If you can’t beat ’em, bribe ’em. That’s Microsoft’s newest tactic for promoting Windows Live Search, whose share of the market is declining despite a multimillion-dollar marketing campaign and the best efforts of the sultry Ms. Dewey. The Redmond Recidivists are offering enterprise customers $2 to $10 worth of Microsoft swag per seat to ditch their Google and Yahoo toolbars and go “Live” in IE7. Meanwhile, Steve Ballmer has criticized Google because it hasn’t “reinvented itself” enough. So, to recap: Making a product people use because it actually works is bad business, but arm-twisting, trash talking, and bribery are the keys to long-term success. Glad we cleared that up.

The war on error: When it comes to identifying terrorists, you can’t be too careful. S3 Matching Technologies claims its TeraMatch data-cleaning algorithms are far more accurate than the software used by the U.S. government. To demonstrate how lame the Feds’ solution is, S3 grafted a Web search engine onto the No Fly List. Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates, and SCO CEO Darl McBride are not on the list, but “Larry Ellison” is. Seems fitting — he’s been terrorizing other software companies for years.

Kills drives dead: Cringester Gary M. says Vista killed the Intel RAID arrays on his Dell Dimension 9200. Other Dell and Microsoft users report system freezes, BIOS incompatibilities, and assorted miseries trying to get Vista to recognize their RAID drives. (Dell says it’s aware of the RAID driver problem and is investigating the cause. Stay tuned.) Vista was supposed to make systems less prone to data loss, right? It’s so hard to keep these things straight.

Memo to Ballmer: Google is indeed developing a phone. (Which is not exactly the same as re-inventing the phone — that would be Apple’s job.) Anybody out there think Google will have to bribe people to use it?

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