October 2009

Microsoft's confusing online strategy

First there was msn.com, Microsoft’s first attempt to become a major online player. Users were told that this would become the one portal that they would need to go to for all their needs. At that time, it was a competition to portals like Netscape and AOL.

Then came along live.com..Microsoft’t second attempt to bring all it’s on-line properties into one place. And live had(s) some really good features (skydrive, sync, spaces). Esp the revamped hotmail, now called live mail. Life was good right..

No..Microsoft then decides to spend a couple hundred million dollars to launch and promote Bing, it’s new search engine.

So you might be wondering, where is the confusion!! msn.com is for content, live.com is for services and bing.com is the search engine. Makes sense right?? Well, for some reason, Microsoft decides to redirect anyone going to live.com (the site that was once promoted as the only home page you ever need to visit) to the bing site. What about average Joe, that just wants to get to his e-mail and goes to live.com? Well, he gets redirected to bing. And can he at least get a link to his old mail services from the bing home page? NO!! One would think that is common sense, but then I am not smarter than the marketing/product folks at Microsoft :). Or is this just a clever way to drive more traffic to bing to increase it’s exposure? I think that is the case. Take a look at the web ranking from Alexa, comparing bing to live.com and msn.com

Now, if you dig deeper into the clickstream data for bing.com (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bing.com#clickstream), you will see that roughly 70% of the traffic originating from live.com is going back to live.com (p.s. : This is a back of the napkin calculation 🙂 ).

Let’s compare that to the all knowing Google God’s way of doing things? If you go to Google.com and click on More at the top you can see links to all the services Google offers. And if you do the same thing on Bing.com, you don’t get the big picture of what Microsoft can offer..

All I am asking Microsoft is to put a link to http://home.live.com (the home page for all live services) on Bing.

Also, it would help Microsoft to start backing up all those millions of dollars in ad money with real content in it’s search engine. I used “kudithipudi” (yes.. I am pretty selfish 😉 ) as a search term in the major search engines and here is the ranking by the number of results

October 28, 2009 by Rantings Technology Uncategorized Web 0

Last half marathon of 2009

I ran the last (at least for now) half marathon of 2009 this weekend along with Jahnavi and Sri. We ran the Northface Endurance Challenge Half Marathon. The Northface Endurance Challenges are a collection of races which take place in the wilderness across the US throughout the year. The race in Wisconsin, held each October, is the easiest out of them. I ran this race last year and wanted to make this of my annual races.

My official time for the race was 3:01:09 (~31 minutes slower than my time from last year). So this makes it my slowest half marathon ever. How do I continue to keep breaking these slow records? 🙂 Well, by not practicing :).

While the run itself was painful (reminder for self.. never ever run a half marathon in the woods without practicing!!), it was fun to have Jahnavi accompany me on her first half marathon. She was a real trooper and kept me company throughout the race. I also took some videos of the race (that again tells you how poorly I prepared for the race 🙂 ). Here is a snippet from my last mile, I was delusional by this point 🙂

The obligatory pre and post race pictures 🙂

Pre Race

Post Race

October 26, 2009 by 2009 : Half Marathons Fun Running Sports Uncategorized 0

Overheard : Comment about weather

Comment from a lady coming out of a portable toilet, during the Northface Endurance Challenge Half Marathon this weekend

You know, it is cold, when you don’t want to come out of the porta-potti!!

It was 36 degrees!! 🙂

October 26, 2009 by Fun OverHeard Uncategorized 0

RECIPE : Palathalikalu

Recipe for Palathalikalu, a dessert from the Guntur region in the state of Andhra Pradesh in India. It is a classical dish and is usually made during the Sankranthi festival. This used to be a “must have” dish in my childhood, but it has become into a exotic dish in recent times. My brother in law made some recently and I was surprised, how easy it is to make the dish. Here is an attempt to share the knowledge :).

Ingredients :

  • Rice Flour (1.5 cups)
  • Brown Sugar (2 cups)
  • Milk (1/2 Gallons)
  • Butter (Ghee) (3 tablespoons)
  • Cashew Nuts (1/2 cup)
  • Cardamom Seeds (eilachi) (~15)

Preparation :

  • Knead the rice flour into a dough by adding 1 cup of brown sugar and some warm milk.
  • Add the rest of the brown sugar to the milk and bring it to a boiling point
  • Put the prepared dough in a cookie press and drop it into the milk as short noodles (use the cookie press template with round holes of ~0.25 inches in diameter)
  • Roast the cashews slightly in butter and them to the milk (along with the butter)
  • Crush the cardamom seeds and add them to the milk.
  • Let all the ingredients boil for ~15 minutes and you are ready to enjoy palathalikalu

Wasn’t that easy? :).. You can also add raisins to the dish based on your preference.

Visuals :

The Ingredients


The Cookie Press (Indian Version 🙂 )

Creating the noodles

Yummy!!


October 17, 2009 by Food Uncategorized 1