before Windows Vista's release — and long before Apple started poking fun at the OS — Microsoft officials were already worried about comparisons between Mac OS X and Vista. An e-mail thread from October 2005 showed that an article in the Wall Street Journal by Walt Mossberg grabbed the attention of managers at Microsoft. In a column headlined What PC to Buy If You Are Planning On a Vista Upgrade, Mossberg alarmed one Windows manager who forwarded a bit from the column.... 'You won't have to worry about Vista if you buy one of Apple Computer's Macintosh computers, which don't run Windows,' Mossberg had written. 'Every mainstream consumer doing typical tasks should consider the Mac. Its operating system, called Tiger, is better and more secure than Windows XP, and already contains most of the key features promised for Vista.' Warrier added a comment of his own: 'A premium experience as defined by Walt = Apple. This is why we need to address [the column].'"
It's called SEO--search engine optimization--and it's pretty much all anyone working with Web sites ever talks about nowadays. You may think it consists of ways to trick the search engines, Google in particular, into giving you higher than usual page rankings. But in fact, it centers around the idea that Google sucks so much that companies think they need to use SEO to get the results they deserve.
By reverse-engineering the way Google operates, SEO experts can see how the process works. From a user's perspective, once you learn how Google does what it does, it's a miracle that you ever get the right results. And from my experience, the right results in many circumstances are nearly impossible to obtain--and may never be obtainable in the future.
Let's look at some of the problems that have developed over the years.
Inability to identify a home site. All the search engines have this habit, but often it is laughable. You'd think that if I were looking for Art Jenkins, and Art Jenkins had a Web site named Artjenkins.com, search engines would list that first, right? Most often this page is never listed anywhere.
Too much commerce, not enough information. There seems to be an underlying belief, especially at Google, that the only reason you go online is to buy something. People merely looking for information are a nuisance. This is made apparent anytime you look for information about a popular product. All you find are sites trying to sell you the product. Hey, here's a challenge: Ask Google to find you a site that honestly compares cell-phone plans and tells you which is best. Try it! All you get are thousands of sites with fake comparisons promoting something they are selling.
What's particularly bad about this is that the few honest sites trying to present information without SEO and all the trickery needed to get attention are put out of business; nobody ever finds those sites. The site you are pointed to should be the best site, not a mediocre popular site. This is the biggest flaw with page ranking.
Parked sites. Have you ever gone to look for something and found what seems like the perfect site near the top of the Google results? You click on it only to find one of those fake "parked" sites, where people park domain names, pack them with links to other sites, and hope for random clicks that pay them 10 cents each. How does page ranking, if it works, ever manage to give these bogus sites a high number?
Unrepeatable search results. Ever run a search a week later and get completely different results? In the end, you have to use the search history and hope you can find it. Can things change so drastically day-to-day that the search results vary to an extreme month-to-month? This is compounded by the weird results you get when you are logged in to Google. These are somehow customized for you? In what way?
Google sign-in changes a query's results to an extreme with no discernible benefit. Often two people are on a call trying to discuss something and both will try finding something online. The conversation often goes like this: "Here it is, I found it. Type in the search term 'ABCD Fix' and it's the fourth result listed." "I don't see it. The fourth one down is a pill company." "You typed in ABCD Fix, right?" "Yeah." This goes on for a while until you realize that one of the two people is logged into Google.
The solution to this entire mess, which is slowly worsening, is to "wikify" search results somehow without overdoing it. Yahoo! had a good idea when its search engine was actually a directory with segments "owned" by communities of experts. These people could isolate the best of breed, something Google has never managed to do. The basis for Google page-ranking is to equate popularity with quality, and once you look at the information developed by SEO experts, you learn that this strategy barely works.
We have to suffer until something better comes along, but there is at least one crucial fix that could be easily implemented: user flagging. Parked sites, for
Your sig is Awsome and surprsingly relevant.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
s/Viruses are some/A successful virus is one/g
PS: Do avoid a plural of virus at all cost. The latin word virus is a singularitantum and has no latin plural.
I'm sorry, what does that have to do with the English word virus?
For those who speak English, however, the English word "virus" takes the plural "viruses," as any dictionary will confirm.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
The English word virus is a singular and has a plural, viruses.
Yes, English steals words shamelessly. It's proud of it even.
Somehow I doubt that Slashdot is "one of the most polarising environments on the internet". In fact, I find that most of the time the moderation is reasonably fair and reflects the middle ground, you'll find highly rated comments reflecting just about about any legitimate viewpoint.
The people who tend to complain about moderation, tend to in fact by the people with extreme viewpoints who are upset when they are correctly modded down for their hyberbole or ranting. Pretty much every claim I've seen of "Slashdot group think" has been from someone who was simply wrong. Not merely voicing an unpopular opinion, but materially wrong.
Now sometimes people do get modded unfairly, but most of the time the system seems to work pretty well.
Fanatically anti-fanatical