DISQUS

"expecially"?

Is that an inside joke or something?

Poisonous to build yet another Windows only application like this.

First in a Windows-only workplace you will never wean users off of what they are used to and they will just continue using Outlook.

Second Microsoft will eventually want to either goble up this company, or one like it, and the rest will be screwed. that is unless they roll their own in which case they will all be screwed.

For small businesses, and home users, what's wrong with Google Docs to solve this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRqUE6IHTEA

I'm fairly sure that for really large companies Google will provide a solution too eventually, but whether it's Google or somebody else half the benefit will be making it OS independent. Apple, Linux, Windows, smartphone, it should still be able to work at least to some degree.

Get your users off the upgrade treadmill!

I'm pretty sure that the policies for Obama look a lot like: If it moves, tax it!

McCain isn't much better but I think his administration would be more likely to hold the line on bigger government.

Our current rate of growth in government is unsustainable. We can wait till the system colapses, or we can fix it now. Sooner the better as far as I'm concerned. I don't normally hawk my blog here, but these two videos (not by me) have SOME ideas thta might address the problems you raise. I'm quite sure the "change" Obama talks about doesn't look anything like this... if it did, I'd probably vote for him.

http://www.youtube.com/user/DanDyer4

Actually, that's a direct link to the video, I bypassed my blog entry.

I find this often the case among my many liberal friends (many of whom are associated with technology in some way while not being all that knowledgeable about "how it all works")... they point out all the stupidities of government and how inept it is, while advocating even more government intervention in our lives. Shouldn't that apparent contradiction pique the interest of a journalist?

"Can't do this because of the Republicans, can't do that while Bush is in office."

Which party's state Attorney General just caused three major ISPs to end access to Internet Newsgroups over the potential use for child pornography? That's exactly the sort of thing she was referring to but it was her own party doing it. These issues transcend party lines in a big way and I'm afraid the Ds are having some success in getting techies (they already have most of the media) cooking the story to get them back in power. How short a memory do you have? You weren't tuned in while Whitehouse e-mail was mishandled during the Clinton administration? How about he security fiascoes that took place back before Republicans took the House and Senate in the 90s?

Simply electing someone who "likes gadgets" is no guarantee that technology issues will be solved in such a way that our freedoms are not curtailed in the process. In fact a mere passing knowledge of such things could lead to more trouble than we would have with a tech ignoramus who has a fundamental devotion to liberty.

Please don't play lap-dog to these people (even if you think you agree with them). Do your homework.

Call this a gripe if you like:

I've noticed a lot of your interview write-ups include a note that the interviewee was "a nice guy" or equivalent. Does that mean that when you do an interview and don' inclde that notation that the person was an a-hole?

An attribute of good journalism, if not THE attribute, is objectivity. If you've known someone for a few years, interact with them of the record and know them to be "a nice guy" that's probably worth a mention.

I don't know about you, but most of the people I meet and talk to fall into the category of "nice guy" (or gal). That doesn't mean though that in their professional life they are not selling snake-oil, perhaps unknowingly, or perhaps knowingly, but with good motives like getting their kids through college.

Here are some questions that I'd like to see asked of all of these self-promoters, nice or otherwise:

(1) Do you have a policy against lock-on? Can users easily export/import data? Does your service or hardware device work with multiple operating systems r does it require that I use Windows, or a specific web browser, or a specific word processing program, e-mail client, etc?

(2) There are other questions like API support, DRM, end-of-life support (Microsoft Music) and so on, but the answer to questions in (1) will pretty much tell you all you need to know about the answers to the other questions, so I'll just leave it at that.

Of course asking potentially embarrassing questions may not result in the "nicest" of interviews, but it will sure make them more useful. Since most of us are not likely to ever meet these people I'm not sure how important their ability to make a good first impression is to us.

For the record, Larry Ellison was extremely nice to me when I met him back in the 70s. Hard to square with some things I've read about him since.

I frequently comment on blogs that are more popular than my own (just about all of them) so that I can get my ideas out there. I generally don't copy those comments to my blog unless I think they are truly inciteful or I fear that the comment might get deleted (I've had comments deleted for simply disputing the facts in a product review), not to mention that some systems just don't handle comments very reliably.

It would be nice if some new technology would make this all work better, but right now, as most of the previous comments above demonstrate, there are too many different companies all trying to solve this in a way (each requiring a separate registration of some form) that suits their own marketing plans.

Ning would be better for a small group, condo association, church group, fan club. Everything you need in 5 minutes, and send the next 5 years customizing. If it gets big enough you can even get a domain name and stay with Ning for the infrastructure.

Google lately has been introducing several new goodies every week. Sometimes blockbusters like this, other times just a new map overlay or something. They may not be as nimble as they once were, but they are running circles around Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo and the other established players (no, Facebook shouldn't be lumped in with the older walled-garden crowd age-wise, except that is the way they are acting).

Still, some of the new Google stuff doesn't always lend itself to novice use. Much of this latest round requires that you be able to cut-and-paste code snippets into parts of your web presentation that you don't have easy access to unless you own your own servers. Ironically you can't easily use some of this stuff if you are also a user of Google pages. They aren't stopping to make sure that everything works seamlessly together. Conceptually Google is re-implementing for the web the same overlapping bloated wasteland that Windows/Office has become. The difference is, that as a user, I only pick and choose the components that interest me. The rest don't fill up my hard drive or constantly ding my CPU for cycles or present targets for viruses (at least not the type I have to worry about).

I guess somewhere at Microsoft they are webifying Word and Excel and at Facebook they have decided to let their captive chat users connect with AIM and Jabber (what a concept! What next? E-mail?) While MS and Facebook play chess with their features, the Nings and Googles are playing Tetris, spitting out new features as fast as possible and letting users figure out how to pack them together.

It's a much better model for development, don't you think?

@Krish:

Nonsense. Have you seen the latest IBM mainframes? They run almost a hundred processors which can be a mix of mainframe Power processors, Intel, PowerPC, and theoretically anything else you want. They can run thousands of instances of any of these architectures in virtual machine mode, which is probably the greenest way possible to run a large multi-server datacenter. They run circles around anything Sun has, and are even capable of running Sun programs via emulation. They are working on systems with expected uptimes measured in YEARS. In many respects the PC world is no longer catching up with mainframes but falling further behind.

I agree with you on Microsoft though. While they continue to do new work in their research division the products they talk about are either intended to compete with companies like Sony (that table form factor for example), or compete with Google (the telescope project). Nothing wrong with these things, but they fall more into the category of product development than research. As far as I know there are no fundamentally new concepts coming out of Microsoft Research. It doesn't really seem to be a goal there.

Personally think MS has been obscuring a decline in growth of new Windows licenses for several years, even if you exclude piracy. Volume Purchase Agreements (VPAs) give MS the ability to not only estimate the license picture but transfer those numbers from one quarter to another to paint a desirable picture.

This only works for a while though and eventually a company has to resort to more drastic measures to impress Wall Street. The monetary failures of Live, Zune, Xbox and other things actually help to make the cash cows look better than they actually are. Failures in those other area are often accompanied by complaints (mostly in anonymous blogs) about failing areas being starved of resources in favor of the monopoly products.

If the Yahoo deal goes through I expect a whole lot of obfuscation to go on, or a bit less obfuscation if synergies actually kick in as only Ballmer seems to think they will.

If the synergies DON'T kick in, then "unfortunate and unforeseen" merger costs will be the culprit and stockholders will be asked to be patient for a bit longer.

I don't normally hawk my blog here, but I'm a couple of hours away from a longer post on VPAs and how they adversely affect some, if not most MS customers and how they allow MS to regularly surprise the market with more "sales" than were expected based on growth in related markets.

No matter what happens with Yahoo the chickens are coming home to roost.

PS: Didn't Yahoo spin off Messenger work to a third party today? They (Yahoo) are playing their own games with user counts and the more they do this sort of thing the more confused and unverifiable the quarterly reports get, not to mention the more difficult it makes things for MS if the merger goes through. But that also neutralizes you point about user satisfaction. I think that is an item fairly low on both companies priority lists.

35 and 43 hit most of the high points.

Ironic this is, only a day after MS announced the discontinuance of DRM music validation.

MS has obviously gotten sensitive to the public perception that they are not open enough, don't play well with others, etc.

However so far, their response has only been empty promises. Yes, this will work with OS X and Linux (some day) just as Silverlight will. Only when reporters ask for status on those efforts MS makes it clear that they are being handled by third parties with whom MS developers have no apparent contact.

I've asked this time and time again with respect to such promises: Wouldn't it be easier to build compatibility in from the very beginning? If you are really serious about providing such compatibility why would you go back an add it later after writing millions of lines of code? Why would you leave such efforts up to unpaid third parties? (thinking .net and mono specifically here). These claims don't really pass any kind of smell test.

Actions speak louder than words Microsoft, and so far there is just no "there" there.

"Want to get something done? Turn off Twitter. Turn off Facebook. Turn off blog comments. Turn off FriendFeed. Turn off Flickr. Turn off YouTube. Turn off Dave Winer’s blog and Huffington Post. Turn off TechMeme."

Um, I don't want to insult anybody, but wasn't this blindingly obvious from the beginning?

It's true that if you want to "scoop" everybody else you have to have many tendrils out there collecting information. But the dirty little "secret" is that is is a rigged game. If you are not Walt Mossberg or David Pogue you won't be the first person to hear about new gadgets, or if by some chance you do, you and your twitter pal are going to be subject to lawsuits.

So that leaves these mostly noise, little signal vehicles for idle chit chat and even more idle speculation. Most of what I've seen from Twitter (and all the other products you name) is either erroneous, irrelevant, or as I called it, idle chit chat, which may be entertaining, but isn't productive.

I wonder to what extent todays audience fails to appreciate both the power of HTML (in its original form) syntax as well as its simplicity compared to what we have today. Linking documents together so that they appeared as one complete whole was unheard of, and you only had to learn a dozen commands or less.

Today, people think they can only create a web page with the help of a tool, and the notion of linking a document, photo, or file from another machine is frowned upon rather than encouraged.

It is human nature I guess to go from simple concept, right past the sweet spot on onto something that is almost unmanageable. Human nature, in this case of course, helped along by organizations that had no intention of letting the Internet achieve its full potential. How much better it could have been had Microsoft (for one) been on board from the beginning.

I don't know if the guy you talked to at Facebook is a real technical guy or just someone with a fancy title. Two things stood out for me in your message and in his response:

I think Open ID is an important part of this. Open ID does not require every product I use to keep a copy of my ID and password, but whatever system I use as my authentication server must have a high degree of uptime and responsiveness to validate me to all the others.

Why can't my address list be housed on Google if I use that most for e-mail, or Yahoo if I use that, and available in real time to any service I've authorized to use it? You seem to be thinking in terms of every service copying all of my accumulated data when I first sign up. I'm quite sure the Facebook guy was thrilled to tell you how impractical that would be. I can just imagine him saying that RSS was impossible as it would require every player to maintain an entire copy of the Internet! Once people join these walled garden companies they can't think straight any more (if they ever could).

Oh a third thing... for data that DOES need to be copied from one service to another, all you need is a standard for defining a "delete transaction" or some more generic transaction mechanism to keep them all in sync without constant copying. And in the case that someone asked above of you changing your e-mail address to different things on several services (assuming you e-mail address was being used as the common linkage) then you would simply be breaking the connection at that point. I don't see anything wrong with that, if that's what you want to do. Maybe there could (and should) even be a way of linking two pre-existing accounts when new services hop on the bandwagon. I would hope so.

Facebook is dragging its heels for purely non-technical reasons, and they make themselves look progressively sillier with every new attempt.

@32 I haven't used Windows since 2000 and have no intention to. Fortunately for me I no longer need to do such things to make a living.

I was in on the early stages of group policy manipulation though and it was still a disaster (unless you worked for Microsoft) as more of your employees had to become Microsoft lobbyists, and go to SMS indoctrination classes all the time.

I doubt much has changed.

The problem with Exchange though is that people are reading mail onto their local machines and those (see my White House reference) are ending up being the defacto "archives" as "administrators" get lazy about managing their storage and back-ups.

By the way, I'm glad to hear they got rid of the Registry in Vista, that's news to me and I always thought it was a terrible idea.

Thanks for playing.

Whether it is Google or not, the important thing is that people are starting to think about the problem afresh. You and others may think that e-mail today is the way e-mail has always been, but that is false.

On Unix systems, people were signing onto terminals and when they were "POPing" their mail they were really reading it from a central (or specialized) server onto their more local (or personal) server for viewing, storage, forwarding, etc.

One mainframe system I used had totally centralized e-mail, similar conceptually to what we have with web-mail these days, but without the web browser.

If I sent a message to everyone in the company, only one copy of that message needed to exist. Even long chains of replies to replies to replies would link back to the original message so there was never any duplication of text. This is the only way a sophisticated (and this really was sophisticated, even by today's standards) e-mail system could exist in the days of megabyte hard drives.

The combination of Google docs and Gmail (although Gmail isn't that essential to the concept yet) allows once again for a single copy and ONLY a single copy of each unique document to exist and be seen and updated by all who need to. This makes infinitely more sense than the Rube-Goldberg machinations most organizations are going through these days to manage e-mail. Ask someone at the White House.

If what Google does finally influences someone at Microsoft to design a better system, then great. the question I always have is would Microsoft, Yahoo, or any of the other old-school providers be offering gig-sized storage for e-mail if Google hadn't started doing so? Do you want to tie your future product choices to a company who is going to be a leader or a follower?

Everyone will eventually benefit from Google's (and other companies) innovations even if you stick with the old fuddy-duddy tech companies you have now.

I would rather just not wait.

I'm still speculating that at some point those pizza-box systems from Google will do more than just intra-company search. Company branded Gmail will not be the exclusive domain of Google Aps, and in fact you could start a small company with one such box and add them as your company grew. Totally turn-key and we administered (no registry keys allowed!)

There are companies that already have systems such as this, so it's not rocket science, but as there are a lot of "LAN-administrators" out there who are not going to see turn-key office automation as a great job-security advancement, it will also be a generational thing, picked up by smaller growing companies first and adopted by really big companies only years later. After all there are still big companies using mainframes long after we expected IBM to be history.

It is like listening to someone play Pong.

The "I don't know how to operate this new phone technology" thing works for about the first 20 shows (which happened during the previous Gillmor Gang incarnation).

The first few of the new shows being about Hillary Clinton threw me for a loop too.

If he can stick with tech, and get someone to run the equipment for him I think it could be a good show again.

It is also important to have a regular set of guests who know how to participate in a group discussion (and have something to say).

So far this doesn't measure up to the original show, but maybe it will get there eventually.

"I want to just load one thing: Firefox and go to work. Right now I’m switching between my Dell and my Mac without any problems at all because almost everything I do now is in the browser."

Amen Bro.

I don't think the need for things like Excel and Word will ever go away completely, but the grandmotherly lady I help from time to time needs to read a word document about once a year. So I installed Open Office for that. Another user I switched from IE to Firefox and now they almost never have "computer problems" any more.

When I'm visiting these people I feel fairly safe checking my own e-mail or creating a document (using Google Docs) from their machine, meaning I don't have to carry a laptop all the time.

I used to be that the PC had to pretend to be a typewriter, fax machine, copier and so on. Those days have mostly ended. Internet technologies aren't replacing local technologies JUST because they are better (and obviously in some ways they are not) but since the primary reason people are using the PC these days is for Internet access and so those other uses (printing out a letter to mail) don't even enter into many people's thinking any more.

Wordpad, or some simple equivalent is all most people should need to compose a simple document on those rare occasions when they feel creative but have no Internet access. But since no-access is such a rare event these days, I think most will just use it as a good opportunity to do something else. That's what I do anyway.

"2. It runs only on Windows. It’s coded in C#/.NET, you’ll meet the developer in our video and you’ll hear more about that then."

I'm shocked. Totally shocked.

I think I tried Celestia around 2000, but I see the copyright on the web site dates to 2001 so it might have been as late as that.

I tried it on Linux. It didn't require any special software or hardware. Faster video cards were nice, but not essential. Maybe if you had seen it back then you would have cried.

But there was no PR for it. No flashy video released months in advance hyping it up.

Think how much sooner the kids of the world would have had something like this were they not waiting for Microsoft to release it.

That's what makes me cry.

I remember being able to switch from one point of view to another (on Earth or elsewhere). Being able to fly anywhere in the visible galaxy at light speed or beyond, improving your intuition about starting and stopping in space as opposed to earthbound vehicles.

Will the MS version do some new things? Probably. Is the concept essentially new? No. Is there any reason it should require Vista? Yes, it's less a Research product and more a Marketing tool.

I found ThinkFree more than adequate for reading and writing compatible Office files. Like Office, and Open Office, it did about two orders of magnitude more things than generally wanted to do.

On Windows the Wordpad editor is about right for me, on Apple the built-in text editor will read and write Word files and on Linux there are several options for a QUICK way to create richly formated documents that can be later uploaded to Google Docs.

Think back Robert to when you first left Microsoft. I seem to remember you saying that you would never get used to working with online documents, or any calendar/mail system other than Outlook.

I know quite a few people, young and old, but mostly old, that say the same thing to me all the time. I send them a link to a Google doc, ask them to change it and save it, I make changes. Then I show them the revision history, how we can both work on the document at the same time.

I expect oohs and aahs, but instead I get "I just can't get used to this!"

The problem of course is that their time frame for "getting used to this" is measured in minutes, not days or weeks.

I know a guy who carried around a 10 year old cell phone held together by scotch tape for years. He had painstakingly memorized all the key sequences for the phone and refused to learn a new one, even if getting a new phone would mean all sorts of new capabilities.

I'm sure there are people who will never voluntarily stop using Office. But there will be new people who come along having never used it.

The end-point is not (as Ballmer believes) Microsoft vs Google. The end-point is online data, with choice of UI (user interface) vs local with only Office, or maybe something like Open Office. Google Docs is still not only a Beta, but a limited prototype. still is is good enough for most of the documents I create.

Reuters recently used a plain old Google spreadsheet chart as the graphic on an election results page. They updated the spreadsheet behind the scenes and the public just saw the resulting graphic on a page. It stood up to huge load and was not done as a promotional stunt in conjunction with Google. They didn't pay Google for extra bandwidth etc. It just worked.

That's the future. Things on the web that Just Work, even if you don't have Windows or Office installed.

Maybe one day Microsoft will even participate in the change. But they have to put away their tape dispenser first.

Dollars to donuts whatever it is will require that you be a user of some other Microsoft product, Windows, IE, Silverlight, that is, unless the product itself costs $400 or so.

This is HUGE news, overshadowed by MSFT/YHOO for the time being. I don't think it an exaggeration to say:

"This changes everything."

"I’m tired of Bush and Clinton families running America and want a change."

I think I can summarize your choice in simpler terms: you've decided to vote for a Democrat no matter what, and you don't want it to be Hillary. Fine. Just say so.

If Jeb Bush were running and a viable candidate at this point your statement above would be a good way to disguise the fact that you eliminated a Republican vote from the start.

Most people, rightly or wrongly, choose the party they are going to vote for well in advance of all the debates. It only irks me when people pretend that they are exceptions to this.

Go to the CBO web site and look at projected Federal spending as a percentage of GDP (and note where the money goes, also note the optimistic assumptions about "other", finally note that this is ONLY federal spending). Explain to me how any of the Dems are going to address this.

Have the Reps done a good job of addressing it? No. But at least they acknowledge the problem and resist the temptation to add yet another exponentially growing entitlement to what may be the downfall of our way of life.

All good advice, but several of the comments indicate poor writing/typing/grammar skills. While you might just get someone to write your resume for you, you still have to demonstrate an ability to communicate during the interview. As an interviewer I would have always found some way to gracefully dismiss those with communications issues. This is not a foreign language issue as many immigrants have better English language skills than native Americans.

I don't think Yahoo is a good poster child for your headline though. Yahoo, and several other tech companies have their own unique problems with performance that have nothing to do with recession, but more too do with continued bad management.

If we are in fact at the beginning of a recession (which is still questionable) the factors driving it will be the housing bubble, and the fact that an upcoming potential change in leadership (as in 2000) gives a lot of people incentives to talk the economy down. So some of this recession will magically correct itself right after the November elections, other parts will take longer.

If we are in fact also experiencing a tech bubble-burst, it may in fact be a continuation of what happened in 2000 which is I think a VERY healthy shift away from everyone's desktop being treated as an independent "data-center". Businesses should be able to get by with far fewer "administrators" than they use today, and home users should not have to learn the details of how a PC operates in order to do ordinary tasks. Web (meaningless number) technology will continue to move toward big server farms that will support appliance-like devices at home (or in the office) that are cheap enough to be thrown away when they stop booting (failure to boot being a very rare event). It's fairly easy to see which companies are helping this process along versus companies that are fighting it all the way. Don't underestimate Wall Street's ability to pick the eventual winners and losers.

@19: yeah, even the transition from MS wasn't this touchy.

I hope it won't be as disappointing as the Apple announcements today were.

In fact, that would be pretty much impossible.

Good luck on whatever it is Robert.