Rui Nunes's thoughts and ideas

I'm the Country Manager of MediaResponse™ Group, responsible for developing our major online marketing brands to evolve at the Portuguese Market.

My primary goal with this blog is to be of value to you with my experience and insights as well to be open to your questions and different approaches. Feel free to ask me anything! ;-)

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Searching Microsoft

Obox Signature Series

What Can't I Buy Just What I Want?

Office_2011

I'm really sick of it. Why can't I just be able to buy what I want instead of having to buy the entire suite that I won't be using?
This makes me crazy and I think its the main reason I like App Stores so much.

I give you an example. I want to buy the Outlook from Microsoft Office for Mac, but it's bundled in their suite. And it's even for the Business Suite which i way pricier.
So, their best product in my modest opinion is the main reason for people to buy their business suite. Otherwise, the normal user just needs to buy the Home&Student version, but if it needs a great integrated messaging and scheduling system like Outllook it needs to buy the entire pack.
Ridiculous. Well, I didn't worked for me. I really just need the iWork suite from Apple (which is way cheaper) and the Mail.app do the service.

There's no doubt about it, the Office Suite from Microsoft is way better than iWork from Apple, but for the normal user it doesn't pay. My professional work is based in email messages (a lot), Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver and so on.
So, the Office tools need to be user friendly and quite stylish and iWork works just fine (pardon the double speech). 

So, sorry Microsoft, but I won't pay that price just for having the Outlook. Even if it is to a business. To explain better, it won't add so much productivity to justify that price. Now if you imagine that you need to buy to everyone in the office is just crazy. 
The Mac Store from Apple can be a great treat to get interesting apps for a nice price. Hummm... now, I like that!

Survey: Windows 7 Early Adopters 'Very Satisfied'

March 31, 2010

A new survey shows that early adopters are overall quite happy with their switch to Windows 7.

The survey, conducted by market research firm Forrester Research, found that U.S. online consumers who identified themselves as early adopters and had purchased Windows 7 were satisfied with the move overall.

Of the 4,559 consumers polled, 490 of them had acquired Windows 7 either with a new PC or as an upgrade to an existing PC. The survey was conducted between Dec. 22 and Dec. 28. Windows 7's consumer debut was Oct. 22.

"We found that consumers who adopted Windows 7 in Q4 were generally very satisfied with their Windows 7 PCs," Forrester analyst JP Gownder, one of the authors of the report, said in a blog post Monday.

The survey found that, of Windows 7 early adopters, 86 percent are satisfied overall, as compared to 74 percent of all Windows users in the sample.

Sales of Windows 7 have been robust to date. In early March, Microsoft spokesperson Brandon LeBlanc posted an entry to the Windows Team blog stating that the company had already sold some 90 million copies of Windows 7.

The Forrester report underlines those numbers. For instance, Windows 7 users ranked the new operating system several percentage points ahead of Windows users overall in categories ranging from ease of installation to reliability to how much it costs. In the category of speed, Windows 7 was nearly 10 percent ahead of other versions of Windows.

The survey found that, while 45 percent of Windows 7 users obtained the system with a new PC, almost an equal number -- 43 percent bought it as an upgrade to an earlier version of Windows. That's unusual but there are good reasons for that upgrade behavior.

"In short, Windows 7 is a thinner client program than was Windows Vista, meaning that it works well on older hardware configurations," Gownder's blog post said.

"The rise of netbooks, the physical assets of multi-PC households, and an attachment by many consumers to their Windows XP machines all contributed to the need for a sleeker, thinner Windows OS, which Windows 7 delivered," Gownder added.

Although Forrester's survey was focused on consumer purchasing behavior, frequently that behavior is a harbinger of how a new version of Windows is ultimately accepted by enterprise IT shops -- or not.

Some pundits have already projected that many corporate IT shops will eschew their usual 12 to 18 month waiting period after a new Windows release and, instead, move to Windows 7 before the release of Service Pack 1 (SP1).

Microsoft recently did begin talking about what will be included in Windows 7 SP1, although it didn't give any inkling as to the date for its release.

Two weeks ago, a survey of nearly 1,000 IT decision makers by market research firm Dimensional Research found that 58 percent plan to deploy Windows 7 before the end of 2010.

Stuart J. Johnston is a contributing writer at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.

via itmanagement.earthweb.com

This is awesome. I'm getting all office computers with Windows 7 ASAP. Finally a good product. This is a good alternative to the stable Mac OS X Snow Leopard for what I've heard of.

Here's What Microsoft And Apple Need To Do To Beat Google In Search

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via businessinsider.com

Look at this awesome chart from Goldman Sachs about what people really want on a search engine, specially on a mobile platform. This says a lot.

And my migration to Mac is greater than ever. Now, Exchange services better on Mail.app than Entourage!

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These few days, my company corporate e-mail services have changed their Exchange Services Provider and the new one doesn't have Mac Support. They don't work with Macs and don't have special configurations for Macintosh.
This could demand my re-migraton to Microsoft eco-system all over again, right?
Actually, NO!

Why? Because, the problem was not about Exchange configurations. It was the Microsoft Entourage configurations necessities that didn't worked with what our provider has given us.
So, what did I to solve this thing? I've opened my Mail.app which I already used for personal e-mail accounts and create my business account on the fly.
It was not complex, it even asked few data than the Outlook for Windows version. And it worked perfectly. Now I have my e-mails being handled more effectively by Mail.app, my Contacts synced with AddressBook.app and my Appointments all sync with iCal.app.
It's tremendous, even better and easily work with Exchange Server in a Snow Leopard environment.

Now, I don't use Entourage anymore, reason why I had bought Office for Mac before (they didn't sold it in separately in my country). So, when I need to upgrade or whatever, I just pass to iWork from Mac and that's it.

Microsoft shouldn't be worried. I'm just a single user. Just one person. They still have the OS and Software leadership... don't they?

ATTENTION: The trademarks, logos and other mentions to corporate or other, are propriety of their respective owners. Their mentions were for descriptive example and I can remove them if asked by the respective owners.

The Danger of Being the Company Star

Star
I'm reading the news about the almost certain new Apple's netbook tablet as well as the possible lack of health of Steve Jobs and I can't stop wondering about how can a company's superstar be so directly influential.

Obviously, until today, Steve Jobs is the human face of Apple. Those few keynotes presented by Phillip Schiller was lacking the magic and the brilliant communication of their CEO. He's charismatic and has the status of a superstar in their medium.
So, is this good for the company?
It went very well for Apple so far, but these news about his health made some doubts about the company's future. The investors are trembling every time some news about it is brought up. And people forget the fact that Apple is more than one person. The products are made by several thousands excellent professionals.

Same thing occurred when Bill Gates went absent from Microsoft. And still is connected as Chairman.
When a company or a brand is completely connected to one charismatic and famous person, it can be very good when things go well, but this umbilical string can be very damaging when some misfortune occurs to that particular person. Imagine that instead of Jobs or Gates it was Bernie Madoff, or even more recently Tiger Woods. Their actions can be decisive for their businesses.

Imagine the responsibility. Imagine that Sir Richard Bronson of Virgin International went rogue. So, the question is... the benefits of having a star as a leading commander of a company are more valuable than the potential losses from their actions or misfortunes?

By the way: I enjoy not being a star. ;-)