Tag: scoble

Microsoft

Microsoft Vista finished

With the two simple words “It’s time“, posted on the Windows Vista blog, Jim Allchin announced to the world yesterday that Windows Vista has been released to manufacturing.

Via Rob (well done Rob, you beat Scoble to the post by 48 minutes!).

Vista is Microsoft’s new operating system, replacing Windows XP

The official Microsoft press release is here.

Released to mnufacturing means that the code has been finalised and sent to be pressed on DVDs for subsequent distribution and sale.

When will you be able to get your hands on it? Well, according to Sven Hallauer, release manager and director of program management at Microsoft:

Microsoft is hosting a series of events around the world on November 30 to officially recognize business availability of the 2007 Microsoft Office system, Exchange Server 2007 and Windows Vista, and we announced today that the worldwide general availability launch is January 30, 2007. So yes, everything is on track and we’re very excited about it.

The next question is will your PC or laptop be able to run Vista or will you need to upgrade your hardware to run it?

According to Microsoft, a the minimum spec to run Vista is:

  • A modern processor (at least 800MHz).
  • 512 MB of system memory.
  • A graphics processor that is DirectX 9 capable.

However, to be able to benefit from the new interface, your computer will need to be a Windows Vista Premium Ready PC which includes at least:

  • 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor1.
  • 1 GB of system memory.
  • Support for DirectX 9 graphics with a WDDM driver, 128 MB of graphics memory (minimum)2, Pixel Shader 2.0 and 32 bits per pixel.
  • 40 GB of hard drive capacity with 15 GB free space.
  • DVD-ROM Drive3.
  • Audio output capability.
  • Internet access capability.

The hardware manufacturers are rubbing their hands with glee!

There is a lot of talk about this new operating system because it took so long to come this far. I’m wondering if Microsoft, after six years writing an operating system, finally managed to produce an operating system which is secure!

Browsers, Microsoft

Internet Explorer 7 has been released

Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) has been released according to Dean Hachamovitch on the the IE7 blog. It is now available for download here.

IE7 will be rolled out via a critical Windows update in the coming weeks which, as I have mentioned previously, will become a support nightmare. For this version it would make a huge amount of sense to have an IE6 look and feel (skin) as the default look with an option to change.

via Scoble

Blogging, Business blogging, video

Oh no! Scoble Show launched

Robert Scoble’s video show was launched this morning. The delay in the launch was due to the PodTech.net site’s re-design apparantly.

The Scoble Show

There are some fascinating interviews there. One of the videos is of a photo walk with Thomas Hawk. Thomas is a photographer in San Francisco and works with photo sharing site Zooomr.

I did a podcast on PodLeaders with Thomas a couple of months back and it was an engrossing interview but Robert vastly improves on my podcast by interweaving photos Thomas was taking as they were walking along by the Golden Gate bridge (and by being a far better interviewer!).

The interview with Sun CEO Jonathon Schwartz was a compelling insight into why Sun still matters!

And I love the wide screen format of the video.

I can’t wait to see the JotSpot video and the Shai Agassi interview – jeez, now I’m never going to get any work done!

[Update] I see Robert has blogged about it too

Blogging, Business blogging, Interviews, Podcast

Shel Israel podcast

The Shel Israel interview went ahead last night, as planned. Shel was great, full of warm humour, interesting insights and relevant anecdotes. below are the questions I asked him and the times in the podcast they were asked:

Shel, what is it about Ireland that appeals to you? – 1:15

You guys wrote Naked Conversations right out there in the open – as you completed each chapter of the book, you published it online – what was it like writing a book as transparently as you guys did with Naked Conversations? – 2:30

Most people have read the book now online, will they buy it? – 5:50

If you were writing another book, would you do it online? – 6:30

Given that very few Irish companies have started blogging yet, why should a company have a blog? – 7:28

What are the advantages of blogging to a business? – 8:40

What advice would you give to business bloggers to help them become become successful – 11:50

Companies can be afraid of being open in their blogs (what if our competitors are reading the blog) and are afraid of what will be said in the comments – how do you deal with these fears? – 15:11

If I am a developer, how can I see what people are saying about my application/product? – 17:55

What do you see as the benefits of Podcasts/videocasts to businesses? – 23:30

How is a podcast/videocast of use to smaller companies (smaller than Microsoft!)? – 25:25

So blogs/podcasts/videocasts are about humanising companies? – 27:50

You have recently blogged that you are going to start writing about startups – what aspect of startups most interests you? – 32:30

What challenges do startups face today that they didn’t 25 years ago? – 34:30

Brian Greene’s question:
There are 40,000 blogs updates every hour of the day. How am I to read all that? seriously hasn’t blogging just added to the textual data smog that make it easier for government to bury the truth, making facts harder to come by? 37:30

You can listen to the podcast of this discussion here.

Search Engines, Technology

Developments in search

Two search announcements overnight:

The Yahoo! blog search engine is disappointing – from a user interface point of view – the blog search results are hidden away in a sidebar of the main results on the right hand side of the page.
This is the part of many web pages which contains ads and consequently is ignored subconsciously by most users. Also, on a couple of searches I performed on the site, the results are poor compared to its competitors and I note that Scoble had a similar experience.

Chris Pirillo’s Gada.be, on the other hand, is an interesting new take on search. It gives the search string in the domain – so a search for nano becomes http://nano.gada.be/ and a search for iPod Nano becomes http://ipod-nano.gada.be/. Also, amazingly if you add /opml onto the end of the domain name (i.e. http://ipod-nano.gada.be/opml) you are presented with an opml feed for the search which can be imported in to most RSS readers. Gada.be is also optimised for mobile devices which will be more and more important as PDA’s and mobile phones converge.

This is something Scoble has been asking for for some time now!

UPDATE:
Lisa Vaas of eWeek has an excellent review of Gada.be, if you want to know more about it, I suggest taking a look at that.

Search Engines, Technology

Google to release Google Office?

Susan Kuchinskas of internetnews.com, eWeek, Scoble and a bunch of others are all reporting that a Google-Sun alliance is set to announce a Google version of Microsoft’s Office suite of applications. Sun bring their much vaunted StarOffice codebase to this partnership while Google bring their experience of running massively trafficked web apps.

Google Office is a logical extension of the online Web 2.0 office apps I mentioned last week.

This development, when announced, has the capability to change radically the way people interact with their PCs (and could be an IT Manager’s dream – no more Office install or patch nightmares!).

UPDATE:
The Sun/Google announcement was a bit of an anti-climax after all the rumours. The agreement is:

to promote and distribute their software technologies to millions of users around the world. The agreement aims to make it easier for users to freely obtain Sun’s Java Runtime Environment (JRE), the Google Toolbar and the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite, helping millions of users worldwide to participate in the next wave of Internet growth

So no Google Office – at least not yet anyway! Personally, I think yesterday’s rumour explosion was a kite flying excercise and that we will see a Google Office in the not too distant future for all the reasons expounded yesterday.