Category: Imported

The big announcement from today was nothing but fluff, in my humble opinion.  Basically, Google and sun are going to play nice, and the end result is that user’s downloads of various Google and Sun products are going to be bloated by bundling.

This doesn’t mean that Microsoft has nothing to worry about.  In the long view, if these companies really do learn to play nice together, it could spell trouble for the folks in Redmond.  Google appears to be sporadically rolling out free WiFi.  Sun’s CEO Scott McNealy has previously stated that he believed that computers in the future will be free.  When you bring Sun’s and Google’s various strengths and capabilities together, it could be a pretty daunting scene for MSFT (the company and the stock).  Google is buying up bandwidth and grid computing capabilities, and rolling out a WiFi last-mile.  Sun has some interesting technology with their Sunray thin clients.  Imagine that instead of paying a service fee (or software licenses), and buying hardware, you just sign-up and receive a smartcard in the mail.  You can use the smartcard anywhere there’s a compatible Google/Sunray client.  You plug it in and instantly, you have all of your email, all of your documents, and all of your authorized programs.  The Google/Sun alliance may even throw in a free Wifi laptop to make it easier for customers to hook in.

Are Sun and Google going to provide this service out of the goodness of their hearts?  Of course not.  In a future post, I’ll look at the business case for such a project.  Stay tuned!

 

A while back, I asked the question “What if Google decided to release an office productivity suite?“, and some folks are speculating that just such an announcement will be made today.  While that’s certainly a possibility, I’m going to put my money on some sort of combined Google / Sunray thin-client solution, possibly with Sun’s OpenOffice as an included productivity tool. 

The traditional press, newspapers, magazines, etc., have long enjoyed a unique power over the information that they present to their readers.  They could selectively quote, frame the discussion, and in many ways make the information portray a preconceived story.

That era is coming to an end.

Mark Jen recently posted a preemptive disclosure of a conversation he had with a Forbes Magazine fact checker.

Mark Cuban went so far as to post the entire text of an email interview he did with a NY Times reporter, who evidently twisted Cuban’s words to fit his story.

Blogs are flattening the world of information.  Big media will continue to hold large amounts of power, but abusing that power will become riskier, especially in instances where you are using quotes out of context, or framing articles in ways that totally disregard the source material.  While it’s true that the majority of your readers may never see the other side of the story directly, your direct competitors may pick it up, and use it to undermine your credibility.

Blogging lowers the bar.  It used to take a great deal of time & money to get a message to thousands or even millions of people.  Now, any person can start a blog for free.  Whether or not their words reach any audience will be determined by relevence, and the indexing of blogs that is being shaped by the likes of PubSub, Technorati, Google, and MSN.

Now, re-read that last sentence, and see if you can guess who the new Media Superpowers are going to be…

The October 2005 Issue of MSDN Magazine has a Microsoft sponsored article titled The Evolution of Tablet PC Technologies in Microsoft Windows Vista.  The basic gist of the article is that Microsoft is moving the TabletPC Framework into WinFX.  This means that ink technology can be used anywhere Vista is installed.  I’ve long thought that this would occur after TabletPC became popular.  If you have ever worked on a PC with a touchscreen or Tablet, I’m sure you’ve experienced the urge to poke or write on your normal desktop monitor, just to meet disappointment when your regular CRT fails to respond to tactile inputs.

This is going to be both a good thing, and a bad thing for the TabletPC brand as a whole.  Basically Microsoft is sacrificing some of the consistency of the TabletPC brand in order to leverage it’s marketshare to effect universal adoption of the key technologies of TabletPC.  Overall, I think this is a good thing, since hardware lock-in has never really propelled a platform forward in the mainstream computing community.

Some really good things are probably going to come out of this.  Imagine being able to add complete tablet functionality to a computer, just by purchasing a LCD monitor with a built-in WACOM digitizer.  I could see this working great in doctor’s offices, hotel & tourism, restaurants, retail, basically anywhere where customers are served.  Even though the traditional TabletPC could have worked in these locations, it hasn’t received widespread adoption.  I can think of several factors.  The portability of the platform increases the perceived risk of theft (even if it’s locked down).  TabletPC’s are expensive, and you’re paying for a lot of features you may not need.  Mounting the TabletPC into a workspace may seem gimmicky.

This is going to force some interesting changes in both the TabletPC and Desktop marketspace. Eventually I believe that TabletPC will just designate a Slate/Convertible form-factor, and will guarantee a certain hardware set.  Tablet functionality will be everywhere.

 

 

Google has launched a Blog Search Engine (From DownloadSquad). 

It fairs pretty will for my favorite vanity searches:

Blobservations and Hallihan

Actually, I’m not being quite fair, it does awesome on those searches.  I’m pretty familiar with what those searches provide on Pubsub, Technorati, and the normal Google Search and MSN Search.  And it’s fast…  Two ways.  It had a nine hour old blog post as my first result, so it’s updating fairly quickly, and the UI is lightning fast.  No perceived wait (although I’m sure it’s measurable).

This is Google’s biggest advantage over MSN search.  Google has that perceived wait down to nothing.

While Google is late to the party on blog search, they have put together a quality offering that I’m sure will become many folks engine of choice for blog searching.