Results tagged “toddbishop”

Only Microsoft could send people fleeing from a free product. But users are abandoning Redmond's free Hotmail service, and they were leaving before the new interface that's got everyone else pissed off: says the P-I, "among the major Web-based mail providers in the United States, Windows Live Hotmail was the only one to experience a fall in traffic in September." (Gmail gained 26K unique visitors, in contrast.) Undeterred, Microsoft is playing stern dad, and forcefully upgrading laggard "classic" users to the new Hotmail interface, like it or not. Ironically, Todd Bishop over at TechFlash has been catching flack from Microsofties for his temporary Gmail address. That's Hotmail's problem! Todd Bishop!

Business reporter John Cook, who came to the P-I in 1999 and founded a cottage enterprise of entrepreneurship coverage (including his Venture Blog), and tech reporter Todd Bishop (at the P-I since 2002, and author of the Microsoft Blog) are departing the P-I, leaving two huge holes in the daily's business coverage and web stats. Outside of sports, their blogs were the top traffic-getters for the P-I website, and both are award-winning reporters. What makes this news even more startling is that both are joining the Puget Sound Business Journal. It's like the Ms losing Beltre and Ichiro to the Aquasox. Word is, the PSBJ has big plans for its new blog-ebrities.

This week's Stranger news section contains an article about a Nintendo contractor who was fired for her blog. "Not work appropriate" said Nintendo, although, what the hell does that have to do with anything? The blogger Jessica Zenner blogged anonymously and without naming her employer or her coworkers. It sounds like her blog was known among her coworkers, though, and according to the article she used "hormonal, facial-hair-growing, frumpy" to describe a female boss. It's not exactly as if you'd written it on the white board in the conference room along with a paste-up laser print of your boss's face, but if your coworkers read your blog and you refer to your female higher-up's mustache... You could be fired. The article concludes with a quote from the now unemployed blogger in question: "Ten years ago, someone would never get fired for their blog. This is such a sign of the times."

Man, if the EU court that stuck it to Microsoft this weekend and Mr. and Mrs. Slowsky were in a race it would probably go off the board for betters. It's. Taking. For. Ever. The crime is Microsoft shutting out competitors by bundling Windows Media Player with Windows, which, to us at least, seems like an ancient issue. What are they going to go after Microsoft for next? Attaching round wheels to an axle? We were all about this issue when it was browsers that were being shut out of Microsoft operating systems, but for some reason we can't get all that excited about media players. Real Player? QuickTime? Fuck 'em. More troubling to us are the protocols that Microsoft has refused to open. Standards; there is a point to it, after all.

Microsoft is attempting to yank the developing world into the age of Personal Computing and to that end they just announced $3 software bundles for developing nations. Windows XP Starter Edition and Office Home for $3, which is about $3 more than what we think developing nations currently pay for their software.

--Todd Bishop has an update on the Microsoft researcher currently lost at sea.

According to this guy's cost analysis, not only is Vista going to screw you, the person who purchased the software, it's also going to doom Microsoft itself and quite possibly the computing universe as we have come to know it. Particularly, he's got issues with the Visa Content Protection specification of which he says in the Executive Executive summary of his paper "The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history." Nerds will be able to parse the fact that a content protection specification has to do with DRM. Normal people might need to be told that DRM has to do with copy-protection and that kind of thing. Bill Gates himself isn't so high on DRM these days, despite the fact that he's about to stake Microsoft on an operating system that holds digital rights as one of its core truths. In December he told a blogger that the best way to ensure that your music is legal and playable is to rip CDs yourself. We'll see if that holds true under Vista.

--If a cool kid sat next to you at lunch today, it wasn't because he likes you.

1998 was a good year in Redmond. Netscape was squirming under Microsoft's heel, Windows 98 shipped in the year it was named after, and women accounted for 27% of the company. Twenty-seven percent was pretty good for a tech company in 1998, and that number was expected to grow as women continued to make inroads into careers previously dominated by men.

Seattlest is a SeattlePI.com power user (so you don't have to be) so we get real excited about new website functionality over there. Yesterday the P-I launched something new with the unfortunate "my" prefix (which does immediately let you know exactly what it is, but is tired nonetheless). Ok, you've been a web user for some time now. We're assuming you're pretty savvy or you wouldn't be here and you can probably guess what "My-PI" does without any training wheels from Seattlest, but that's not going to stop us from rambling on for another couple hundred words.