What's new in week 14, 2008

Wednesday, 2008-04-02, Copenhagen

There has been a rumor that Microsoft is testing an online version of Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE). It seems that (if this is TRUE), MS is seriously looking at the threats that Google has put to its desktop tool suite like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. And MS is also launching projects (such as Albany) to compete on this line. Is MS becoming Google or the other way around? No doubts that both sides are working on the web 2.0 direction.

Facebook is revolutionizing from time to time. It recently introduced a ‘People you may know’ feature so that it becomes easier to fill out your buddies list and what’s more to find opportunities to re-connect.

Online document collaboration tools, where it started? Perhaps one could say it can be originated from the time when Google acquired Writely, which was a web-hosted word processing tool. Microsoft now has provided a new service called Officer Live Workspace in order to let people collaborate on documents. And there are other players on this front line. Adobe has Buzzword (a flash-based tool), AOL has just acquired Goowy and of course its online workspace tech. ThinkFree online offers an online office tool and there is Zoho.

Thursday, 2008-04-03, Copenhagen

Apple has just been elected as the most influential brand in the world! The poll is brought out by online magazine brandchannel.com. Microsoft and United States nation brand are numbered 2nd and 3rd. It seems that, by iPod and Mac computers, Apple has really been buries in the mind of a majority of people as the coolest and most impressive stuff.

Ops, there is local news. The Danish telecoms operator TDC just announced that it will offer free music downloads to its mobile phones and broadband Internet customers in cooperation with EMI, Warner Music and Song BMG. Anything in TDC's plan but hidden under our tables? Let us just cross our figures and see.

OOXML vs. ODF? ISO is working on it now. Microsoft has pushed quite hard for the certification of Open Office XML (OOXML) so that it can become an international standard supported by ISO, while Sun has already introduced the Open Document Format (ODF) which is ISO-approved. Google actually used the ODF standard in the Google Documents applications. So this becomes yet-another-war between MS and the ‘open world’ led by Sun.

Comcast has made an agreement with BitTorrent that it will re-configure its network management practices so that users of P2P services will not have discriminated services. Comcast admitted that the P2P traffic used to be ‘delayed’ in peak times. P2P services have been believed to be one of the sources for illegal usage of copyright content. But the net neutrality is the major issue and Comcast seems to be doing the right thing now.

Facebook has made a deal with CareerBuilder to start up a campaign of job recruiting. It seems that the US style of job recruiting is going on the Internet as well. Such an idea was actually adopted by LinkedIn for a quite while.

Friday, 2008-04-04, Copenhagen

Microsoft has been talking about LINQ (Language Integrated Query) for a while and it has made quite a big progress towards this target. LINQ actually merges the gap between programming languages and database. With LINQ, all kinds of data happened in a program flow can be queried like what a standard SQL do to a standard DB dataset. But, my question is, are you trying to clear things out or are you trying to confuse people more? My belief is that LINQ will be a generation but just a generation, meaning that it definitely be replaced and people may come back to the time that language should be separated from database (remember what FoxPro and FoxBase did?).

NAC, network access control, is a good idea for people to be able to have full and flexible control of their networks. Right now there are only two vendors in the market, Cisco and Microsoft. Most other competitors are either disappeared or moved to other business scenarios.