Category Archives: Microsoft

Microsoft Needs to Fix Outlook

Posted on by
Reply

Microsoft dominates the market for productivity software, with its suite that includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. We have been using these tools for many years, and have found them to be well-crafted and free from errors … except Outlook. The following three examples have caused us considerable pain.

First is the matter of duplicate emails. We frequently receive two identical emails, sent a few minutes apart. This is better than receiving none at all, but it wastes our time, and makes a mockery of its putative “productivity” positioning.

Second is its “Quick Print” feature, which simply doesn’t work. Again, it is not the end of the world, but is inexcusable from a company with massive resources and hundreds of software engineers.

Third is its unilaterally creating of new-and-unwanted mailboxes. This caused us considerable pain, because an incoming email from an important new client was incorrectly stuck in this new mailbox that was out of sight because it was below the normal viewing range.

Microsoft Goof of the Month: NSA Discovers Major Security Flaw in Windows 10

Posted on by
Reply

In our earlier days we wrote the software. We, or one or more colleagues, tested it in a variety of ways to make sure that it did what we thought it should do. As time passed the software became more complicated, and the penalties of mistakes increased, so the testing had to become more complicated. In addition, an increasing number of malevolent hackers emerged, necessitating increasingly draconian measures to key them at bay. Even then, the size and complexity of code these days make it very difficult to cover all the possibilities. Fortunately there is a government body, the US National Security Agency, that was doing its mission appropriately.

If All Else Fails Read the Instructions

Posted on by
Reply

The Apple Watch is very popular, and we were excited to receive one for Christmas 2018. But trying to use it is UN-exciting. For starters, Apple provided nothing but 2-point text of nonsensical legalese. If we had instead received a Casio we would been at least able to use the watch to tell the time. And we would not need the iPhone, like we do when we have the Apple Watch.

Apple’s philosophy was shaped by Millennials, who apparently had plenty of free time to play hide-and-seek with their latest gadgets. People who have to earn their daily bread don’t have so much free time, and want both documentation and elegant-in-their-design features. Surfing the web was a lot more productive, and we learned how to do some of the things we wanted.

Unfortunately, we found out some things we DIDN’T want to do. One of those was to be annoyed frequently and promised that the watch’s iOS would be updated overnight, and it never seemed to happen. Another is to be annoyed by incoming phone calls because it is unclear how to silence them. Another is for the watch “cleverly” guessing that we are walking or running after we have been doing it already for 15 or 20 minutes.

Worst of all, the iWatch behaves randomly. Sometimes after one finds out how to do some favorite tasks, it changes its mind and the tasks have disappeared.

Self-Driving Cars Need to Drive in All Environments

Posted on by
Reply

We have a weekly meeting in Mountain View, CA and every week we see at least one Waymo car (with one or two people inside) driving along the streets. (Since the company’s headquarters are in Mountain View, this is not surprising.)  But Mountain View’s streets are easy to navigate compared with the myriad driving environments that self-driving cars face. In March 2018 a driver of a Tesla X was killed when its navigation system failed to recognize a fork in a freeway and crashed the car into a traffic barrier. And this situation still is a lot easier than many others: bad pavements, hard-to-see fences or barriers, etc. While we and millions of other people continue to be excited by the notion of self-driving cars,  we believe that it will take a long time for manufacturers to build the needed database of conditions these vehicles face.

Is Samsung in Cahoots with Toner Manufacturers?

Posted on by
Reply

A tried and true scam is to give away a gadget and charge for its consumables. One that comes to mind immediately is razor blades. And to add insult to injury, the messages from the printers are either incomplete or inconsistent or both.

We recently purchased two Samsung color computer printers from Fry’s in Palo Alto, CA. The first one (call it #1) was motivated by (1) the high price of toner for our aging printer, and (2) a super-low price advertised by Fry’s. The second one (call it #2) was motivated by the limited space available for it.  Strangely, when one or more colors of toner in printer #1 got low, it warned on the PC #1 “Toner Low”, but it didn’t tell WHICH color or colors were low. But on printer #2 it DID tell which color was low on PC #2. Interestingly, we found that yellow runs out first. And we weren’t the only ones who noticed this.

 

Needless Tech Giants’ Hiring Worsens Silicon Valley Housing Shortages and Traffic Jams

Posted on by
Reply

We have twice before posted strong pleas for the giant tech companies—especially Alphabet/Google/YouTube, Apple, and Facebook—to stop expanding their Silicon Valley facilities rather than creating/expanding sizable operations in other cities. They’re mostly software companies, which could be located anyplace with high-speed data transmission capabilities!!! Are these companies afflicted by cases of hubris?

We wonder why all those cities who were campaigning for the Amazon HQ2 aren’t similarly campaigning for expansions of other tech giants.

We also wonder why Silicon Valley communities have not been able to either (1) extract enough money from these companies to compensate the many victims (long commutes, wasted time in traffic jams, inability to find housing, homelessness, etc., or (2) tax the companies so much that it makes it uneconomic to expand there.

Other organizations that are keeping up the good fight include the San Francisco Peninsula Resident Association.

Unwanted Guest with Terrible Table(top) Manners: Windows 10 Automatic Updates

Posted on by
1

In our experience, most software asks permission before it updates itself. There is usually a “Not Now” option. But since Microsoft has a monopoly for Windows-based personal computers, they do what they please, ignoring the needs and preferences of their customers. As we noted in our March 28, 2018 post, Apple’s updates can be traumatic, but at least they ask beforehand.

Apparently this nasty behavior has been around for some time, at least since the introduction of Windows 10 in July 2015. We had seen for some time warnings against “upgrading” to Windows 10, but for some reason had not experienced any of these potentially-damaging events until the last few weeks. The advice “save early and save often” applies as much or more to files one creates on a personal computer as to retirement planning!

Scammers Delight: “Your version of Bing search is out of date” pop-up

Posted on by
Reply

The “Your version of Bing search is out of date” pop-up tries to force installation of Chromium (a public domain version of Google’s Chrome browser) and the Bing browser on its victims. Victims will know immediately of the attack, because it plants itself in the middle of the screen and they will either have to reboot their PCs or (unwisely) click on “OK” Apparently this nasty behavior has been around for some time, at least since December 2012. The scammers have taken advantage of the open-source nature of Chromium to use it as a means to install unwanted “adware” and other unwanted programs. Fortunately, there are ways to remove such programs.

Increasing Overlap of Tech Giants

Posted on by
3

Question: When you’ve joined the $100+ billion market cap club, what do you do next? Answer: You start invading the other members’ territories (e.g., Amazon is now chasing the digital advertising business that Facebook and Google make billions of dollars from) AND you hire a bunch of pricey lawyers to defend you against antitrust suits.

This club is pretty exclusive today, with American members including mainly Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Netflix. They are so big that to grow significantly they have to look for other big markets (like cloud computing or self-driving cars or Hollywood-type movies) to enter, and most of those big markets are already occupied by other club members or non-member already-large specialists. What are the bloopers here? A classical one would be monopoly/oligopoly pricing and/or restraint of trade. But perhaps more important might be the opportunities lost by a failure to allocate capital to creating useful NEW-AND-DIFFERENT products and services.

Demand for H-1B Visas Continues to Rise in 2018

Posted on by
2

Continued massive growth by the giant high-tech companies in Silicon Valley brings with it commensurate demand for trained software engineers (as well as housing shortages and high prices, traffic jams, and other problems). The U.S. doesn’t produce enough STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) trained people, so the tech companies are forced to cast a wider net by hiring foreigners, using the mechanism of H-1B visas. Many of these H-1B hires are from India, and of those many are provided by well-compensated outsourcing firms such as Infosys, Tech Mahindra, and WiPro.

The situation in 2018 is similar to the one in 2017, with the important difference that now President Trump is now involved. He does things in strange and wonderful ways, and the America First plank in his election platform may bode ill to the H-1B visa program. Plus, he is at odds with the leaders of the giant high-tech companies. So anything can happen.

While the H-1B visa program may enable well-educated (especially in technology) individuals to enter the U.S. and earn considerably more than they could in their native countries, some of them are dissatisfied with the layers of bureaucracy that prevent them from advancing. However, there are two outstanding exceptions to this (both natives of India), namely Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella (who joined Microsoft in 1992 and became its CEO in 2014) and Google Inc. CEO Sundar Pichai (who joined Google in 2004 and became its CEO in 2015 when its now-parent Alphabet Inc. was created).