Imagine you are a simple businessman, who has his own website and you want to bring more traffic on your site. As you are familiar with Microsoft software for decades now, naturally you'll want to check out their online advertising system.

Here are some basic guidelines to make the experience less painful:

First pitfall - Don't even consider using Safari or any other browser except IE and Mozilla, adCenter website does not support other browsers. Their help center states that also Mac and Virtual machines are not supported.

microsoft adCenter Safari

Before he found out that all Mac browsers are banned, Alec, our creative director, spent several hours trying to get Microsoft adCenter to work with all of the browsers under Mac OS, including spoofing the user-agent. Futile, he assures me. You can't even view the System requirements page!

Microsoft adCenter system requirements for Mac users: unviewable!
The page loads forever!

What is Microsoft thinking here? I know they are PC centric, but making potential advertisers lives miserable by not allowing them access via their preferred platform? No wonder Microsoft's Live.com is in last place among the big three search engines.

After installing Mozilla or using IE you log in into setup pages. Using Medium security settings (one of the defaults) on IE will cause Second pitfall - Their site will popup a security warning on your IE, telling you that some parts of the web-page are not secure. Well if you are cautious person you'll probably shut down your browser and never use their service again. If not you have two choices, both bad:

adCenter on Internet Explorer 6

1. Lower your security settings
2. Click Yes each time you access a page, which will be more than a little annoying.

If you are not very technical, you'll probably need help with setting up ads in adCenter. If you try to do it on your own you'll probably end up spending many hours and you'll call for help in the end.

As a Mac user if you want to use Microsoft adCenter, you will need a copy of VirtualBox (our preferred virtual machine software at Foliovision, due to the absence of painful licensing routines - we do own Parallels have tested VMware but don't use them) or alternative virtual machine software, as well as a copy of Windows XP or 2000. Be careful with Windows 2000 - you may run into limitations there as well.

Even for professional Google AdWords campaign managers, Microsoft adCenter setup is very unpleasant in comparison to the smooth and user-friendly setup of Google's AdWords.

But once you do get onto adCenter and set up some ads, your chances of a successful campaign (low-volume of course, as there just isn't much traffic there) go way up.

Why?

First, it's so annoying to run a Microsoft adCenter campaign that most people can't be bothered for the volume of traffic involved. The time investment is just so much more efficient in Google AdWords.

Second, the sort of people so clued out as to use Microsoft Search / Live.com for their searches are likely to be either highly inexperienced internet users or totally straight dweebs who believe in Microsoft.

In either case, they are a public who are more likely to part with their money more quickly, as they lack the savvy or will to shop around more aggressively. I.e. good potential clients.

Our live testing on client campaigns supports this view. Microsoft Live campaigns are delivering a sale for 1/3 the cost of the same sale on Google AdWords.

So even Mac Users have grounds to swallow their distaste and start their virtual machines.

By Peter

Microsoft AdCenter Setup for Mac Users

Post from: Foliovision

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1. no right minded developer would ever let his computer get to this state.
2. no competent sysadmin would give employees the leeway to do this on the corporate network

Microsoft Windows System Tray Run Amok

Some good pointers and getting the invevitable Autorun out of there - which is something which will be useful for us at Foliovision:

Using Sysinternals' AutoRuns tool I had a look at all the different places that can be used for running software on logon or boot, and apart from all the (presumably) tiny gadgets and widgets I also found a lot of the ubiquitous pre-loading parts of all sorts of common software: Adobe's PDF Reader, Microsoft Office, something from iTunes and several others....

Nobody in their right minds would boot their machine in the morning and manually launch Acrobat Reader, all MS office apps and every application they might possible use that day just to have them ready. It is immediately apparent to even the novice user that this is probably not making the machine more responsive. 

But this is - almost - exactly what happens with all the auto run entries: You just don't see them on the screen immediately. So one thing I always do after installing any software is double-check whether it just registered some sort of auto run and if so remove it.

This is the result you are aiming for at the end:

Windows XP System Tray in Healthy State

Normally we do all this by hand, but I am going to try the Autoruns tool. It looks like a great way to speed up the cleaning process. Check Daniel's article for how to detox an XP computer without formatting the drive. Frankly, I think if I was going to go to this much trouble I would just move the data off and format and then back. There are too many things that can go wrong if you don't format the drive. But in these days of 500 GB standard hard drives, his tips willl become more valuable.

20080206 Update

I've found a great tool for cleaning out the start menu: Mike Lin's Startup Control Panel. Autoruns is wonderful but it is a bit overwhelming for non-programmer types.

Don't let the long name deceive you. Startup Control Panel is just 34 kb. As Mike says "like all my programs, it's very small and won't burden your system". I recommend the .exe version which you run only when you need to. The less clutter in the way of startup the better.

Startup Control Panel screenshot

BONUS TIP

While you are there, be sure to avoid Mike's Clipomatic. While attractive and including the functionality I'd like, Clipomatic has weird issues on XP which prevent it from functioning correctly.

M8 Free Clip

I've had to keep the Foliovision Windows boxes on the very ugly but functional M8 Free Clipboard. If anyone has any better ideas for a free or inexpensive multi-clipboard, I'm all ears.

By Alec

Detoxing a Windows Box: Getting Rid of Autorun Entries, Cleaning the System Tray

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On paper, it looks like it does. And very well.

Over at roughlydrafted.com, Daniel Eran Dilger gives a short history of how Microsoft, embraced, extended and extinguished through the eighties and nineties. In the end it turns, out Microsoft has paid more than $4.2 billion in antitrust and patent infringements, not counting the impending EU (European Union) settlement.

Legal System Catches Up a Decade Later.
Those cases between Apple and Microsoft established that the legal system wasn’t going to prevent or curtail criminal behavior in software development, but could only offer at best a review of copy infringement well after the damage was done....By the end of the 90s, reality reigned in on Microsoft and it began racking up a series of settlement obligations it was forced to pay to other victims of its copy-killing efforts and related anti-trust actions:

• Microsoft paid Caldera $275 million for its antitrust actions against DR-DOS.
• Microsoft recently settled with IBM in an antitrust suit involving OS/2 and IBM’s Lotus SmartSuite applications to the tune of $775 million.
• Microsoft paid Novell $539 million to settle its antitrust suit over the NetWare operating system, and Microsoft is still being sued by Novell over claims related to WordPerfect.
• Microsoft paid Palm over $23 million to settle an antitrust suit over the unfinished BeOS.
• Microsoft settled with Sun in an agreement that included $700 million in antitrust and $900 million in patent infringements, both related to Java.
• Microsoft paid AOL $750 million to settle the antitrust suit over Netscape.

Of course, Microsoft has earned far more than they paid out.

At the same time, one can say that Microsoft is more or less hamstrung now:

• the level of mistrust from other software developers is insurmountable
• the regulatory bodies in both the US and more particularly the EU are watching Microsoft's every move
• consumers don't trust them either
• open source continues to knock down walls
• legacy code support hinders good developers from writing clean apps
• their marriage with the devil of DRM (digital rights management) makes their OS unwieldy and alienates the consumer still further

We are running our offices on Open Office and couldn't be happier. There are some issues with shortcuts in the spreadsheet application (the one good product in the whole Microsoft portfolio is Excel).

But we have ten computers over three operating systems working in perfect sync, all on the same open source software with a little help from Google Apps. We are running some Windows XP, but mainly for testing and as a bridge to Linux (Linux is getting better and so are we - we are acquiring the skills necessary for a successful implementation: previous staff was familiar with Windows).

By Alec

Price of Antitrust: $4 billion and climbing

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