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This week Microsoft will take its Office 2010 suite out of beta. If you're considering upgrading Office with Office, we'd encourage you to consider an alternative: upgrading Office with Google Docs. If you choose this path, upgrade means what it's supposed to mean: effortless, affordable, and delivering a remarkable increase in employee productivity. This is a refreshing alternative to the expensive and laborious upgrades to which IT professionals have become accustomed. Google Docs has been providing rich real-time collaboration to millions of users for nearly four years. It lets employees edit and share documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in the browser from anywhere in the world. We recently made tremendous strides in improving Google Docs formatting, speed and functionality, and a growing number of companies are now using it as their primary productivity software. Of course, you probably already own Office 2003 or 2007 (or maybe Office 2000?), and there's no need to uninstall them. Fortunately, Google Docs also makes Office 2003 and 2007 better. For example, you can store any file - including Microsoft Office documents - in Google's cloud and share them in their original format (protected, naturally by Google's synchronous replication across datacenters). Plus, in the coming months, Google will enable real-time collaboration directly in Office 2003 and 2007, as you can see here. Google Docs represents a real alternative for companies: a chance to get the collaboration features you need today and end the endless cycle of "upgrades". For more information on the choices available to you, check out the summary below. But don't take our word for it - you can try Google Docs and the rest of the Google Apps suite for free. The only thing you have to lose is a server or two.

Early in December Microsoft, Apple, EMC and Oracle notified the German regulator that they planned to form CPTN Holdings with a view to purchasing 882 of Novell's patents. But the filing was withdrawn (Rücknahme) on Dec. 30. No reason was given for the withdrawal by German authorities, but it is likely voluntary as authorities would not yet have had time to investigate the proposal. However, in recent weeks the German Federal Cartel Office has received letters and recommendations from various open-source organizations including the U.S.-based Open Source Initiative (OSI) and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). These open-source advocates are extremely alarmed that patents with claims on some elements of open-source software could fall into the hands of companies that compete with that open-source software. Given Novell's past involvement in free software development, it's seems very likely that at least some of the company's patents would cover free software technologies.

excerpt:  As you might know, WebKit Web Inspector is implemented as an HTML + CSS + JavaScript web application. What you might not know is that Web Inspector can run outside of the browser environment and still provide complete set of its features to the end user. Debugging over the wire Running debugger outside the browser is interesting because mobile platforms do not often provide enough screen real estate for quality debugging; they have network stack and CPU specifics that often affect page load and runtime. Still, they are based on the WebCore rendering engine, they could have Web Inspector instrumentation running and hence expose valuable debugging information to the end user. Now that Web Inspector is functioning out-of-process over the serialized-message-channel, attaching Web Inspector window to the remote browser is possible. Here is an example of the remote debugging session using Chromium: 1. Start your target browser with the remote-debugging-port command line switch: Chromium --remote-debugging-port=9222

Not sure what to make of this news.  XP continues to rule the desktop, Office 2003-2007 the productivity sweet spot.  I have used and researched Office 2010 and emphatically insist that it is a honey-trap for SharePoint and Live.com cloud-computing.  The MS-Cloud becomes THE default hard drive for Office 2010, with social networking-Facebook like contagion based on shared documents, crap collaboration and in-your-face insistent Live.com/Hotmail eMail.  Everytime i wanted to do something in Office 2010, there were 20 road blocks and hurdles MS put in the path forcing their Facebook-virus on my associates and myself.  Incredibly anti-productive.  Yet it's the only cloud-productivity solution capable of easing the difficult transition from desktop to cloud productivity environments.  Office 2010 does this by integrating into legacy desktop productivity  systems just enough that users will not realize until it's too late that a mine filed of hurdles and gotchas lies ahead. excerpt: Businesses are now deploying Office 2010 five times faster than they deployed Office 2007. Office 2010 is also the fastest-selling version of Office in history. "Nearly 50 million people worldwide use Office Web Apps to view, edit, and share their documents from anywhere with a browser and an Internet connection," added Numoto. Microsoft previously revealed in October that the company had sold six million copies of Office 2010. The company didn't reveal any additional sales figures on Wednesday but reaffirmed that the software is selling well. Office is currently used by more than 750 million users worldwide according to Microsoft.

I wonder about those numbers. 6 million copies of Office 2010 sold; total of 750 million users of all versions. That makes 0.8 per cent of Office users who had upgraded between June and October of 2010? Five times faster than Office 2007 would make Office 2007 sales in the same period of its release cycle 0.16 per cent of the 750 million, assuming the number of users had remained constant. I suspect there are some apples and oranges in that wood pile, to mix a metaphor. E.g., retail sales that exclude sales to OEMs?

Wow.  Why fight over the editing of Wikiword when you can make up your own history?  The Microsoft Office - SharePoint Blog team is busy trying to reshape history from the inside out.   This bookmark is going to require a ton of highlights and comments.

Gartner Analyst Michael Silver wrote the study, "Windows 7 is all but inevitable".  Here is a quote explaining why it's near impossible to migrate away from MSOffice and the MSOffice Productivity Environment: There have been many organizations that have investigated moving off Microsoft Office, usually to a distribution of OpenOffice.org (including the free download, Sun's StarOffice, Novell Edition and IBM Symphony), but relatively few have actually made the migration. Impediments include switching costs, issues with macros, stationery, databases and mail clients. For better or worse, for the past 15 years, organizations have chosen to overprovision and deploy a product that can do everything the most-advanced user requires to every user for the sake of homogeneity. Organizations that want to deploy OpenOffice.org (OO.o) need to come to terms with the fact that some users will still require MS Office and they will be forced to support a mix of products. To Gartner, it makes sense to take advantage of viable perpetual licenses for Microsoft Office for as long as possible. The expensive product you already own will be cheaper than the cheap or "free" product you need to spend money to which to migrate.

excerpt:  Social Business 4.0 (SBS), is Jive's latest version of its enterprise collaboration technology. In this new release, Jive includes deep integration with Microsoft Office, a mobile application for the iPhone and Blackberry plus the ability to bridge from internal to external communities. Jive is offering the ability to create or save documents in Microsoft Office with automatic upload to the Jive platform. Documents are rendered for the browser for users to view and make comments.Users may also collaborate on documents such as Power Point presentations. This co-authoring feature is similar to what you can do in Google Docs.

Knock me over with a feather. Now comes news that Cisco wants to challenge Microsoft Office and Google Apps. Paul Smalera of Business Insider questions the wisdom of this initiative, insisting that Cisco must know it can't beat either MSOffice or Google Apps. Maybe Cisco is fishing for help? Where is that wave-maker application Jason and Florian are said to be working on? :) Excerpt: Cisco VP Doug Dennerline told reporters, the company is "thinking about" adding document drafting and sharing to WebEx, which already features instant messaging, online meeting and email services.

Moving the Point of Assembly Kudos to Zoho. Their efforts remind me of the early days of the Microsoft Productivity Environment where core MSOffice editors expanded their reach through DDE, OLE, rich copy/paste, data binding, merged content and data, VBA scripting and the infamous recorder, and a developer API that meshed platform and productivity apps so deeply into end user information that the binding of business processes to the MOPE is proving near impossible to break. Even for years after the fact. A business ecosystem for client/server was born back in the early 90's, with Microsoft continuing on to own entirely the client side of the equation.

Clash of the Productivity Clouds: Before we attempt to answer those questions, one thing must be stated flatly: Office 365 and Google Apps are vastly different products. Office 365 is meant to be used with a locally installed version of Office (preferably Office 2010), whereas Google Apps lives 100 percent in the browser. To use a hackneyed metaphor, we're talking apples and oranges. With so many feature variables between the two products, blanket pronouncements don't make a lot of sense. Nonetheless, with the production release of Office 365, the cloud era of desktop productivity software officially kicks into high gear. Office 365 works with Microsoft's Web App versions of desktop Office applications -- Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote -- so theoretically, you can use it without a locally installed version of Office at all. But most people won't. The real Office 365 ploy is this: Sick of maintaining Exchange and SharePoint servers? No problem. Pay Microsoft and it will run those servers for you -- and throw in the fancy new Lync communications server. Office 365 represents the first time Microsoft has bundled desktop software (Office 2010) with an online service into a single subscription-based offering. But if you have another source of licenses for Office (2010, 2007, or otherwise), or if you want to run just the Office Web Apps (not likely), you can get an Office 365 license without paying for Office.

A book detailing years and years of Microsoft's misdeeds.

Prepare to be blown away. I viewed a demo of Numecent today and then did some research. There is no doubt in my mind that this is the end of the shrink wrapped- Microsoft business model. It's also perhaps the end of software application design and construction as we know it. Mobile apps in particular will get blasted by the Numecent "Cloud - Paging" concept. Extraordinary stuff. I'll leave a few useful links on Diigo "Open Web". "Numecent, a company that has a new kind of cloud computing technology that could potentially completely reorganize the way software is delivered and handled - upending the business as we know it - has another big feather in its cap. The company is showing how enterprises can use this technology to instantly put all of their enterprise software in the cloud, without renegotiating contracts and licenses with their software vendors. It signed $3 billion engineering construction company Parsons as a customer. Parsons is using Numecent's tech to deliver 4 million huge computer-aided design (CAD) files to its nearly 12,000 employees around the world. CAD drawings are bigger than video files and they can only be opened and edited by specific CAD apps like AutoCAD. Numecent offers a tech called "cloud paging" which instantly "cloudifies" any Windows app. Instead of being installed on a PC, the enterprise setup can deliver the app over the cloud. Unlike similar cloud technologies (called virtualization), this makes the app run faster and continue working even when the Internet connection goes down. "It's offers a 95% reduction in download times and 95% in download network usage," CEO Osman Kent told Business Insider. "It makes 8G of memory work like 800G." It also lets enterprises check in and check out software, like a library book, so more PCs can legally share software without violating licensing terms, saving money on software license fees, Kent says. Parson is using it to let employees share over 700 huge applications such as Au

Sounds like Microsoft must-buy-or-kill technology.

Too little, too late? IBM enters the SaaS cloud market with an email-calendaring offering. But where's the IBM SaaS cloud ecosystem? 

Summary:  It was 10 years ago this week that Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ordered Microsoft split in two as a remedy for abusing its Windows monopoly. That judgment was tossed out on appeal, but the eventual antitrust settlement has had plenty of repercussions. From crapware to insecurity, here's my wrap-up of what 10 years of antitrust regulation has really accomplished.

Notification of this article also appeared in the Diigo Document Wars Group..... WebODF...   An especially interesting project that was presented is WebODF, which wants to bring ODF to the web. Jos van den Oever started from the observation that a lot of office suites are moving into the "cloud". Examples are Microsoft Live Office, Google Docs, and Zoho. But where are the free software alternatives for the cloud? For OpenOffice.org, KOffice, AbiWord, and Gnumeric, there are none that have a cloud version with ODF support. That was the motivation for Jos to start a project to fill in this gap and let users view and edit ODF documents on the web without losing control of the document into some company's servers. The strategy Jos followed was to use just HTML and JavaScript for the web application. The application then loads the XML stream of the ODF document as is into the HTML document and puts it into the DOM tree. Styling is done by applying CSS rules that are directly derived from the and elements in the ODF document. That is how WebODF was born; it is a project with the initial goal of creating a simple ODF viewer and editor for offline and online use, implemented in HTML5. The small code base consists of one HTML5 file and eight JavaScript files, each of which is a few hundred lines of code. The most interesting part is that it doesn't need server-side code execution: the JavaScript code is executed in the user's browser and saving the document to the web server is done using WebDAV. It supports both the Gecko and WebKit HTML engines. There is also an implementation on top of QtWebKit, which is for better desktop integration, and an ODFKit implementation. This means that WebODF is an easy way to add ODF support to almost any application, be it in HTML, Gtk, or QML. KO GmbH has received funding from NLnet to improve the current WebODF prototype and see how far the idea goes. Interested readers can try the online demo