Category: Microsoft

Streaming media and home entertainment…

History / Microsoft / Phones / Software / Technology / Video

I’ve recently helped a few friends get setup with "media centers" as their home entertainment systems. They’ve all been centered around using a small form-factor computer to ‘power’ things, and central to that is Microsoft’s Windows 7 and Windows Media Center. I was lucky enough to be a software tester at Microsoft around 2001 testing the first version of Window Media Center Edition (MCE) and it was exciting back then. It’s now been 10 years – and it still hasn’t caught on. But, I’m confident that’s about to …

Microsoft Live ID system fails again…

Customer Service / Microsoft / Technology / Websites

About a year and a half ago, I wanted to transfer my XBox achievements and credits to my primary Microsoft Live ID account. Sadly, I was told that it was impossible. About a year after my frustration with the XBox Live ID issue, I decided to spend more time using my Microsoft Zune player. When I first got it (about about two years earlier,) I was required to sign in with a Microsoft Live ID to track my music purchases and plays. But now, I wasn’t using that …

Zune on Facebook

Microsoft / Software / Technology / Websites

In January 2010, I spent far too much time trying to find the "Official" Zune Facebook fan page. There were three Fan pages, two of which had almost 30,000 fans. However, I wanted to be join the official Microsoft owned/run/sponsored Fan page. Sadly, there was no way to tell which of the three was created by Microsoft. I had been a fan of the two larger fan pages, but they had pretty much stagnated at 25-30k fans for many months. So, while I was working at Microsoft, I …

Google’s ‘Sidewiki’ feature…

Blogging / Customer Service / Microsoft / Software / Technology / Websites

Back in the mid-1990’s when I was working on the MSN Engineering team at Microsoft, one of the projects we started to work on was a tool that would allow people to post comments about web pages "on" the webpage. That is, it was a feature in Internet Explorer very similar to the "Comment" feature in Microsoft Word. As with far too many Microsoft products, they started it, then shelved it. I was really excited about it back then because of the great potential for true customer service …

Will Windows Vista be the next Windows Me?

Microsoft / Software / Technology

For those who even remember it, Windows Me (Millennium Edition) was a stinker. Even internally at Microsoft no one (at least the people I worked with on various engineering teams) liked it. There’s plenty of websites dedicated to why it was a stinker, so I don’t need to go into those details. But, with Windows Vista, there was a lot of the same vibes… which made me think, will Vista be the next ‘Me’? Like with ‘Win Me’, Vista was plagued with issues of all kinds, but the …

2D barcodes, winners and losers

Marketing / Microsoft / Phones / Technology

Although 2D barcodes (also called QR codes – short for Quick Response) aren’t new, but they still haven’t caught on in the US. I’ve been asked by a lot of people “What is that?” when they see a QR code. To answer those people, they are postage stamp size or larger mathematical image that smartphones (with a high enough resolution camera) can read and convert to characters. Those characters can be a web address or a block of text or just about any input that a smartphone can …

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