Real World Computing

These days it seems that Microsoft simply can't keep up with the competition, though I think they've simply been making too many enemies recently. I suppose that if I were to compile a list of the top competition for MS, it would look something like this (in order of danger); Google All those little niche things and web applets are really starting to take their toll. Google's desktop search is much better than the Microsoft Windows search and it beat their new search engine (coming real soon - on day - sigh) by a couple of years. Google's Gmail is heaps better that hotmail and beat the Windows Live Mail service (almost live now - sigh) by over a year. IBM (including Lotus) One of the worst things that Microsoft has done lately has been to annoy IBM as it has caused them to embark on a series of quite damaging "Move to Lotus" and "Move to the Penguin" campaigns. IBM is the second largest software developer in the world (after Microsoft) and their ...

Recently an old keyboard overuse injury has flared up again. Aside from the the exercises that I need to do to overcome it, the other thing that seems to be helping is that I have installed Dragon simply speaking. I remember trying out an IBM product called "VoiceType" some years back. That product was quite good although it did tend to confuse my voice with that of the dog. Strangely enough, it would never listen to anything my wife said - possibly a bit like myself :-) At the time I installed Dragon, my hopes weren't very high. I figured that if things had changed drastically in the industry, I would know about it. Dragon still isn't perfect, but people can come up and bother me at work and their words are not recorded. I still need to correct Dragon quite frequently, but it gets it right more often than it gets it wrong. I'll post and update after I have been using the software for a bit longer but you may be happy to know that this blog was written using ...