What’s New in Microsoft Land: 11 – 15 February, 2008 - Love should have filled the air

Yahoo! put an end to all the speculations around Microsoft’s unsolicited bid on Monday. The answer was a big no, thank you, and the motivation was that the Sunnyvale-based company’s board considered that the offer greatly undervalued Yahoo! The proposal of $44.6 billion, or $31 per share, was forwarded to the Internet giant on the first of February.

The rejection couldn’t go unanswered, so Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO issued a statement saying, among others, that "A Microsoft-Yahoo! combination will create a more effective company that would provide greater value and service to our customers. Furthermore,
the combination will create a more competitive marketplace by establishing a compelling number two competitor for Internet search and online advertising. The Yahoo! response does not change our belief in the strategic and financial merits of our proposal. As we have said previously, Microsoft reserves the right to pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo!’s shareholders are provided with the opportunity to realize the value inherent in our proposal."

The last phrase gave birth to a lot of controversy regarding what all of those "necessary steps" might be, a hostile takeover being what everybody instantly thought about. Nobody dared compete with Microsoft head on regarding the Yahoo! deal, but several companies reportedly had some talks with the Internet company about eventual alliances that would save Jerry Yang’s firm from being forced to sell. Google was the first, but its interest won after realizing that regulators would not allow it to happen and AOL came second, but that was mostly the rumor mill working its magic. The most serious of all was News Corp, and messages being sent back and forward between Murdoch and Yang were reported in the press.

Tuesday, the Redmond-based company officially confirmed that Windows 7 and Office 14 would not be confined to desktops only. Eyeing the tremendous growth of its online counterparts from Google in particular and some other companies, Microsoft decided to implement its own branded strategy with Software plus Services.

"On the consumer side, though, our work will be anchored in a few core things. Windows and Office need to embrace the Internet and go live, and we’ve got good efforts underway and in market for both Windows Live and Office Live," CEO Steve Ballmer said after, the previous day, Chairman Bill Gates had underlined the importance of blending the desktop-based Office System with services in the clouds.

A file sharing program
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The peer to peer copyrighted file sharing scandal that has been roaming the Internets (© George W. Bush) for the past month or so, with renewed vigor, convinced Microsoft to conduct a survey among students between the seventh and tenth grade, and its results found that most of them were not aware of the laws in state. Wednesday was educational day for the Redmond-based company, so it launched an interactive web site, http://www.mybytes.com for the young to develop their own intellectual property and assign usage rights, by mixing music online to create a custom riff for downloading as a ringtone, according to Press Pass.

49 percent of the respondents said that they were not familiar with the laws and the penalties for such crimes, while only 11 percent admitted to knowing "very well" what the regulations were. The rest answered that they were aware that illegal downloading wasn’t a good thing and said that some rules were clear, but rather in a big haze.

"Widespread access to the Internet has amplified the issue of intellectual property rights among children and teens," said Sherri Erickson, global manager, Genuine Software Initiative for Microsoft for Press Pass. "This survey provides more insight into the disparity between IP awareness and young people today and highlights the opportunity for schools to help prepare their students to be good online citizens."

Valentine’s Day didn’t deliver on the love, but it compensated with the best known surrogate: promotion. Not one, but fourteen, and all at the top. It was the 14th after all, so they kind of had to go with that number.

These came to reflect the company’s commitment to maintain and furthermore built a strong and dynamic management team across its unique portfolio of businesses. "Along with attracting world-class talent from outside the company, one of my top priorities is growing Microsoft’s existing leadership team. […] Each of these executives will play a critical role in leading Microsoft into the future. Today’s promotions are a result of their ability to think strategically on a global scale, the respect they’ve earned from their peers, customers and partners, and their significant contributions to the company," said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft.

The seven executives that were promoted to senior vice president are Chris Capossela, Kurt DelBene, Antoine Leblond, Andy Lees, Satya Nadella, S. Somasegar and Bill Veghte, and the seven executives promoted to corporate vice president are Walid Abu-Habda, Brad Brooks, Larry Cohen, Steve Guggenheimer, Scott Guthrie, Roz Ho and Brian Tobey. Best of luck to them all!


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On Friday, news came out about long time security giants Symantec, McAfee and Trend Micro being bested by Microsoft’s alternative, the lesser known Forefront, in terms of performance. It was widely less resources consuming, using 60 percent of what Symantec threw at it, the AntiVirus Corporate Edition 10.2. Compared to the same product, Microsoft Forefront proved to be able to deliver 13 times faster boot times and more than twice greater speed at quick scans.

This study was conducted to test Forefront Client Security’s system performance compared
to the three leading competitive products. Testing was carried out during April and May 2007. The study shows that Microsoft Forefront Client Security’s results were favorable, compared to those of two of the leading competitors. It uses few system resources on servers and is comparable to the leading competitor in scanning times on both older and newer machines, and also when scanning .cab files. West Coast Labs also found that when malware was discovered, Microsoft’s bandwidth usage on clients was the lowest of all the four products," revealed a member of Microsoft Switzerland.

Windows With A Pinch of Mac

I have always been keen on that "dock" feature on Mac systems. Besides the fact that it looks awfully good, it is also an extremely useful component of the desktop. Compared to its Windows counterpart, the taskbar seems stiff and inflexible and no matter how hard you try making it look fresher by changing themes or applying different styles, the results won't even come close to Mac dock.

Fortunately, this can be ported to Windows with the use of a simple to use third party components that try to replicate Mac dock's detail and add some new functions at the same time. The applications to achieve this second taskbar on Windows are not that numerous and, contrary to any expectation, some of them also come as freebies.

RocketDock from PunkSoftware is one of the best solutions if you are trying to replicate Mac dock on windows. Well, it does not look exactly like the original, but preserves the general lines and brings some new options and features to impose with flexibility. The installer is just a little over 6MB large and installation goes nice and smooth as all you have to do is keep pressing that "Next" button and accept the License Agreement. The only complication appears when you have to select whether to place an icon on the desktop or not.

By default, RocketDock will place itself in the upper part of the screen and will incorporate some locations in Windows (Computer, Network, Documents, Music, Pictures, Control Panel) as well as shortcuts for application settings, Recycle Bin or the link for donating to the developers and to Punklabs' home page. If you really like the original setting, then I suggest you lock all the items as dragging them outside the dock causes their deletion and there is no way to restore all default icons automatically.

However, if you lose the original configuration of the dock, there is an easy way to add the shortcuts to the dock or simply place your own locations there with a simple drag and drop from the file manager you use. For more comfort, RocketDock allows personalization of the shortcut either by using one of the default icons it comes with (which are beautifully drawn) or using one of your own (check Icons folder in the installation location). Going online can get you more icons.

For changing a shortcut's icon just access "Icon Settings" window from its context menu and choose the desired image. Here's the place to make other changes as well, such as defining the target to refer to when clicked (which can be anything from the location of a file or folder to a Web location), setting up optional parameters for the target app, set the working directory for the application, define the state of the window when app is started, etc.

RocketDock provides a set of default elements that can be added at any time and, among these, there is the shortcut for Settings panel, separators, Recycle Bin icon or RocketDock analog Clock.

Setting up the application to perform at its best and yet affect system resources as little as possible is piece of cake and you will discover how to make the most of the dock. The application can start with Windows and, among its "talents", we count the capability of minimizing all windows to the dock. This practically renders Windows
taskbar obsolete (which is no biggie), but there is a problem with apps that minimize to system tray and which will also go to the dock. Or you can use both the dock and the taskbar to gain some space: minimized apps will go to the dock, while all the others available on the screen are accessible from the taskbar.

A very important feature is marking running apps. This way, you'll always know which applications are started. The mark is very simple and consists of a little black down arrow placed above the icon of the running app (just like in Mac dock).

For preventing any accident that could result in losing some icons in the dock, the program offers the possibility of locking the items so that nothing can affect them.

In Icons menu of Settings window, you can make adjustments concerning the opacity level (between 50%-100%) of RocketDock (live preview is enabled), enable the icons to become opaque when zoom is on them. Adjusting their size (all original icons are 256x256) is a very handy option as it extends the number of items that can be incorporated in the dock.

Visual effects are included in the settings, giving the possibility of selecting the hover effect over the docklets: Bubble (pretty nice), Plateau, Flat or None are all the options at your disposal. My favorite is Bubble, but, if you're not looking for something fancy, you can remove all effect and turn RocketDock into a differently looking taskbar.

RocketDock developers did a very good job with the software and also included positioning options. Thus, the dock can sit on either sides of the screen with absolutely no problem, doing the same great job both vertically as well as horizontally. Where you settle it is just a matter of personal taste (my vote goes for upper part or right hand side of the screen).

If you're thinking that having the same theme is boring, then there is no issue with using RocketDock as the program comes with a set of 30 different themes to choose from (live preview is available in this case as well) and you get more online. More than this, making it look more stylish extends to customizing the font of icon labels, apply colored shadows, outline it or set outline and shadow opacity levels.

Making the dock less intrusive is actually a snap thanks to its capacity to autohide. But here's a piece of advice: do not remove all the icons and set it to autohide as you will have a tough time finding the dock. At least, take some precautions and permit minimization of applications to dock for easy find. By the way, the time to autohide can be user defined and goes from 0ms to 1000ms in a a drag of a slider.

Don't be shy and make all the settings you want as the software proofed against messing things up by allowing you to revert to its defaults. But this does not mean that all initial icons will be reinstated.

Bottom line is that RocketDock looks incredible in Vista environment and proves to be a stable launcher equipped with just enough options not to turn setting it up into a painful effort. It uses acceptable computer resources (during our testing 14.5MB of RAM was about the average). However, there are several issues with some applications under certain conditions (read "The Bad" section), but on the overall RocketDock gets high scoring.


The Good

The look is incredible and integrates perfectly in Vista environment extending the default Windows taskbar, thus providing an easy management of shortcuts.

You can enjoy the benefits of autohide function which leaves absolutely no mark on the screen indicating the position of the dock (hint – it's always going to be at half the distance of your screen).

There are plenty of customization options for both the docklets and the way the bar looks, both through the myriad of themes you can change to and the opacity settings provided.

The Bad

Minimizing windows to dock may cause some issues with applications set to minimize to system tray. These apps will be available both in system tray and in the dock space and sometimes launching them from RocketDock may not work as expected (they would minimize to taskbar but not make themselves available on the desktop). But this glitch can be bypassed if the launch is performed from system tray directly.

I wish there was a warning when deleting the last item in the dock space as removing all elements and using Blank theme is a dreadful combination causing a bit of trouble finding the menu for adjusting the settings (hint – keep right clicking right in the middle for finding its context menu).

The dock does not automatically shrink when screen limit is exceeded due to adding docklets (but you can adjust this from its settings).

The Truth

RocketDock is absolutely free of charge and, during our testing, it behaved magnificently. There are minor glitches that hopefully will be fixed in a future version and you can run into trouble only if you really want to (playing hide and seek with the dock was pretty fun but educational as well).

It proves to be an excellent solution for extending the taskbar and adding more functionality to Windows. Plus the plethora of themes help styling it up and comply to your frill standards.