Patrick’s Blog(2)

A lot has already been said about Google’s Chrome OS. I think it’s pretty funny that Google announced their Chrome OS just before Microsoft’s PDC. Guess Redmond execs are going to get a different kind of questions than they were preparing for.

Looking at the currently available information I’m not impressed. After all it’s just Linux 2.6 with a new Window Manager. I like the subtle change of Ina Fried’s take to “to challenge Microsoft, Google might want to think Apple”. With it’s appeal to the Open Source Community Chrome OS seems to be a product for techies by techies. Nothing wrong with that but Chromes OS needs a WOW factor. Something that the iPod, iPhone and  MacBook Air all had. Where are the screencasts and pics? Where’s the OS?

The thing is the Chrome OS probably competes more with existing Linux distributions than with the products from Redmond (or Apple). Renai LeMay thinks that Google should have based their work on Ubuntu’s stellar work already carried out by Shuttleworth. Off course Renai is totally wrong. Ubuntu & Shuttleworth mostly leech on the stellar work done by others: primarily the Fedora and Debian Communities and commercial backers like Red Hat which probably employs more kernel hackers than Canonical’s total global workforce. Canonical’s marketing is great but their contributions back to the Community are negligible. So if you want Google to work with a distribution than Ubuntu just isn’t an option. It makes more sense to align with Fedora and cut a Desktop deal with Red Hat.

Over at CNET Dennis O’Reilly reports that the Windows Search Service on his Vista PC tried to change the default search setting from Google to Bing. Fortunately Google Toolbar noticed the change and alerted Dennis of the attempted change.

Changing a setting chosen by the user and without so much as asking the user if changing that setting is ok just to draw more traffic to a competing search engine is highly questionable. I hope the European Commission takes notice.

An interesting post by Matt Asay titled “Two clues Microsoft is losing its way”. Last week I read Microsoft’s new “Get the Facts” (yeah right) browser campaign and had a great laugh. If that’s the best that they can come up with then they are in deeper trouble than they already seem to be.

One would almost feel sorry for them. First Google makes their cashcow Desktop platform irrelevant. Who wants to shell out hard earned cash for a Desktop Operating System like Vista just so you can fire up a browser and get all your work done online? Who needs Vista when you can get a free Desktop Operating System like Fedora?

Once Google gets Google Docs sorted out Redmond’s Office suite cashcow is to follow. After the European Commission forced Microsoft to open up their protocols, companies like Zarafa and Scalix popped up and are starting to eat into their Exchange cashcow. Then there’s this annoying little company called Red Hat that steals away revenues on the server side at a rate that must give Steve nightmares and make chairs fly.  And let’s not forget about Cisco’s recent product announcements that seem to compete directly with Microsoft.

With Redmond’s cashcows becoming less cash and more cow it makes me wonder where Steve is going to find the budget to finance all those fancy adventures. Bing will need a staggering amount of money over a long period of time if it wants Bing to go anywhere but straight into oblivion. Despite the hype in it first few weeks it just did bing instead of bang. Bing’s market share seems to be well below 5%. Hardly threatening to Google.

I can’t imagine that Microsoft’s shareholders are pleased with the amount of money that adventures like Bing and Vista devour while revenues from a rather disappointing Vista never took off as they did with WinXP. And it seems they never will too as Microsoft has acknowledged an 18-month Windows 7 to XP downgrade policy. What does that tell you about the market’s perception of Microsoft’s latest “innovation”?

Microsoft claims to be innovative and a market leader. Yet from where I’m standing I see a company on the defence, incapable of coming up with an answer to an online future powered by Google and incapable of maintaining its once innovative powers. Immoderate greatness indeed.

I just stumbled on Wordmobi , a WordPress client for the Nokia E71 written in Python. Installing was very easy and after a quick configure of the app I created a short post with it. Works very well. I only find the “Posted by Wordmobi” that’s added to the end of each post pretty annoying. Anyone know how to make it stop doing that?