Kicking Vista at this point may fall into the dead horse category because so many users have already vented their frustrations that there isn’t much left to say.  But, fellow Social Media Collective member Zoli Erdos has been having a lot of fun trashing Microsoft lately and my first encounter with Vista is still fresh […]

Oops, you did it again.  I’m not talking about sending snazzy new laptops loaded with Vista to certain influential bloggers.  Except for the fact that you didn’t send me one, that was a great idea.  Bloggers don’t have some ancient ethical code about accepting gifts like real journalists do.  Most of us can be bought […]

First an imitation iPod, then an imitation Google, now an imitation YouTube. 
With today’s  announcement of Soapbox on MSN Video, a site that “makes it easy for people to express themselves by uploading, discovering and sharing personal videos,” the Microsoft survival strategy has become clear:  Don’t invent anything.  Let others market test new ideas and if they pan out, […]

Google founders Sergey Binn and Larry Page may behave like tree-hanging simians when the subject is decking out the company superjet but their approach to charity strikes me as incredibly sensible and mature.  As a front page article in today’s New York Times points out, the Google founders have taken an approach to charity that differs wildly from […]

You know a company is having dark thoughts about its own mortality when it starts sticking the word “Live” in front of all its new products.  Such has to be the case with Microsoft which released its Live Search from beta today and launched Live.com in 47 markets worldwide.  The company also launched Live Local Search in the U.K. and […]

How do you maintain a fresh, engaging intranet that 350 employees will actually use–without hiring a full-time editor?  That’s one of the challenges often faced by mid-sized companies and big departments within larger enterprises.  Without frequent updates and compelling content, intranets quickly go stale and employees just don’t use them. 
Tracy Hutton, Director of Learning at […]

To cop a conceit from Ira Gershwin, they all laughed at Vassil Mladjov when he announced last year that his (and George Athannassov’s) new company Blogtronix would be built around a .NET blogging and business collaboration platform. 
Well, not everyone laughed, but many of the open source zealots and the-anything-Microsoft-does-must-be-garbage crowd sure did.  Why would someone do something so safe and boring, […]

You don’t hear a lot about the role of mobile telephony in discussions of the expanding Enterprise 2.0 universe, but you should.  Simple, cheap, exasperating web-enabled mobile phones remain the principal collaboration tool connecting co-workers with each other and salesforces with their customers.  Blogs, wikis and other forms of social media are valuable for longer-term projects but when you absolutely, positively have to know something right now, there is no substitute for getting […]

Back in February 2004, just after the Democratic presidential frontrunner Howard Dean crashed and burned in an an Iowa corn field, I wrote a much-admired (Doc Searls linked to it) piece for a political blog called The Internet Does Not Scale/The Internet is Not Random (scroll down to find it or skip it altogether if liberal commentary makes you angry). The piece attempted […]