The Revenge of Microsoft

I don't know if you have noticed lately but Microsoft has been on the move.  Forget the delays and insanity surrounding Windows Vista.  Windows XP is pretty soiled as an OS especially since service pack 2 and adding security hooks.  It's time to focus on what's cooking in the Microsoft Labs. 

Microsoft has made some very serious shifts and it looks pretty exciting. For one thing there's Windows Live.  Having played with it and viewed a lot of the features, it reminds me of the Google Personalized Page but a much nicer version.  If you have a Passport account go to Live.com and give it a spin, it's high quality and well done. Another cool element to Windows Live is that it works quite nicely on my Palm Life Drive. The are some rough elements but over all very slick. But there is far more to talk about. 

So how about this... I'm using a beta version of Microsoft "Writer" to make this post.  It took literally less than 10 minutes to setup and I off and typing this post for you.  It's Microsoft's blogging to that will work not only with Microsoft's "Live Spaces" but, Blogger, Typepad and a host of other blogging tools.  Pretty good stuff and I must say that I'm liking it.  I'll give a complete review later because I'm busy delving into Microsoft Office 2007 beta that I'm finding really compelling.  For some odd reason, Microsoft charges 1.50 per software item to download (is this a vain attempt on their part to cover bandwidth cost or something).  Along with Microsoft Office 2007, I've also been playing with their new version of Microsoft One Note.  Everything has been fairly impressive and a lot of fun since they have changed up the paradigms for how we typically work.  The nice thing is that all the changes I've played with have been remarkably better (get used to the word "ribbons"). They seemed to have really done their homework on the UI (user interface).  I'm not sure what happened up at Redmond, but they are learning and giving their UI a new lease on life.  Pretty smooth stuff I must say and this is coming from someone who uses a Mac 60-70 percent of the time.  They are doing a nice job at luring me back with tool where I don't have to think about this or that but rather just create, which has defiantly been the Apple paradigm.

In closing there are some other products worth mentioning. Here are just a few:

• Visual Studio Express
• SQL Server 2005
• Expression Interactive Designer
• Expression Graphic Designer
• Expression Web Designer
• Ultra Mobile Personal Computing (platform)
• The Zune (something akin to an iPod)

Microsoft is not only delivering, but they are recalibrating their products for the "experience" economy similar to Apple.  I'm very sure that there will be stumbles along the way, but no one gets things right 100 percent of the time.  We've got to give them credit for that. They are not resting, they making the push to offer a genuinely better products which the best revenge considering that Microsoft has appeared outwardly to be in something of a tech-slump.

// Jaye Morris, Technologist