Category: Blog

Some decisions are just stupid

Nick Eaton / The Microsoft Blog:

Judge: Microsoft can’t sell Word anymore  —  A Texas judge ruled Tuesday that Microsoft cannot sell one of its flagship products, Word, in the United States because of patent infringement.  —  You read that right: Microsoft cannot sell Word, the judge ruled.
via techmeme.com

This kind of news amuses me and annoys me. What I think of this?

1. It is stupid

2. It is waste of time, everybody’s time [even mine as I write this]

3. There has to be a better system dealing with such issues.

I don’t see how this is going to stop Microsoft selling Word!!

Tr.im’s existence

Tr.im: We Were Just Kidding About Cutting You Off. Also, We’re Still For Sale.

via techcrunch.com

I haven’t used Tr.im a lot but from what I read on Tr.im’s blog, I don’t think they took the decision very lightly.

I am seeing a lot of comments on how people managing Tr.im are “idiots”, criticizing their decisions etc. etc. But I want to say one thing to those users “How many businesses have you started in your life time?” Don’t stand on the side lines and be a smart ass commenter. Because overall, it just shows how ignorant you are about business matters.

Good luck guys at Nambu [Tr.im’s parent company in dealing with the situation and I hope you get a favorable result.

It’s all about me and I have a choice

I am subscribed to Jason Calacanis's mailing list and I read his article on The Case Against Apple. Some interesting points and some I agree to as well. Then today I read some arguments/discussions against the post here and here on TechCrunch. I am not writing in favor of or against Jason's post. I am just penning my thoughts on what questions make it easier for me to select a product that I am going to use. So while I was digesting the thoughts of different people on this matter, I thought it came down to few basic things for me: –

  • Are the products [Apple] better and value for money?
  • Am I loving the user experience that Apple products are giving me compared to other alternatives?
  • Are the products making me more efficient and productive in what I need to get done?
  • Am I really excited about using the product and invest my time, energy and emotions in learning about it and dealing with it's short comings?

If the answers to the above questions is more number of Yes then No, then I am buying those products.

I used to say that I am a FAN of Microsoft product or I am a FAN of iPhone/Mac. But now I think that the important thing to me is if the product is going to work for me and if it can pass through my questions above, I will make a change, I will not get stuck with Apple or Microsoft for that matter. At the end of the day, it's about me and whether the devices are fulfilling my requirements and making me happy. I have a choice at any given time. If I am not happy about it, I will move on to another product. Recently, I read many people moved away from iPhone because essentially, the benefits of iPhone were lost compared to other benefits they could have. They had a choice and they executed on these choice.

I used to admire Microsoft and Microsoft products and used to be a un-paid evangelist for their products. But in the last year or so, Windows Vista has given me a lot more grief [it was a combination of applications that I run on Windows Vista and Windows Vista itself] but I got tired of the time I was spending on fixing issues and getting my PC to work perfectly. That's when I started looking for alternatives including running Ubuntu or going back to Windows XP. Then I started using Windows 7 on my computers and I was happy chappy again but it was a bit too late.

I am a recent Mac convert and quite happy about it and 80% of time i use my Mac compared to Windows 7 systems. But if at any given point, the benefits of using Macbook drop to using other system, I will make the move.

I have started Binging, have you?

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So far we used to Google [Term used for web search], now we will be Binging [or just Bing] if not now may be sometime soonish. Looks like Bing is capturing fair share of it's market. Although I don't use it as my primary search engine and it might be sometime if I ever start using it as my primary search engine, I see a lot of my friends have changed to Bing. Normally, I am the one who is evangelizing the latest technology, but for a change some of my friends and colleagues are evangelizing Bing to me!

I do use Bing from time to time and I like it's speed and simple interface. For now sometimes I just visit to see what's on Bing's home page today [from what I can tell, they keep on changing their home page images].

What do you think of Bing?

Sometimes Wikipedia Contributors and Editors just do not get thanked enough

Over the years as I have started to rely more on more on Search engines and the information that they provide, I have also got more reliant on specific sites like Wikipedia. If you are like me, you do a quick search for a term in Google, expecting a link for the specific term or event to show up in Google search results. Next click is on the Wikipedia article link and then read, read, read, scroll down, down and most of the time close the window and move on to the next task or action.

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With us wanting to fit more and more things into our already busy lives, this means that we are looking for high quality and accurate information that will save us time from going to site by site just looking for the key bit of information. And that is where the Wikipedia serves the best purpose. People keep on updating information on Wikipedia as up to date as possible and editors make sure that the standards and quality of the document is maintained. And most of the time the efforts of these people just do not get recognized enough. I certainly forget to thanks for all the effort that goes in a well written article on Wikipedia. So just wanted to take some time today to show my gratitude towards the contributors and editors on Wikipedia.

Thank You! Thank You for Making getting the accurate information easy and thanks for all the efforts.

I have moved my blogging to Tejaspatel.com

Well it has been very hard to keep myself motivated to keep on blogging in last few years. As I have said so many times before, tools like Twitter does not help either to keep me motivated to blog [essentially blog something with substance].

As much as I love to keep writing and to share my views and thoughts and try to add value to some discussion, I need to find out ways that keep me both interested, motivated and make it fun. And for me, using Email is still fun!Posterous has made it easy to blog and to share thoughts/photos/links or for that matter, just quote somebody or something. So for now, I have decided to move to Posterous using my other domain Tejaspatel.com.

As of now, I don’t know what I will do here on this blog or for how long I will be gone, but I will keep you posted. For now, you can check Tejaspatel.com to hear more of me.