Bold words, but I hear them echoed a lot lately. Microsoft, people argue, has made most of its money through underhanded business dealings and by driving its competitors out of the market. Its products aren’t competitive because it doesn’t need to compete. It’s the largest company in its industry today simply because it was the largest company in its industry yesterday; no other reason.

I’m not sure I agree. There’s a new challenger in town — Google — and there’s every sign that its presence in the market has given Microsoft a much-needed kick in the pants. Ray Ozzie, Bill Gates’ successor as Microsoft’s chief software architect, has put in motion an ambitious plan designed to beat Google on every front — and it just might work. Read my complete analysis in my latest article at InfoWorld.com. This one’s a biggie (single-page version here) but I think it will be worth your while.

Note: This fix involves changing the Registry. If you’re not comfortable with that, you may have to just put up with wonky search results. As always, you should backup your Registry before making any changes, and I take no responsibility for any damage these instructions may cause.

I should also mention that I’m doing this on Windows 7 Ultimate x64. Other versions might require a different fix.

As I said, the problem is that the OneNote Search Connector DLL isn’t registered properly. On Windows x64, Explorer needs to know to look for the 64-bit version of the DLL, found in the “Program Files” folder (not “Program Files (x86)”). On my machine, the appropriate keys were simply missing from the Registry. These are the keys you’ll need to create:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{0875DCB6-C686-4243-9432-ADCCF0B9F2D7}]
@="Microsoft OneNote Namespace Extension for Windows Desktop Search"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{0875DCB6-C686-4243-9432-ADCCF0B9F2D7}\InprocServer32]
@="C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Office\\Office14\\ONFILTER.DLL"
"ThreadingModel"="Both"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{0875DCB6-C686-4243-9432-ADCCF0B9F2D7}\ProgID]
@="OneIndex.ShellFolder.1"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{0875DCB6-C686-4243-9432-ADCCF0B9F2D7}\ShellFolder]
"Attributes"=dword:20180000
"WANTSFORPARSING"=""

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{0875DCB6-C686-4243-9432-ADCCF0B9F2D7}\VersionIndependentProgID]
@="OneIndex.ShellFolder"

To make your life easier, you can download the appropriate registry file here. Just save the file to your desktop and double-click it to create the appropriate Registry keys.

Note: If your copy of Office 2010 Beta is installed on a drive other than C:, you’ll need to edit the Registry file to reference the correct drive before it will work.

Once you create the Registry keys, clicking on OneNote search results should take you to the appropriate page in OneNote. You should not need to reboot or rebuild your search index.

On my machine, however, there was one more problem. The “heading” under which the search results appeared in the Start menu was still labeled with a long, meaningless codename, prefixed with “oneindex14–”. It turns out the fix for this is easy, too.

Just open the start menu, type “%UserProfile%/Searches” and hit Return. In this folder, you should see a couple of items under the heading “Search Connector.” Find the one that’s named after the weird code, and simply rename it to “Microsoft OneNote,” like you would rename any other file. Your OneNote search results should now appear in the Start menu under that name.

Thanks to John Guin at the OneNote Testing team at Microsoft, whose original blog post about Office 2007 led me to cook up this solution.

Visitors to the Googleplex are invariably stunned by these displays of Larry and Sergey’s nigh-prodigal largess. At most of their own offices, they’re lucky to score a free newspaper for the train ride home.

But there is one thing Google is less willing to provide, as I learned this week while covering the Chrome OS announcement. Next time you have a chance to visit the Google campus, just you try getting a drink of water.

I don’t own a car. So for me, schlepping down to Silicon Valley to cover a tech industry event means riding Caltrain. In Google’s case, the main campus is about two miles from the Mountain View station, or just a few minutes by bicycle.

On this particular Wednesday I forgot to bring a water bottle, so when I parked my bike at the Google Visitor Building at 1950 Charleston Way, I was feeling a little parched. Since there was still time before the press conference began, I asked the receptionist if he could point me to some water.

The receptionist’s brow furrowed slightly. “Well,” he began, “there’s a cooler with bottles of juice, if that’s OK.” He pointed to a little refrigerator on the other side of the room lined with shelves of Odwalla — free for the taking, of course.

Since it was the only option offered, I figured it would have to be OK. Anyway, juice sounded fine for the moment. And free Odwalla? Who was I to turn down the fabled Google generosity? I grabbed a SuperFood and chugged it down while I waited for the event to begin.

Once inside the conference room, however, my bewilderment increased. They had the usual concession table full of croissants, fruit, and little snacks. There was a decanter of coffee. There was a decanter of orange juice. There were supplies for making tea. But one thing that wasn’t there was anything resembling plain, cold water. Reluctantly, I poured myself a second glass of juice and sat down.

The event happened. I won’t go into it here, because it was about as exciting as such events ever are. But by the time it was over, I realized that I was actually what I would describe as thirsty. Moreover, the sun was high in the sky, and now I needed to ride my bike back to Caltrain.

Back out in the lobby, I approached the receptionist again. “So,” I said, pointing toward the little refrigerator. “Juice. But no water.”

He looked at me thoughtfully for a moment, then suddenly a little light went on behind his eyes. “No,” he said. A look that can only be described as utter satisfaction spread across his face. “Google is going Green,” he said proudly. “We don’t do bottled water anymore.”

I said, “How is it ‘going Green’ to make me drink bottled juice instead of bottled water?”

He frowned.

“Do you have any of the other kind of water, maybe?” I asked. “The non-bottled kind?”

His look was now one of heartfelt sympathy. “If it was up to me, there would be a drinking fountain right here in the lobby.” He pointed, and my eyes followed his finger to a spot along the opposite wall where there was no drinking fountain.

“But there isn’t one,” I said.

“No.”

“So let me get this straight. Google is ‘going Green,’ which means nobody at Google is allowed to drink water anymore. Only juice. I mean, it’s water, you know? It’s 95 percent of what people drink,” I said, adding weakly, “It’s good for you.”

At this, the receptionist’s sympathy evaporated into contempt. This was Google, after all. How dare I imply that Larry and Sergey would fail to provide something for their beloved employees?

“Google has installed water delivery systems near employee workstations,” he intoned with measured patience, “that decant filtered water into glasses and other receptacles.”

A water delivery system — imagine that! And he emphasized the word “filtered” — as if to say that one day, I too could be lucky enough to have a job at Google, and then I wouldn’t have to scoop my water out of a rotting, pre-Roman aqueduct with an algae-covered gourd anymore.

(Google is changing the world, after all. Freeing suburban Californians from the twin scourges of cholera and amebic dysentery is just one small part of the plan.)

“But,” the receptionist continued, looking at a spot in the air just above my shoulder, “they’re all upstairs.”

I turned. Behind me was a steel staircase painted navy blue, the kind Google installs in its buildings to make everybody feel like they’re working in a vast Soho loft. Up above, I could just make out a few Googlers moving around, going to and fro in their Googley jobs — all well-hydrated, no doubt.

I turned back to the receptionist with a look that said, So that’s that?

“If you want,” the receptionist continued flatly, after a moment, “I could go upstairs and get you a glass of water.” He seemed to perform a mental calculation, then added, “If you want to wait.”

“Thanks anyway, man,” I said. “I think I’ll live.” And then I left.

Postscript the First: I’ve since come up with a plan for the next time I have to cover something at the Google campus. I won’t bother to ask about water. Instead, I’ll ask for the men’s room — because I’m pretty sure OSHA regulations require companies to provide those. Once inside, I’ll bend down and wave my hands at the sink’s motion sensors while I lap from the faucet like a dog — the Google Way.

Postscript the Second: Receptionist at Google Building 1950, if you’re reading this: You’re a total wanker.

InfoWorld was invited to participate in the press conference, so they sent me down to check it out. You can read my coverage at InfoWorld.com (and on various other sites, via IDG Syndication).

I can’t say I’m totally convinced. The idea of an instant-on Web browser appliance is interesting, but Google isn’t the first to propose it. After all, don’t a lot of people use iPhones for that? And while Apple has backed away from its stance that all iPhone apps should be based on the Safari browser, Google continues to insist that the future of all computing lies on the Web. Sorry, but I just don’t see the trend being as “very, very clear” as Google’s Sundar Pichai claims it is.

Nonetheless, I’ll be following this project with great interest, and you can expect more coverage from InfoWorld as details emerge.

ARM Holdings of Cambridge, UK has been manufacturing power-efficient chips for the embedded systems and digital device markets since the mid-1980s. Intel hopes to win away ARM’s customers with its newest, low-voltage Atom CPUs. But to do that, it will have to contend with a company whose business model is substantially different from the Intel Way. Click on over to read how the contest is shaping up, and be sure to leave your comments.

Makes sense, right? At least, when I say it that way it seems pretty obvious. You probably had some inkling in your mind of the idea that “complex behavior can arise from simple sets of rules” even before I mentioned it to you — didn’t you?

Well, strangely enough, Stephen Wolfram — although a mathematical prodigy who published his first scientific paper at 15, went on to school at Eton, Oxford, and Caltech, and invented the mathematical computation software Mathematica, among other things — did not. When he stumbled upon this idea back in the 1980s (simple rules could produce complexity), he found it not only surprising, but incredible. Astounding. MIND-BOGGLING. So much so that he decided to withdraw from academia, or indeed much of public life, and devote the next 20 years of his life and at least 1,200 pages of text to precisely this phenomenon.

The culmination of this labor is A New Kind of Science, a doorstop of a book that Wolfram claims revolutionizes all forms of scientific research and indeed every kind of human endeavor, from art, to philosophy, to the Meaning of Life itself. I kid you not. And I’ll grant you the favor that Wolfram cannot and allow you to jump off here, if you wish, by giving you my own summary:

This book is complete and utter bullshit.

It’s not so much the information that Wolfram presents that’s the problem. Most of the book is devoted to discussion of cellular automata, a particular kind of computer program the behavior of which my Go example gives only a poor analogy. Wolfram did indeed do some pioneering work with cellular automata in the 1980s, and he knows whereof he speaks.

No, the problem is threefold: A.) Much of what Wolfram presents in this text is not actually new, and much of it was developed by others than Wolfram himself (and he seldom gives credit where it’s due); B.) Wolfram insists that his computational methods are so significant and important that they effectively brush aside all previous scientific methods and indeed mathematics, which Wolfram dismisses as inadequate (despite thousands of years of historical success with those methods); and C.) He makes all these claims with such a pompous, self-congratulatory air that his text is almost impossible to read. (And here I admit that I could not finish it; reading turned to skimming; skimming turned to flipping pages; flipping pages turned to throwing the book down in disgust.)

Take, for example, this passage from chapter 3, which hopes to explain how Wolfram (and Wolfram alone) was able to arrive at the incredible “discoveries” laid on in that chapter: “…one of the problems with very direct experiments is that they often generate huge amounts of raw data. Yet what I have typically found is that if one manages to present this data in the form of pictures then it effectively becomes possibly to analyze very quickly just with one’s eyes. And indeed, in my experience it is typically much easier to recognize unexpected phenomena in this way than by using any kind of automated procedure of data analysis.”

Just on the face of it this paragraph seems intellectually dishonest. Wolfram’s brilliant technique is to “present this data in the form of pictures”? What… you mean like graphs? Anyone who’s made it past elementary algebra without seeing the graph of an equation must be blind.

What Wolfram is in effect proposing, however, actually goes beyond simple graphs of mathematical systems. It’s much crazier than that. Wolfram claims that traditional methods of scientific analysis are needlessly vague and imprecise. Instead, he says, scientists can learn all that they need to know by searching for the precise sets of rules that govern the behavior they’re trying to observe and then reproducing them on the computer. Regular observation-based science can only yield statistical probabilities of outcomes. Nail the right ruleset, however, and you need only run the program a few million times in the computer and you will actually SEE what will happen — not with any kind of statistical analysis, but with your own eyes. All of the universe, Wolfram claims, is merely based on computations of this kind.

He then goes on to give examples of automata that can generate graphs that look curiously like spirals, or leaf forms, or trees, or what-have-you. And this is all well and good — you’ve probably seen such effects before, even if Wolfram claims he hasn’t, in fractal images. There’s even a software program called Painter that uses fractal-based computation to simulate natural art media, including oil painting, pastels, and watercolors.

But that’s just it: Painter is a simulation. Ask any artist whether the experience of using the oil-paint tools in Painter is the same as using actual oil paint, or if it yields the same results, and they will tell you no. The results might be effective enough to convince an observer that the picture was made with real oil paints, but it will only be an illusion. A real oil painting created by the same artist would look substantially different, because the model is imperfect.

But to Wolfram, who has spent the last 20 years sitting in front of his computer, an imperfect model only means that there must be a perfect model out there, waiting to be discovered. To Wolfram, who believes that all of the universe can be represented through computation, the model and the reality are the same thing. Instead of wasting their time with fruitless experimentation, Wolfram says — he’s quick to dismiss just about anybody else’s work as “fruitless” — scientists should sit down at their computers, like he has done, and start looking for the cellular automata-based patterns that unlock the keys to nature.

The idea that man can capture the essence of the universe in a simple calculation, like a genie in a bottle, is an attractive one — but in much the same way that the idea of a perpetual motion machine is attractive. It’s fun, it’s wistful, but it’s not very practical. (Oh wait — did I forget to mention that Wolfram claims to call into question the Second Law of Thermodynamics? p451: “Starting nearly a century ago it came to be widely believed that the Second Law is an almost universal principle. But in reality there is surprisingly little evidence for this.”)

The biggest problem with Wolfram’s automata is that they have virtually no predictive power — and so therefore are virtually useless to scientists. Suppose a scientist discovered an automata that, given a certain input, produced a pattern that looked remarkably like the coastline of Norway. What would it prove? What predictions could we make based on that? Could we know what Norway will look like a hundred, or eighteen billion years from now? Probably not, because as any geologist will tell you, what Norway looks like has precious little to do with what Norway IS. No wonder Wolfram advocates discarding all previous scientific method — since it has little use for his “experiments,” it must itself be useless.

“It has taken me the better part of twenty years to build the intellectual structure that is needed, but I have been amazed by the resuls,” Wolfram writes in the first chapter (if he does say so himself). “For what I have found is that with this new kind of science I have developed it suddenly becomes possible to make progress on a remarkable range of fundamental issues that have never successfully been addressed by any of the existing sciences before.”

Fine. Proof is in the pudding. What progress? What advances have been made based on this material? What science is it revolutionizing, and what great steps forward have humankind taken?

Ultimately, though it’s sad to say it, this book belongs nowhere other than the crank file, along with all the books on secret energy sources, ESP, and UFOs building the pyramids. I’ll never again be able to think of Stephen Wolfram without being reminded of that character in the movie Pi, being driven mad by all those numbers. Somewhere out there, even now, Stephen Wolfram is staring at page after page of graphical output from cellular automata programs — completely and irreversibly batshit insane.

Save yourself the same fate and don’t waste a minute on this overlong, repetitious, hollow, arrogant, self-aggrandizing, dishonest, tedious, intellectual dead-end of a text.