From their article The traditionally protectionist group responsible for providing input into the EU's globalization arm and butcher knife (read collude and conspire to squash American, Japanese, and Asian competition) comes the brilliant idea that will ruin many a grandmothers' Christmas present.

Right out of the "Gee Boss, I'm not sure what to come up with so I will just come up with someone else's idea" department the EU group recently published an article which says they believe the best way to increase competition and help consumers is to damage the companies that the market reward. Why don't they just come out and say it. The solution? A PC and it's OS should be sold separately. The fact that most major companies already sell PC's with many different variants of Linux isn't good enough, if grandma buys a PC, she should be forced to also buy an OS, if she doesn't know what one is, she will be trying to email her family from BIOS. 

Instead of letting the market decide what technologies they want at home and in the workplace, the EU seems to want it to be regulated. A monopoly should be forced to compete on equal of slightly less secure footing, but this is the most idiotic thing I've ever heard. The group is trying to bring down a slew of American companies including Intel, Apple, Rambus, and many people are speculating their next target for rape is Google.

Candace Lombardi says:

The signal the institute refers to is the September 17, 2007, ruling in which the EU's Court of First Instance upheld commission rulings requiring Microsoft to share certain technical specifications with rivals and to offer customers an unbundled option in cases where Microsoft has tied together two separate products. The court ruling also upheld a $613 million antitrust fine against Microsoft that had been imposed by the European Commissioner for Competition, Neelie Kroes.

I'm not sure why I even am blogging about this, this group seems pretty confused, let's point out some foolish statements from their article:

• Moreover, there are other costs: some argue that support costs are higher for Windows than other operating systems, particularly when one considers security vulnerabilities:
• We do not believe this would add complexity for consumers ??? What???
• By increasing competition, 10 operating systems would all be competing, and all programs would somehow run on all of them.
• We consider the Mac to be a premium, niche product
• Microsoft has had an OS monopoly for 20 years.

This paper is so off the mark that I think the act of publishing it has forever stained and tarnished the word think tank. They must have been living in a tank for the last 20 years perhaps. This will actually hurt consumers who would not be able to buy Microsoft OEM version and end up costing Europeans more money.

Paying Microsoft for services "to be delivered" is probably never a good idea, it's probably what made Vista a product that took so long to deliver, and is probably why Ultimate Extras are taking so long if they even ever materialize. I think that all people should receive Vista at a much cheaper discount, and for every major issue that gets fixed in the OS, more money is transferred into their bank account. This would create a bug free Microsoft based on what I've seen in the past with software assurance, and now Ultimate Extras.

Not only have we received basically nothing that was a surprise as an added bonus, which could be implied by the price we paid for extra, or two copies of Ultimate in my case, but we haven't even received nearly any of the features promised on time. Long Zheng says it best:

Ironically a whole lot of nothing is exactly what you’re getting.

When it comes to technology, especially gadgets, and software, many technologists simply must have the best. Microsoft marketing team knows this, and so they used some actuaries to show that the profit margin normally found in Windows and even Office would be dramatically increased by simply creating a small team of engineers that would create a few doodads, that could be really hyped up, but deliver absolutely next to zero value, and they could put in as much value into these copies of windows as they wanted, and deliver it whenever they wanted.

Have you ever felt that it was wrong for a contractor to ask for 100 percent down, for work to be delivered at a later date? I know I have, and I have refused. In the world of technology things are the same and different.

Anyone who must be truly informed about Vista all had to get Ultimate because they would be clueless about the experience and they would have to experience secondhand through the voice and thoughts of others. By getting Ultimate, you get all of Windows, as each other copy is just a subset of Ultimate. I know I wouldn't be able to blog with as much confidence about Vista unless I had Ultimate. I trusted Microsoft so much that I purchased two copies of Ultimate.

What Microsoft marketing may not know is with each copy of Ultimate they sold a little bit of their trust to us. Not all of their trust, but maybe enough trust that the true hard working innocent engineers at Microsoft whom are burning the midnight oil and had nothing to do with this get tired of their masterpieces being treated as ho-hum, and leave the company to deliver similar products to rave reviews.

At big companies at Microsoft, it's very hard to understand what happened. Perhaps the Ultimate engineering team was planning on receiving more head count, and perhaps marketing thought so too, but why is it in Microsoft's interest to pour resources into software that has already been sold and will not increase the next quarters numbers. This is a lesson we all believed Microsoft had already learned with Software Assurance.

I like to think that Microsoft sold a little bit of trust in each copy of Vista Ultimate as well as each software assurance copy. What's the Ultimate extra we've learned with Microsoft? Never pay up front, for services to be delivered later on, because there is a conflict of interest when company management is being offered a paycheck that reflects the next quarters outcome. It's a shame that a higher-up like Bill Gates or Ray doesn't step in and make it right, it's their brand name though, and it leaves you feeling that if this is the Ultimate thing Microsoft can do, perhaps none of their other products are even worth trying.

...and I really mean it.

Dave Winer points out that he doesn't like the new word, Social Graph and Nickolas Carr agrees so much he thanks him. Due to the way he words it, I believe he really means your AN idiot if you use it. They say that it's impossible to passionate unless you are intelligent.

Dave explains "Why not use the equivalent--social network? He supports the argument with an unarguable degree of understanding of the two words, and then he says that using the buzzword creates confusion.

Others are saying that in order to rightfully declare the fact that we are now seeing a new burst of money chasing innovation, we need a new buzzword--Social Graph--to explicitly show that it's an innovative improvement over things like good old Friendster and My Space.

I tend to agree with Dave and Mr. Carr, people already know what a social network is and after all, we still call an operating system an operating system, and it's definitely been evolving, all of them. I guess maybe some at VMWare might like to call it an operating layer.

Obviously there are many different opinions, and I thought I would just come up with a Microsoft Marketing Buzzword, which would adequately describe the improvements using a definition Microsoft has already "drilled down" even the most laymen techies' mind. 

2.0 really refers to an era, and I can hardly say we've even been through the first era of real social networks, perhaps at the end of an era, but not into the next era. Whatever happens, let's not use Massively Multi-nodal Online Extensible Social Networks.

I think this would be a great time to create an online poll, at the end of the poll, we look at the results, and then we all have to agree to the new, or not so new word. When all is said and done, I think we will all agree that we've done a better job than our counterparts in the online gaming industries. :)

When I first used this crawling, sluggish, OPML choking excuse for a Google sub-domain I was not very impressed. Silly Google, rich clients belong on my hard drive, not in the cloud! Slowly but surely, the product went through a number of revisions which quietly added functionality and tuning. Today, with each account having it's own built in index, I'd say the product is the best of breed reader. Really the best thing to say is great job to the folks at Google Reader, and it's quickly becoming better than Google.com as a way to research something you are very familiar with.

You've done quite a fantastic job on your product, and you make it important to have a large OPML, where as with other clients, having a very extensive one causes problems. Categorizing your large amount of content becomes important. As of last week, you have graduated from Google Labs, and rightly so, you deserve it, however, I don't think it's time to stop improving and I never like to give a pat on the back without some suggestions for improvement.

Improvement Suggestions, Let's see if you listen!!

Integrate:

• Just as you are planning on integrating many other of your products and API's into Orkut, I think it would make more sense than anything to add unique functionality that pulls elements of reader into blogger, and blogger into reader. Sure, this isn't the best way to do serious blogging which is best left to best of breed blogging tools like the Live Writer which I use when I'm using Windows, but by integrating the two you can enable micro-blogging and other quick "Get it off your chest" type blogs, and some blogging can be done from here.
• Google Gears it! What good is Google Reader if you Can't Read it?
• Add Gtalk into the reader. Sometimes I don't about the blog about what I'm reading, but I know someone who does, or I want to twit about it. Adding Gtalk would enable me to email another user as well so this could be the one stop shop functionality making the product Viral. Perhaps I want to verify a news source, or verify a fact without leaving an application.
• Add Zimbra Zimlet type features. Perhaps there is a word or subject that I'm reading about that I'd like to get a quick back round on before reading the rest of the story, just so I'm analyzing in an efficient context. Don't be like the NYT's and if you click on a word it pops up, make sure the user is holding a shortcut key and or make it launch up in a DHTML window after a right click left click to confirm. Other items which are good just about anywhere are auto parse to Google Maps.

All in all, the offline mode with Google Gears is going to be the most important feature that will get me off of my other hardcore readers. I have faith in the giant Metroid brain in the sky that is Google.

Presently is not yet a good way to create a stunning decks, although it's a fantastic way to share and collaborate all of the contents of a one. Google still hasn't created a compelling way to create presentations, nor have they with documents, but that matters very little. What they are doing a better is taking the strengths of delivering software on the cloud. Google isn't worried about being the best Power Point or Keynote producing software, what they are interested in is taking these platforms, embracing them, and then extending them.

Also important to note, there are so many companies that want a piece of Microsoft's Office's money making dominance that Microsoft should be glad that Office 2007 is a solid product. (With a fast processor on XP) IBM is getting ready to release plans to Kill Office with Symphony  IBM has released Symphony, and so I guess you can say that Google's Defiance to Microsoft's dominance has emboldened all of Microsoft's competition to come at it from all angles atat once. 

Other companies such as Electric Rain are busy getting ready to deliver the next generation of presentation software, namely Standout, which when released will be by far the best way to create a compelling, stunning deck with a lot shine.

A quick look at Google Presently:

From the "File" menu, you pre presently presented with the options to:

• Open a New Presentation
• Upload a file (PPT, etc.)
• Save
• Save as a new presentation
• Rename
• Delete Presentation
• Printable View
• Save as Zip
• Start Presentation (CTL + F5)
• Discard Changes
• Save & Close

Also, you can expect to find most or all of outline and markup abilities found in Google Docs including:

• Undo
• Redo
• Bold
• Italics
• Underline
• Change font (The five majors)
• Change Text Size
• Change Text Color
• Change or Create Text Highlight
• Create a link
• Ordered List, Numbered and bulleted
• Indent left and right
• Align left, center and right
• Remote formatting

There are also revision buttons in which you can "Summon" previous versions of the document so that you can perhaps recall a change that wasn't supposed to be made.

Analysis

So there it is, Google Presently, currently a good way to create basic presentations online, but a better way to store, publish and collaborate on documents that were first created in offline, rich document authoring programs like Power point, Apple's Keynote 08. Also, Google will not have the first presentation software with built in conferencing. Currently Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional allows professionals to use the widely deployed Adobe Acrobat , Flash and Video production platforms to create, edit, review, share, publish, screen sharing and even create conferences online. You can check out a demo here.

Google is taking the simple approach to a presentation platform, but their strategy is not a bad one. Let traditional software companies be the offline rich editor, but let them save to our online collaborative, platform where we can then embrace and extend your platform. Google and Microsoft are fiercely competing to be your Cloud Computer. The cloud computer is your free advertising supported computer in the sky that acts as a hard drive and processor. The network is the computer was Sun Microsystems' slogan from over a decade ago. Too bad most people were still not using at 56k modem yet.

Get your tarballs downloaded now, according to Michael Arrington, he has heard it through the no bad grapes vine that Yahoo! Has closed in on Zimbra for 350 million dollars. Zimbra has over 6 million paid mailboxes which Yahoo! would like to be their paid mailboxes.

Zimbra has the absolutely best email system on earth in my humble opinion, and if Yahoo! close sources this project somehow it will be a disaster for the open source community.

Google has recently been ramping up it's office killer wannabe and smoozing up with corporate America in order to eliminate Microsoft's dominance in the workplace. Most of corporate America doesn't like online mailboxes that are not directly tied to their own infrastructure but as these companies build up more and more of a compelling and cheaper offering, they will be forced to at least examine the options every year or so. There is a major pull inside large companies to reduce costs from software licensing however possible. 

Something else to note: Zimbra is more closely integrated with Google services, such as Google search and Google maps. There are Y!Maps in Zimbra. Bringing Yahoo on board will hopefully only give Zimbra users more options, and not tie in Zimbra features with Yahoo entirely.

The only other thing I am hoping doesn't happen is the renaming of Zimbra. I hope that the service keeps it's Zimbra name, and I hope that Yahoo! keeps offering a great open source server for running in the home without charging for personal use.

Update: The Yodel.yahoo.com blog has the following to say:

Zimbra is a global leader in email and collaboration software and its services are aimed at universities, businesses, and ISPs worldwide, which is a major driver of what made the company so attractive to us. We’re constantly being approached by these entities for our expertise in email and communications. Combining the best of Zimbra with what’s made Yahoo! Mail the top dog in web mail will not only allow us to cater to these markets better than anyone, it will allow us to expand our presence to partners and consumers at school, work, and home

That's freaking Scary. Sure I'm probably jumping the gun, but are they going to just purge all of the cool Zimlets and other features out of Zimbra and then pop them into Yahoo and then let Zimbra die on the vine? I hope Yahoo! sets a clear strategy and roadmap for both of these products, and allows both to flourish separately the same way that freedesktop.org takes components from KDE and Gnome and pushes for cross pollination and innovation instead of competition.

I hope the dice will fall like this if not a whole lot of people will be upset.

1. Zimbra continues on as a standalone server and client with added Yahoo! features and...
2. Yahoo mail continues on as a mail service, with the added benefit of Zimlets, which should be considered as a major yahoo API I hope.
3. Zimbra Open Source Addition continues to receive valuable mainline patches from the open source community and Yahoo! in order to remain a great product for us techies who love having a multipurpose, multi OS server rack in our home. (Okay maybe a bunch of crappy PCs on a shelf but I call it a rack =D )

One Last Point: This new acquisition makes Comcast a major partner of Yahoo! AT&T while traditionally a Microsoft partner, is now heavily an Apple partner. Do you think that AT&T saw how much value there was in becoming a big time partner with Comcast simply because the first major Internet portal to offer a new phone with effective GPS enabled advertising will be pulling in the big bucks and will have something that can take large chunks out of Microsoft's enterprise pie, simply by not only drastically eliminating their software licensing costs, but by doing the same for their communications?

The New York Times has a very important analysis on why the 3 percent of market share that Apple currently enjoys, isn't growing. I recently purchased a Macbook Pro and the out-of-the-box experience began with two hours on the road.

Many people are saying that this might be slowing down the adoption of Macs but the truth is it definitely is slowing down the adoption.

Dell lost a lot of market share to other companies when the laptop became the primary type of computer purchased. It was said that people like to play with laptops and they really don't care so much about desktops, they can see pictures, and then just order online. Perhaps this is true even more with Macbooks, especially those who are afraid they will have trouble making the jump to the Mac.

What no one is talking about is why the Mac isn't sold in every Best Buy. There is an immense amount of training that needs to take place. Your average employee at a Best Buy doesn't usually spend two thousand dollars or more on a laptop.

Even still, the training is occurring, and the number of stores that sell Macs are Ramping up. Next January, the Bestbuy close to my house is supposed to start selling them.

Actually, I honestly don't know if Apple ever has done a single thing for the OSS community. They most likely voted against OOXML but other than that (someone correct me if I'm wrong) Apple doesn't care about the OSS community, and has recently made moves which thwart its advancement and acceptance with it's iPod, to let them know exactly how much they do care. Will says:

This affects Linux users - there's no iTunes for Linux, so popular Linux iPod management tools like gtkpod and Rhythmbox will not work with the new range of iPods.

Granted, this might be a side effect of bigger things going on that we don't see, I'd like for once to see Apple give back for all of the great things that it takes from the open source community, primarily all of the great things which it conveniently puts on it's Xserve stack.

The open source, UNIX foundation of Apple’s operating system makes it easy for developers to port their existing enterprise database and UNIX server applications for deployment on Xserve. In fact, tens of thousands of UNIX developers are already turning to Mac OS X to combine the performance and reliability of a UNIX-based platform with Apple’s innovation and ease of use.

Let's count the number of OSS applications which earn Apple money:

1. Apache Web Server
2. Webmail
3. WebDAV
4. JBOSS
5. Tomcat
6. MYSQL

There are probably many more like OpenLDAP and others. Apple, if you want to keep being the cool kid on the block, you are going to have to do more than deliver top notch products, you are going to have to deliver top notch products that play nice. If you mess with the OSS community, your popularity will suffer. People should voice their concerns and email Apple and let them know you are unhappy. Let them know they should extend support to the Linux platform, or at least let the good people who reverse engineer the iPods for the Linux community a break.

I continue to have someone go in and flip and flop pictures around on my space. I had a post of a screen shot to a hacked looking shot to Microsoft live mail and it got replaced by another picture. This is not the first time this has happened, I am documenting everything and I'm going to have to find out what's going on. It's not fair to me or my readers. More later.

Everyone is going crazy with excitement over the new iPods and price drop on the iPhone. I can't help but be excited about yet another quality craftsmanship conjured by the demigod artists at Cupertino but I know it’s not too much of an advancement when you really think about it and Dave Winer agrees. For what it’s worth, Apple under promised and over delivered once again at it's hip-A-list-only media event today. With all of the excitement, it's understandable everyone hasn't put enough thought into the ramifications of the first true next gen iPod.

By far, the biggest announcement was that the 8Gig $599.00 dollar iPhone was getting a 30 percent price drop, and will now only set back your gadget budget by 399.00. I fully believe this is mostly in response to somewhat poor adoption, and a somewhat lackluster response (for an Apple product that is! No Keyboard!!!) but mostly because they know a monster is coming and they want to capitalize on the holiday market before the CEDIA announcements come in less than a week and before the real competitors show up. Gphone anyone?

The point of this post.

That's not the point of this post right now though. I was hoping for some better insight when I read Saul Hansell of The New York Times' analysis about the future of digital entertainment devices but everyone on Techmeme scene is missing some key points about the future of the music player.

What does it take to make a successful music player in tomorrow world? Upnp or in Apple's case, a highly secret competitor to DLNA.

DLNA, or the Digital Living Network Alliance is an international, cross-industry collaboration of consumer electronics. The goal of the standard is the establishment of a wired and wireless interoperable network of personal computers, consumer electronics and mobile devices in the home and on the road, enabling a seamless environment for sharing new digital media and content services. The standard was founded by Sony and Intel in 2003, but is currently made up of 8 board members, HP, Intel, Matsushita, Microsoft, Nokia, Phillips, Samsung, and Sony.

Notice I didn't say Apple, and notice I didn't say Google. While the first format was battled over AAC vs. WMA and was a file format war, the second battle will be DLNA vs. something Apple just announced and is testing out with Starbucks today. Upnp Allows for the streaming of media to various parts of the home and is supported by every single hardware manufacture that you will see at CEDIA this year. Steve Jobs did not call the Apple TV a hobby for no reason, he intends to let the iPod be the controller for whole house audio/video, and I am praying that he doesn't make all of the quality investments out there of other people in the home obsolete.

It's a shame not too many people read this blog, i was talking about this months and months ago, I have an inside source (not at Apple) that let me in on that fact that Apple is indeed working on whole house Audio/Video.

I sure hope Apple embraces DLNA, but surely I'll understand if they don't, afterall, that just means we have to go out and buy all new high end preamps, power amps and all of my other home gear. That will help with Apple's recent stock price problems.

Disclaimer: I'm a busy guy, I wrote this in less than 15 minutes so there are probable mistakes, I'll try to correct ASAP.

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Technorati tags: iPod, iPod 6.0, Digital Media Format War, Digital Media Format War 2.0, itunes, iPod Classic, iPod touch, Apple Price Drop, iPod price drop, iPhone price cut, DLNA, uPnp, Cedia, Sau Hansell, NYT, Whole House Audio, Whole House Video

The ISO has voted to reject Microsoft’s OOXML as a standard. The blogosphere is having a conversation about it currently and I’m hoping that the primary reason for this is to give Microsoft a good incentive to address any legitimate concerns.

I can't think of a better supporting example of why Microsoft should be able to have its own open documents format standardized than to use Macromedia's SWF format as an example. I can write a tool that publishes to SWF, but I can't integrate features into the formats upcoming revisions until those specifications are released. Being a huge lover of opensource and Linux I feel very alone on this issue. All companies should be required to make their documents open so that others can read and write to them, but none should be required to lose control of the format in which the tool is forced to write.

It is not fair of a government that both forces Microsoft to publish to an open ISO standard + forces the company to use another company’s standard. Microsoft wrote the book on office publishing and it clearly deserves to be able to produce its own paper.

Macromedia opened up its SWF format so that others could write programs which could output to it but there was not a single company on earth better able to utilize it than Macromedia (now Adobe) itself. There have been many tools which ended up complementing the Macromedia (Adobe) suite.

The same people, who have rallied against Microsoft to make its websites work in Firefox, are now being a bit of hypocrite when they try to say that OOXML is evil. What we users want is choice, and just because you don't like Microsoft gives you no right to try and say Microsoft wanting its own standard is unethical or an attempt to undermine any other companies’ ability to compete.

Governments who require an ISO approved document format will now suffer because Microsoft will not take advantage of any of the advanced features of ODF in its office format which will be in use in the majority of scenarios. Microsoft will continue to improve and work with countries but everyone is upset and spreading FUD about the whole affair. I am a huge OSS advocate and I've never seen the community spread as much FUD as it is right now. There should be more than one format; opportunities will be created by those who seek to implement unique tools which help both Microsoft Office, and Open Office.

The bottom line, I always loose respect for companies and organization that drop the lowest common denominator of what’s acceptable in ethics, and I don’t like seeing the vast majority of the blogosphere completely and utterly confused about an issue completely because they’ve heard so much nonsense about the real issues. Microsoft is being flamed at the stake for getting talking folks into supporting its open standard. The truth of the matter is, Microsoft is making and improving OOXML so that other document programs can read and write to it, if you want to put Microsoft out of business in the Office arena write a better damn program and don’t whine to international bodies and tech enthusiasts, because some of us are smarter than that. Let's face it, if the supporters of ODF were interested in true interoperable document solutions, they would urge Microsoft to join ODF by giving them a fair amount of control over it so that their future office revisions could take advantage of the format as much as Google, Sun, Linux, and IBM's suites could. Instead, they are using government policy to spread FUD in order to somehow give them the upper hand but I think the entire thing will backfire, considering Microsoft will not be under as much government scrutiny soon. Microsoft has been trying to be a corporate citizen much more than a lot of other companies lately. I don't want to argue so I'll just say that no one company is perfect, and you can't hold Microsoft accountable for the actions of one employee in all situations.

Update: I've been reading a blog called No OOXML(tiny bit biased on the subject) and they feel there is some evil in Microsoft's format. I'll read up on it and then I'll re assess the situation. I don't understand why ODF cares as long as there are ODF to OOXML converters? What I've heard up until now is that there is too much documentation, and also that there is not enough documentation, for instance how to save to Word 95 format? Who cares again? These machines are all running Linux now anyway!

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Where is this going?

First of all, I think MOCK is the best acronym for a way to describe what it takes to bring down Microsoft. I'm not saying I want to see Microsoft taken down, I just think  MOCK is pretty ironic in at least two ways. Google is very serious in its intention to enter the enterprise by storm. Wiki means rapidly in the native Hawaiian language, and taking down the Microsoft Monopoly would put a lot of Google folks in Hawaii in a hurry.

They (Google) have some stealth underwater nuke subs that haven't been picked up on radar (I've got my scuba gear on for you readers!), as well as well as some that are getting ready to surface. They are being very mum about the entire ordeal, especially, the Gphone and how it will bring them massive income.

I believe that Google's enterprise strategy is to do the same thing to Microsoft, as Microsoft did to Netscape, in as much as they will make quality replacements for Microsoft's cash cows for very cheap and will/might supported by advertising, until the worlds IT managers have no excuse to not switch over to Google or a newly created Microsoft life line. I know, you are probably laughing right now. Advertising has the ability to subsidize quality software, just as it has for quality entertainment (and not so quality) for the last 100 years.

The Advent of the Wiki

A wiki is the most productive online documentation/communication and collaboration model known to man. The Wiki-in many ways replaced the need for utilizes like PHPBB. The features in a wiki were the first to make the online bulletin board obsolete as a support tool. I expect the Google Wiki to integrate viral features which make Google Wiki even more useful to the point that it will facilitate communities further making online bulletin boards unpopular unless they start becoming more advanced, and quick. Even so, it's tough to get people excited about the latest PHPBB, and even harder to get people excited about a proprietary online BB. ...I digress.

After acquiring Jotspot 11 months ago, Google has been a busy bee. Tony Ruscoe at Blogoscoped has posted some information which details on how there is now currently a disabled login page to the new Google Wiki Service. Combine this with the fact that Google's PowerPoint competitor and Google Wiki are most likely are to concurrently demonstrated at next week’s Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.

      ( One of the latest Pre-Google Jotspot Builds )

Related:

Zoli Erdos connecting the dots by showing what he thinks Google's been up to with the Google Wiki:

· It could provide for much better document management than the current Docs &­ Spreadsheets UI. 

· It overlaps with Page Creator, also with the simplified version found in Google Groups - in fact Groups which is no longer just email lists but a rudimentary collaboration platform and Jotspot could very well be merged / integrated.

· Finally Jotspot tried to provide primitive applications (spreadsheet, calendar, Etc) all if which have a better Google counterpart, so one would hope they will be replaced, too.

Great thoughts Zoli, and perhaps the most thinking going on that I've read on the subject: Modded for interesting! =)

My Conclusion

 With the calendaring app, notes app and all of the other goodies Jotspot has rolling, let's not forget they had that developer’s corner that was just taking off. I'm hoping for an API, and I'm also hoping that the presentation app takes advantage of either some killer DHTML or Flash. More important than that even, is Google is missing a real application for brainstorming ideas, much like Microsoft Visio does so well. I'd like to be able to see someone put together the first social Visio, and if it would become mainstream and useful, you might be looking at the most rapid way to go from thought to deck to business plan in the industry. I'm also surprised that Google hasn't started integrating its online offerings via Eclipse or at least a Java IDE for their Phone. I'll save that for another post but it would be cool to get a really cool Google IDE Google Web Toolkit or at least a major upgrade to the suite.

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Recently the New York Times has had a slew of articles which show an ever increasing lack of understanding when it comes to technology. It's either that or the fact that they love their Macs so much that they never use Windows or Office and simply don't understand relevant strategy, or even quite understand web 2.0. I don't want to bash the company, surely, it's a news source that I read along with the Wall Street Journal. Those the two basic papers that I read all of the time without question. There are a few others from Chicago and DC that I will read on occasion.

Yesterday in an article about iScrybe, Michael Fitzgerald of the NYT said, in an otherwise informative (to NYTimes readers) article about iScrybe, that:

"It (iScrybe) also works offline, something that Outlook and other existing programs cannot do."

I wont go into all of the inaccuracies that I've read lately but I'm starting to wonder, how much at a disadvantage are reporters who use only OSX going to be at when writing about a technology world that is mostly dominated by Google and Microsoft--not Apple, and Is The New York Times becoming technology irrelevant.

Today, John Markoff of the NYT's claimed that:

"Microsoft’s new approach is in many ways a mirror image of the strategy used during the 1990s in defeating Netscape Communications when the start-up threatened Microsoft’s desktop dominance. Microsoft tried to tie the Internet to Windows by bundling its Internet Explorer Web browser as an integral part of its desktop operating system."

The first thing I must tell John is, "John, you must have been in a cryogenic freeze for the last five year to even draw this parallel. Microsoft bundled IE 4 directly into it's operating systems, forced all operating system level API and all URL protocols link directly to IE, so that even if a user wanted to use Netscape, they constantly ended up using both browsers in an age where browsers still cost money, and Microsoft was making money of off it's--at the time--near monopoly. He Goes on:

Today, that strategy has been flipped with the growing array of Web services that are connected to Windows. But the new approach, which the company refers to as “software plus services,” is once again beginning to draw industry charges of unfair competition from competitors.

and

Last week, for example, Microsoft executives were put on the defensive after the company’s efforts to gain international adoption for a Microsoft-designed document format known as Open Office XML, led to charges of vote-buying in an international standards vote in Sweden.

You have to seriously be kidding me. Yes, this was erroneous by Microsoft, and might cost them dearly in their race to establish Open XML as an office standard, it was a mistake by a lower ranking official at Microsoft most likely trying to hit his internal goal targets but the Microsoft you compare them to exported it's Office formats to a type which was completely unreadable and writable by any competitors program.

All Microsoft is really wanting to do here is control there own open Interoperable ISO standard, and giving the fact that they have invented what an office suite for all competitors (yes, even our lovely open office, Thunderbird and Koffice suites are highly influenced by Office) should look like over the last decade.

I feel they have every right to own their own document format which is completely compatible with any distribution of Linux that currently exists. Sure, Novel's OpenSUSE has it working by default in it's upcoming OpenSUSE 10.3 but the bits are opensource and so each and every Linux distribution can use it to their own advantage.

The fact that IBM, who owns it's own proprietary suite, has embraced the Opensource community more is irrelevant. IBM has only done so because it's wants to weaken Microsoft in as many areas as possible. I think it's perfectly fine if both formats are standards, int his fashion, no one company owning an office suite and force another to change its office suite based on it's lack of control of the format it writes too. Since they are both open, consumers will benefit no matter what because the two formats will have converters and readers available in the form of add-ons shortly after a new version of each spec is released.

Michael Arrington even points out that the NYT's is considerably off. Michael is a highly motivated, thoughtful, intelligent and well connected Valley power broker and blogger with a lot of bloggers writing for his network of blogs. None of them would consider posting garbage like this.

I don't want to bash anyone but I stated years ago that one of the primary goals I was going to try to accomplish via this blog is to point out when misinformation is spread on a mass scale and to try my best in the average of 10 min a blog posting, that I can. And so the point of this article is to point out that I can not understand how the NYT can say that Microsoft's IE Anti competitive behavior is in any way similar to Microsoft trying to fast track their OPEN standard.

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 Everything is coming together for Google it seems at the last minute. We are two weeks away from a Rumored but "Confirmed iPhone." Perfect timing for an application that has dates from the 2005 Era on it. Patrick Altolf on SEO optimize has an excellent find. Right when I had imagined Gcheckout could quite possibly be merged with Visa to enable local payments Google reveals how it will take this market by storm.

All of the peices are falling together for a Google Advertising Monopoly sooner rather than later. If Google has Gpay + advertising on a Gphone + GPS enabled ads, then they will most likely be able to take on the emerging Mobile GPS enabled Advertising era by storm.

Update, Om Malik over at GigaOM has some juicy "facts" about the Gphone. Om isn't going to lie about this stuff...

I dont know but I'm logging into my live mail and this is what it looks like? Very odd! I even tried Internet Explorer!

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This article is not meant to be a catchy headline that starts a controversy about the potential ethics of recent moves by Google to shake down Newspaper sources as just another respective on the news. Web 2.0 is a pyramid, where the sources of the news and exclusives get the most eyeballs. I believe Google has a renewed focus on Google news because they want more newspapers who have found a backup source of income to die. Just like Microsoft wanted Netscape to die. The reality of the matter is that there are three types of advertising, and an emerging form of advertising that I will talk about below will I strongly believe --and will provide clues as to why--will be much more lucrative than all of the previous three combined.

When I read about interesting revaluations like Google signing long term deals with the wire services themselves, I realize that the strategy they are about to reveal and execute. Slowly, the moves of Google will finally show all newspapers that Google is planning on making their survival very difficult.

They also want to suction as much money out of the radio advertising budget and the print advertising budget so that there is yet even less competition for Google. Once they have over 90 percent of the market, they will increase prices as it's the only thing left to do in order to expand their income, and by that time, there will practically no one other power house advertising shop that is worth mentioning.

Do No Evil. Driving your competitors out of business is not only legal, but it's ethical (unless you are in Japan), taking steps to maintain that monopoly, or using it to enter other markets is what is evil. Let's go through the nitty gritty. Here are the forms of advertising. Keep in mind, there is a finite amount of cash in advertising, and the only way to grow the entire finite amount of money in advertising is the increase the methods by which advertising generates revenue. I'll show you how Google is going to do that in a moment.

1. Print advertising. This type of advertising is your local ads printed in local papers, as well as quasi national papers like the New York Times and the WSJ. Advertisers are spending less and less money here on targeted ads--money that Google never sees, unless it's a part of one of the ads that results from one of the deals Google recently struck with many newspapers.

2. TV/Radio advertising: This type of advertising is the second fastest shrinking form of advertising, 5 years ago, it was perhaps the best form of advertising, and although it's not in nearly as much trouble as print, it also represents advertising dollars that Google doesn't get.

3. Internet Advertising; Search powered pay per click advertising is as of right now the most lucrative type of advertising, not only to the advertising agencies and Google, but also to the customers, who get the best return on investment for their dollars. The reason for this is most of the time a person clicks on Dog Medication, or Dog Flea treatments, or execute queries like this, they are either looking to learn more about such items, but are most likely looking to shop for said items. Advertisers like advertising which turns into direct sales, especially when those sales far surpass what is paid to the advertising provider.

4. GPS enabled advertising:  Even if not combined with fantastic Google Local Search (it will be), it is still a much more potentially lucrative form of advertising simply because most people still spend the vast majority of their discretionary income via their automobiles. This form of advertising is also much better than anything else, and Google is in the position to totally annihilate and dominate this market. It will open the advertising market to furniture outlets, as well as manufacturers of heavy equipment. It will change the way some of the largest companies in the world advertise. Namely, Bestbuy, Walmart,Target,Costco, and so on.

5. Enter Google Checkout, Gphone + Google Maps/Earth in the Car: I believe Google will sign a major deal with one of the major credit card companies in which they will be able to combine transactions with Google Checkout with let's say Visa. Every purchase that is made via this card will be tracked by Google, users will get great deals, and Google will make so much damn money that they will destroy all advertising competitors in so short a time that it will make what Microsoft did to the software industry look like a silly game of ping pong.

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On January 17, 2007, a little over 7 and a half months ago, a Trojan horse dubbed Storm Worm was launched and began attacking Windows computers in mostly Europe and the United States. 15 days later, Storm Worm had accounted for 8% of all infections globally.

Researchers were somewhat marveled and frightened at the spectacle. A Symantec security research associate, Amado Hidalgo said:

 "During our tests we saw an infected machine sending a burst of almost 1,800 emails in a five-minute period and then it just stopped."

Storm Worm is an engineering marvel. Brian Krebs at the Washington Post recently said:

"If we assume the average Storm worm victim machine falls within this range, the Storm cluster has the equivalent of one to 10 million 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 processors with one to 10 million petabytes worth of RAM."

It's also engineered to be very difficult to stop. Storm Worm uses links to infected websites to quickly spread in a viral fashion. It uses false but catchy headline news stories to draw its victims into clicking on a link which will then run a series of exploit tests. The headlines range from phrases like, "Saddam Hussein alive!" to open ended nonsense like "Re: Your Text"

These exploits are updated all the time, and represent a huge hole in the fabric of security, as it's not illegal to sell an exploit to the highest bidder. Making the situation more problematic, Storm Worm uses P2P technology, and doesn't have a central server which would be traditionally taken out of commission by security engineers. Signature based detection is almost useless against the Storm Worm as it self modifies every 30 minutes.

This botnet represents a danger on the Internet that we have not ever seen before. To imagine a process which is out there updating, improving, expanding, avoiding detection with enough raw horsepower to undermine serious encryption mechanisms, launch network attacks on a global scale, and should control of this monster be sold to a group with more evil intentions, there could be severe damage which could undermined the the open and free nature of the future of the Internet itself.