I’m going to be spending this week in San Francisco, at the Game Developer’s Conference. Anyone reading this who happens to be attending, I’d love to meet up with you to talk about games. There are a lot of people here I’m excited to meet in person for the first time.
For those of you who cannot attend, or who are wondering how to reach me, you can always follow my Twitter account at @Malgayne. Hope to see you there!
So I’ve just spent most of the afternoon trying to organize my digital self. It’s kind of the online equivalent of cleaning out your desk. I’ve consolidated all of my emails down into one gmail account, updated all my passwords, brushed up my LinkedIn and my facebook…all that’s left now is to try to fix up my contacts.
This leads to my question—I have an iPhone, and my business uses Microsoft Exchange. My contacts and calendar are stored there. My iPhone (where I keep my contacts most times) automatically syncs my contacts from the office Exchange server. However, any changes I make on my iPhone are automatically updated to the server. This means none of my contacts are stored anywhere ELSE but there—meaning my mother’s home phone number is stored on my office exchange server, and ONLY there. Aside from the obvious privacy concern, if I were to lose access to my office’s server—due to a technical problem, or a change in career—suddenly I wouldn’t have any of my contacts anymore.
So, I’d love to import those into the Address Book app on my computer, or store them on Google Contacts, or even just keep them saved on my iPhone. Problem is I can’t figure out how to get an EXPORT of those contacts off of the Exchange server without an installation of Outlook.
Anyone got any ideas?
According to Gizmodo, all PCs sold in the new Microsoft Store will be sold completely free of “bloatware”—all those obnoxious free trials and antivirus nags that seem to come with all new Windows PCs these days.
The author of the original article praises Microsoft appropriately for this, and then (interestingly) goes on to beg Microsoft to use their industry clout to urge other computer manufacturers to institute similar policies.
Now, don’t get me wrong. This is the sort of thing I encourage, we’d all be better off if the more unscrupulous software companies found it just a little more difficult to prey upon the foolish. But I think most readers can see Microsoft’s real angle here—if you can go to Microsoft and get a sparkling clean, crap-free PC, then you’re that much less likely to get one from Dell or Gateway.
Microsoft is trying to set themselves up as an elite computer company, an interesting change of stance from their earlier, more conventional status. I think we may start to see more Microsoft exclusive offers—special software packages, etc. Who knows? Microsoft may even try and set themselves up as a hardware manufacturer. And considering how the hardware on the Xbox is performing, I’d be interested to see if they can do it…
I'm Casey Monroe, Community Analyst at Zynga, and former Head of Community and Content for Wowhead.com. These are my thoughts, and those of my closest friends, on the game industry. Opinions expressed here belong to the author alone.
Email me at casey@alpha-build.net.
