Now, Yahoo will likely be pairing up with Microsoft to face Google in its domination of the search market. Bing will become the search engine on Yahoo, and Yahoo would deal with most of the search ad work.

I’ve used Bing quite a bit now, and I think it is definitely worthy to compete with Google. In particular, I’m fond of the daily picture on the homepage everyday and overall interface, though I’m not sure its results are as accurate to what I’m searching for as Google. Microsoft is pouring a lot of money into Bing’s, and if done properly will likely take a chunk of Google’s domination. Together, Microsoft and Yahoo will have 30% of the market.

Any thoughts on this Microsoft+Yahoo combo? Leave a comment!

More reading:

BusinessWeek

Article on AdAge

BoomTown

Also, as a side note, some photos I took in China are uploaded onto Flickr here. And a probably more interesting note that I just discovered is that Bing is blocked in China for some reason as well as sites like Flickr and Blogger.

Image from Wikipedia.Com.

Here are a few of them. You can check them all out at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/watchtheads/

Also, Microsoft did the Mojave Experiment where they told people that Mojave was the new Windows, where in fact it was Vista to show people that what they thought Vista was isn’t actually true.

There are also a few other ads with Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates in them which are funny, but I’m not sure they are very good ads:

So even though Steve Ballmer promised at CES a public beta of Windows 7 to be released on Friday, we didn’t officially get it. This was from server overloads, errors, and a bunch of other issues with people all trying to get the beta. I would assume the main reason to this is that Microsoft told us it would only give out 2.5 million keys to beta testers (which they have decided against), so people were rushing to grab one. I got the beta on that day from a direct link to the ISO file, but I still didn’t have a product key. But the beta works for 30 days without a key, so I installed it on my Lenovo S10 Netbook. The installation went quite smoothly and right now I’m typing this blog post on Windows 7 (with Windows Live Writer). I did finally get a key from Microsoft, so my beta will work until August 1, 2009.

Overall, I think the OS is quite nice and does bring quite a bit of extra functionality to your computer. The interface does take a bit to get used to with its changes. As I mentioned in my other article about Windows 7 (see here), there are some nice simple features that make the experience with Windows much better. One of these is the Aero Snap feature where you can just move a window to the side an it’ll “snap” to occupy half of the screen. Or at the top, where it will go full screen. This is extremely helpful for using a website to write a report or for multitasking. Another is Aero Peek where you can hover over the bottom right hand corner and see the desktop without actually going to it. This is helpful if you have widgets there.

Some other small improvements include having a little triangle next to start menu items that you can hover over to explore recent documents, websites, and common tasks without opening the application. Also, there is the Action Center where you can manage your system’s security and solve issues that Windows finds.

The OS is definitely faster than both XP and Vista, and keeping mind that Aero is enabled with its transparency and animations, is quite a feat. The system does boot up quite quickly and feels quite stable. The fact that it is Vista’s successor is quite obvious with the similar start menu and feel to it. Though that isn’t a bad thing, those were reasons why Vista was good, the bad was the incompatibility and slowness of it. The compatibility is quite amazing. I just plugged in random devices and the OS quickly detects and installs drivers for it.

Some criticism: The taskbar’s organization. Though I feel it has been improved drastically, I do find having shortcut icons and open windows together a bit annoying, but I think I’ve gotten used to it, since Microsoft does differentiate them by putting the open windows in a box. I’m also still not quite sure why they took out some applications such as Mail and Movie Maker and put it in a separate suit (Windows Live Essentials) and made people download it separately (unless you buy a Dell, which as partnered up with Microsoft to bundle Windows 7 and Essentials together).

If you are interested in downloading and trying out the beta. Here are my tips. If you have XP, you aren’t able to just upgrade up to 7, but if you have Vista SP1, you can. For XP users, you’ll just have to do a clean install on a separate partition or deleting XP (and your files) and installing it on your current partition. I would recommend backing up before installing Windows 7 (for XP users, it is kind of mandatory, otherwise, you’ll lose all your files). Keep in mind that the beta ends on August 1st, 2009, so plan ahead for upgrading to the final version or to reinstall your original OS.

To repartition your hard drive (shrink your current partition, and then make a new one). I would recommend using GParted Live (see here). You can run this from a CD or a USB drive.

For backing up, check this page out.

For the beta FAQ, go here.

For release notes, go here.

For installation instructions, go here.

For an overview of what is new in Windows 7, go here.

Want to dive in to Windows 7? Go to the Windows 7 main page(http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/) to download the beta (NOTE: You need a Live/Hotmail account to do so). I would recommend reading the information on the download page before going ahead. Again, Microsoft is not having that 2.5 million beta keys limit anymore (until January 24th), so don’t worry about not getting a key.

Good luck, if you are going to test out Windows 7. Also, I may post up a video about Windows 7 in the future, so look for that.

Thanks to Wikipedia for having that screenshot of Windows 7, build 7000.

The little taskbar that I have there is what the Windows 7′s taskbar looks like as of Build 6933. It has icons of the programs and pops up previews of the windows when you hover over it, even the tabs (such as of IE, and the various docs on Word). Right clicking on one of these icons results in a Jump List. These give you access to data such as the most recent document, website, and to common tasks like media controls. The system tray has also been optimized to smoothen the experience. The default tray will have four icons, Volume, Power, Network, and Action center. Applications that install system tray icons are hidden by defualt. To the far right, there is a little rectangular box which allows you to access “Peak”. Hovering ofter this will make all windows transparent giving you a clear view of the desk top, a click brings you to the desktop. Learn more about the taskbar on this website.

Windows 7′s New Taskbar (from http://windows7news.com/)

The Start Menu (from arstechnica.com)

“Peeking” (from arstechnica.com)

A few of the typical programs you find on a Windows system have also been updated. The calculator now has in addition to Standard and Scientific mode, Programmer and Statistics mode which are handy for those functions. Paint and Wordpad have also been revamped with the Ribbon taskbar borrowed from Office 2007.

The New Paint (from http://windows7news.com/)

Wikipedia also states that there are “advancements in touch, speech, and handwriting recognition, support for virtual hard disks, improved performance on multi-core processors, improved boot performance, and kernel improvements.” The Control Panel has also been updated with additional icons, “including: Accelerators, ClearType Text Tuner, Display Color Calibration Wizard, Gadgets, Infrared, Recovery, Troubleshooting, Workspaces Center, Location and Other Sensors, Credential Manager, Biometric Devices, System Icons, Windows Solution Center, and Display.”

There are also features called “Aero Snap” and “Aero Shake”. Snap allows you to move your cursor to various points on the screen and the window will snap into a specific shape (full screen, half screen). Shake allows you to “shake” a window which causes all the windows other than that one to minimize and if done again, maximizes them again. See these in the videos below.

A demonstration of “Aero Snap”

A demonstration of Aero Shake

Microsoft has also added a new feature to the Windows Explorer called Libraries which basically is a folder, but rather than the files in the folder are actually in that folder, they are from various locations all put in one area. In other words, it is a way to organize your files independent of the location of the files.

Libraries in Windows 7 (from arstechnica.com)

Tafiti is a Silverlight (“Microsoft’s Flash”) based research tool. It uses the Live search engine to power its results. On the right side there is a place where you can save pages for later reference, and you can stack them to for similar topics, you can also label the groups too, so you remember which stack is which. You can also save these to a Live Space or email it to others.
You can select what you want to search for from the little circle thing on the bottom left side. A nice feature is that you can easily “filter” the results (adding a second search term) by using the box at the top right corner of the results page.
A cool thing you can do is that you can change the results into a 3d “tree view” giving you a web like view of the results that you can rotate.
The thing with Tafiti is that although it is cool, it isn’t that useful as it uses the Live engine which isn’t that good. If Microsoft comes up with an app that will allow you to use any engine and integrate services and sites like Wikipedia and Digg, it could be a great tool.

The Zune website is planning to add a new online music community. This is sort of like Last.fm but Microsoft style. Zune owners will make “Zune Cards” which according to Crave is a little gadget that will send your favorite songs to the site and your friends will be able to see it and maybe hear a preview.

The new Zune will also feature a new interface, although is similar to the original, is much sleeker and cooler. The big rounded square in the middle is supposedly a 5 way button (up, down, left, right, middle) and is also touch sensitive for users to scroll around the menus.
You will also be able to put your recorded TV shows from Windows Media Center on your Zune and any podcasts (Zunecasts) from online.

Zune 2.0 is coming out this month and according to Engadget on the 16th. If you want to see more photos of the new Zune see this Cnet Crave slideshow at http://crave.cnet.com/4335-1_105-6591203.html.

The new Zunes all lined up!
Image courtesy of Cnet’s Crave Blog

When using it, you quickly notice how simple it is to control things around on the screen, and the animations make it look quite cool. Not only can you create Mashups, but also a website without any prior HTML knowledge. I’ll be adding more posts about it as the program progresses into its final form.

Microsoft Popfly (Credit: Microsoft)

Yahoo Pipes (Credit: Techcrunch.com)