Filed under: Internet, Internet Tools

Google Gears has been around for Firefox on the Mac for quite a while. However, Safari users have been left in the cold. Google Gears grants you to access certain Google services, most notably Docs and Reader, offline (as well as other offline-enabled web services like Remember The Milk). This week, a beta for Safari has become available.

With Google Gears, for example, you can view all of your Google Docs offline — and even edit them (word processing docs only, spreadsheets and presentations are viewable but not editable). When you connect back to the internet, you will be able to sync the changes back to Google.

We’re glad that Google has finally seen the light and released a version for our Safari-using counterparts. To make Google Gears work with Safari, you’ll need to download and install the Google Gears package for Mac OS X. Once installed, navigate to a “gears enabled” page, you will be able to use the Google Gears system. Remember, this is a beta and we’ve heard there might be issues if you’ve tweaked Safari in certain ways.

Oh, and there appears to be limited support for Fluid, which is nice.

[via the Apple blog]

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Facil, a Quebec-based open-source organization, has sued the Quebec provincial government for buying Microsoft software without considering open-source software, as CBC reports. The problem, it seems, is that Quebec has an “open markets” policy that it is supposed to follow. In practice, however, the Quebec government IT buyers have been …

Source:The Open Road

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Novell beat Wall Street’s estimates with a solid third quarter, but the real story is in its continued Linux growth. Net revenue rose to $245 million from $237 million in 2007, but Novell’s third-quarter loss quadrupled to $15.1 million from $3.7 million in 2007. The company …

Source:The Open Road

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Dennis Howlett writes a thought-provoking piece on proprietary maintenance revenue, challenging the value that software vendors provide or, rather, the generic way in which it is provided. Howlett proposes a way to customize maintenance fees to the actual value provided by a vendor:

In software terms, we already know that (differentiation for customers) happens through software implementation, configurations and customizations that are a core part of delivering to customer needs. There is no reason why the same principles can’t be applied to the maintenance element of the business relationship. If you stand back and put aside the notions of the last 30+ years, it is blindingly obvious.

It is obvious for example that in the early stages, customers will consume a considerable amount of resource(s) as they learn and become familiar with the product. They should therefore pay an economic price that reflects the services they consume. However, the software vendors need (to) do three things in order to soften the impact and reduce the long term burden…

I’ll leave it to you to read Howlett’s post to discover the three things, but even in the short blurb above Howlett unwittingly calls out a fundamental difficulty in open-source software revenue models, one that Savio Rodrigues has been banging on for a while, and one that NBC iVillage CTO Jon Williams has also called out:

Open-source vendors start making money from their customer base precisely at the point that the customer base is least prone to renew.

… Source:The Open Road

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Paul Kedrosky notices an impressive feat for Microsoft: for the first time in a long time, its stock has outperformed Google’s this week, this month, and this year.

Granted, this is like calling Microsoft the sexiest nun in the convent, given how poor its performance has been, but it’…

Source:The Open Road

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