Over the past month or so, a funny thing happens when I log in every morning - my desktop screen shows up in the background with a focussed login window for the Microsoft Passport Network. I did not bother with it till this morning (which was the first time I wasn't busy as crazy in a month). As I started investigating the cause of this annoying sign-in box, I discovered that the Google Desktop Crawler was the process responsible for it. My immediate thoguht was - "spyware".
After making all the rudimentary spyscanner checks, I started looking around to find out if anyone else was facing the same problem. Turns out, several people have had the issue. It turns out that Google Desktop Crawler treats your Microsoft account as an extension of your desktop and tries to index that as well. Great idea - if you are logged in to MSN - bad idea if you are not , caause the process just hangs up from that point on. Then the crawler runs during work hours instead of at 3 am. I haven't figured out a way to disable this yet :( I will post an update if I find it out.
That's it for the technical part of the discussion - now for the phiolosophical part. I have a problem with companies making products that try to do more things than they are supposed to. Microsoft went down this path earlier. I would like Google to index my desktop and my desktop only ... else give me an option to desiable such "features". I don't know if this was just an over-enthusiastic engineer going "it will be cool if..." or if this was part of the strategy. Final question which really perplexes me - why are they just indexing the stuff on MSN, why not Yahoo, Facebook or GeeksWithBlogs :p