Chris Betcher

I started using a personal computer in 1982. It's now 2006, and for the majority of the past 24 years I've used computers running some version of Microsoft Windows. My first experience with Windows started with version 3.0, then 3.1, WfW, 95, 98, 98SE, ME, 2000 and XP. On the server side I've used Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Server 2003. I have also been a Microsoft Office trainer, hold a Microsft Office Specialist certification and have even been a technical writer for Microsoft. Professionally, I'm currently responsible for managing a Windows network that encompasses 6 Windows servers and around 300 Windows XP workstations. You could say that I have invested a good deal of time and energy into Microsoft products over the years. So when the time came recently to buy myself a new computer, it may seem surprising that I bought myself a Mac. Yes, a Mac. It's not my first Apple. I started my love affair with personal computers on an old Apple IIe, back in the ...

When I first saw Google's interface for search a few years ago it was like a breath of fresh air. It wasn't cluttered with crap like every other major search engine seemed to be at the time. Yahoo! and whatever other search engines were around back then took a portal approach and jammed as much stuff on the screen as they could fit, whereas Google's search tool was elegant in its simplicity. I'm sure this elegance is a major reason behind its ongoing success. That, and the fact that it would actually find what you wanted 99% of the time, and sites couldn't buy their way into the top rankings. For much the same reason I've not been a big fan of web photo storage sites like Photobucket or even Flickr, because of the amount of clutter and crap that goes along with them. I have a Flickr account but rarely use it because it's just too, I dunno, inelegant... So I was very pleased to have just discovered Google's Picasa Web Albums , a free photo storage and...

Just as a follow on to that last post, it's interesting to compare the marketing strategies of Microsoft and Apple, especially when it comes to the release of new products. Microsoft takes the hype-it-up-early approach - witness such products as Origami, Vista and Zune. Apple on the other hand are very tight-lipped about new products and essentially say nothing until a new product is announced by His Steveness at an event like MacWorld or WWDC. This latter approach by Apple always seems to cause the rumour mills to work overtime with speculation and guessing at just what might emerge, but the actual product releases often exceed consumer expectation, or at least are still full of surprises. On the other hand, Microsoft's hype-in-advance approach seems to build enormous consumer expectation around their products but it is often dissapointingly not met when the crunch comes. With both Vista and Zune still out on the horizon somewhere, it will be interesting to watch and see jus...

I read an interesting, albeit quite old, post by a guy called kstaken called " Has Microsoft lost its Marketing Touch? " about Microsoft's track record of failure to capitalise on its own marketing hype. I found it interesting because it talks particularly about the Tablet PC. Back in the day, I was actually quite involved with the marketing of the Tablet PC when I was working with Microsoft Australia's case study program. As a technical writer it was my job to write business case studies on how Microsoft technologies were being implemented for success in the corporate and educational arenas. Just before the tablets were released I had the job of getting all the rapid deployment program (pre-release) stories together, writing all the case studies, and even travelling with the film crew as they made short promo pieces about the tablet technology. When the day arrived for the release it was with much fanfare, a big press event in Sydney, and then... nothing. Well v...

I just finished reading an interesting book about blogging, titled Who Let the Blogs Out , but a guy called Biz Stone . I'm still wondering what the name Biz might be short for, but regardless, I did find it quite an engaging read. Biz Stone was a very early blogger, was involved in created Xanga, has written a couple of books on the subject and now works at Google helping run Blogger. I guess that makes his opinions worth hearing, purely just based on his credentials. The overriding message I took from his book was that the true worth of blogging cannot be appreciated on a small scale. A single blog post, or even a single blog, is not what it's all about. Blogging gets it's power from becoming a large scale ecosystem, a thriving community of people all cross linking to each other, creating connections and networks of ideas. The power of blogging is way more than the sum of its individual parts, and to gauge the power of this new medium it needs to be seen in the light ...

I figured that since I was enjoying the whole blogging experience during our teaching exchange to Canada, I would start another blog, this time focussed on matters educational/technological. I plan to use it mainly to air my thoughts and ideas about the uses of technology, especially with regard to education, but pretty much about whatever I feel like writing about. I can see a lot of potential for the uses of blogs, wikis and podcasts in the educational environment, but it will be interesting to see exactly how it all pans out. I did convert a largely textbook task into a podcast project last semester, and I think it worked out ok, but this semester I am going to try to push things a bit further. If you have any ideas about interesting uses of Web 2.0 technology in the classroom it would be great to hear about them...