Twenty five years ago today, Microsoft released Windows 95. It was undoubtedly a technical leap forward, but its biggest, most lasting impacts are about how it...

Here's Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (sampled in @Beyonce 's "Flawless") offering the truth: we should all be feminists. http://t.co/uZekGPQEcL...

I don’t usually agree to participate in corporate promo videos, but Microsoft asked me to talk broadly about why writing software is still inspiring to me afte...

This month’s Wired magazine includes a milestone I’m incredibly excited about: My first published print column! You can read Safe In Its Shell , my explorat...

Providing more evidence that blogging is something you can get better at the longer you do it, my friend Rafe Colburn put out a brilliant post the other day ou...

If you liked my post on Google’s Microsoft Moment last week, you may well enjoy Fred Vogelstein’s detailed piece in this month’s Wired. I think no small...

The two best quotes from Ina Fried’s interview with Bill Gates today: On advanced science: “That’s right. We’re going to make the cows that don’t fart. Y...

I’m not sure Google’s new Chrome OS announcement is that big a deal, or that the eventual product that gets released will actually have that much impact, but...

Another new version of Windows is nearly upon us, as Microsoft will release Windows 7 later this year. Vista was greeted with probably a few too many jeers, wh...

This one’s been kicking around in my head for a while, and maybe you can all help me understand it. With any contemporary social networking site, I can control...

If you’d like to open up the package for your licensed copy of Microsoft Windows Vista, you only need to follow these three helpfully-illustrated steps ....

In the middle of this year, in observation of his retirement from Microsoft, I wrote Bill Gates and the Greatest Tech Hack Ever , one of my most popular posts...

Bill Gates has pulled off one of the greatest hacks in technology and business history, by turning Microsoft’s success into a force for social responsibility....

Almost five years ago, I got involved in a project that would eventually become Atom , a pair of matching standards functioning as a syndication format and a...

I’ve seen a number of people make reference to Facebook’s application platform without knowing a lot of background about some historical examples that might be...

One of my favorite posts that I’ve ever written was Excel Pile , about people’s propensity for using Office tools like Microsoft Excel to track mundane parts...

Ten years ago, then-Microsoft fontographer Vincent Connare launched the Comic Sans Cafe . During 1994 I noticed that a large number of cartoon/comic style...

I found some really interesting responses to the launch of Google Web History that are all well worth visiting. CNET’s Margaret Kane has a roundup of ne...

This is one of those “how to market a product effectively” examples that’s been kicking around in my brain for a while, I thought I’d share it. About half a de...

Since I’ve already been described as a Microsoft apologist, despite creating delightful little films to mock their products, I might as well point out someth...

Gen has captured the cost of monoculture with his excellent look at the unfortunate result of some technology choices made in South Korea years ago: This...

I found Frank Hilario’s rant entitled Microsoft’s Mr Bill Gates And The Boy Who Cried Worp to be largely incoherent, but from what I could deduce, he thinks...

From Ron Liecty’s rumination on developer evangelism on Nokia’s site, “Microsoft apologist Anil Dash, in ComputerWorld’s Jan 9th article, said Microsoft’s op...

Summary: Earlier this year, I said that Office 2007 is the bravest upgrade ever, and the reason was simple: The audacity of introducing a radical new user in...

I don’t know exactly what the significance of this realization is to me, but I thought I’d share. The debate between Robert Scoble and Dave Winer about Micro...

So maybe Gracenote (formerly CDDB) isn’t evil after all ? I love anything that challenges the conventional wisdom, especially when someone’s gotten a bad...

Microsoft has just launched the Zune , which will be one of the most popular digital music players ever made, and could have been considered a wild s...

Features that didn’t make the cut for Windows Vista. For those of you who already think I’m too much of a Microsoft fanboy, check out the list. My favorite i...

Windows Vista’s astoundingly long beta period is winding down (they just sent out the “what did you think of the beta?” surveys to testers), which means a whol...

Three years ago, Dan Geer led a team of security experts in authoring a paper about the threat of a software monoculture. The paper, entitled “ CyberInsecurity...

It’s an all-Office day today. The Globe and Mail embraces the bad pun with “ Stressed? Busy? Excel-erate your life “. Tralee Pearce amusingly asserts that “The...

Lisey’s post about geeking out in Excel had the world’s most perfectly-targeted banner ads: � Read more on Vox...

There’s been lots of discussion over Microsoft’s pretty decent desktop blogging client, Windows Live Writer. A Seattle Post-Intelligencer story that I was qu...

A little cursory research shows that Microsoft sells roughly as many licenses for Windows XP Media Center Edition as Apple does for Mac OS X, on a quarter-by-q...

Microsoft’s AdCenter advertising service has a demographic predictor as part of their labs; It’s supposed to indicate what audience can be expected to respon...

Short and sweet, the Ribbon and new UI in Microsoft Office 2007 is** the ballsiest new feature in the history of computer software**. I’ve been using O...

Congrats to Robert Scoble on his new gig, and no disrespect intended to great MS bloggers like Dare Obasanjo and Niall Kennedy, but for my blogging dollar, the...

I guess I’m not the only one thinking about copy and paste . Ray Ozzie is way, way ahead of me . In a development that’s clearly been brewing for some time,...

It’s like they chose the onstage talent at this event just to appeal to me ! ![Rock Your BillG.jpg]https://cdn.glitch.global/71e5579f-aba0-499a-b200-01549a2a...

If you enjoyed posts such as Excel Pile , where people detailed their favorite ways of geeking out with Microsoft Excel, you may enjoy such recent discoveries...

Or, “Yahoo bought everyone on my buddy list, and all I got was this t-shirt”. Following up on the discussion about Web 2.0 from last week, the only thing a...

Now, I’m as skeptical as the next person in regard to Google’s “Dont Be Evil” mantra, which makes me snicker just because , well, it seems like an awfully low...

Baseline magazine (which has been one of my favorites almost since its first issue) has a brief piece on companies that are forming software co-ops to help r...

Four years ago, Jeffrey Zeldman said, " To Hell With Bad Browsers " and ended up changing the web. That’s damned impressive. I’d never really been...

This one’s just for myself, there’s a leaked version of Royale , a Windows XP theme that Microsoft apparently made for the new version of Media Center. I like...

David says that Google’s angle on snapping up library content is to prevent banner farmers from scanning it all in and wrapping AdSense around it. That may...

Neowin, which is probably the most popular site for Windows groupies, leaked screenshots of MSN Desktop Search , as is their wont. What surprises me is that I...

According to today’s Infoworld story , it seems like Passport is getting scaled back by Microsoft . Thanks to Olivier for the link....

Microsoft hasn’t talked much about Passport lately, but Monster.com sent out an email last week saying that they were discontinuing the option to sign in usi...

Behold, it’s Microsoft Decathlon ! It was like Epyx’ Summer Games, but crashed more....

“In the 2004 election cycle the formerly Republican-leaning company’s political contributions have undergone a massive shift to favor Democrats.” An interestin...

...

Microsoft bought Lookout , the small company that makes excellent Outlook search tool. Lookout uses a variation of the highly-regarded Lucene search engine...

I’ll pay $100 to the first person who figures out how to make SubEthaEdit (worst name ever! I still call it Hydra) and OneNote service pack ‘s document-edit...

The conventional wisdom with a lot of the software industry is that Microsoft can just bundle any reasonably decent application into the Office suite, even i...

Most of the people I know are geeks, and some large number of geeks are obsessive to one degree or another. (This can be verified by anyone who’s ever mumbled...

Though it’s gotten no shortage of mainstream press coverage, the recent two billion dollar detente between Sun and Microsoft had one significant aspect tha...

So, Google’s own CEO has stated that Google is a media company , maybe it’s worth observing whether the world’s most successful Internet companies are media c...

Despite all the security vulnerabilities over the years, the clunky interface, and the near-glacial pace of improvements to the program, I still use Microsoft...

I keep returning to the concept that software provides an environment for creativity, and that these tools create a context for the content we create within th...

Dear Microsoft: What the fuck? Ten years ago, Windows 3.1 was the current version of Windows. I’d been using Windows for the better part of a decade then, an...

I mentioned earlier that the best way to protect your privacy is to control your identity . But, while proactive publishing of one’s identity is a necessary s...

Picture the following scenario: Microsoft has created a weblog tool that is designed to run inside the firewall at a company. It’s browser-accessible from any...

Just in time for a Halloween scare, a new piece in magazine , Microsoft’s Weblog Software . Your feedback is welcomed....

Just a heads-up on next week’s magazine , I’ll be posting the promised follow-up to Why Tablet PCs Will Succeed , explaining why weblogs are the Tablet PC’s...

The Times has a pretty good write-up of Microsoft’s XP Media Center OS that’s coming out. I’ve seen some demos, and it is pretty impressive, especially since...

Have you ever used Microsoft Picture It ? Do you know anyone who has?...

What about a Word macro virus that searched all available drives for Word documents, converted them to HTML, and then propagated itself to as many other users...

Apple is committing a grave folly in not taking advantage of their tight OS/hardware integration. People forget just how much one can do with well-integrated h...

Microsoft’s been promoting its Tablet PC s for about a year now. Despite all the claims, they’re more evolutionary than revolutionary, of course. But that’s t...

I am wondering why Microsoft’s announcement of upcoming WiFi products has flown under the radar so much. I can understand that their BlueTooth mouse and keyb...

Dear whomever replaces Bob Pittman: Please know, one of your biggest competitors now is eBay, especially with the purchase of PayPal. They now have a billing r...

There’s some interesting findings if you read through the docs and source code for the Common Language Infrastructure component of Microsoft’s .NET framework...

news://news.microsoft.com/microsoft.public.basic.dos...

Google Search Microsoft . Or here ....

Continuing in the vein of companies trying desperately to lose their markets to Microsoft, take a look at Palm . They had a tremendous, overwhelming dominance...

If you can overlook the abominable layout, this thorough description of the technical differences between the file formats of WordPerfect and Microsoft Word...

Nothing’s funnier than playing it straight. Neale reviews Microsoft Weblogger . Maybe it’s time for me to post the Word-to-BloggerAPI stuff I made a few mon...

Nina is a cool little font. It’s like Microsoft Silkscreen . And, while you read about it, now might be a good time for me to point out again that there i...

For dorks only: a nearly comprehensive list of the services that are installed by default in Windows 2000. (And, for the most part, in Windows XP as well.) G...

Microsoft Portrait is a black-and-white low bandwidth videoconferencing application, courtesy of Microsoft’s research labs in China. In motion, it’s eerily r...

Here are about 8 kabillion (that’s an estimate) keyboard shortcuts for Microsoft programs . I know all of these already, but you might not. No really, I do...

I have had a lot of thoughts in the past year about Microsoft’s Tablet PC initiative, and I’ll cover those later. But, there is one opportunity from their pu...

If you’re running Windows XP and have ClearType enabled, you can tune your settings over at the Microsoft Typography website....

I’ve been playing around with making a totally desaturated version of the default blue theme that ships as part of the updated UI in Windows XP. This idea has...

This is a PHP editing add-in for Microsoft Frontpage. Total estimated market for this product? Zero....

So InfoWorld’s resident Jesus freak and one-trick open source pony Nick Petreley is leaving . I don’t have anything against the guy, indeed he’s been very cor...

Just for Leia , NT4 and Windows 2000 users should find Microsoft Personal Security Advisor quite useful....

And what the hell is Paul doing over on MSN’s homepage?...

Lane makes a pretty persuasive argument that I’ve allowed Microsoft to frame the argument in my discussion of Smart Tags. I would prefer to think that I was...

Hey, have you ever had one of those days? Me too. I tend to pride myself on being a good speaker or writer when going off the cuff. And, as my peeves along...

Novel Windows XP thing: When you try to open a file of an unknown type, Win XP will let you pick an application to open it with, as always, or give you the o...

Just FYI, Adobe released Acrobat 5.0 today, and the Reader seems to have graduated from being miserably horrible to just unpleasant to work with. Also, they...

For those who thought it would never be done: Migrating Microsoft Hotmail from FreeBSD to Windows 2000 Technical Case Study . I’m surprised we didn’t hear mor...

As a follow-up on yesterday’s tool for Outlook 2002’s Attachment security settings , you can also check out the official Microsoft tool for making these cha...

I am the only person who likes Microsoft Outlook. That is, until recently. They added a stupid, "save me from myself" security fix to it that made...

Take a look at the Microsoft Inductive User Interface Guidelines : "[T]he IUI model suggests how to make software applications simpler by breaking featur...

Man, reading about the Microsoft Office XP Smart Tag SDK makes me wish DeepLeap was still around… sigh. There’s also a press release with more info on Smar...

Derek and Tanya Build a Wedding Web Site — using Microsoft Office! Who writes this stuff?...

I know a lot of folks who are passionate about Photoshop. "Just give me Photoshop," they say, "and I can do anything." But what makes me po...

Xbox is going to use a modified USB port for its controllers. I want to get a patent on the Xbox-to-standard USB adapter. Then I could spend all day playing wi...

One of the things I thought about a lot when Microsoft’s sites were down the other day was the reason that the flawed, single point of failure architecture was...

Interesting recognition of a market niche: Microsoft has a page called Windows 2000 for Tech Enthusiasts . I guess that’s me. I’m a geek....

Hmmm. A tool to migrate Apache settings to IIS is supposed to be available by the end of the month. I had thought about scripting something like this, inters...

I’m not surprised they say they’ve found security holes in Windows Media Player skins . I did one of the first skins Microsoft commissioned for Player 7, and...

I added something to FadMaker today, and it got me thinking… Microsoft is using (at the behest of publishers, it says…) the standard console revenue model of...

I liked this article when it was first published, and I still like it now: Design and User Interface Inspirations at Microsoft ....

Microsoft’s PowerToys have been around for years, (they became indispensable to me back when I was beta-testing Win95) and I never realize how essential they a...

I know as a developer I’m supposed to hate Microsoft, but I’m really impressed by the whole (idiotically named) .NET thingy. ( Good explanation here .) But wha...

This has been fixed. Finally....

Bill Gates’ other company seems quite clueless… Corbis is redoing their back-end systems and just sent out an email containing the following: In order to...

I was at a conference yesterday, and got a chance to reiterate why I would always, always, always choose a Microsoft program over an Oracle one for a solution....

Did everyone remember to go get their OneName ? It’s a similar idea to Microsoft’s Passport , but it’s based on an open, XML content description format. You...

Microsoft finally updated Tweak UI for Windows Me and 2000. Best feature: It lets your customize the places bar in the file dialogs. I’m so glad I don’t...

Microsoft also released a utility to customize the Office 2000 Places bar , but I wasn’t too concerned about it because there’s been a WOPR PlaceBar customize...

This CSS Style Testing Tool from Microsoft’s site tests your CSS to make sure it’s valid....

Microsoft turned 25 yesterday. I turn 25 today....

One terrifying bit of info from ZDNet’s writeup of Microsoft at 25 : [Brian MacDonald] has been a behind-the-scenes guy ever since Microsoft bought his co...

According the MS press release, Office 10 has two features that seem like they would have been perfect with DeepLeap : **Native XML support. **Excel and...

A few ideas that have been kicking around in my head long enough that I figure they’ll never actually be fully formed, so I might as well get them out now… T...

Maybe DeepLeap should get in touch with CrossGain …? CrossGain is headed by recently departed Microsoftie and antitrust trial star Tod Nielsen. Nielsen wa...

That’s, um…. unfortunate. From the MSN homepage today:...

Odd… MSN’s eshop agreed to include epinions reviews on their site, but apparently they’ve only managed to sign up 9 members under their affiliate program ....

I really like inside.com, and another reason why is this great story about some of the behind-the scenes purchases of memorabilia for the EMP. Which remind...

While criticizing Microsoft for a lack of innovation is certainly mostly legitimate, think of how cleverly they implemented the progression from DOS/Windows 3....

Funny that DeepLeap went public with all that stuff yesterday and today’s .net initiative from Microsoft seems to be right along the same lines....

As always , the dumb people mess it up for the rest of us: Microsoft Trades Flexibility for Security ....

Yes, I’m still alive, expect a lengthy update later. But for now, go check out the PocketPC ‘s. While I’ve been accused of being both a MS shill and an MS hat...

Neat little insight into how to construct the letterforms for a font . I feel so illiterate when I realize I hadn’t even heard of some of these characters…...

For the Clueless Executive in your life, Microsoft presents their Tech Glossary . It’s surprisingly even-handed without the usual MS slant. Although I fin...

Cool little thing for Microsoft Office 2000 users, the Save My Settings Wizard , a little utility that copies your personalizations and settings from one PC...

Lookit! I’m here . (Scroll down a little.)...

Microsoft Blog? Didn’t know that the form was so adaptable, but there is actually a blog of sorts running on Microsoft’s typography site, it’s called Typograp...

From ZDNet : Microsoft to include Hindi in Win2000 Microsoft Corp.’s (Nasdaq: MSFT) Windows 2000 software platform, due to be launched in February, will...

In the immortal words of Diana Ross, " I’m Coming Out, I Want the World to Know "”. And what exactly is my secret? I am the guy Microsoft makes all t...

Microsoft Passport Part One and a Half: Continuing the User Experience At the end of yesterday’s exciting episode, User X was waiting , mouse-finger poise...

As promised: Microsoft Passport Part One: User Experience Okay, so after spending waaaay too much time reading all the documentation at the official Pa...

Little bit of appreciation for good design — despite an underwhelming set of new features, Microsoft ‘s Office 2000 has got some damn cool icons. They’re...