Vishal Kothari

Last Wednesday, Microsoft’s Live Labs introduced Thumbtack - a new service that lets users collect snippets of information from websites & share it with others.

Thumbtack would be useful when you are researching for a particular thing like hotels, cars, mobiles, etc. Typically what users do is copy / paste information when researching to a document. It allows you to publish your collections & they can be shared via email as well as a URL. For instance, while researching for mobiles, I quickly created something like this:

http://thumbtack.livelabs.com/tovishalck/Mobiles

Nice way to collaborate. Some people say this is similar to Mozilla Joey (now defunct).

Such a thing could be used in the design phase of a particular project, where the client would point to various reference sites, logos, etc.

I feel this is a good start by Microsoft in the collaboration domain. I will be using this over the next month or so & try out.

Another Slashdot story which interested me:

Before reading the article, I was pretty sure like most of you that Working at Google will always be a better choice than at Microsoft. The article proved me wrong.

It contains remarks from an employee who has shifted from MS to Google. Here is the link to the article:

http://web2journal.com/read/603827.htm

It could be true or could not be true. Posting a couple of key reasons mentioned by that employee:

On one hand, there are beneficial effects - it is easy to ship software quickly…On the other hand, I was using Google software - a lot of it - in the last year, and slick as it is, there’s just too much of it that is regularly broken. It seems like every week 10% of all the features are broken in one or the other browser. And it’s a different 10% every week - the old bugs are getting fixed, the new ones introduced. This across Blogger, Gmail, Google Docs, Maps, and more

The culture part is very important here - you can spend more time fixing bugs, you can introduce processes to improve things, but it is very, very hard to change the culture. And the culture at Google values “coolness” tremendously, and the quality of service not as much. At least in the places where I worked.

The conclusion:

“Google’s big problem is that the company hasn’t realized that it isn’t a startup anymore.”

Found this one from Slashdot. Being a Microsoft critic, thought to post it here:

All of us have one time or another been completely frustrated by certain Windows usability issues, and in many cases our experiences have driven us over to Linux, or kept us there.

For anyone that has ever been frustrated, you will be happy to know you aren’t the only one. After reading this leaked Microsoft memo from Bill Gates back in 2003, you will surely have more insight into why Vista is a complete disaster due to Microsoft not learning anything from their experiences from XP.