There’s a lot being written right now about Microsoft’s giving Vista PCs to bloggers, and the ethics of the bloggers taking them. If you’ve managed to miss it, there are a few links at the bottom of this post that you can read, but frankly, I’m already tired of the whole subject, and imagine that many other people are too.
But since I’m no longer averse to stealing good ideas (way too many of mine have been lifted), and since we’re trying to drum up more activity on this blog (both posts and comments), we’re going to start a monthly giveaway to people who comment on the posts.
Here’s how it will work:
- Around the first of each month, we’ll give away one of our titles (recipient’s choice, and you can choose one of our suites, so you’d essentially get 3 or 4 programs) to someone who has commented on any of the posts in the previous month. People who have all the software they want can instead get some of our swag, which right now is still just stylus pens, though I’m thinking hard about getting something else.
- We’ll pick the winner each month using a random number that we map to the comment IDs.
- To be eligible, comments just need to be legitimate, and somehow related to the original post.
To help this along, I’ll encourage everyone here to post a lot more, so there’s more content to respond to.
And, as promised, here are the links to a few of the articles about the Microsoft giveaway:
I Started Something
Jason Dunn
Ed Bott
Joel on Software
There’s a lot more that’s been written about this, but starting with the above will probably lead you there.
I recently installed IE7, and for a lot of reasons, didn’t like it much. I’ve never managed to get along well with Firefox, but after spending some time with Opera, found that it worked pretty well for me. There’s a lot it doesn’t do – I do keep IE7 and Firefox both available as well, but I decided to use Opera as my primary browser. Given that Opera imported my IE bookmarks and that I only ever let IE save the passwords I didn’t care much about (things that I don’t really consider very secret, like my logins to sites where I have to register just to read an article), I figured the hardest part about converting would be retraining my fingers.
Maybe it’s the holiday spirit, or leftover giddiness from the release of eWallet 5.0 last week, but I’ve decided today would be a great day to release another new product – and this time, it’s free!
When I announced our open beta I promised that I’d let everyone know how it went. I mean this is a ‘behind the scenes at Ilium Software’ blog after all! I’ll start by saying that overall, this was a great experience. We got some really excellent insights into how people reacted to changes, caught a number of bugs, and found out how folks liked the new features. Without question I plan to run additional Open Betas in the future.
That’s right – eWallet 5.0 has been released! You may have heard us talking lately about eWallet 5.0 in the open beta, or maybe you even downloaded the beta version yourself, but now – the real deal is here!