Microsoft's battles with Google

Disclaimer: This is all my own opinion and not the view of my employer.

I've been thinking about the battle between Microsoft and Google, lately. I've come to realize that I'm not sure Microsoft is approaching the battle with Google in the right manner. Microsoft has been very reactive to apps developed by Google and I think it's giving Google the advantage.

Microsoft's approach to the market has often been to acquire companies that develop a great product, and after a few revisions, the product becomes a cash-cow (i.e. MS DOS, MS SQL Server, Excel). In this case, Google has a product that Microsoft wants to develop from scratch and try to make it compete with the existing market. This worked in the Netscape vs. Internet Explorer war, so I'm not going to say it's not a penetrable market.

The problem is, Google's sole venture is really only the web search market. It is their turf, and I think Microsoft should respect that. That's not to say that Microsoft should give up on developing these new web technologies. Microsoft can make any existing product better than it ever was. The best comparison of Microsoft innovation on a concept is with the new mapping:

• Google Maps - the first AJAX-based mapping software that features drag & drop map panning as well as aerial views. This tool made it really easy to map travel directions as well as spot all the local McDonald's.
• Microsoft Windows Live Local - a similar mapping tool that vastly expands the capabilities of online maps. Some of the best features are:
  • Scroll to zoom
  • Traffic reports using data from Traffic.com
  • Save 'pushpins' of locations the user wants to remember
  • Bird's eye view of locations that gives a helicopter view of cities instead of just a satellite view
  • If searching for restaurants in an area, as you drag the map around, it will re-search the map area for restaurants and display the ones pertinent to the current view

Maybe that's the point Microsoft has been making to Google all along. They can make anyone else's software better. However, I believe Microsoft will do better to continue to create new avenues of online systems that are completely unassociated with Google's. The best example is currently the online Office Live tools that are currently available in beta. This is an innovative market that Google will not be able to compete on.

All in all, I look forward to the continued battles that will, no doubt, occur. These make stock prices rise and fall, and innovation flourish.

Windows Vista Glass with NVidia driver set

I was having a lot of problems getting Aero Glass to run on my Vista drive on my Toshiba Tecra M5.  It doesn't make any sense because the video card is a 256 MB video card that supports the WDDM driver necessary to run the Glass interface.  I've had several friends have the same problem and after discovering a solution, I thought it was worth blogging.

First off, this is by no means a recommendation of Microsoft, just one employee's method to get it working (after reading Scoble's rants on blogging and the media, I've learned the disclaimer is a necessary evil). This information is provided AS-IS and WITHOUT WARRANTY.

Anyways, NVidia has been working to make all of its video cards run the from the same set of device drivers--something called the "unified driver" set (or something like that). Because of this, any driver you select will have the same settings as the one you're looking to get working.

So, to get it working, you will have to do the following:

1. Go to www.NVidia.com and download the Vista drivers
2. Extract the driver set to your local machine
3. Go to Control Panel->System->Device Manager
4. Right-click the video card from the tree and select Update Driver...
5. Don't let it select the best driver from the internet. Install from a specific location. Next >
6. Don't let it search your machine for a driver, you want to select it yourself. Next >
7. Click the Have Disk button on select the directory where the NVidia drivers were extracted.
8. Select a driver that has a name similar to the video card you have. I don't think it really matters, but I wanted to be able to see the right video card name in the device tree.
9. Click OK through all the prompts that say the device won't work. You'll be forced to reboot and at that point, you should see glass automatically. If it worked you can go to the Personalization screen and select Visual Appearance, you'll now be prompted with the Aero Glass color blending screen.

If this doesn't work, you'll probably be prompted with the black screen that asks you if you want to go back to the last known good configuration. If that doesn't work, you can go into Safe Mode and uninstall the driver from the device manager.

Good luck!