Hi readers,

I recently decided to develop applications for the iphone. I needed a new email id for development purposes. The obvious places where you get one are – yahoo, gmail and hotmail. I already have a gmail account. But, Gmail is terribly slow in my wireless 2g connection. I chose hotmail as its the fastest mail provider among the big3. I was lucky to also get the email id I wished. Good start, woohoo! The email id I desired was so easily available???

I am gonna list out the strange things I saw after signing up with hotmail. It made realize that an alternative world exists online apart from almost flawless facebook, google.

Hotmail has good,  fast and well designed inbox

Hotmail is defenitely good folks. Despite the lack of labels, I like hotmail. Hotmail feels fast, preview page loads messages faster, the design and fonts are good. The next step was to integrate hotmail with thunderbird. Soon I started realizing the difficulty in using hotmail. Integrating my old gmail account and thunderbird was a breeze. Google has clear instructions for it. But, hotmail needed a software. I got frustrated and searched online for easier solutions.

Hotmail’s sad state in google search results

I searched hotmail and got this : @-o?

google search results for term "hotmail"

What were my search results – Hotmail is still a few years old in google. It has only 2mb storage?????????? Hotmail’s 2mb storage was increased around 4years ago.  Today Hotmail.com login page clearly specifies hotmail has 5gb storage. Why is the google page still saying 2mb? I cant open the cached page that shows when the page was spidered. Thanks to google for revolutionizing email, I use around 172mb in my gmail account. Hundreds of newsletters are stored in my mail account. People have a need for more storage.

The second address is microsoft.com/isapi/redir…. Do not have redirect urls without any description of the webpage. What do I know about the page if I only see a page titled “Free hotmail”.

The third and fifth address become even more annoying. MSN and live. Google has managed to produce results that contain all brands MS used in its history. Despite microsoft’s admission that MSN was a failed branding attempt, MSN is popular. If MSN is a failure, kill it completely. Then rebrand everything as Live. God knows why, Microsoft is still living with many brands online.

The sixth address is “Microsoft breaks hotmail for linux users?” Thats great!

Well, the fact is Microsoft has a completely dead online venture. Google has successfully given useless results for hotmail.

Comparison of the bias

Lets see what we get when we search yahoomail and gmail in google. Google search results bring pages that say Yahoo mail is the best email and is also the smartest email! Google calls Gmail is easy and effective!!!!!!!!!

I can definitely call this is a bias. I dont know if google has manually changed the results. Or has it? Lets see how hotmail fairs in other search engines.

Only a live search for hotmail shows the correct results. Only windows live comes in the searches. A yahoo search is not very bad. But, I still have 2brands – Live and MSN. Thats kind of, okay until you call hotmail as outdated.

I am getting a bit curious. Is Google intentionally trying to kill MS? Now, I go and search for internet explorer.

google results for search term "internet explorer"

It displays only internet explorer 7. There is zero buzz about internet explorer 8. It would have been a little fair to have atleast one article about the features in internet explorer 8. There is a paid ad on top. Its an ad for IE7 from google. It says – “Faster & more secure browsing. Get the new IE7 customized by Google.” Customized by google is no big thing. Its just adding google as default search in IE7. Google is completely aware that IE7 is the most popular browser. This could be one of the most effecient ways to market google to the masses. The word secure and faster belong to Microsoft. Google just added itself as a default search engine and calling it customized.

I still manage to login to my hotmail account. The interface is good. There is only ad on the right side. Its a banner, not a text ad. Its an ad for “Jataka tales”. Its an ad for fables. Hialrious! I have no idea what I can do with children books.

The magnitude of the problem

There are currently 89,683 searches a day for the term hotmail (according to digitalpoint wordtracker analysis). Thats almost 33million searches a year. Considering only 10% of the searches are from unique users new online. Thats 3.3million users every year fooled hotmail has only 2mb!!!

The search results may not be very relevant to the US. The new internet growth is coming from places like India, China and Brazil. The consumers may not be sophisticated enough to search and find out the truth. They will be impatient and may walk away from hotmail if they are confronted with many brands with 2mb storage. Its time to correct some google results.

What happened to my IMAP? I am now using izymail.com for accessing hotmail in thunderbird. It works as good as gmail IMAP. I am unhappy about giving my login details to another site. I forgot after I use it for 2 or 3days. But, I continue to have a bad impression on hotmail.

Hi,
I wish a very very happy birthday to Steve Jobs, CEO of apple who turns 54.

Iconic, charismatic, innovator, a genius and last but not least god!

In my opinion, Steve has to be given the credit for making the computer and electronics industry more fun. The two other exciting features of a computer are games and websites like facebook. Otherwise, this computer would have always been a business tool. Never has internet explorer, photoshop, flash player, mozilla created an interest in using them for the common man. They all had good features. They were not much fun. iPod, iPhone have good features too. There is always something extra. The looks of ipod, the simplicity, the scroll wheel…. The man who invented it all – Mr.Steve Jobs of apple.

Do you know that apple has as much cash as does microsoft? Thats amazing for a company that makes high end products compared to microsoft that licenses it technology to be installed in every computer (well, almost) in the world. He gets many things right. Every product he designs is a marvel. iPod, iPhone, Macbook air, airport and the list goes on…. This marketing genius creates hype like no other person can or does. The bench punching, demanding CEO is not as arrogant or greedy as others rather choosing to work for $1 a year (some time back). This comes as a real eye opener especially in our recession times.

The first major disappointment from Steve Jobs so far has been his illness. He was treated for pancreatic cancer 4years back. His health has been deteriorating noticeably for some time. And then we had the bad news. Apple cancels macworld, Steve announces 6months leave and the apple stock falls. The macworld was cancelled just 3weeks before it was scheduled screwing the travel plans of those who wanted to attend it.The last macworld was definitely boring. SVP of Worldwide Product Marketing, Phil Schiller did the macworld. Steve is considered a marketing genius. But, the SVP of marketing cannot make a great presentation. How do we believe Jobs style is institutionalized? In a stark contrast to Steve’s dressing, we saw a fat Phil (sorry, Phil) doing something like a board room meeting. In part, his fault is also due to a lack of products. Fair. But, why are there no products? Did Steve not even design them or give ideas? Does that mean Steve was ill for more time than we know? Its hard to say Steve did all the designing. For example, apple employees tried thousands of designs before settling on the current version of iphone design. The final go is given only by Steve. Who else would give this final go and in another way, who is the successor at apple? Despite all this controversy, apple sales show no signs of heavy decline. We love our macs, ipods and iphones. People still keep buying them. The hype about apple will stay. The hype about Steve will stay. Whether Steve works or not, Steve is Steve and I respect him.

A report by tech columnist Robert X. Cringely says that Jobs has stopped logging into his IM client. Cringely dug further and confirmed that Jobs has been completely offline for weeks. But another more recent article on techcruch mentioned that a doughnut shop where Steve eats often reported seeing him in good health. Allow me to stray a bit. Lets say a woman falls down and hurts her leg. She covers the hurt and goes home to change clothes. She wants to look beautiful and not with stains. I dont care what privacy laws or company laws about disclosing health related issues we have now. Just simply care for this guy as he deserves it every bit. Let him be peaceful. Lets all wish him a good recovery and that he will be back again with an envelope in his hand. I urge those who wish Steve a good recovery may use the comments section.

This is my first post on www.techwhy.wordpress.com. I am very glad to say that this post is one of the best topics I can start with.

Hi,

We have tons of blogs that report the latest happenings in the tech world. I read a lot of news myself. Some articles can be biased, some are intentionally made sensational. This blog will search for any lack of logic, search online to verify the facts and so on. I mean, what this blog will be will adjust based what I can really do.

I will try to post articles that are worth reading. I am neither a proper journalist reporting news nor do I have time to post many articles a day. I will post quite infrequently and less. The idea is to have few good quality posts. They must be different from the same reporting on all blogs.

I will be happy if the readers contribute to what they think was inappropriately reported. You can comment in the blog posts or send an email to techvenky@live.in about what article you want. The blog will become very successful if someone really genuine comments like company employees, contract manufacturers for electronic devices. I encourage the readers to bring people knowing facts to comment.

Thank you for reading my blog.