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Gary Edwards

GlideOS 3.0 | Transmedia Corporation : Reducing Digital Friction - 0 views

www.transmediacorp.com

glide

shared by Gary Edwards on 03 Jun 08 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 03 Jun 08
     
    Glide 3.0 has been released and it is excellent! Does not yet run on a Treo, but htings are looking great. The sync program is very intriguing, and they seem to have a well thought out hosting model. Way beyond Google Docs and Zoho. Not much information on the file format side of things. Glide is written in Flex with native OS adaptations written in C-C++. Optimized for Firefox. I'm still ocnfused about the browser vs. Flex runtime (VM).
Gary Edwards

Kevin Lynch on Adobe's AIR: Extending the Web beyond the Browser - Knowledge@Wharton - 0 views

knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm

adobe air flash flex lynch silverlight

shared by Gary Edwards on 31 May 08 - Cached
  • CEO Shantanu Narayan described AIR as Adobe's "fourth platform," positioning it as the next link in the chain that includes PostScript, Acrobat's PDF (Portable Document Format) and Flash. The first three created disruptive paradigm shifts in their respective fields -- typesetting and document printing, electronic document interchange and web interactivity -- and all have generated significant revenue for Adobe. Adobe hopes AIR will follow suit
  • Gary Edwards on 31 May 08
     
    good interview with Kevin Lynch about the future of the Web. Covers AIR, Flex, Flash, Silverlight and how the Web is moving from universal access and exchange of documents to that of applications. Lynch places Adboe products into a larger context of which problems these inventions solved. The new problem is that of expanding the Web to the desktop through these emerging universal applications.
Gary Edwards

Independent study advises IT planners to go OOXML: The Bill Gates MSOffice "formats and... - 0 views

talkback.zdnet.com/5206-12558-0.html

anti-trust browser-wars comes gates iowa msoffice netscape ooxml w3c

shared by Gary Edwards on 30 May 08 - Cached
  • 3.2.2.2. A pox on both your houses! gary.edwards - 01/22/08 Hi Robert, What you've posted are examples of MSOffice ”compatibility settings” used to establish backwards compatibility with older documents, and, for the conversion of alien file formats (such as various versions of WordPerfect .wpd). These compatibility settings are unspecified in that we know the syntax but have no idea of the semantics. And without the semantic description there is no way other developers can understand implementation. This of course guarantees an unacceptable breakdown of interoperability. But i would be hesitant to make my stand of rejecting OOXML based on this issue. It turns out that there are upwards of 150 unspecified compatibility settings used by OpenOffice/StarOffice. These settings are not specified in ODF, but will nevertheless show up in OpenOffice ODF documents – similarly defying interoperability efforts! Since the compatibility settings are not specified or even mentioned in the ODF 1.0 – ISO 26300 specification, we have to go to the OOo source code to discover where this stuff comes from. Check out lines 169-211. Here you will find interesting settings such as, “UseFormerLineSpacing, UseFormerObjectPositioning, and UseFormerTextWrapping”. So what's going on here?
  • From: Bill Gates Sent: Saturday, December 5 1998 To: Bob Muglia, Jon DeVann, Steven Sinofsky Subject : Office rendering "One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities. Anything else is suicide for our platform. This is a case where Office has to avoid doing something to destroy Windows. I would be glad to explain at a greater length. Likewise this love of DAV in Office/Exchange is a huge problem. I would also like to make sure people understand this as well." Tuesday, August 28, 2007
  • Gary Edwards on 30 May 08
     
    The IOWA Comes vs. Microsoft antitrust suit evidence is now publicly available. This ZDNet Talkback posts an extraordinary eMail from Bill Gates concerning the need to control MSOffice formats and protocols as Microsoft pushes onto the Web. The key point is that Chairman Bill understands that the real threat to Microsoft is that of Open Web formats and protocols outside of Microsoft's control. It's 1998, and the effort to "embrace and eXtend" W3C HTML, XHTML, SVG and CSS isn't working well. The good Chairman notifies the troops that MSOffice must come up with another plan. Interestingly, it's not until 2001, when OpenOffice releases an XML encoding of the OpenOffice/StarOffice imbr that Microsoft finally sees a solution! (imbr = in-memory-binary-representation) The MSOffice crew immediately sets to work creating a similar XML encoding of the MSOffice binary (imbr) dump. The first result is released in the MSOffice 2003 beta as "WordprocessingML and SpreadsheetML". XML was designed as a structured language for creating specific structured languages. OpenOffice saw the potential of using XML to create an OpenOffice specific XML language. MSOffice seized the innovation and the rest is history. Problem solved! So what was the "problem" the good Chairman identified in this secret eMail? It's that the Web is the future, and Microsoft needed to find a way of leveraging their existing desktop document "editor" monopoly share into owning and controlling the Web formats produced by Microsoft applications. MSOffice OOXML is the result. ISO approval of MSOffice OOXML is beyond important to Microsoft. It establishes MSOffice "editors" as standards compliant. It also establishes the application, platform and vendor specific MSOffice OOXML as an international "open" standard. Many will ask why this isn't a case of Microsoft actually opening up the MSOffice formats in compliance with government antitrust demands. It is "compliance", but not in the sense of what
Gary Edwards

Microsoft Silverlight - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/Silverlight

flash flex ria silverlight xaml

shared by Gary Edwards on 30 Apr 08 - Cached
  • The international, non-profit European Committee for Interoperable Systems ("a coalition of Microsoft's largest competitors"[50]) fears that with Silverlight Microsoft aims to introduce content on the web that can only be accessed from the Windows platform. They argue that use of XAML in Silverlight is positioned to replace the cross-platform HTML standard. Effectively, if Silverlight usage becomes widespread enough, users will risk having to purchase Microsoft products to access web content[51]. California and several other U.S. states also have asked a District Judge to extend most of Microsoft's antitrust case settlement for another five years,[52] citing "a number of concerns, including the fear that Microsoft could use the next version of Windows to 'tilt the playing field' toward Silverlight, its new Adobe Flash competitor," says a Seattle Post-Intelligencer article. Microsoft has also been criticized for not using the Scalable Vector Graphics standard for Silverlight, which, according to Ryan Paul of Ars Technica, is consistent with Microsoft's ignoring of open standards in other products, as well.[53] However, according to David Betz, an independent .NET technologies specialist, Microsoft would have needed to alter the SVG specification to add .NET integration and UI constructs on top of SVG to make it suitable for scenarios Silverlight uses markup for (UI and vector markup, by default). Consequently, the "choice by Microsoft to use XAML over SVG, served to retain the SVG standard by not adding proprietary technology [to extend SVG]".[54]
  • Gary Edwards on 30 Apr 08
     
    Silverlight Wikipedia description
Gary Edwards

Is MSOffice the new Netscape? | Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: - 0 views

www.roughtype.com/...one_of_the_corn.php

google mesh msoffice xaml

shared by Gary Edwards on 02 May 08 - Cached
  • One of the cornerstones of Microsoft's competitive strategy over the years has been to redefine competitors' products as features of its own products. Whenever some upstart PC software company started to get traction with a new application - the Netscape browser is the most famous example - Microsoft would incorporate a version of the application into its Office suite or Windows operating system, eroding the market for the application as a standalone product and starving its rival of economic oxygen (ie, cash). It was an effective strategy as well as a controversial one.
  • Google is trying to pull a Microsoft on Microsoft by redefining core personal-productivity applications - calendars. word processing, spreadsheets, etc. - as features embedded in other products. There's a twist, though. Rather than just incorporating the applications as features in its own products, Google is offering them up to other companies, particularly big IT vendors, to incorporate as features in their products.
  • Google's advantage here doesn't just lie in the fact that it is ahead of Microsoft in deploying Web-based substitutes for Office applications. Microsoft can - and likely will - neutralize much of that early-mover advantage by offering its own Web-based versions of its Office apps. Its slowness in rolling out full-fledged web apps is deliberate; it doesn't see Google Apps, or similar online offerings from other companies, as an immediate threat to its Office franchise, and it wants to avoid, for as long as possible, cannibalizing sales of the highly profitable installed versions of Office.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • It knows that, should traditional personal-productivity apps become commonplace features of the cloud, supplied free or at a very low price, the economic oxygen will slowly be sucked out of the Office business. That doesn't necessarily mean that customers will abandon Microsoft's apps; it just means that Microsoft won't be able to make much money from them anymore.
  • Microsoft may eventually win the battle for online Office applications, but the victory is likely to be a pyrrhic one.
  • Gary Edwards on 02 May 08
     
    Microsoft faces down threats from Google, IBM and SalesForce.com with it's threat to enterprise IT - MSOffice as the ultimate browser.
  • Gary Edwards on 02 May 08
     
    Google Office productivity alternatives are "trapped inside the browser". MSOffice, Silverlight, Live Mesh and Adobe Flex "RIA" browser alternatives are comparatively feature rich and powerfull.
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