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Commission v. MIcrosoft Redux.

Is Intel right?  Is there a "compatibility-interoperability" problem between Windows RT Office (ARM) and legacy (x86) Windows MS Office productivity environments?  It seems to me that the entire reason iPAD, Android and other ARM based tablet systems want MSOffice and MSOffice Visual Document Viewers is exactly because they want and expect a high level of compat-interop with legacy Windows productivity workgroups and client/server systems. What's the truth?  And is there anything x86 providers like Intel and AMD can do about compat-interop and the unstoppable cloud-mobility revolution? excerpt: The Asus tablet has a quad-core Tegra 3 processor from Nvidia. Windows RT comes preloaded with Office 15, a group of widely used productivity applications. Microsoft has said it had to re-engineer Windows RT to deal with expectations for ARM based devices, which include all-day connectivity and low power consumption. The tablet also has an 8-megapixel camera at the rear with LED flash, and a 2-megapixel camera at the front. It has 2GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0. Intel has already started the war of words against ARM around Windows 8, with Intel's CEO Paul Otellini saying that ARM devices will be incompatible with existing Windows applications and drivers. But analysts have said that Windows RT devices will likely be attractive to users who have few ties with legacy Windows PCs. Low prices could also attract users to Windows on ARM devices.

The free CloudON app for iPAD provides a very nice ribbon interface for viewing and editing MSOffice XML documents.  Supports important workgroup features like "change tracking", show or hide markup, make and view comments, restrict editing, and compare and combine versions.  Very cool. Lacks support for custom add-ons, templates, auto-correct settings, and other advanced features may limit the program's usefulness.  Time to do some testing.  Hope Florian catches this post :) excerpt: Support for Office XML file types, and a ribbon to boot ...... Speculation continues as to whether -- most say when -- Microsoft will release a version of Office for the iPad. (CNET blogger Zack Whittaker cites sources predicting a November arrival.) It's not like you have to wait months to create and edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files on your iPad. Last June I described how to use Google Docs and Google Cloud Connect to edit Word and Excel files on an iPad for free. The end of that story noted the likely arrival of iPad apps supporting Office file formats. One of the most popular of these is the $15 Quickoffice, a program that was recently acquired by Google. But before you shell out for an Office alternative, check out the free CloudOn app, which now connects to Google Drive and Box accounts as well as Dropbox accounts. Other new features in the latest release let you send files as e-mail attachments and open PDFs. (See Lance Whitney's post on the Internet & Media blog for more on the program's PDF features.) CloudOn's ribbon is a big departure from the Quickoffice interface, which look nothing like Office. (Of course, many people will prefer the clean, clutter-free look of Quickoffice.) None of the Office extras, but all the essentials: In a group setting CloudOn's lack of support for custom add-ons, templates, auto-correct settings, and other advanced features may limit the program's usefulness. Still, the word processor lets you track and accept changes, show or

Interesting stats coming out from the recent Forrester study on Office Productivity.  The study was conducted by Philipp Karcher, and it shows a fcoming collision of two interesting phenomenon that cannot continue to "coexist".  Something has to give. The two phenom are the continuing dominance and use of client/server desktop productivity application anchor, MSOffice, and, the continuing push of all business productivity application to highly mobile cloud-computing platforms.   It seems we are stuck in this truly odd dichotomy where the desktop MSOffice compound document model continues to dominate business productivity processes, yet those same users are spending ever more time mobile and in the cloud.  Something has got to give. And yes, I am very concerned about the fact that neither of the native XML document formats {used by MSOffice (OXML), OpenOffice and LibreOffice (ODF)} are designed for highly mobile cloud-computing.   It's been said before, the Web is the future of computing.  And HTML5 is the language of the Web.  HTML is also the most prolific compound-document format ever.  One of the key problems for cloud-computing is the lack of HTML5 ready Office Productivity Suites that can also manage the complexities of integrating cloud-ready data streams. Sadly, when Office Productivity formats went down the rat hole of a 1995 client/server compound document model, the productivity suites went right with them.  Very sad.  But the gaping hole in cloud-computing is going to be filled.  One way or the other.

"FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS What is WhiteHat Aviator? WhiteHat Aviator; is the most secure , most private Web browser available anywhere. By default, it provides an easy way to bank, shop, and use social networks while stopping viruses from infecting computers, preventing accounts from being hacked, and blocking advertisers from invisibly spying on every click. Why do I need a secure Web browser? According to CA Technologies, 84 percent of hacker attacks in 2009 took advantage of vulnerabilities in Web browsers. Similarly, Symantec found that four of the top five vulnerabilities being exploited were client-side vulnerabilities that were frequently targeted by Web-based attacks. The fact is, that when you visit any website you run the risk of having your surfing history, passwords, real name, workplace, home address, phone number, email, gender, political affiliation, sexual preferences, income bracket, education level, and medical history stolen - and your computer infected with viruses. Sadly, this happens on millions of websites every day. Before you have any chance at protecting yourself, other browsers force you to follow complicated how-to guides, modify settings that only serve advertising empires and install obscure third-party software. What makes WhiteHat Aviator so secure? WhiteHat Aviator; is built on Chromium, the same open-source foundation used by Google Chrome. Chromium has several unique, powerful security features. One is a "sandbox" that prevents websites from stealing files off your computer or infecting it with viruses. As good as Chromium is, we went much further to create the safest online experience possible. WhiteHat Aviator comes ready-to-go with hardened security and privacy settings, giving hackers less to work with. And our browser downloads to you - without any hidden user-tracking functionality. Our default search engine is DuckDuckGo - not Google, which logs your activity. For good measure, Aviator integrates Disconnect

"Opt out of PRISM, the NSA's global data surveillance program. Stop reporting your online activities to the American government with these free alternatives to proprietary software." A designer named Peng Zhong is so strongly opposed to PRISM, the NSA's domestic spying program, that he created a site to educate people on how to "opt out" of it. According to the original report that brought PRISM to public attention, the nine companies that "participate knowingly" with the NSA are Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. Zhong's approach is to replace your workflow with open-source tools that aren't attached to these companies, since they easily stay off the government's radar. If you want to drop totally off the map, it'll take quite a commitment.   Are you ready to give up your operating system?  The NSA tracks everything on Windows, OSX and Google Chrome.  You will need to switch to Debian or some other brand of GNU Linux!  Like Mint!!!!! Personally I have switched from Google Chrome Browser to Mozilla Firefox using the TOR Browser Bundle - Private mode.

"One of the strangest things about Stripe - or perhaps, one of the strangest things about Paypal - is the list of people who are funding Stripe. Three of its biggest individual backers are people who played a key role in making PayPal a success: cofounders Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, along with Elon Musk, who joined PayPal through an acquisition. Why would Thiel, Levchin, and Musk fund a machine built destroy their baby? Probably because, in Silicon Valley, PayPal is viewed as a lost cause. We've heard a lot of complaints about how awful and hard it is to implement. " Stripe isn't the only well-funded startup going after what it views as a decrepit, disrupt-ble incumbent. Jack Dorsey's Square is too, and it's now worth billions of dollars. Another heavily funded startup, Braintree, owns the technology millions of people use to pay for things inside apps like Uber. Finally, some of eBay's bigger rivals such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are gunning for PayPal too.

Speaking at Gov 2.0 Expo this week, Kemp said it takes one to two minutes to launch a virtual server on Nebula. That compares to as long as nine months to order and install a server using standard processes. At Gov 2.0 Expo, Kemp demonstrated a forthcoming Web application, developed in partnership with Microsoft and called Worldwide Telescope, that will make high-res imagery of Mars available to the public. Worldwide Telescope will be hosted on Nebula. Cureton said that NASA is assessing its cloud computing strategy in parallel with an analysis of its data center requirements. In February, Federal CIO Vivek Kundra announced a government-wide data center consolidation initiative. In response to that, NASA is taking an inventory if its data center resources as a first step toward consolidation. The advantages of cloud computing are "compelling," Cureton said during a Web 2.0 Expo keynote presentation. She outlined five primary advantages of the cloud model: ....... reduced IT costs, ....... faster deployment of IT resources, ....... organizational flexibility, ....... computing resource efficiency, and ....... the ability to provide high-quality services to users and departments.

Memeo Connect, which my colleague David Worthington tried and liked a few weeks ago, is an app that lets Google Apps users sync their documents and other files to a PC or Mac so they can get access to them even when they're offline. And as of today, it's available in a beta of version 2.0, which lets you get at synced files not only in Memeo's app but in Windows Explorer or the OS X finder, as well as in file open/save dialog boxes. The sync is two-way, so anything you drag or save into this repository gets moved back to Google Apps' storage once you're back online. And as before, Connect can handle files of all sorts and do conversions between Google Docs files and PDF and Microsoft Office formats. This virtual drive shows up in Explorer or Finder labeled as "GDrive"-a playful reference to a Google product that people have been expecting to arrive any day now for at least half a decade. (Don't tell anyone, but I've seen something called Google Web Drive in use at Google's offices; I assume it's undergoing internal testing and will get rolled out to the rest of us someday.) All in all, the new Connect competes more closely with Box.net (which launched its own syncing feature recently) and sync-focused services such as SugarSync. Memeo Connect 2.0′s other major feature is full-text search of the files in your Google Docs collection: Previous versions could only search file names. The Memeo Connect 2.0 beta is free, but the final version will cost $9 per user per year. It requires a $50/year Google Apps Premier account. (I think plenty of users of Google Apps' free version would pay for it, but Google only lets third-party apps and services that access the Apps API work with the paid edition.)

Some good questions are being asked about the future of Google Wave and collaborative computing.  He misses however another important play for Wave; moving to the center of the emerging Open Web Productivity Environment. excerpt:  Google Wave is another grab for the Holy Grail of collaborative computing. But, will it be more successful than previous attempts? Whenever you see something compared to Lotus Notes, as Google Wave has been, you know to expect an uphill slog. Add a comparison to Microsoft Groove, which I have not seen but seems reasonable, and you can expect deep trouble. Both Notes and Groove are wonderful, innovative applications that have never caught on as I had hoped. Why? They are too difficult to use and develop for. They were way ahead of their time. Maybe Google Wave, a workplace collaboration application that is being rolled out to an additional 100,000 beta testers, has arrived at the right time, finding the right mix of power vs. ease-of-use, and the right metaphor for delivering it. We have an excellent story that offers "Five Reasons To Dive Into Google Wave." That is, if you can find a way to get into the beta. The big question: Can Google Wave succeed where seemingly every collaboration application that has gone has failed?

Excellent Wave coverage from Scott M. Fulton III.  The Hollywood Movie industry use case scenario is very interesting.  But Scott is one of the few people to draw an analogy between Google Wave convergence of concurrent communications and collaborative content and the early days of the Microsoft Office Productivity Platform where we saw DDE, OLE and MAPI rise and rule. Excerpt: Today, Google is expected to invite as many as 100,000 more participants into the private beta of its concurrent communications system, called Wave. As that happens, many more participants will be able to not only communicate with one another in a more granular form of real-time, but potentially collaborate on work and projects. It's that latter part of the program that's supposed to congeal at some point into a collective sense of purpose. But this time, unlike Microsoft's first experiments with Dynamic Data Exchange between applications on the same computer three decades ago, there isn't yet a clear, single purpose for the system. No question it could bring individuals as close together as people separated by indefinite distance could become; but as to the question of what they do with one another once they do get together, Google is hoping this question -- like so many others it puts out there in the open -- resolves itself. Yesterday, Google offered links to a number of different independent assessments of the possible, eventual purpose of Google Wave, though it offered them as use-case scenarios rather than projections of possible goals for the product...which is what many actually were.

Wow!  30GB free.  250 file formats with a "universal translation engine".  And HTML5. excerpt: "You can't have convergence unless you have the ability to translate files across different platforms and devices," Donald Leka, TransMedia's CEO, told Macworld. "There's a war between the big tech companies like Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, and Google, and these compatibility issues are not going to go away." Glide also lets you share any documents or media in your account with other users or the public. And with new desktop clients for Mac and PC that can sync a local folder up to your cloud storage space, Glide is taking on popular competitors like Dropbox, SugarSync, and Apple's own iDisk. Glide is free to use in desktop browsers and on the iPad, and free accounts get 30GB of space to start. Premium accounts offer 250GB of space for $50 per year.

From the NOT So OpenWeb department, MacroView provides a folder based hierarchy view of MSOffice, OutLook and PDF documents/messages.  Note that the metadata information is held at the server level - it is not part of of the document container!  Which is another way of saying that while the document might be portable, the metadata and layered components/relationships involving that document are not.  SharePoint only.  I doubt google Search will be able to access and read this metadata. intro:  Enable full function document management in Microsoft® SharePoint® 2007 and 2010 - save, browse and search from the applications that you use every day with MacroView DMF™ v7 (formerly known as MacroView WISDOM DMF)

According to a new Forrester report, though Microsoft Office continues to be a mainstay both in the enterprise and at home, developing concerns about productivity as they relate to mobile, cloud, and collaboration may bring a shift in enterprise behaviors.

We can all learn a lot of lessons from the history of DDE/OLE/ OLE3/COM /ActiveX/DCOM /COM+ (you can start reading up on Wikipedia to get some background) and how we went from everyone using best-of-breed standalone apps to one integrated, nearly monolithic Office. It basically all started with copy and paste. People who never spent a lot of time in singletasking, character-mode operating environments like the DOS command line don't recall that simply copying-and-pasting information between apps was difficult at the time. And part of the revelation of Windows for mainstream users (or Mac, for leading-edge tech fans), was being able to easily share data in that way. This was different than what Unix users were used to with the command-line pipe, or from what most applications do with feeds today, in allowing structured information flows between applications. There's a desire to combine data from different sources in an arbitrary way, and to have the user interface display the appropriate tools for whatever context you're in. The dominant model here, probably because of the influence of the early PARC demos, is to have toolbars or UI widgets change depending on what kind of content you're manipulating. Microsoft was really into this in the early 90s with OLE2, where your Word toolbars would morph into Excel toolbars if you double-clicked on an embedded spreadsheet. It was ungainly and ugly and slow, especially if you had less than an exorbitant 8MB of RAM, but the idea was pretty cool. And it still is. People are so focused on data formats and feeds that they're ignoring consensus around UI interoperability. The Atom API and Metaweblog API give me a good-enough interface if I want to treat a discrete chunk of information (like a blog post) as an undifferentiated blob. But all the erstwhile spec work around microformats and structured blogging (I forget which one is for XML and which one's for XHTML) doesn't seem to have addressed user experience or editing behavior

Eucalyptus, an open-source platform that implements "infrastructure as a service" (IaaS) style cloud computing, aims to take open source front and center in the cloud-computing craze. The project, founded by academics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, is now a Benchmark-funded company with an ambitious goal: become the universal cloud platform that everyone from Amazon to Microsoft to Red Hat to VMware ties into. [Eucalyptus] is architected to be compatible with such a wide variety of commonly installed data center technologies, [and hence] provides an easy and low-risk way of building private (i.e. on-premise or internal) clouds...Thus data center operators choosing Eucalyptus are assured of compatibility with the emerging application development and operational cloud ecosystem while attaining the security and IT investment amortization levels they desire without the "fear" of being locked into a single public cloud platform.

Janco notes that from February 2009 to February 2010, IE dropped 6.21%, from 70.99% to 64.78%. "The major findings are that in the last 12 months Microsoft's browser market share has continued to erode - Microsoft lost over 6% in the last 12 months; Firefox's market share is unchanged for the last 12 months; Google Desktop and Chrome now have just under 6%; and Netscape is no more," reads an excerpt from the Browser and Operating System Market Share White Paper.

... The Internet Operating System is an Information Operating System ... Search is key to managing and working "information" ... Media Access ... Communications ... Identity and the Social Graph ... Payment ... Advertising ... Location ... Activity Streams - "Attention" ... Time  ... Image and Speech Recognition ... Government Data ... The Browser Where is the "operating system" in all this? Clearly, it is still evolving. Applications use a hodgepodge of services from multiple different providers to get the information they need. But how different is this from PC application development in the early 1980s, when every application provider wrote their own device drivers to support the hodgepodge of disks, ports, keyboards, and screens that comprised the still emerging personal computer ecosystem? Along came Microsoft with an offer that was difficult to refuse: We'll manage the drivers; all application developers have to do is write software that uses the Win32 APIs, and all of the complexity will be abstracted away. This is the crux of my argument about the internet operating system. We are once again approaching the point at which the Faustian bargain will be made: simply use our facilities, and the complexity will go away. And much as happened during the 1980s, there is more than one company making that promise. We're entering a modern version of "the Great Game", the rivalry to control the narrow passes to the promised future of computing.