Computer Support Blog

With technologies changing very fast, popular companies absolutely need the best possible advertising to survive.  In fact, the corporate strategy that a company devises to survive changes or remain dominant in a given field may be useless if they are not able to properly express that strategy to their customer base.  With the move toward digital media (downloads) over physical media (DVD, Blu-Ray discs), companies like Netflix have been struggling to adapt.  Or, rather, Netflix would be struggling were it not for the effective efforts of Leslie Kilgore!

Leslie Kilgore is the Chief Marketing Officer of Netflix and she has served the company since 2000.  Kilgore is credited with much of the success of Netflix in terms of winning over the American people on the concept of a mail-delivery DVD service.  As Chief Marketing Officer, Kilgore was responsible for the advertising campaigns that launched Netflix into the collective consciousness and made Netflix into a serious competitor to traditional video rental chains, like Blockbuster Video.  Through her tireless efforts, Netflix surpassed Blockbuster as the primary video rental service in the United States!

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Internet humor is, arguably, an acquired taste and it is certainly dominated by youth!  Because young people tend to be fickle, staying with something only so long as it is trendy, many Internet humor sites and Internet humor phenomena are not enduring.  They rise up, the novelty of their form of humor captivates an audience and then the audience dissipates and the contributors go on to the next big thing.  One of the real exceptions to that cycle came from the creative mind of Sherrod DeGrippo.

Sherrod DeGrippo is the creator of Encyclopaedia Dramatica and, before you go looking for it, don’t bother; Encyclopaedia Dramatica is no longer on the Internet.  The site closed down in 2011, but what makes Sherrod DeGrippo so impressive is that she almost singlehandedly held together the perverse, edgy and often disturbing Encyclopaedia Dramatica for seven years.  That makes Encyclopaedia Dramatica one of the biggest successes in Internet free speech and Internet humor yet.

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We all know Google, Bing, and Yahoo are the most popular search engines. Why, when there are hundreds of other possible choices, do people choose these three? Maybe there is a better choice out there, but how will you know? How do you choose a good search engine?

According to comScore’s latest press release, Bing now controls 15.1% of the market share for search engines in the United States. Yahoo, which dipped to 14.5% in December, has been decreasing in market share for quite some time now. Google, unsurprisingly, reigns supreme with 65.9% market share. If Bing continues to rise in popularity though, it may eat slowly away at that impressive number.

But what makes one better than another? Why did Bing finally surpass Yahoo? Why is Google the most popular?

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There are few job sectors where women are overlooked for hiring, promotion, and leadership roles compared to their male counterparts as in the technology sector.  Despite intense gains in social equality in the legislative arena, concerted efforts to provide computers specifically to impoverished girls, and rising test scores for girls in math and science, jobs in the technology sector have remained scarce for women.  But because the Internet has helped women to network, the barriers to women in the technology sector may be broken down.  If they are, it will be in no small part thanks to Carolyn Leighton.

Carolyn Leighton earned her bachelor’s degree in human development at Pacific Oaks College.  In her studies there, she became passionate about women’s rights, specifically in the workplace.  An expert on the gender gap and the glass ceiling, Leighton’s studies revealed to her a profound inequity in the treatment of women in the technology sector.  As a businesswoman, Leighton was baffled at how slowly women were making progress in companies responsible for computer development and electronics manufacturing.  Having had several successful businesses since college, Leighton was building Criterion Research when she conceived of the International Network of Women in Technology.

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Internet social networks are still a relatively new phenomenon and as a result, programmers, businesspeople and the public do not yet fully understand the nature and impact of them.  For sure, Myspace, Facebook, and Google+ have all grown and attracted people to them, but there are few people who understand why.  To unravel this great mystery of why people use Internet social networks and how to retain users, there is Paul Adams.

Paul Adams is fascinated by sociology and studied social media on the Internet as it developed.  Adams holds a Bachelor’s degree in Design in Industrial Design and he earned his M.S. in Interactive Media.  Armed with those credentials, he initially entered the workforce as an industrial designer.  As a free agent, Paul Adams designed car interiors for Faurecia and he designed the vacuum that became Dyson’s best-selling vacuum in Japan!

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With all of the rapidly-changing aspects of computer technology, it can be very hard to keep up.  Indeed, for those who are casual computer users without real investment in the computer hardware industry, it was not so long ago that the USB port became the dominant interface port.  Suddenly, when you upgraded your computer and wanted to use your favorite old keyboard or mouse, you discovered there were no ports in the back of your new computer for it!  Like compact discs to records, the USB port has pretty much eliminated most specialized ports on computers.  In the world of USB ports, USB 3.0 is slowly creeping up in popularity.

But, you might be wondering, just what is USB 3.0?

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Internet videos have made overnight celebrities.  Most of the viral videos that have launched obscure people into the collective consciousness of popular culture have resulted in a very fast rise and fall for the subject of the video.  In fact, there are very few subjects of Internet viral videos who have had real success following their peak popularity in a viral video.  One of the few to actually have a successful career following their viral video’s inevitable flameout is Amber Lee Ettinger.

Amber Lee Ettinger grew up as a dedicated student who was deeply interested in fashion.  After high school, she was accepted to New York City’s prestigious Fashion Institute of Technology, where she began to study fashion and clothing design.  At that point in her life, she wanted to be an entrepreneur and design her own clothing line.  After a brief stint on the beauty pageant circuit – she was Miss NYC in the Miss Hawaiian Tropic pageant – she set her sights on the performance arts.  Ettinger appeared in a music video for the John Popper Project and appeared on a very popular segment for the Internet show The Onion News Network.

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A few years back, Microsoft had some legal troubles.  The U.S. government decided to aggressively pursue the Microsoft Corporation for antitrust violations.  This resulted in a restructuring of much of the way Microsoft does business and as Microsoft progresses past that dark chapter in its corporate history, it is once more growing steadily.  The results of the government probes and prosecution would have been much worse, had it not been for Mary E. Snapp.

Mary E. Snapp is the Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel in the Law and Corporate Affairs branch of Microsoft.  She specializes in providing legal advice for the Products and Services Division of Microsoft.  As Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel of the vital Products and Services division, Snapp oversees 150 lawyers working to protect Microsoft’s legal claims for some of the most widely-used Microsoft products.

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The biggest problem in the tech sector is not supply chain problems, environmental regulations, lack of creativity or even limited battery life.  The biggest problem in the tech sector, like so many industries, is hubris.  Hubris, the pride that leads one to believe that they are invincible, flawless, destined for greatness/market dominance/perfection, is the true scourge of the tech sector.  Why?  Quite simply it is the vainest form of hubris wherein the largest technology companies come to believe that because they have hired the absolute best and brightest tech school graduates, that the pool is empty, no other geniuses exist.  Virtually every major tech company believes that they have the individuals and teams who are the most skilled and most creative.  That belief makes them blind to the creative programming geniuses who work outside the corporate structure.

Symantec was so blinded when hackers cracked into their servers and downloaded the source code for Symantec’s pcAnywhere and Norton Antivirus.

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After the federal government took down the file-sharing website MegaUpload, many people have renewed the copyright debate. MegaUpload, and the associated site MegaVideo, were some of the most popular websites on the Internet, with millions of page views a day. The Justice Department’s quick and efficient takedown of MegaUpload has scared many of the other major file-sharing websites.

FileSonic and FileServe have both suspended users’ ability to download any content that the users did not upload themselves. This reaction, immediately after the MegaUpload takedown happened, is meant to save them from the same criminal charges the owners of MegaUpload are facing.

Other than file-sharing sites changing the way they function, there have been many mixed reactions to the Justice Department’s actions. Some say that it was unconstitutional, as users who had legal files on MegaUpload cannot access those files anymore. Others praise the decision and swift action for stopping online piracy.

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