Posts Tagged ‘microsoft’

Recently, Google merged their regular accounts with their Google Apps accounts. Unfortunately, they didn’t do it very well.

The problem is that people often had both accounts using the same email address. For example, chrisworfolkfoundation.org is managed by Google Apps and so we have an info@ email address. But because you only get mail, calendar and docs with Google Apps, in order to use services like YouTube and Google Checkout, Google made us set up a separate account with the same email address.

Now they have merged them all together, obviously they have found that they have a lot of conflicts.

Indeed, we noticed then when I recently tried to sign into the Foundation’s Checkout sellers account and found that it wouldn’t accept the right password. It would accept the other password, but that account was empty. When I contacted Google Support – a rarity they let you do I will tell you!, they said they had created a temporary account for me and I would have to sign in to that one and use the migration tool.

I signed in, there was no migration tool.

I then started to worry about my other accounts with Google and signed into one of their other services, at which point I finally made it onto the migration.

This would seem OK, I could migrate a lot of my data over to the new account. However it wasn’t as simple as this. First of all, a lot of the data is sensitive and doesn’t want to be accessed by everyone who has access to the email account. But you don’t seem to be able to migrate to any account other than the conflicting one. The only other option is to create a whole new account @gmail.com.

Secondly, none of it works. We use about 12 different Google services – 9 of which aren’t supported by the migration wizard, two of which are supported but weren’t available for us because there were complications. In fact, the wizard only actually allowed us to migrate one of our services – Picasa Web Albums over to the new system.

This left me with having to create a brand new @gmail.com account for the Foundation which many of our services are now using including YouTube, reCAPTCHA, Google Checkout, AdWords and many others. All of which now looses significant user confidence because what organisation uses an @gmail.com account?

After all this, many of the manual migration that Google suggests you do as a last resort doesn’t exist either. reCAPTCHA for example offers no way to transfer the domains/keys you hold to a different account and of course, because it’s now a just a small wing of the Google Corporation, you can’t contact support about it because Google don’t do customer support.

I actually mourn for the days of Microsoft, they weren’t perfect but at least they do backward compatibility and customer support.

I finally got round to watching the first episode of Secrets of the Superbrands which looks at technology.

I’ll be honest, the presenter, Alex Riley, really failed to endear himself to me with his surely attitude. I’m sure he’s an intelligent guy who on purposely plays the fool with comments like “iPhones, and iPads and 3gs and stuff like that.”

In fact, these go on and on with comments like “that’s a massive electromagnet, so if I brought in anything that was metal it would fly over there and rip Adam’s face off” or “is there any time when you think eww, it’s a brain, it’s horrible” to which the woman succinctly answers “no.”

Anyway, as we are all aware, marketing these days is brilliant. It’s amazing. Remember the last time you went round Tesco – did you buy something that wasn’t on your list? Buy an extra one because it was two for one? That isn’t an accident. You didn’t go out to buy that stuff, but you did, and it might sound like a simple thing, but millions of pounds of Tesco’s money goes into making sure it happens, every time you walk in that door.

Apple especially have some amazing marketing too. People hang off Steve’s every word.

But I really felt the show suggested that Apple were somehow tricking us into buying their products. Missing the point – that Apple produce really, really good products. So they should be – they are really expensive. But isn’t that just how the world works normally? You pay more, you get a better product? I don’t buy Apple products because it’s a cult, I buy them because I have enough disposable income to buy better products.

As for his treatment of Microsoft, there seemed to be disdain in his voice when he said they spend $5.5 billion on research and development. Of course R&D helps their profits in the long term, but it’s also giving back to the community (OpenOffice is great for example, because they just copied Microsoft Office which is great is because of all the money Microsoft spent making it great).

Also some of it was just factually incorrect. Microsoft’s income isn’t dwindling, they’re setting new quarterly records.

There is nothing wrong with his Nokia 6330 Classic but it’s just silly to take an attitude of “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it” when new phones are adding some amazing new features bringing you better communication to those you care about and access to the sum of all human knowledge.

As for, us getting better software because they get our details to target ad at, surely that is actually a good thing? How many boring ads do you sit through on TV ad breaks? Most of them don’t target you, so there is no point you looking at them. What if you could just watch the one advert and then get back to your programme? That is what targeted ads offer.

And seriously the presenter was very, very annoying. No surprise he labels himself as an agnostic. And who asks the man behind Kinect if he was abused as a child? He’s like annoying, offensive, shit version of Louis Theroux.

Anyway, rant over lol.

Does anyone else miss Microsoft?

Say what you want about their business practises, you never found this in Internet Explorer’s EULA:

You retain copyright and any other rights that you already hold in Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content, you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. This licence is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

Due to massive pressure Google have now removed this. But how anyone can make the claim that Google aren’t just as much a faceless evil corporation as anyone else these days is beyond me.

Thursday saw Microsoft’s Premiere Field Engineering section come in to the School of Computing to try and grab some recruits. It started out with a lecture in the morning at which I picked up two t-shirts and a USB stick (as well as several pens though none of them actually worked lol). This was followed by some technical demos, which despite suffering technical problems at every turn was quite interesting.

Finally we hit The Faversham where the conservatory had been reserved along with a bar tap of £400. Disappointingly it took us about two hours to drink our way through it, though not by lack of effort on my part.