Politics.NET

I wrote about this in 2013; apparently Microsoft must not be listening to me (the horror!) since the option is still there in the business version of Outlook. In fact, I think it might be the default because I had to change it to "Reply" from "Reply All" today. Why would Microsoft include this option, much less make it the default? I have no doubt there are some people who use "Reply All" every time but surely they have to be in the minority. Besides, that's just bad behavior and it shouldn't be encouraged, even minimally, by having an option for this. Dear Microsoft, it's 2016...stop encouraging bad internet etiquette.

Did you know Google now has an operating system? You didn't? Well I didn't either. But, like the classic definition of vaporware, Google announced their OS last week to widespread acclaim from the google fanboys. People are talking about Google OS having stuff Windows doesn't have. Nevermind that not a single code of Google OS has been publicly released (alpha, beta or RC). So when Microsoft releases vaporware, it's bad. But when Google does it, it's the dawn of a new day. I seem to remember the same acclaim when Google Chrome came out. Several months later, it's stuck way behind IE and Firefox (except of course amongst the fan boys). Also, if Microsoft got into hot water for bundling IE with Windows, how will Google circumvent the same legal trapdoor? I suppose it's more likely the presiding judge would be a google lover (or perhaps Google will impress upon him the need to rule their way or have his search data be public knowledge....I kid). Currently ...

Chrome is Google's new browser. So far it hasn't overtaken any of the major browsers in terms of user adoption. I have switched because it's much faster and uses less memory than Firefox. But it does have it's shortcomings (after it's just a baby compared to the others). Now I have noticed that Microsoft's Hotmail doesn't quite work in Chrome. You basically can't type anything. So while it's good for reading your hotmail email you can't really really.  Today, I saw Google has come out with a work-around for the problem: simply pose as Apple's Safari browser and Hotmail works fine. Minor fix! But leave it to these 2 big guys to get in a spitting match about whose fault is it and who should respond faster with a fix: Google position:  Normally you think of Web pages being faster to update than client-side software downloads. In this case though, Chrome updates near-weekly, much faster than Hotmail did. Another illustration that velocity and spe...

First came username/password combination. That quickly got old and unwieldily. Then came Microsoft Passport to makes authentication easier. Of course like all proprietory schemes, it failed woefully. Then came openID. While it hasn't gain much traction with regular folks, tech-savvy users have been embracing it. But oh no, here's comes Google and Facebook with their closed authentication schemes. Closed in the sense that, unlike OpenID , only Facebook can be a provider of facebook connect. Likewise Google is the only supplier of Google Friend Connect . I am sure Microsoft and Yahoo won't be far behind in coming up with their authentication schemes (not counting Microsoft Live since I have yet to see it on a non-Microsoft site). The question isn't so much who'll win but whether coming up with all these different authentication schemes isn't creating more problems than it's solving. The original problem was this: each website requires authentication. This ...