Microsoft

Keep an eye on Microsoft. Seriously. They recently released a new search engine- bing.com, which is pretty much awesome. Unlike other search engines, including google, Bing is "I'm tech unsaavy because I was born in the days of rotary telephone's and will do everything in my power to resist change but I've heard about this internet and will demand my kids teach me how to use it even though I won't really pay any attention to a word they're saying because of that aforementioned predisposition against change" proof. I can type in a very generic query such as 'Audi R8' and not only will I get the standard links as seen in Google but on the left panel there will be a Table of Contents directing me to specific information about R8's. For the Audi, my ToC options are: sale, specs, reviews, dealers, problems, video, images, reference. For different items, the Table of Contents is different- it all depends on what you're looking for. This added feature can be real handy when you're searching for things you have little information on (or don't understand how to properly ask Google to find what you're looking for).

With that said, I'm very committed to Google (my homepage is igoogle, my email is gmail, this blog service is run by google, the search box in firefox is google, etc.) and this upgrade isn't likely enough to really to out-convenience all of those things but it's a solid product.


Of even more interest is the new Microsoft Operating System, Windows 7. Beta Testers have been raving about the new OS and the "it just works" factor that's helped Apple all these years. Evidently it's stable, plays nice with all of your peripherals, and does all of this in a user friendly design. Much of this can be attributed to the fact that the new OS no longer consumes such a large percentage of your pc's computing power. Simply put, the more energy your pc needs to run the OS the less you have available to use itunes, mozilla, word, etc. The new Windows 7, apparently, has a slimmed down footprint, that requires so few resources that it even installs on an old school Pentium 3 (think 1995 computing power, XP won't even install on that computer).

All of this looks very promising for microsoft. As a recent mac convert I don't see myself making the switch back any time soon; however, if I hadn't already taken the plunge, this new Windows OS may have been reason enough to give Microsoft one more chance. And evidently the financial community also believes this to be the case. I've been tracking Microsoft's stock since they first started beta testing the new OS and it's run up from $16 to $23 in just a few short months. It's always a good sign for a company's upcoming product line when those that know a lot more than us are willing to bet their cash on that corp's future.