I’ve been a Microsoft Action Pack subscriber for years, and I was dismayed to hear that they were going to be requiring any proficiency test for 2008. Not because I was afraid I couldn’t pass it (which I couldn’t without studying) but because it was a huge inconvenience and time sucker.

I had already resigned myself to the fact that I just wasn’t going to be renewing for 2008, and I was just going to buy the necessary software that I needed. In fact I was considering giving up office altogether and favor of Google Docs.

About 10 days ago I got a phone call from Microsoft saying that they were offering me the opportunity to renew my subscription before the end of November without having to take the test. That phone call was immediately followed up by e-mail with the same offer.

So this is a reminder to those of you computer consultants who don’t have the time to take a Microsoft test that you can get in on the Action Pack by renewing your script and before the end of November.

I followed the link in the email, which got me to the MS partner site, but there still no obvious way to renew.

Once I got in, the interface changed completely, and there was still no simple way to convert my renewal.

Finally, I found the signup form, where upon attempted re-enrollment, I was required to put in my subscription number. Here are a couple of screen shots to smooth the path…

***************

Then here-

After filling out my info, it said this -

To locate your Microsoft Subscription ID, please refer to the renewal reminder email you received. If you cannot locate that email, contact your MAPS customer service representative.

but the email I received did not contain any number, because it wasn’t a renewal notice, and I have no MAPS customer service representative I’m aware of. Sigh…

Ultimately, I logged into my office PC remotely, (I’m out of town) and found my old filed email.

To make a long story short, renew before the 30th or you’ll be taking a test and studying…

Am I the only person that didn’t know this? I just “accidentally” discovered that an entire website wasn’t ranked for ANYTHING in MSN. They had #1 ranking for the primary phrase in Google and Yahoo, yet could not be found anywhere in the top 200 results on MSN. After scrolling through 5 pages of SERPS, I guessed that it just wasn’t in the index, but I was wrong…

It was in the index alright, but only one page for the domain name, which was 301 redirected at the root. When I did a site search in Live, I was greeted with just one page, and when I hit the “cached page” this is what I saw:

So domainname.com had a 301 redirect on it to domainname.com/directory/, but instad of following the 301, the MS Live bot just completely ignored the server directive, and cached the server page. How dumb is that? Is this just common knowledge among SEO’s that I somehow missed?

I’m not here to debate the wisdom of redirecting the main page in the first place, but my point is that if the site owner decides to, for whatever reason, the bots should follow, and the majority (Google, Yahoo, Ask etc.) do just fine.

How to solve this dilemma? Well I’ll have to get to that in another post, (because I’ll have to figure it out) but for now I have a question…

Why does Microsoft bot not follow 301′s? Is it an inherent technical inability to do so, or is it actually a conscious decision? It REALLY seems stupid to me…

*Update next morning -

I’m out of town all week, working from a laptop / cell phone connection, and things are painfully slow, but here’s that I’ve found out so far…

1. This is not a new problem, and others have seen it before, going back all the way to 2004.
2. In 2005 someone else noticed it, but nobody even responded.
3. Nearly 2 years later,  it was still unresolved, and now, 3 years later it’s still not.

I wish I would’ve known this before I changed my permalinks last week, since now ALL 250+ of my blog pages will likely drop completely out of MSN / Live / Microsoft, or whatever we’re supposed to call them….

As a user of Microsoft Office for nearly 15 years now, (wow) I’ve become quite familiar with the pain of upgrading from one version to another, but this one really has a lot to hate.

Something came over me this summer, and I finally installed my MS Action Pack version of Office 2007, which of course updated my Outlook, Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

Within minutes, I wrote a post about them moving the status flags (incredibly stupid) but within hours the next item popped up and so I started to keep a list.

Over the past couple of months, the list has been growing and growing, and I finally decided to post my dirty dozen this morning, after determining that I will never actually take the time to post screenshots. Feel free to add to the list!

1. Flags moved
I wrote a blog post about this already, but it REALLY bothers me. After going for years with my “flag status” appearing in the top left pane of my window, Microsoft has decided to move it to the right side by default, and the ability to relocate it is “broken”. This is stupid. Fix it Microsoft.

2. Program overhaul – One Note
I’ve used office One Note 2003 for quite awhile now, for keeping track of client projects and information. It’s quite useful for me as a project manager, because it’s simple, and I really didn’t have to think much about learning to use it.

If there was one thing I dislike about one note 2003, it was that if you had multiple projects open at any given time, there was no way to sort them, you simply had to close the ones you didn’t want to appear at all times.

Well now I’m longing for the days of One Note 2003, because not only is there STILL no way to sort them, but it forces you to display all of your projects in tabs across the screen at any given time. No longer can I only have the eight to 10 projects open that I wish to have, I’m forced to keep all of my projects open at all times, even if I haven’t touched or looked at any of them for months.

Microsoft One note used to make me more productive – and now it’s just like having a hundred sticky notes all over your monitor and you can’t find anything.

Over the time it’s taken me to write this article, I’ve now gotten used to this, and figured out that there is a fairly efficient way of getting to every file on the left side. Still, this was an incredible pain in the neck and served no real purpose that I can tell other than to confuse the user.

3. Changing my Time Zone
Day three I woke up to find a message on my screen “Change calendar time zone”
Here’s what it said -

A change has occurred from (GMT -08:00) Pacific time (US and Canada) to (GMT -08:00) Pacific time (US and Canada)
Updating personal folders from (GMT -08:00) Pacific time (US and Canada) to (GMT -08:00) Pacific time (US and Canada)

What? Oh well…
Since I have a 5 user license, I have seen that on all three PC’S, too.

4. Slower and more sluggish than you think
Although it was to be expected, office 2007 is slower, way slower, and uses much more of my RAM, nearly double Outlook version 2003.

I have a dual core Intel chip and four gigs of RAM, but am usually operating Camtasia, Dragon Naturally Speaking, and Outlook, as well as several browser windows.

Office 2007 sluggishness is even less tolerable than version 2003…. sigh.

I think a good rule of thumb would be not to buy any version of any Microsoft software that comes out after you buy your computer, without anticipating a big performance hit.

5. Copy/paste into e-mail is odd and frequently colors are incorrect.

I frequently have to copy FTP paths out of my WSftp software into e-mail. For some reason, typing “http:/” and then pasting the entire FTP path /domain.com/folder/folder/filename.etc now suddenly leaves a space between the first two slashes after the : which makes the link inoperable. Agggh – fixing this repeatedly is absurd.

Also, are there different clipboards? I use Ctrl-C more frequently than right click and paste, but I interchange often, sometimes right in the same few seconds. They’ve always been the same thing before, but now I frequently find myself attempting to paste one thing that I just copied, but Ctrl-V pastes something from a few minutes earlier.

I’ve actually gotten stuck to the point of having to use only “right click copy” and “right-click paste” just to be able to send an e-mail. I haven’t taken the time to troubleshoot and replicate, but it happens every day.

6. Cannot look up contact?
In the past, I could right click on the e-mail address of someone in a mail message, and choose Lookup – Outlook contact. When I attempt to do that now, I’m greeted with a message saying that is not possible. It says – “cannot perform the requested operation. The command selected is not valid for this recipient”.

Then I choose, “Show Help” and I get another message:

This error usually occurs when you attempt to view the calendar for a user who has one or more of the following issues:
Is not part of your domain.
Is not listed in the LDAP.
Is not a member of your Exchange Server.
Has not granted you the necessary permissions to view their calendar.
To avoid this error message, use the Open Calendar command only if the user is using Exchange Server. If the user uses Exchange Server and you still encounter an error message, ask the user for the appropriate permissions to view their calendar. If they are not part of your network, you will probably not gain access to their calendar.
For more information see the Microsoft knowledge base article and gives a link.

THEN – Clicking on the link gives this -
The Knowledge Base (KB) Article You Requested Is Currently Not Available
The article you are looking for is currently not available. Please try one of the following options for assistance: Suport Home, Customer Service and other MS links. UNREAL.

You’ll notice that the error message I get says
“…when you attempt to view the CALENDAR for a user…” which is not what I chose.

But all I did was choose to “view CONTACT” in my own sincgle user Outlook! sigh.

7. Mystery Mail Arrival
Mail does not consistently show up in my inbox automatically after a send and receive.

I hit send and receive, can see I’m “receiving numbers 1 through however many emails”, then it says “send/receive complete” but all the new messageare not in the inbox that I can see. No kidding.

I have to actually click a different mail folder, wait for the contents to render on the right, then click back on the “inbox”, on the left side, and “voila” there it is.

I’m sure this is “not a Microsoft problem” and there “must be something wrong with my computer” but it sure is coincidental that it started the very moment I upgraded to Office 2007, and continues to this day.

8. Word 2007 can’t remember?
Microsoft Word refuses to save occasionally, citing “not enough memory available” error. This is crap.

Apparently four gigs of memory is enough to do what I want using office 2003 without ever encountering this error, but Office 2007 has stretched the limits of my measly four gigs of ram?

This may be loosely related to #4 above, but the error is specific enough that I thought I would give it its own place on my list.

9. Ribbons of Shame
For over 15 years now, (wow) the world has been been used to standard command menus being across the top of the window in Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word, and pretty much all software windows in general.

“File”, “Edit”, “view”, “tools” “help” etc. suddenly aren’t there any more in version 2007, and Microsoft has introduced what they are calling “Ribbons” as some sort of revolutionary way of bringing more options to users fingertips.

I suppose it’s possible that in a year or two I will appreciate these improvements, but for now, while I’m trying to get work done, it’s a big pain in the neck.

The inability to figure out how to do something simple, such as sorting columns in Excel, or Spellchecking in Word is infuriating and stupid.

When Windows XP changed everything about the control panel from Windows 98, they offered a “switch to classic view” that allowed busy people to remain productive without having to learn their new “warm and fuzzy user friendly interface”. I appreciated that and use it to this day (I wonder if that’s in Vista?)

No such option exists that I can find in Office 2007, and that really sucks bigtime, and has cost me a lot of time.

10. A link is not a program
Occasionally lately, clicking on a link in an e-mail leads to an error box popping up…

“Microsoft office outook”
General failure. The URL was “http://www.turbols.com/”. The system cannot find the file specified.

OK

There’s a link for “was this information helpful”, but all that did was thank me and disappear.

Dear Microsoft,
The reason you can not “find the program” is because it’s a link and not a program. It’s clearly a link, and my friend did indeed type it correctly.

I suspect this is a ploy to get me to use IE 7 as my default browser, but I’m not giving up Firefox to try, because it happens less than three times a week.

*** – Update 1/2008 – Here’s the fix for that issue if you’re using Firefox, and here’s the directions to fix if you’re using Internet Explorer

11. Cannot edit email signatures with .html
I wanted to use the feed burner headline animator for my signature, but Office 2007 longer lead you to your e-mail signatures with HTML directly from the program.

Instead, we’re forced to use a third-party HTML editor or manually edit the file with notepad, which is located in c:/Documents and Setting/Username/Application Data/Microsoft/Signatures

12. Default Microsoft Blue is not acceptable anymore.

I like to use royal blue text on all my html e-mail replies, and I have for years. There now seems to be a “richer color scheme” available to choose from, which is fine, but viewing “standard colors” does not show the normal shade of Microsoft blue that I’ve used for years.

On the one hand, I suppose it’s time for a change, but on the other hand, why have they suddenly decided that standard royal blue, as defined by every previous version of Windows is suddenly not good enough for 2007?

At least let me CHOOSE to use it if I want to!

Bonus –
Things I have always hated about Office that they still haven’t fixed.

1. Still cant sort your “favorite” mail folders alphabetically (sort by name)
2. Still can’t view a folder inside of another favorite folder
3. Still cannot jump to an alphabetized list of folders by typing more than one character. For example, typing ‘sm’ will jump to your S folders, and then to the M folders, instead of to the sm folders.

I’ve only been using office 2007 for a couple of months, and I’m sure I’ll come up with more, but would love to see comments on this post with thoughts from others…

UPDATES:

Here’s another one -

Outlook Won’t Allow Permanent Access to Files

I recently had to allow a program (Dragon Naturally Speaking) to access my files, and this warning kept popping up.

According to Microsoft “in general, you cannot prevent this from happening”. Nice.

They also say this – “You should not get this message if your synchronization software is a trusted add-in that can properly identify itself to Outlook as a safe program”

What does that mean? It means they pay a fee to Microsoft – a large one, no doubt.

While I’m not opposed to the warning, LET ME CHOOSE MORE THAN !) MINUTES! I needed access for hours, necessitating multiple clicks, every 10 minutes. And if I didn’t click? The progress stopped.

Here’s the “warning” and here’s where they’ve known about it since Office 2003

Here’s a supposed fix, too –

Update:  Summer 2009
Some company made an Office 2007 “add-on” that gives you back everything you’d grown to know and.. “tolerate”,  if not “love”  about the old Office menus that were in use from the 1990′s right up until 2007.

It’s called “Classic Menus”, and It’s become quite popular. so much so in fact, that they’re already working on the version for Office 2010.

Product sales page here -

*** Update 10/2009
UNDO (Ctrl-Z) does not work if you mark something as “Not Junk email while inside the junk email folder.

Instead, the action BEFORE that gets “undone”. In my case, that action was to UNdelete about 150 at once, after picking my way through them to choose deletion in the first place. Sigh… I’m sure 2010 will be fine though….

This ad was on during the Yankees Angels game last night, and could easily apply to MS Office too… Great ad

The Oregon Computer Consultants Association will be holding their monthly meeting the Tuesday before Halloween.  This month the subject will be Windows Sharepoint services, which a lot of members have been asking about.

Title: Windows Sharepoint Services
Date: Tuesday October 30, 2007
Time: 7:00-8:30PM (No-host dinner at 6:00PM)
Speaker: Tom Rich, Mt Hood Computer Services
Place: Rheinlander German Restaurant
5035 NE Sandy Blvd
Portland OR 97213-1941

We will discuss Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS). Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 ships with WSS 2.0. It is possible to also install WSS 3.0 and not break the applications and components that are dependent on WSS 2.0 by leaving it in place.  Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 provides the solution platform for SharePoint Products and Technologies, delivering a wide range of functional capabilities that are exploited and extended by other SharePoint Products and Technologies.

We will talk about the difference in versions, how to install 3.0 and keep 2.0 intact, what can be done with WSS to improve office productivity, how to load templates and put them to work. If the demo deities are kind, we will have live demonstrations of Sharepoint web parts in action.

Tom Rich is President of Mt. Hood Computer Services, Inc. in Portland Oregon. In business since 1998, we are a Microsoft Registered Partner and each tech is a Microsoft Small Business Specialist.

Earlier in the month I applied to the beta program for the Microsoft Webmaster portal when I first heard it was coming out, and yesterday, I finally received my invitation for registration.

You know the way your Aunt or neighbor forwards you those jokes in e-mails where you can see everybody elses e-mail address? Well imagine my surprise when I got my e-mail, and there in the “to” field was everyone that Microsoft they sent this message to.

I can’t imagine that the list I see is really everyone that they sent it to, because it’s only a few dozen people, but still, to have a bunch of email addresses copied in the “to” field seems absurd for a company like Microsoft, and at first I thought it was an idiotic oversight.

After looking at the list of people in the to field, many for whom I recognized the domain names and consider competitors, I decided I needed to sign up immediately rather than wait to read what others have to say about it, so I did.

Ahh – Only then did I catch the clever marketing move at the expense of my privacy… Nobody at Microsoft could really be so inexperienced at email etiquette that they would “accidentally” include the email addresses of so many people, could they?

PS – Since signing up, I haven’t heard a word. I didn’t even get taken to a thank you page, but right back to the Live search home page. Huh…

This month’s Oregon Computer Consultant Association meeting is tomorrow night, and were having a presentation about reducing e-mail clutter that promises to be enlightening. The subjects are e-mail reduction in Outlook, and a second part about using the new Windows Home Server product.

Excluding spam, I am personally plagued by nearly 800 e-mails a day, only a small fraction of which I actually need a reply. Many require only Outlook auto-filing for future reference, and many just require a quick review, and manual placement into a folder.

The vast majority just need a simple read and delete, and I’ve really thinned out what I have to look at, but in the end, there are still over 200 e-mails a day that I have to open.

Last week I discovered another e-mail in my inbox that should have garnered an immediate response, and by the time I got back to them, even though they expected up to three business days, the issue was no longer relevant, and my reply was no longer needed. This wastes their time as well as my own.

This isn’t the first time it’s happened, and likely won’t be the last, and that’s why I’m excited to hear a presentation tomorrow night at the Oregon Computer Consultants Association by an independent consultant named Scott Hanselman.

I’ve never met him, and he’s not a member, but he does operate a popular website, called HanselMinutes and hosts a weekly Internet radio show there, as well as having a popular blog at ComputerZen.com

Date:
Tuesday, August 28
7:00-8:30pm (no-host dinner at 6:00)

Location:
Rheinlander German Restaurant
5035 NE Sandy Blvd
Portland OR 97213

He’s giving a two-part presentation:

First – “Let go of the psychic weight of the 10000 emails in your Inbox and enjoy the bliss you can get with “zero email bounce.” We’ll talk about what that is, and how you can implement it in your daily email workflow, in Outlook, or in Gmail and other clients.”

Second – We’ll talk about Windows Home Server. Scott has been beta testing WHS for the last 6 months and living with it day to day. We’ll see what it offers, if you should build or buy and what it provides over one of the off-the-shelf NAS solutions.

His bio is below, and I hope to see you there:

Scott Hanselman was the Chief Archiect for Corillian Corporation and a Principal Consultant at STEP Technology and has been in technology for the last 15 years. He’s written a number of books on .NET and Microsoft technlogies and has a popular blog at http://www.hanselman.com and a weekly podcast on iTunes and at http://www.hanselminutes.com. He’ll be starting a new job at Microsoft as a Program Manager in the Developer Division this fall.

For some reason I decided that today was a good day to install my Office 2007, which I have had since February. My primary reason for doing so were some of the good things I’ve seen and heard about Excel 2007.

Immediately upon opening Outlook, the first thing I noticed was that my Flag Status column had moved from the left side, where they were highly visible, all the way to the end of the toolbar on the right.

In any given day, I get over 200 emails into my Outlook In Box. I have been meticulous about using the “Flag status” to colorize and prioritize things I need to do, so I went in to try to rearrange the order.

Despite my choosing to display the flag status column first with the field chooser, the flag status icon remains unmovable and locked in place way over on the far right hand side.

Attempting to drag the icon from one area of the toolbar to another is unsuccessful, you can drag every other column around, and organize them however you like, but any attempt to place columns behind this one, don’t work either.

If you’re going to offer organization in the field chooser, then why wouldn’t it work? Well it looked like a bug to me, so I immediately went to Google, an attempted to find a solution.

I did find plenty of people complaining about this, and finally I found the Microsoft page, with specific instructions how to move the flag status column. This is what it says, but it does not work:

Move the Flag Status column

1. In the main Outlook window, on the View menu, point to Current View, and then click Customize Current View.
2. In the Show these fields in this order list, select Flag Status, and then click Move Up or Move Down until Flag Status is in the position that you want.

So now 30 seconds of using Office 2007, I absolutely hate it because of a stupid bug that nobody seemed to notice before they released it.

Maybe what happened Was that one developer noticed the problem and said another developer the e-mail, who immediately flagged it because it was so important he wanted to be sure he didn’t forget.

However, since the flag appears way over on the right side of his screen he didn’t notice it before release day, so the rest of us are played until Microsoft releases an Office 2007 service pack. Thanks Microsoft.

What an aggravating two days this has been for many people, thanks to a Microsoft Update. I got phone calls or e-mails from several different people about the same issues I had, due to yesterday morning’s update.

Here’s a “workaround” for your problem, if it was caused by Windows Updates this Wednesday, June 13th, 2007

Start in Safe Mode or Safe Mode with networking -

Do this by repeatedly tapping the F5 key at the top of my keyboard. This must be done fairly rapidly at the first white text appearing on the monitor at boot up.

This brings up a menu, where you should chooose “safe mode with networking” by moving the arrow keys on your keyboard and pressing enter for that selection.

Upon boot up, there is a Windows message notifying that diagnostic mode, then hit okay.

Go to Start button – All programs – Accessories – System tools – system restore – and complete the process choosing a date before Wednesday’s Windows update

Complete the restore process and reboot –

Then Turn Off Windows Updates

Right-click on my computer and go to properties

Choose the automatic updates tab, and turn automatic updates off and hit apply.

If you lost any sound or other devices TOO (like I did), here is how to fix that -

Right-click on my computer and go to properties

Go to the hardware tab, and hit the button for Device manager

Use the arrow keys to go down to “sound video and game controllers” and expand to see all devices

Right-click on any devices listed and choose “uninstall” for all that are available.

Go to the “action” menu item, and choose “scan for hardware changes”

That’s it – but beware, because now you have a system that is not being updated with Microsoft’s latest patches. What are we supposed to do now, Microsoft.

Yesterday morning, Wednesday, I woke up to my computer rebooted by Microsoft for the automatic windows updates.

Every time an update is so critical that Microsoft forces a reboot, we all lose every window we had open, and anything in mid-project has to be remembered, and hopefully, everything was saved.

After getting over that frustration, I signed in with my password, where Windows proceeded to get to the desktop, then began starting all my programs, my backup service,my chat, my antivirus, and miscellaneous programs that I have running at all times.

About three quarters of the way through the process the computer rebooted. This went on for four times in a row, before I attempted to boot in safe mode, which was successful.

By this time I’m 45 minutes behind checking my e-mail etc. so I worked my way through the morning e-mail and tasks in safe mode before having to leave for an appointment at 8am.

When I got back, I cited to try again, which was unsuccessful, so I get a Microsoft system restore back to the previous day, and all was well. Obviously, something had gone wrong in the Windows update process, so by going back to the way things were Monday, everything was fine.

Unfortunately, I forgot to turn off automatic updates, so I had to go through the process again this morning! Aggghh -

After getting things back to normal I found that my sound drivers were corrupted somehow, so I could not use my headset and microphone. Looking in the device manager, showed no problems, but I no longer had a microphone or any input ability showing in my Windows volume controls.

Using system restore to go back to previous states did no good either, and in the end, the solution was to manually remove all of my sound drivers (not the codecs) from the device manager, then search for new hardware, then all was founded back to normal.

Thank you again to Microsoft for wasting nearly 2 hours of my time, at inopportune moments over the past two days. Now I’m running an unpatched system, and don’t have time to look around your troubleshooting area for your solution.
So now I’m running an unpatched version of Windows XP…

As the average consumer, am I supposed to drive my computer somewhere or pay someone to come to the office to deal with this?

Since I’m a computer tech (in a previous life) am I supposed to break down and finally install Windows Vista, which has been sitting on my shop bench since January?

The second option makes the most sense because I’m sure that Microsoft has gotten it right this time, with Windows Vista, right?

Thanks to a commenter on this blog, we now know there’s a workaround for this issue. Still, why would Microsoft not send us full versions?

Now I can go buy a new hard drive, then do a clean install of Windows Vista from an upgrade disk

I rarely reboot my PC and leave it run 24/7. It seems like whenever I can tell need a reboot, I’m too busy to take the time.

I have 4 gigs of ram on a dual core Intel CPU, but I have literally dozens of tasks or windows open at any given time.

This morning,  my pc was running very slowly, (just killing me), and I needed a reboot. Remembering my own advice from this summer, I rebooted Windows without rebooting and so I’m writing this instead with all my free time.

Here are the steps to instantly speed up your PC, when explorer.exe is using too much of your memory, and you think you need a reboot.

1. Press Ctrl-Alt-Del keys simultaneously once to bring up Windows Task Manager
2. Select the Processes tab
3. Press MEM Usage (which sorts your programs by their resource consumption)
4. Scroll to the bottom (the biggest memory hogs), and find explorer.exe. (You can also sort my Image name, and find it alphabetically)
5. Highlight explorer.exe. gape in amazement at the amount of memory it’s using, and  and press the End Process button.
6. In the Task Manager Window (which is still there) go to File – New Task
7. Type explorer.exe  and hit OK
8. Get back to work!

I’ve been a Microsoft Action Pack subscriber for  year, and usually had my software upgraded as soon as possible after release. As a computer consultant, I always had to rely on the latest software, and I’ve kept up my subscription for years.
Finally, yesterday, my Windows Vista and Office 2007 arrived . However, I’m less than enthusiastic about not only taking the time to install it all, but about the potential problems I’ll encounter.

Another reason I’m hesitant is that unlike previous years, the new version of Windows Vista I received is an upgrade, and not a full version. What the heck is that all about?
Upgrading an operating system without a full reinstallation goes against everything I’ve always recommended, so i’m not gonna do it yet…

I’ll let everyone else have the problems first, then I’ll have a wealth of information to research online about everyone elses problems, as I (no doubt) encounter them one by one.

Anyone done a successful vista upgrade yet?  Please comment…

When you think about the Microsoft search platform, do you call it “MSN”, or “Microsoft” or “Live”?
When Microsoft first began development of their new search engine, MSN was not utilizing it yet for searches. When discussing any examples of Microsoft search, it was necessary to call it “Live” to distinguish between it and the old MSN.  You couldn’t accurately refer to Microsoft search without clarifying whether you meant MSN or Live.

This summer however, “Live” and “MSN” search both began returning identical results, using the “new” search engine, further confusing the issue.

This week I sent a customer an email and ended a sentence using the words, “…in Google, Yahoo and Live” Of course, the reply came back “What’s Live?”.
When I replied that MSN Search has morphed to “Live”, I realized that I should probably call it “Microsoft” again, so people know what I’m talking about.

Most people have not even noticed the switch, and I was surprised myself when I first saw that a search at MSN now shows the “Live search” logo at the top, and a “Back to MSN” graphic on the right.

The problem is that the URL in the address bar for a search from MSN is still showing MSN.com, and not a LIVE.com, like you get if you begin your search from the Live.com home page.

Why is that a problem?

Well I guess it’s not, as long as you don’t mind people being confused. I thought Microsoft was trying to “brand” this new platform, of web services called Live.com. So why not take people from MSN when they search, so that “Back to MSN” actually means that you’ve left MSN in the first place?

Far be it from me to give marketing advice to Microsoft, but if you want people to think of a new brand name, shouldn’t you actually start to use it? Actually, I’m talking about it, so maybe this is just a clever marketing ploy to generate discussion and build inbound links to Live.com?

There, I’ve removed the link that was in my fist paragraph, just in case
Anyway, I’ve long called it MSN, but since it’s not MSN any more, but still not exactly “Live” either, I guess I’ll have to call it “Microsoft”, until their next new version.
Hmm, what other things might we call “Microsoft search”?