Author: Rick Hallihan

I don’t know how many “Sorry I haven’t posted in a while” apology posts I have read in the years I have been following blogs, but they always seem a little out of place.  With very few exceptions, blogs generally don’t imply any sort of commitment on the volume of content, and honestly for most folks I would really rather they didn’t post if they don’t have anything interesting to say.

This highlights another interesting benefit of the RSS syndication model.  A non-updated feed does not take away from my attention.  It doesn’t waste my time the way that visiting a stale website would.

So to all the dark bloggers out there, release yourselves from the guilt of not posting.  It doesn’t matter to me or my feed reader that you haven’t posted in a month.  Your subscribers will still be here ready to read your next post, and very few will drop your feed from their blogrolls.  I would argue that you are more likely to lose subscribers from repeated apology posts, or uninteresting filler posts.

So, when family commitments get in the way, or when work hits crunch time, or when you just don’t have anything interesting to say, just lay low. The blogosphere will be waiting when you have the time, energy and inspiration.

I’m not sure if this is the direction they are going, but I am starting to wonder exactly how open ended the Zune brand is going to be.  We have already seen that Microsoft is keeping Zune pretty well isolated from the Windows brand, and even from the Microsoft brand.

I wonder if Microsoft might be manufacturing a schism between their business productivity OS (Windows), and their ideal of being the personal media hub in people’s homes and in people’s hands. Keeping up with the business aspects of Windows has somewhat hobbled Microsoft’s media hub efforts.  By trying to be all things to all people, there are certain market segments that Microsoft is losing its grasp on. 

If Zune takes off, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Zune Desktop/Media Center (hopefully with a better name than ‘Media Center’), and maybe even a Zune Home Media Server. By cannibalizing the home user market share that Windows currently holds, Microsoft would be in a better position to defend against Apple, Linux, and others… It would  be much better for Microsoft to lose this marketshare to itself rather than to a competitor.

What would this allow?  I could have a Zune Umpc/Origami device, Zune Media Center, and Zune Handheld/Phone, all syncing my personal information and media seamlessly and giving me a rich experience free from all the overhead of a general purpose business PC.  The Zune platform would focus on: web, email, video, audio, blogging, podcasting, video, and social networking. This would also allow each OS to be tailored to specific usage scenarios that are wildly different, giving business users more of what they need in Windows, and giving consumers more of what they want under the Zune brand.

Didn’t they do this before?  Microsoft used to have two codebases.  With Windows XP, they ditched the older DOS/Win95/98/ME codebase, and brought the consumer OS’s in line with the NT codebase.  This brought a a lot of efficiencies since the Windows team no longer had to worry about maintaining two very different codebases, but it also saddled the Consumer OS with all of the burdens of the Business OS, including strict backwards compatibility, corporate manageability, and a seemingly infinite hardware ecosystem.   Just like the X-box borrowed from the Windows codebase, the Zune brand extensions could do the same (Hmmm.  Aren’t the X-Box folks behind this whole Zune thing?) 

Making use of existing mature code where appropriate, and leaving behind the things that don’t make sense could bring an awesome experience to consumers.  Basically Microsoft would be taking advantage of all of their intellectual property, and all of the lessons they learned building NT for businesses and building X-Box for gamers, and they would be applying that to solving the consumer scenario.

More brand confusion is on-tap from the MSN/Live.com folks.  They are slowly opening up the beta of their Soapbox.msn.com video site.  Now many folks are going to be confused as to why this isn’t Soapbox.live.com.  It’s for user-generated content right?  That’s kinda like spaces.live.com.  It’s for sharing with your friends & family.  And strangely, the beta invitation signup appears to be handled through ideas.live.com.
 
Back when the whole live.com branding thing was new, there was a lot of discussion about what it all really meant.  Sanaz Ahari posted some clarifications, and then later a bit of a mea culpa on behalf of Microsoft. 
 
The original explanation points to the reasoning for why Soapbox is an MSN site.  MSN is about supposedly about content, and Live.com is about services.  Unfortunately, there are many problems with trying to make this distinction.  Blogging is all about content.  95% of the value of a service like spaces.live.com is the content!  Gallery.live.com? Content as well.   Yes there is a services aspect to spaces, gallery and soapbox, but after seeing the flury of live.com announcements, I was totally expecting Warhol to come out under the live.com banner.  Maybe you at least put an CNAME record in the live.com DNS to redirect Soapbox.live.com to Soapbox.msn.com.
 
On a lighter note, was everyone else as disturbed as I was by the disco/robot/etc butterfly?

The Windows Mobile team has posted to their blog about an update to Virtual Earth Mobile. The new version is 1.67, and includes an option for a traffic overlay and a bunch of other fixes.

Virtual Earth Mobile is one of my favorite free Windows Mobile applications.  It runs great on my Motorola Q, and after I figured out how to hook up my Bluetooth GPS, it became very useful for in-city navigation.

I experienced some of the same install hiccups that others were commenting on on the update announcement post, but after doing a manual uninstall of the old version and restarting my Q, it installed fine.

If you’ve got a mobile device with an internet connection, this is a must-have package, and if you’ve got a Bluetooth GPS, it rocks!

I haven’t checked, but I don’t think they have updated the version posted to ViaVirtualEarth, so make sure you grab the cab file from the Windows Mobile Team Blog post.

MSFN is reporting that all Vista Editions will be included on the same DVD, but that the discs will be color coded to indicate which version the consumer purchased.  The good news is that consumers will be able to upgrade to a higher version of Vista if they decide they need more features.  I still think that the number of different SKUs is excessive, and it’s going to lead to confusion.  Especially with things that we’ve read like splitting off the Fax functionality to the Business SKUs. 

Microsoft likes to talk about how we’re going to be connected everywhere we go.  How our digital life, both work and personal, will be able to follow us.  Just like we take the occasional personal call or email at work, many folks field business communications, and do real work during their “personal” time.  Segmenting the functionality of Vista runs counter to this “Connected Person” ideal.  I know they are trying to increase revenue by offering differentiated products, but they are doing so at the expense of some of the consistency of the platform.

I’m hoping that if any of the feature splits end up being pain points for consumers, that Microsoft will do the right thing and just offer a free update to correct the issue, instead of constantly repeating the “you can pay to upgrade” mantra.