Well, they certainly don't make it easy to find, but luckily it has been found! Upgrade now and bask in the slightly more stable and tiny bit faster-iness of Vista SP1

Download details: Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Five Language Standalone (KB936330)

Well, it looks like the move away from the desktop is in full swing. I remember theorizing about the Google/Microsoft endgame scenario which went something like this:

Google would litter the Earth with GoogleOS CDs much in the same way that AOL has littered the Earth with their "1000 free hours" CDs. People would pop these into their PCs and they would be able to boot up, get online, and do stuff. Word processing, no problem. Photo editing, no problem. Email, no problem. It'd all point at Google and their partners and it'd all have no out of pocket costs for the user. And like that...Microsoft would would be in deep trouble. Not that they're not already in deep trouble, but the GoogleOS CD would really accelerate the decline of the lumbering giant (troll?).

Then I see this $200 Walmart PC that gets entry level users online and functional in a non-Microsoft world. Whoa. Way back when, people would start their truly productive computing lives on a Microsoft OS when they started work. I think they must have mistaken their productivity to be as a result of using Windows rather than as a function of their sheer need to get stuff done in order to keep their jobs.

But I digress...the $200 buck PC with linux and links to the web is a great way to go. I wonder if the MSNTV users would be interested in this?

I never understood the logic behind the idea of a Microsoft and Yahoo! merger. I mean, what does each bring to the table?

Microsoft brings a few cash cows, buckets of cash, and an ailing online service. Yahoo on the other hand, brings over a lot of eyeballs, some cool bits like flickr, delicious, and others, and a lot of duplicated services (WL Mail = Y! Mail, WL Messenger = Y! Messenger, WL Search = Y! Search, WL Maps = Y! Maps, etc). Anyway, it's an interest idea that they could merge, but I'm not sure what it would do to slow down Google. If anything, it'll slow down the newly joined-at-the hip "Yahoosoft!" I mean, let's take two very large bureaucratic companies with overlapping services, mash them together, and watch the ensuing politcal firefight ensue.

Anyway, I hope these two giants will take a good look at why Google is winning. It's certainly not the breadth of services or the even the reliability of them as I've experienced first hand. No, they are winning for two simple reasons:

1) Search: accurate. They've built the better mouse trap
2) Syndication: They allow you to make a few (or quite a few) bucks on your own blog running on your own server that you can do whatever you want with.

That's it folks. Those are the two reasons that Google is winning. Smashing Microsoft and Yahoo together will NOT get you these two things. The only two things that Microsoft, Yahoo, or Yahoosoft (or Microhoo, or Mihoo!, or Moohoo, or...I can go on for days) can do to beat Google are:

1) Search: make it more accurate than Google.
2) Syndication: get off your "walled garden" wall and let people syndicate your ads on their own site with their own servers that they can do whatever they want with. Yahoo figured this out eventually, but it is most likely too late. The other way to do it is to offer more cash than Google is willing pay. That should win you some converts (until Google ups their payout too, of course).

There you have it folks...no fuss, no political war with clashing cultures ensuing. Just a way to really win over Google. The question isn't if they can merge, because we know they can. The questions really are: does it matter? and will it help? The answer is most likely: no.

Big ups to Ars Technica for sparking this rant: Yahoo-Microsoft merger talk resurfaces

Sweet! It looks like my old team over at Microsoft finally got the first beta of MSN Mobile out the door! I worked on testing the underlying web services that run the site. It was quite a challenge in December all the way through when I quit Microsoft. We had to do a bunch of load tests that just didn't want to work right. Finally we realized that our load generation tool was just funky and didn't give us the right sort of load characteristics that the operations folks wanted to see. Anyway, I worked up until about 7:30pm on my last day to help them get over this hump and it looks like they finally pulled it off.

Well, don't just sit there, go check it out:. MSN Mobile Device homepage

If you wanna be fancy, just go to beta.mobile.msn.com and it will redirect you depending on fi you're a PC or mobile phone...I know, I know...oooo, aaaaah. But seriously, there are two pages geared towards different purposes. The PC homepage kinda gives you the gist of what you're getting yourself into, while the mobile page is where the meat of the whole thing is.

Other nice features: the site knows what kind of device you are visiting on and tries to resize images, and change the layout depending on your device's screen size. A good example of this is if you have a Pocket PC with flip out keyboard. You'll see that if you visit the site on portrait mode versus landscape mode, you'll see a slightly different layout.

Anyway, I want to give a shout out to my old team for getting this done and going from having the msn mobile project dropped in our laps to to a fully functioning site in pretty short amount of time (considering all of the msn specific hoops we had to jump through).