Zune Media Player for PC

I wonder why Microsoft would not use Zune Media Player for PC as a standard application and add support for all other media players (That support Windows Media). It is a great piece of software with a really nice UI.

Microsoft advertising on Google Adsense

Microsoft's advertisements about Seachperks are appearing on Google Adsense and various google applications.

When will Microsoft learn not to play with users?

Okay, 

Now that anger is out on the title of the post, let's get the facts straight.

I got an email from Microsoft today and to get 100 bonus points, decided to try their toolbar. See previous post here.  Installation of the toolbar was fine, i skirted the obvious options to change my default page and default search engine and did the plain toolbar install. Worked just fine. All it needed was to exit my IE and run it again after installation and did first search. Now comes the cons:

• When you use toolbar, it automatically does like "auto sense" or behaves like Google Suggest. There is no way to disable it.
• The feature is very slow, which means you have to wait long between keystrokes.

Anyways, Since I got my 100 bonus points after doing first search, I decided to uninstall the toolbar. Uninstall process was almost smooth. It required me to shutdown my IE obviously. Now comes disaster: It started changing few registry settings. Lavasoft ad-watch running on my pc caught these. This is what it tried to do:

• Change default search to MSN by changing HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Search\SearchAssistant to http://search.live.com/sphome.aspx
• Change default page of the browser by changing HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\Start Page to http://www.msn.com
• Change search engine for the user by setting HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\Search Page to http://search.live.com

It is entirely outrageous to change these settings without informing user beforehand.

Once 

Download the Club toolbar and get 100 bonus tickets

I got an email from Microsoft with following text and subject as it is in the title.

Take the Club with you everywhere on the Web.
The new Live Search Club toolbar makes it even easier to search the web, check your Club account, access your favorite games and prizes, and earn tickets, just by searching. Install and use* the new toolbar before November 13, 2008, we will add 100 tickets to your account. Go ahead, try it now!

 

I am going to download the toolbar and try it out. Will post update once done.

Why isn't there an anti-trust case against Oracle?

Now that polarization is almost complete in the industry.

Microsoft is still the leader in the desktop space, with Windows Operating System. Apple is second with Mac OS X, Linux is probably at Number 3.

Google is inching closer to achieving monopoly in the web space. It probably just needs to acquire Yahoo, AOL and FaceBook (and shut down Orkut, if merging proves to be difficult). MSN and Lycos will remain to cater to rest of the market till Google acquires more and more of it.

Oracle has already acquired Siebel, Peoplesoft & JDEdwards, Agile, BEA Systems and so on.

Microsoft Snooping on PCs without users knowing about it

Normally I implement most Microsoft Office patches without getting into fine prints, but the latest one spooked me completely. Here is a screenshot.

Want to read it verbatim? It says:

Size: 1.0 MB
Microsoft has released an update for Microsoft Application Error Reporting. This update fixes an issue with Microsoft Application Error Reporting that may cause some information about application errors to be sent to Microsoft without notifying you.
More information for this update can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=EE28696F-0826-409F-9B1C-781D28BB5981&displaylang=en

That means Microsoft had been getting data from My MS Office about crashes without me knowing about it.