If you haven’t yet, take a few minutes to watch the second set of highlights from Walt Mossberg’s and Kara Swisher’s interview with Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates at the All Things Digital Conference. As the interview opens up to audience questions, Tim O’Reilly asks Gates and Ballmer a very pointed (and poignant) question:
Microsoft has been playing “me too” these past few years, following the lead of other innovators. Do you’ve any “big, hairy [audacious] goals” now, he asks, or do you need to?
In other words, where did all the famous Microsoft ambition go?
Bill Gates blundered through a response about “Quests” and such, and then honed in on putting a tablet PC in the hands of every student in the world. Ambitious? Perhaps. Inspiring? Not even close. It’s just a fatigued extension of Microsoft’s current dominance, without a thought for interesting new vistas for computing (pun intended).
But where things got really odd was when Tim followed up with a question about why Microsoft spends so much time speaking about search and the web when these weren’t mentioned by Gates as Microsoft’s goals.
… Source:The Open Road
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I’m closing up my quarter today (Not sure who said open source is easy, but…. :-), but wanted to highlight a few of the more interesting stories I read this day.
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I’ve been an outspoken critic of Google over the years, admiring some of its products (Search, SMS, News, etc.) while deriding its relationship to open source and deprecating most of its products.
There appears to be, however, a new Google afoot, and it’s one that I like quite a bit. Google might need to change its slogan from “Don’t be evil” to “Be open,” as this looks to be the direction it is going. At Google I/O this day, Google announced a few things that make me feel like the future of the web is much safer in its hands than in Microsoft’s (if Microsoft ever figures out the internet at all).
First, as ReadWriteWeb rightly applauds, Google is dropping its name from its Gears project, a
symbolic move aimed at reinforcing Google’s commitment to working with existing standards communities and helping them to define superior open standards for bridging on the web applications and the offline world.
Indeed, Google’s Gears Engineer Aaron Boodman writes that Gears “aims to bring emerging web standards to as many devices as possible, as swiftly as possible.”
More open, much sooner.
In Google’s increasingly open world, Steve Ballmer’s insistence that Vista “is not a failure and it’s not a mistake” talks to the wrong questions surrounding the much maligned operating system. What he should be protesting is that “It’s not irrelevant.”
… Source:The Open Road
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Filed under: Software, Freeware, World wide web, Internet Tools
The Firefox team would like to invite the world to join in their quest to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. How do they planning to do this? They want as many people as possible to pledge to download Firefox 3 within 24 hours of its release as part of Download Day 2008.
While the release day is still unknown — sometime in June is as much of a hint as we’re getting — pledging signs you up for updates about the imminent release of Firefox 3. You can also use your favorite social networking group (Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Twitter) to follow the journey of Firefox to a world record.
When I wrote this post, 356,554 people had pledged to grab Firefox 3 on Download Day 2008. The US is leading with 58,862 pledges, with Brazil in second place with 23,030. Wherever you reside, be sure to participate in this fun event!
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