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Nice article from Scott M. Fulton describing Microsoft's iron fisted lock on government desktop productivity systems and the great transition to a Cloud Productivity Platform.  Keep in mind that in 2005, Massachusetts tried to do the same thing with their SOA effort.  Then Governor Romney put over $1 M into a beta test that produced the now infamous 300 page report written by Sam Hiser.  The details of this test resulted in the even more infamous da Vinci ODF plug-in for Microsoft Office desktops.   The lessons of Massachusetts are simple enough; it's not the formats or office suite applications.  It's the business process!  Conversion of documents not only breaks the document.  It also breaks the embedded "business process". The mystery here is that Microsoft owns the client side of client/server computing.  Compound documents, loaded with intertwined OLE, ODBC, ActiveX, and other embedded protocols and interface dependencies connecting data sources with work flow, are the fuel of these client/server business productivity systems.  Break a compound document and you break the business process.   Even though Massachusetts workers were wonderfully enthusiastic and supportive of an SOA based infrastructure that would include Linux servers and desktops as well as OSS productivity applications, at the end of the day it's all about getting the work done.  Breaking the business process turned out to be a show stopper. Cloud Computing changes all that.  The reason is that the Cloud is rapidly replacing client/server as the target architecture for new productivity developments; including data centers and transaction processing systems.  There are many reasons for the great transition, but IMHO the most important is that the Web combines communications with content, data, and collaborative computing.   Anyone who ever worked with the Microsoft desktop productivity environment knows that the desktop sucks as a communication device.  There was

Control vs. Creativity.  As the ulitmate control freak, Ballmer was guanteed to crush the life out of Microsoft's most creative individuals and teams.  Gates was focused on Windows and MSOffice, and Ballmer on control.  That one-two punch made certain that Microsoft would not be a player in the next great wave of computing; The Cloud.   excerpt: This is yet another example of what I like to call the Wile E. Coyote syndrome. Like the unfortunate character in the old Warner Bros. cartoons, Microsoft now seems to be a company that has long since run off the cliff but, with legs spinning for all they are worth, doesn't know yet that it is ready to drop. Yet drop it most certainly will. Microsoft Win8 Tablet Is NOT a Game Changer Adam Hartung Contributor Snapshot: Steve Ballmer Follow (93) #44 Billionaires IDC Analyst: Microsoft's Surface Sizzle Needs Win8 Steak Daniel Nye Griffiths Contributor To understand how this happens, take a look at the work of Arnold J. Toynbee, a historian who studied the rise and fall of civilizations. He argued that a civilization flourishes when it motivates insiders and attracts outsiders with its creative dynamism and culture. The civilization breaks down when its leadership loses this creative capacity and gives way to, or transforms itself into, a dominant minority. When this happens, the driver of the civilization becomes control, not attraction. And it's precisely this switch from attraction to control that is the source of the breakdown. Interestingly, Toynbee says that the consequences may not be immediately apparent. A civilization can keep up momentum because the controls it puts in place generate some short-term efficiency. But eventually it will run its course and collapse, because no amount of control can replace the loss of collective creativity. Observe this in the corporate world by looking at the example of General Motors. G.M.'s 2009 bankruptcy came at the end of a long decline dating back to the early 197

Good in depth article about Huddle, and their challenge to Microsoft SharePoint.  We met these guys at the 2006 and 2007 Office 2.0 conference in San Fran.  Lengthy conversations about the Windows Productivity Environment and how Microsoft built that platform.  Need to take a closer look at how far they have come.  The Cloud is a greaqt opportunity for a new Productivity Platform.

Vaporware, but interesting. More info on the developers' website at .  Basic idea is a computer on a stick that can be plugged into either other computers or into an HDMI flatscreen TV. In the latter scenario, Bluetooth connectivity for keyboard/mouse combo, provided by e.g., a smartphone. The USB connection is v. 2.0, but I'll guess that USB 3.0 would soon be an option in newer models.  According to the specs it can run either Android or Ubunutu. If you check the developer's website, they definitely have their eyes on the growth in the numbers of HDMI-equipped TVs. Note that if delivered as described, this breaks boundaries of mobile devices, tending toward a convergence of TV monitors and mobile devices in an unexpected way. 

Nice infographic!  Shows that great transition from Windows desktop client/server to Cloud Computing is well underway.  I've tried RingCentral, and it's very good.  But i much prefer Google Voice - especially since i have an HTC Android.  RingCentral only offers one advantage over gVoice; they have integrated fax.  Everything else about RingCentral seemed like a throwback to DOS applications.   gVoice is slowly evolving.  Seems like it's taking forever to complete the integration with gMail, gSearch, and gDocs.  But i can see the incredible potential of Cloud integrated communications, content and collaborative computing.  gVoice has a potential like no one else. excerpt: The results are in from our annual smartphone survey! We polled 300 RingCentral SMB customers about their mobile device adoption and cloud use. The key takeaway: 57% of business owners said the majority of their business-critical applications currently run in the cloud.

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.

Oh, great. My router and all of my hard drives have NSA backdoors in them. And my BIOS on the Linux box may be infected with a backdoor. What are the odds that NSA has not developed similar capability for the UEFI on our two newer Windows boxes? 

This seems like a reasonable role for government. 

"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.

Return to the bad old days Many of Apple's demos rely on "experimental" CSS3 properties to work. The exact implementation of these properties has yet to be hammered out, so browser vendors must use their best guess to determine how they should be rendered onscreen. Because of the ambiguity this introduces, it is the custom for browser vendors to attach a vendor-specific prefix to the CSS property names. Firefox uses "moz," while Safari uses "webkit," named for the browser's WebKit rendering engine. This means Web developers who want to use a specific experimental CSS feature must include the vendor-specific properties for each browser they want to support in their style sheets. It's a less than ideal situation, but the actual coding required is trivial. Apple chose not to bother for its HTML5 demo site. That would be bad enough. But Apple's demos don't work on Google's Chrome browser, either -- and Chrome also uses the "webkit" prefix for its experimental CSS3 properties (because it's also based on the WebKit rendering engine). Rather than detecting browser capabilities and degrading the user experience gracefully where features aren't supported -- as is the accepted best practice on modern browsers -- Apple chose to deliberately screen out any browser that doesn't self-identify as Safari. That's right: By forcing my browser's user agent string to identify as Safari 5, I was able to view many of the demos just fine in Firefox 3.6 on Windows. Seriously, Apple? I thought we left elaborate browser-detection scripts behind in the bad old days of the 1990s. I can't imagine anyone would want to start up the practice again, let alone one of the leading companies in the development of next-generation Web standards.

Jailbreaking vs. Unlocking Jailbreaking and unlocking the iPhone are two different hacks which allow you to take control of your mobile device in different ways. Jailbreaking is a type of hack that lets you install unapproved third-party applications on your iPhone or iPod Touch from searchable repositories provided by apps like Cydia and Icy. Unlocking, on the other hand, is a hack that lets you use your iPhone on another cellular network. Here in the U.S., that means you can use the iPhone on T-Mobile instead of AT&T. You have to first jailbreak your phone before you can unlock it, but you don't have to unlock a phone in order to jailbreak it. How to Jailbreak the 4.0 Software for the iPhone 3G and iPod Touch Second Generation The "Redsn0w" jailbreak software has been updated to support iOS 4.0 on both Mac and Windows and works for iPhone 3G and the iPod Touch, second generation. This jailbreak is especially helpful for for iPhone 3G owners as the new OS won't offer the much sought-after multitasking feature on their devices. A jailbreak application called multifl0w will, however, provide an alternative. Another jailbreak app called WinterBoard offers a way to customize the iPhone's background even though that too is disabled for 3G owners running the latest OS 4.0 update. This jailbreak guide assumes you've already downloaded and updated your phone or iPod Touch to the latest software, iOS 4.0, and have backed up your device. If you are looking to unlock your phone in order to run it on a network belonging to another carrier, this is not the guide for you.

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.)

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.

The Future of the Open Web You're right that the browser wars do not matter - except for this point of demarcation; browsers that support HTML+ and browser that support 1998 HTML. extensive comment by ~ge~ Not all Web services and applications support HTML+, the rapidly advancing set of technologies that includes HTML5, CSS3, SVG/Canvas, and JavaScript (including the libraries and JSON). Microsoft has chosen to draw the Open Web line at what amounts to 1998-2001 level of HTML/CSS. Above that line, they provision a rich-client / rich-server Web model bound to the .NET-WPF platform where C#, Silverlight, and XAML are very prominent. Noticeably, Open Web standards are for the most part replaced at this richer MSWeb level by proprietary technologies. Through limited support for HTML/CSS, IE8 itself acts to dumb down the Open Web. The effect of this is that business systems and day-to-day workflow processes bound to the ubiquitous and very "rich" MSOffice Productivity Environment have little choice when it comes to transitioning to the Web but to stay on the Microsoft 2010 treadmill. Sure, at some point legacy business processes and systems will be rewritten to the Web. The question is, will it be the Open Web or the MS-Web? The Open Web standards are the dividing line between owning your information and content, or, having that content bound to a Web platform comprised of proprietary Microsoft services, systems and applications. Web designers and developers are still caught up in the browser wars. They worry incessantly as to how to dumb down Web content and services to meet the limited functionality of IE. This sucks. So everyone continues to watch "the browser wars" stats. What they are really watching for though is that magic moment where "combined" HTML+ browser uptake in marketshare signals that they can start to implement highly graphical and collaboratively interactive HTML+ specific content. Meanwhile, the greater Web is a

Wow.  Does this mean i no longer have to create URL links in my documents?  With this Aperture-Scribd agreement, everything is linked automagically.  Everything!  So, here's the news blip, "the document-sharing site Scribd will now allow users to use Apture Highlights on the tens of millions of public documents posted on the content platform. 'Apture Highlights' plugs the "search leak" that is taking place with content on the web. The feature allows you to highlight any word or phrase on a page and instantly bring up search results in a window. The startup brings results from 60-plus sources including YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, Google and more for extra context around content. Now, when users are reading documents, books, or other works on Scribd, they will be able to highlight any word, and Apture will open a small browser within the page to search for the additional information on Google, Bing or Yahoo. Scribd representative Michelle Laird said that this integration is made possible party because of the company's move to convert the platform to HTML5.  I guess this means that hyperlinking that made the World Wide Web such an exciting and ultimately dominant Internet application, has moved to a new level of auto linking.  Is there an anchor tag in HTML5 i can use to point the mega search engines first at the primary research, then to wikipedia, and then to the global search list?

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

EU settlement will alter Microsoft's stance on interoperability By Kurt Mackie Dec 21, 2009 Microsoft provided more details about its settlement with the European Commission (EC), particularly with regard to interoperability agreements. In a blog post on Thursday, Dave Heiner, Microsoft's vice president and deputy general counsel, claimed that the company has pledged to implement a threefold approach to interoperability that EC Commissioner Neelie Kroes outlined in past speeches. Heiner summarized that approach: companies should disclose technical information, provide a remedy if the information is inadequate and charge equitable royalty rates for associated intellectual property. Kroes had also specifically called for companies to follow open standards as one of the best ways to achieve interoperability. However, Heiner omitted the word, "open," from his comment. He said that "products from different firms can work well together when they implement common, well-designed industry standards." Microsoft's interoperability pledge announced this week appears to continue ideas the company put forth in February 2008. At that time, the company announced broad interoperability principles as well as APIs for software developers working with Microsoft's mainline products, including Windows client and server operating systems, Exchange, Office and SharePoint, among others. Microsoft has been releasing documentation for that purpose, with "hundreds of Microsoft developers" devoted to the effort, according to Heiner. The new elements to Microsoft's interoperability pledge appear to be warranty and patent-sharing templates. Those documents, and more, can be accessed at the end of a statement about the settlement by Brad Smith, Microsoft's senior vice president and general counsel.

Dick Brass, former VP at Microsoft (1997-2004) unloads.  He describes how legacy product groups, like the Windows OS and MSOffice groups, conspire to defeat smaller groups focused on emerging and innovative solutions.  Excellent read. excerpt:  Internal competition is common at great companies. It can be wisely encouraged to force ideas to compete. The problem comes when the competition becomes uncontrolled and destructive. At Microsoft, it has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence. It's not an accident that almost all the executives in charge of Microsoft's music, e-books, phone, online, search and tablet efforts over the past decade have left. As a result, while the company has had a truly amazing past and an enviably prosperous present, unless it regains its creative spark, it's an open question whether it has much of a future.

Matthew Papakipos, the engineering director for the Chrome OS project, and Eitan Bencuya, from Google PR. Over the course of the interview, Papakipos and Bencuya go into considerable detail about topics that range from big-picture perspectives on how Google develops software and where it sees the Web going with HTML5, to the nuts and bolts of what Chrome OS is slated to offer in specific areas. In short, we cover the following ground: ... How and when the Chrome OS project was conceived... The relationship between Chrome OS and Android... How Google is trying to tackle the same "file handler" problem as Windows OLE and the registry, but in the cloud.... Who Google sees as the target audience for Chrome OS, how did they decide which projects and features to pursue... The convergence of the phone and the computer... Nuts and bolts details, like native client execution, security, and UI issues... The significance of Chrome's built-in media player

Nice article from Matt Asay, who is now the COO at Canonical, the company behind Linux Ubuntu and Google's Chrome OS. excerpt:  As ZDNet's Dana Blankenhorn remarks, "Just as the Internet takes friction out of the distribution and development process, open source for Google removes friction from the business process." In Android land, this means making it easy for device manufacturers and wireless telecoms to evaluate, develop on, and ship Android-based devices. And ship them they are, to the tune of 60,000 Android devices per day. As Wired noted after the recent Mobile World Congress: This year at the Mobile World Congress is the year of Android. Google's operating system debuted here two years ago....This year, Android is everywhere, on handsets from HTC, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and even Garmin-Asus. If this were the world of computers, Android would be in a similar position to Windows: Pretty much every manufacturer puts it on its machines. There is one key distinction, though: Android is open source. It makes all the difference.