Daily Archives: January 7, 2008

microsoft, windows

Why I haven’t seen the best of Bill Gates

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I’ve been covering Microsoft for enough years to have seen and heard Bill Gates on numerous occasions. But I’ve not done so for enough years to have seen the best of him. I gather from other journalist friends that until maybe the early nineties, Gates was excellent value for the IT press, showing his technical side and chatting in-depth about some of the details of his products. Note this comment from Joel Spolsky:

Bill Gates was amazingly technical. He understood Variants, and COM objects, and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date functions. He didn’t meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn’t bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual, programmer.

Sadly I was a little too late to see this side of Gates. Microsoft grew too big; Microsoft execs grew too distant. In the keynotes I’ve heard, he talks about the company vision and the state of computing and leaves the technical details to others to explain. He occasionally takes questions, to which he typically gives long, circuitous answers, a favourite technique used by senior execs with, I suspect, the goal of reducing the number of questions that can be asked and answered in the time available. Nonetheless I respect him for steering the company through its path from the early days of DOS through to having its products installed on nearly every desktop and in nearly every home.

What prompts this post? billg is retiring in July and confirmed this at CES:

It’s the middle of this year, in July, that I’ll move from being a full-time employee at Microsoft to working full-time at the foundation.

This isn’t news; it’s in line with a previous announcement in June 2006; even the date, July 2008, was announced then.

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internet, search, web authoring

Wikia Search is live

You can now perform searches on Wikia, the open source search engine from the founder of Wikipedia.

This is from the about page:

We are aware that the quality of the search results is low..

Wikia’s search engine concept is that of trusted user feedback from a community of users acting together in an open, transparent, public way. Of course, before we start, we have no user feedback data. So the results are pretty bad. But we expect them to improve rapidly in coming weeks, so please bookmark the site and return often.

I tried a few searches for things I know about, and indeed the results were poor. I am going to follow the advice.

Wikia’s Jimmy Wales says there is a moral dimension here:

I believe that search is a fundamental part of the infrastructure of the Internet, and that it can and should therefore be done in an open, objective, accountable way.

There are several issues here. The power of Google to make or break businesses is alarming, particularly as it seeks to extend its business and there are growing potential conflicts of interest between delivering the best search results, and promoting particular sites. Google’s engine is a black box, to protect its commercial secrets. Search ranking has become critical to business success, and much energy is expended on the dubious art of search engine optimization, sometimes to the detriment of the user’s experience.

Another thought to ponder is how Google’s results influence what people think they know about, well, almost anything. Children are growing up with the idea that Google knows everything; it is the closest thing yet to Asimov’s Multivac.

In other words, Wales is right to be concerned. Can Wikia fix the problem? The big question is whether it can be both open and spam-resistant. Some people thought that open source software would be inherently insecure, because the bad guys can see the source. This logic has been proven faulty, since it the flaw is more than mitigated by the number of people scrutinizing open source code and fixing problems. Can the same theory apply to search? That’s unknown at this point.

It is interesting to note that Wikipedia itself is not immune to manipulation, but works fairly well overall. However, if Wikia Search attracts significant usage, it may prove a bigger target. I guess this could be self-correcting, in that if Wikia returns bad results because of manipulation, its usage will drop.

I don’t expect Wikia to challenge Google in a meaningful way any time soon. Google is too good and too entrenched. Further, Google and Wikipedia have a symbiotic relationship. Google sends huge amounts of traffic to Wikipedia, and that works well for users since it often has the information they are looking for. Win-win.

internet, microsoft, security

Unanswered question: how’s Vista’s real-world security compared to XP?

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Reading Bruce Eckel’s disappointing I’m not even trying Vista post (I think he should give it a go rather than swallow all the anti-hype) prompts me to ask: how’s Vista’s security shaping up, after 12 months of real-world use?

I could call the anti-virus companies, but I doubt I’ll get a straight answer. The only story the AV guys want to see is how we still need their products.

I’d like some stats. What proportion of Vista boxes has been successfully infected by malware? How does that compare to XP SP2? And has anyone analysed those infections to see whether User Account Control (Vista’s big new security feature) was on or off, and whether the infection required the user’s cooperation, such as clicking OK when an unsigned malware app asked for admin rights? What about IE’s protected mode – has it reduced the number of infections from compromised or malicious web sites?

Has anyone got hard facts on this?

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