Or You Could Use Linux
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Microsoft aims to reach next billion PC users | CNET News.com
“The software maker will offer the $3 Student Innovation Suite to governments that agree to directly purchase PCs for students to use in their schoolwork and at home.”
Documents
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Grabbing Microsoft by the neck- Hindustan Times
Somewhat rambling article and questionable facts, but expresses some of the non-document format issues around office software.
Err, Can I have XP With That?
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Dell brings back XP on home systems | CNET News.com
“Amid significant customer demand, the computer maker said on Thursday that it has returned to offering the older Windows version as an option on some of its consumer PCs.”
Second Life, Virtual Worlds
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VC Ratings: Beyond Second Life: Club Penguin, Gaia & Areae
“It was the first public look at three emerging virtual world startups and provided context around the notion that this is an area poised for rapid growth.”
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InformationWeek Weblog: The Complete Rebuttal For Second Life Skeptics
“Second Life expert Wagner James Au provides the final rebuttal to skeptics who think that the virtual world is just a fad, or are baffled why it’s getting so much attention.”
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“To find volunteer Redaktisto Noble, you have to go to John Edwards presidential campaign headquarters. Not in Iowa or New Hampshire, but in cyberspace.”
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Role-players amok in Second Life | The Register
Vampires, star troopers, medieval princes. Maybe it is a game … sometimes.
The New Ubuntu
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Ubuntu Linux Releases ‘Feisty Fawn’ Into The Wild – Yahoo! News
“Both include a Microsoft Windows migration assistant, wireless networking support, and improved multimedia support.”
The Hindustan Times raises quite a few valid points. However it misses the main value of the Google offer: hosting.
A users of Google docs don’t have to worry about infrastructure. Disk and server infrastructure is provided free. No upgrades, no obsolescence refresh cycles, and the data backups are part of the service. They also provide email archival and indexing. For SOHO users this is a huge pain in the neck gone away. Hosting also makes the documents extremely mobile and available on all of the user’s devices without having to copy and perform version control.
Security is not that a convincing weakness considering how Microsoft Office is used for targeted corporate espionage. This is more dangerous than worms an viruses because the corporate spies are after you personally. Their attacks are not likely to be caught by you security vendors honeypots. Without customers reports or honeypots discoveries, the anti-virus vendor cannot learn of the malware used and cannot update his signature files. If the spy knows what anti-virus you use he will test his attack in a lab before he sends it to you. The anti-virus stands no chance of stopping it.
Google docs reminds me of Clayton Clayburns inventor’s dilemma. The innovation need not be fully functional to displace the incumbent.
Even then Google are not that far from a good enterprise offering. If they could provision extra disk space on-demand for a fee and offer a way to consolidate indexes across users from the same domain and manage retention schedules, the limited document authoring functionality will prove enough for all except for power users. The only issue is the risk of what if Google decides to stop using the service? Copying several GB of data to your local disk space in a rush could prove problematic.