They lack the feature of making you want to smash them to a million little pieces with a toffee hammer whenever you try to actually use them.

(not posted from my Nokia 5800)

There’s plenty of people unhappy with how Google swaggers about with AdSense. If Microsoft could actually compete in ads to make customers – the advertisers and the publishers – happy, they could take a sizable chunk of the market. Yahoo! with Overture manage to actually do worse than Google for ads.

MS: Sell crap but use illegal tactics to force people to buy it anyway. Bully all competitors out of the market.

Apple: Sell stuff people think they want. Bully all competitors out of the market.

Just because they’re both arseholes doesn’t mean they’re doing it the same way

The business model that’s starting to teter is leveraging their monopoly on the operating system and in the ‘office’ business to make further sales of their other rubbish.

When you get right down to it, Microsoft’s business model isn’t all that different to Apple’s. And Apple is every bit as manipulative, controlling and (when they need to be) down right nasty as Microsoft. In fact, in their own market Apple is even more controlling than Microsoft, because they make the hardware and the software.

But Apple proves that people will, indeed, “pay more for something if they feel they are getting a good value”. In short, Apple makes good stuff and Microsoft makes crap, e.g:

* Zune. – DOA.
* XBox 360 – coming up on four years old and *still* plagued with hardware problems.
* Exchange – no in-place upgrades. Each new version often requires a massive rip and replace of server hardware and OS to little discernible gain.
* Vista – bloated crap. The first Microsoft OS since WIndows Me that was actually worse than its predecessor.
* Windows 7 – ditto. Will be better than Vista but still not as good as XP.
* Office 2007 – massive bloat and entire new interface that requires retraining to use. OpenOffice UI is now more recognisable for long time Office users.
* Sharepoint – sales may be booming, but companies are now running into its many limitations.
* Search – poor third to Google and Yahoo.
* Hotmail – an abortion since Microsoft bought it. Spam blocker is useless and you can’t even open an email in a new tab or window.

And so on. *This* is Microsoft’s problem.

You can use Clean URL

http://wiki.johnjosephbachir.org/MediaWiki_Clean_URLs