This is a big deal in Windows 7. The problem is Microsoft themselves were the biggest offenders in this area.  When I saw the MSN messenger doing the special balloon popup for the first time I was impressed with the quality of it. I did not realize at the that there would not be central place to disable such popups from all of the applpications that do this.

I am able to disable all balloon popups from MSN messenger, Outlook 2003/2007 and such from the application config. I completely stopped using Yahoo messenger after trying to stop it doing that popup thing for a while. These days I don’t even go there. No more yahoo messenger and toolbars for me.

Now the question is with this positive initiative, how is Microsoft going to get everyone to use a centralized API? Every frigging application and service uses their own way to display balloon popups. Some examples are Virus Scanners, FireFox, wireless driver applications, desktop search stuff all in addition to Microsoft software.

Good luck with the effort

Read the Windows 7 blog post here.

Do you know that a 32 bit Internet Explorer is the default in Windows XP 64 Bit Edition? Have you ever seen this?

What does this picture tell you? Consider the fact more than 90% of the world’s computers run Microsoft OS.

It tells me that

- Most of the jobless people use Mac and they scout the net for these polls.

- People are outright lying.

- People are trying to be politically correct or want to be part of the most vocal groups.

- People want to send a message to Microsoft while continuing to use an MS OS.

What you think?

Apple is too closed at this moment. They do have the capability to run on x86 architecture and they choose to keep it close. I would choose Linux over apple because Linux is completely open and is available for my own x86 machine I built from ground up. It can also run on any x86 computer that I can buy except probably the ones from Apple.

Pretty soon we will start seeing Vista like features and UI in all Linux distros. If you do not want to spend money on Vista, you probably can get the closest experience from those Linux distros.

Apple upgrades the OS almost once a year and the upgrade prices are around $100. I don’t think I want to spend that much money every year. Microsoft calls such upgrades as service packs and they are free. In the Linux world everything is free anyway.