emails we get out of the blue stating "we're an all Linux shop but we want an Exchange server with Outlook licenses for compatibility reasons.
Compatibility with what? Sounds like BS to me.
Compatibility in communicating with other customers, I guess. I'm not in sales so I don't get to hear the full story. Believe me or don't, but I see these emails monthly.
No, the US buys it for its own (government) use. But it spends way more than France does on OOo disks. You complain that France spends such an amount on disks, but you don't seem to care about how much the US government spends.
I wasn't complaining about anything. I was stating a fact. I don't live in France or America so I really don't care what those governments spend their money on.
Don't google apps make extensive use of open office in the backend?
No, it uses its own open formats.
Microsoft is marginally worried about Openoffice in some geographies (mainly France where the government freely gives out OOo disks at the taxpayers' expense)
As opposed to the US, which buys Microsoft Office disks at the taxpayers' expense. And how much does an OOo disk cost? The price of CD-R?
Not sure I understand your point. Are you saying the US government distributes MS Office for free to its citizens like France does with OpenOffice?
Yeah. Even it if was possible, which I doubt, it would still be a BAD THING (TM). It nullifies the only real advantage PCs have over consoles (modability and independent games), you lose the concept of owning a game...
OnLive doesn't nullify anything - it enables gamers who are below the bar of entry to play high-end games on their current hardware. Watch the video in TFA. The presenter plays Crysis on a Mac netbook and on an iphone. The customer who does this will not care about modding; he'll just be thanking his lucky stars he can play this game without having to invest in an entirely new platform.
This looks to me like a unique platform with its own advantages and shortcomings. It's not going to be all things to all people, it's a means to play games from multiple platforms on any dumb terminal.
I work for a reseller of Microsoft (and other vendors') software and have attended many MS presentations about Office vs. OOo vs. Google Apps. Microsoft is marginally worried about Openoffice in some geographies (mainly France where the government freely gives out OOo disks at the taxpayers' expense) but has a clear objection handling routine for everywhere else. Basically, Microsoft urges companies to to try Openoffice so that they can learn how dated and incompatible it is with the business world in general. They also push organizations to try Evolution instead of Outlook for the same reasons.
You'd be surprised how many emails we get out of the blue stating "we're an all Linux shop but we want an Exchange server with Outlook licenses for compatibility reasons. How much for a server and 100 seats of Office?"
Anyway, Microsoft's real fear right now is Google Apps. Everybody, even Google, knows how inferior Apps is to Office, but the sexy Google name greases the runway to bring this cloud-based office solution into more and more workplaces. Microsoft is fighting tooth and nail to prevent every single switch from Office to Apps. Openoffice is hardly on Microsoft's radar compared to Google.
Google is using target's search engine to run searches and doesn't know how to interpret the string "We could find no matches"?
Not spam. Bad coding at Google.
Google isn't using Target's search engine to run searches, it just doesn't know the difference between a search engine results page and a page with actual content on it. I agree that the fault is with Google, but this is some bad press for Target as well.
People are linking to an old product URL (Target sometimes has humorous products on their site), which Target redirects to a search page when they no longer carry the product. Google indexes this redirect and treats both URLs as the roughly the same (you'll notice that the links you find above point to a product URL, not the search result URL).
Good sleuthing there. It's a clever feature to run a search on similar products if the desired one is not found. It may or may not have been intentional for Target to pollute search results with garbage. However, Google's mission statement is "To organize the world's information and make it useful", and failed retailer SERPs are not information nor useful.
This is hardly a new issue, though. Try looking for walkthroughs for a video game that has just been released and you'll find many SERPs full of "game123 walkthrough" links, only to click them and find a page with the content "be the first to submit your walkthrough." Misleading search users is a failure of Google's mission statement.
The query you want to run is:
[blockquote]site:target.com "could not find matches"[/blockquote]
This produces 604,000 results. Definitely black hat seo spam. Google needs to either filter "/search?" and "/ref=sr" or they need to penalize Target like they would for any other spammer. Target is a large American retailer so Google probably won't do anything at all.
"Experience has proved that some people indeed know everything." -- Russell Baker
