Word: microsoft
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...another review of an eagerly anticipated smartphone. And yes, the Motorola Q is fairly similar to high-powered consumer phones in other parts of the world. (It looks like a Palm Treo that's been flattened with a rolling pin.) But the Q brings the first-ever pairing of Microsoft's Smartphone operating system - which comes with Outlook and Pocket MSN, including Hotmail and messaging, built in - with a QWERTY keyboard that makes text messaging a lot easier...
...every big company is convinced, however, that the long tail is relevant for business. Microsoft, which relies on monster software hits like Office, "is clearly a short-tail development house," says the company's corporate standards director, Jason Matusow. He rejects the idea that the long tail--in this case, open-source software developers--poses a threat. "People say the long tail is the perfect way to look at open-source software and understand how it's going to save the world," Matusow says. "But with 400 million users, we're enabling the long tail...
...Microsoft says Urge represents its closest collaboration yet with a content provider, and the service launches with a beta version of Windows Media Player 11. I had hoped that meant fewer gremlins in the system, but I have already encountered a few. When downloading albums, some songs just will not come, no matter how much you call. The message that appears is one of my favorites: "This (error) can occur when another program or operating system component encounters a problem but does not communicate the nature of the problem to the Player." Since all of the software is Microsoft...
...have a music player such as iriver's brand-new 2GB clix ($200) - or another player listed on Microsoft's PlaysForSure website under the "Subscription Enabled" header - you can set up Urge to auto-synch playlists and feeds, but these players will never threaten the iPod. No, Urge poses a threat to Apple because of the MTV brand and because MTV closely works with youth-oriented cell-phone carriers like Virgin Mobile USA. When the circle is complete, it won't be an MP3 player that gets synched with your TRL feed, but a phone with 2GB of flash memory...
Author and artist Douglas Coupland's new novel, JPod, follows the lives of six workers at a Vancouver video game company. Like his 1995 book Microserfs, about a group of Microsoft employees, JPod is full of visual humor (the listed ingredients in Dorito chips) and pages of numbers (the first 100,000 digits of Pi). He spoke to TIME's Rebecca Myers about Google, his bridge between art and words, and why Douglas Coupland is such a jerk...