Matt Loney's Blog

Yellowcave, an IT manager in Dorset, has posted an interesting Talkback detailing his company's experience with Vista uprgades.

"We needed a Gateway laptop with Vista Business, but at Best Buy could only purchase with Vista Home preinstalled along with an 'upgrade disc which will enable online upgrade'", writes Yellowcave.

"We were not given the option of upgrading to a business edition only the ultimate version, unnecessary and OTT, but to add insult to injury having deducted the fee from the credit card and completed the 'upgrade', along comes the supposedly defunct Blue Screen of Death necessitating a complete reinstall (back to Vista Home)."

"A look at the paid for options available did not reveal the upgrade so the process had to be repeated with exactly the same result. And now we have 2 debits to the CC, a useless laptop and no one accepting liability."

We suspect this is just the tip of the iceberg. Who let the IP people start meddling with upgrade policies?

Several years ago we began hosting a feature called IT Anthems - a collection of the best and worst (mostly the worst) corporate songs from tech companies. It went down a storm and corporate anthems were briefly the topic du jour, with The Times newspaper even devoting the whole of page 5 to the phenomenon.

Last week a member (we know who you are) created an account on ZDNet with the username "IT Anthems" and the sole purpose, judging from this member's blog, of persuading us to revive the feature. We can be persuaded, but we'd like to know what you think first.

Should we? Shouldn't we? Let us know what you think. If you're not sure you might like to check out the IT Anthems blog for a few examples of the bune crunchingly embarassing material that we're takling about here.

As we start to delve into the intruiging world of Vista upgrades, the following email arrives from disgruntled Microsoft customer Mike Cope:

"After spending over 2.5 hours on the phone with Microsoft's customer service and tech support, they admitted that they are now aware of a new bug with legally purchased upgrade product keys.

Windows Vista Upgrade is advertised to allow users to perform a "clean installation", however, after installing the operating system and attempting to activate it, Vista reports that the product key entered cannot be used because this version must be installed from a previous version of Windows.

Personally, I own Windows 2000 Professional, and so, I had to RE-INSTALL my Windows 2000 Pro, and then try installing my Vista upgrade. However, the installation then reports an error that I do not have enough disk space for the temporary files ... Even though I have a 500GB hard drive with ONLY Windows 2000 installed.

As mentioned, it was only after over 2.5 hours on the phone that a customer service representative told me that Microsoft is now aware of the situation. HOWEVER ... they are unable to provide users with a new product key. In other words ... My legally purchased copy of Windows Vista Home Premium Upgrade is currently USELESS.

Sure it can install ... but I can't activate it, so it will currently expire after 30 days. As a professional cartoonist and multimedia designer, I was extremely pleased with the beta versions of Vista -- at a time when I've been debating about buying a Mac instead. Unfortunately, Microsoft has told me that I'll need to wait until "mid-week" before they can help me anymore. They really dropped the ball this time, and wasted my entire afternoon."

We've been hearing other rumblings of odd policies and behaviours with Vista upgrades - almost certainly a case of technology hobbled by business models. If you have any interesting experiences with upgrading Vista drop us a line.

Is Google working on a hosted power point app? Evidence that was wiped from its site over the weekend seems to point to it. Digging around in the language files in Google Docs, US blogger lonut found the following snippet:

var MSG_VIEW_PRESENTATION="View presentation";
var MSG_PRESENTATION_SETTINGS="Presentation settings";
var MSG_DOC_TO_PRESENTATION="Convert document to presentation";
var MSG_DOC_TO_PRESENTATION_HINT="Once your document is converted to a presentation, you can insert slide breaks using Insert > Slide from the main menu.";
var MSG_PRESENTATION_TO_DOC="Convert presentation to document";
var MSG_POPUP_BLOCKER="Presently is unable to launch your presentation in full-screen mode. Check your pop-up blocker settings.";
var MSG_NEW_SLIDE_TITLE="New Slide";
var MSG_UNSUPPORTED_BROWSER="Unsupported Browser Presently doesn't support Opera and will not function properly. Would you like to continue anyway?";
var MSG_SLIDE_INDEX="Slide %1 of %2: %3";
var MSG_NEXT="Next";
var MSG_NEXT_HINT="Space, Enter, N";
var MSG_PREV="Previous";
var MSG_PREV_HINT="Backspace, Del, P";
var MSG_ZOOM_IN="Zoom in";
var MSG_ZOOM_OUT="Zoom out";
var MSG_ZOOM_RESET="Zoom reset";
var MSG_TOGGLE_AUTOFIT="Toggle AutoFit";
var MSG_PICK_THEME="Choose theme:";
var MSG_THEME_BLANK="Blank";
var MSG_THEME_GOOGLE="Google";
var MSG_THEME_LIQUID="Liquid";
var MSG_THEME_MONOCHROME="Monochrome";
var MSG_TOGGLE_TOOLBAR="Hide/show toolbar";
var MSG_EXIT_PRESENTATION="Exit presentation";
var MSG_END_OF_PRESENTATION="End of presentation. Are you sure you want to exit?";

Whether it ends up being called Presently (the word processor that started it all for Google was originaly called Writely) is neither here nor there.

What is important is that it would complete the basic triumvirate for Google Docs of word processor, spreadsheet and presentation package, making it a more complete offering along the lines of Zoho, which we reveiwed here.

You can bet that Google will be investing more in Docs as use increases; and useage will increase as more people a) learn that it is there, b) learn what it can do (Google's online spreadsheet blows Excel away for dealing with mulitple concurrent editors), and c) people inreasingly get used to trusting Google with their data.

US organisation Pew Internet and American Life Project released a report this week saying that 28 percent of internet users have tagged or categorized ontent oline such as photos, news storis of blog posts. The report notes that some sites ask people to apply labels. And in the past weeks Google has leant its weight behind the use of 'labels', with the launch of its latest Toolbar which, as you can see in the image below, asks you to add labels, not tags, to describe your bookmarks.



Here's why Google is right.

People are very good at recognising patterns, but when we try to create patterns to define what we see, we're not so good. The reason is that while pattern matching is an automatic, cognitive process, pattern creation requires conscious thought; it gets mixed up with our feelings, our experiences and our knowledge, all of which are particular to the person creating the pattern. HSBC's ads in airports around the world are a great example; one person's holiday is another person's hell, even though it may actually just be a beach.

Computers on the other hand can be very good at looking at content and creating patterns; if you want a clean, precise and untainted definition of something, a computer is your best bet. If you've read my post below you may already see where I'm going with this.

All the Web 2.0 sites that ask people to tag content are falling behind the times. Tagging has been an acceptable term for this human process, but there seems to be a shift in thinking, and not before time. After all, we're used to labelling things. Labelling is a human process; when we label someting we are applying a word to something that describes it in a way that is useful to us.

Tagging is, or should be, a computer process. At ZDNet UK we post at least 40 articles a day - often many more - and we apply labels as we do so, to categorise them. This helps define where an article sits in the navigation, it helps define what treatment the article should get, and it helps define what ads should be served alongisde it. We also apply tags to the article, and this is done automatically by our search engine using the process described in the post below; it is those tags, not our labels, that are used to populate the tag clouds on ZDNet.

For us, tags create a more consistent tag cloud than labels would.

Oh, and why is Google only mostly right? Because Google Docs is still in tag land.