Microsoft’s business has never been superior. Ironically, that might well be the problem.

I will admit to a love/hate relationship with Microsoft. I tend to respect Microsoft’s technology but not the business practices wrapped around it. In fairness to Microsoft, it has traditionally been the latter that really drives its business, pushing the company into new markets.

Of late, however, Microsoft’s successful business strategies seem to be stifling, not stimulating, the company. The company’s success at hoarding existing monopolies seems to have made it intellectually lazy in seeking new ones. Even SharePoint, which has been phenomenally successful financially, is tiny more than a lightweight portal designed to prop up Microsoft’s existing businesses: Office, SQL Server, Windows, etc.

This may be good for the industry, but it’s certainly not good for Microsoft. Whatever Microsoft may think of itself, it has never been much of a technology pioneer, preferring instead to copy others’ ideas but deliver them more conveniently and at superior pricing.

Not anymore.

… Source:The Open Road

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Filed under: Software, World wide web, World wide web Tools, Open Source

As reported earlier here on TUAW, Firefox 3 Download Day began with a whimper instead of a bang. Starting shortly after the official launch, TUAW received a number of tips from readers who tried downloading the vulpine browser and got…nothing.

It appears that things cleared up fairly quickly. Several TUAW bloggers were able to successfully download the new browser about 90 minutes after the 10 AM PDT launch. The Mozilla Blog has a message from Paul Kim, Mozilla’s VP of marketing, speaking about the early difficulties and the subsequent download trend:

“Our systems were quite busy earlier this morning so individual requests may not have gotten through - but they are all up now and serving a tremendous amount of traffic and downloads. We are currently serving almost 9,000 downloads a minute, which puts us on track to reach 5-7 million downloads our first day of general availability.“

More highlights and records are outlined on the blog. Be sure to download your very own customized Thank You! Certificate, available here.

[via the Mozilla Blog]

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Open source has made a significant impact on the “offline” world of packaged software, but it’s arguably having a more important impact on the web world. In the latest sign of the importance of openness to development in a SaaS world, eBay announced that it wil be opening up its Selling Manager auction tool to outside developers:…

Source:The Open Road

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When I first saw ZDNet reporting that IBM might open source its DB2 database, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. The comment that led to the report? “We have a light version of the product offered for free, which is a step towards exposing our core (DB2) …

Source:The Open Road

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Adobe and Alfresco announced a significant partnership this day to embed Alfresco’s content management software into Adobe’s LiveCycle Enterprise Suite. The inclusion of Alfresco enriches the Adobe LiveCycle experience, as Adobe’s Brian Wick notes:

For example, if a user is filling out a loan package, the application would go into the repository to package together other content related to the process.

“It’s much easier, much quicker for our customers to build LiveCycle apps with the content services piece built in,” Wick stated.

I’m biased, but I see this as one more step to facilitating content as the center of the web/software experience. As Adobe customers like the Say of Louisiana are suggesting, it makes it simple to link content to a process or application. It has wide applicability to governments, healthcare organizations, and other enterprises that need to wrap business processes around content.

It’s also a great addition to Adobe’s previously reported work with Alfresco, the Adobe Share product that integrates Alfresco.

Adobe notes that Alfresco was a clear choice:

… Source:The Open Road

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Filed under: Internet Tools

Promised at 10 a.m. Pacific time (1 p.m. Eastern), Mozilla was eager to set a one-day world-record for the release of Firefox 3. With most of the day already gone for much of the world, and nary an update to be seen, it’s looking bad for June 17.

Getfirefox.com alternates between being entirely down and cheerfully offering up the latest and greatest version of Firefox 2.

“Check for Updates” inside of Firefox (eventually) returns a “AUS: Update XML File Malformed (200)” error reading the XML file that would normally contain information about Firefox updates.

When will we see an update? “Shortly,” according to the Mozilla Blog. They are also careful to point out that the “official” 24 hours of record-breaking will commence the moment the software is released, and not from their original 10 a.m. estimate.

Thanks everyone who sent this in!

Update: 3:05 p.m.: We did it! TUAW single-handedly provided the schadenfreude necessary to get the server running, and getfirefox.com is serving up Firefox 3.

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