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Microsoft was there letting people fill out forms for user research. I did some game testing for MSft back in college and it was usually pretty cool. You always got a free product at the end. I would always get Office and sell it on eBay.
The Microsoft home page was almost entirely taken over by the advertisement of a Bill-retrospective.
I get this now and again when working with big spreadsheets like our product catalogues. I thought I was just seeing this message because we've been given an old version of Excel (2000) to work with, but users of Excel 2002 and Excel 2003 also get these error messages.
Microsoft's solution to the problem is to stop working with big files. I'm sure that'll go down well at work: "Sorry I sure would like to do that vlookup on the catalogue for you, but Microsoft says I shouldn't work with big files..."
Microsoft Word 2007 features an entirely new interface. Gone are the old toolbars, in is the new contextually relevant Ribbon.
This is a real picture, from Sofia, Bulgaria. I liked the idea of having Microsoft behind police line..
Thanks to sandelion for pointing out an interesting fact to me about Microsoft's new search engine bing. I blogged about bing earlier this week and have been using it as my default search engine instead of Google all week. Apparently Microsoft has decided that part of their job with the new search engine is to become the world's new censor.
At first I couldn't believe this. Why would Microsoft think limiting the information provided in a search engine to be a good thing? But then I tried it myself. You can try it too. Just change your location preference in bing from the U.S. to India and try searching for the term "sex." Yes, Microsoft has decided in their infinite wisdom that Indians should not be allowed to search for information about sex. In Microsoft's words, "The search sex may return sexually explicit content. To get results, change your search terms." That's right, there's no, "okay, I'm a big boy, go ahead and show me my results" button next to this Microsoft error message, there is simply a message telling you to change your search term. It's like an instant trip back to the Victorian age.
Now in fairness, it seems that people in India could always just change their country preference from India to the U.S. to get these search results, but it's still super lame that Microsoft would deem it necessary for people to have to change their country preferences to look up something as universal as "sex." And many people of course won't think to do this.
Google, by the way, has no problem with people searching for the term "sex" in India. I guess that's all part of that whole "organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful" thing that they seem to be after. Since bing supposedly stands for "bing is not google," maybe Microsoft should adopt their own mission statement for bing. It could be "censoring the world's information and making it inaccessible and useless."
This sort of censorship is a really stupid decision on Microsoft's part. It's the biggest reason yet I've heard for why I won't use bing anymore. Censorship sucks Microsoft, don't you know that yet?
More here.