Is Skype a Telephone Operator? France Will Investigate - NYTimes.com

Is Skype a Telephone Operator? France Will Investigate - NYTimes.com:

A fine example of the long and arduous road to governments' desire to regulate everything they can in telecom. Reminds me of the arcane debates in the '80s and '90s about defining and regulating,or not, information services and enhanced services in the U.S. The lawyers loved it!

As technology continues upending traditional business and regulatory models, governments will run to catch up and tax/manage/control/subsidize various aspects of it. Infrastructure and services no longer comply with neat definitions of the past so government's job becomes more difficult.

The time will come, though, when the Internet will eventually and unfortunately be 'regulated.' But who will do it? NTU or some other international entity? Shudders abound at the thought. The good news is it will take a very long time.

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A Look at Chrome OS Future

http://m.zdnet.com/blog/google/5-reasons-everyone-will-be-using-chrome-os-in-3-years/3649?pg=2

This ZDNET writer believes the Chrome OS will win a big chunk of market share. The battle is on between Google, MS and Apple. A key to winning will be the enterprise.

Barnes & Noble, Microsoft ink $300M deal on e-reading | Microsoft - CNET News

First, Microsoft made a big investment in a failing Nokia in order to create a hardware platform for its new Windows mobile operating system. Now, $300 Million invested in the Nook business of a shaky Barnes and Noble, while its book business flounders in the wake of ebooks and digital content. All this to fuel an ecosystem for Windows 8. This new operating system/content consumption platform is Microsoft's big bet to counter Apple, Google and Amazon. Microsoft needs a hardware and content play in order to be competitive.

The next shoe to drop may well be some advanced hardware from Google via its recent purchase of Motorola. I presume that Microsoft has acquired or is obtaining the licensing it needs for video form Hollwood.

With these four titans rumbling in the digital forest, the battle will be huge and all the competition will be good for consumers. The days of dead-tree books are inevitably winding down

 "The companies announced today that Microsoft has invested $300 million into a new Barnes & Noble subsidiary, known as Newco until the company can come up with a name. The $300 million investment will give Microsoft a 17.6 percent equity stake in the firm. Barnes and Noble, which assumed a $1.7 billion valuation on the subsidiary, will retain 82.4 percent ownership."

Microsoft Inks Its Biggest Cloud Deal Yet: 7.5M Students And Teachers In India | TechCrunch

In America we are often too parochial to recognize the impact of an American company's success in foreign lands. This is a very big deal for Microsoft. Seven and a half million users...wow! Hope it's profitable.


The cloud reigns!

 "Microsoft has announced that it has signed its largest-ever cloud services deal, an agreement with the All India Council for Technical Education to deploy Microsoft’s Live@edu service to some 10,000 technical colleges in the country, covering 7.5 million users."

"To give an idea of the relative size of the AICTE deal compared to others Microsoft has signed, one of its more recent deals was with the Kentucky Department of Education covering 700,000 users. In all, there are around 22 million people using Microsoft’s Live@edu service, meaning that this newest deal in India represents about one-third of all of Microsoft’s cloud/education business."

How Windows 8 Tablets Could Seriously Challenge the iPad

Microsoft has a lot riding on this launch of a new operating system. They'll need strong hardware manufacturers to adopt Windows 8 to create a compelling alternative to the new iPad. I think I'll wait for the new Win8 tablets.


I truly like the desktop PC experience, but for traveling and RVing, a new tablet would be handy. I'd want to be able to connect to a projector. Hopefully the new Win8 hardware will have appropriate I/O ports.


Meanwhile, I'm very pleased with my Amazon Kindle Fire and my smartphone for those times when I'm not chained to my desktop.

.."Could the tablet market’s dark horse be a Windows 8 device? It’s possible, but it hinges entirely on how consumers respond to the new user interface, Metro.

The thrust of Windows 8 — and why it’s such a big gamble my[sic] Microsoft — is that it brings the same UI to tablets and traditional PCs (desktops and laptops). Metro is ideally suited for touchscreens, but it works with a mouse and keyboard, too. (Here’s a full breakdown of Windows 8.)
There’s a reason Microsoft has done this, and it’s not really the spirit of bringing tablet features to your laptop. Quite the opposite, in fact. In order to have any hope of succeeding in tablets, Microsoft has to convince its army of Windows developers to make software for those tablets. [emphasis added] But no one’s going to develop software for an unproven OS where the company has seen little commercial success (no current Windows tablet has significant market share)..."

"...Microsoft needs to get Metro 100% right if Windows 8 tablets are going to have any hope. If users like Metro, then the developers will follow, and a real ecosystem will emerge. If not, the iPad will probably be the only tablet worth talking about for a long, long time. "

The Browser Wars 2010-2011

What a difference a year makes in the browser world! I use Chrome mostly with occasional forays into Firefox and Internet Explorer. IE continues to lose market share to Chrome while Firefox and Safari are relatively stable.

Google Working On Siri Response Codenamed Majel; Aiming For End of Year Release

I love it! The computing horsepower provided by the cloud enables this wonderful world of voice activation for all that we seek to know and do!
Go Apple! Go Google! Go Microsoft!

"“Our approach is more like Star Trek, right, starship Enterprise; every piece of computing surface, everything is voice-aware. It’s not that there’s a personality, it doesn’t have a name, it’s just Computer.”"

Search can't scale without social, and Bing has Facebook and Twitter on its side | TechRepublic

The massive amount of information that humankind creates is becoming evermore difficult for search engines to master. This story examines what Bing and Google are up to to.

" throughout all of human history up until 2003 we created 5 exabytes of data (five billion gigabytes). We now create that much every day. In 2011, we’ll create 1.8 zettabytes of data (a zettabyte is a 1000 exabytes). That’s up from 1.2 zettabytes in 2010, and we’ll be creating over 20 times that by 2020."

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My Droid 2 Now Working with my Home WiFi

I previously reported problems connecting to my home Wifi network on a Motorola users forum.  My D2 worked fine on open WiFi or other encrypted networks tested. I determined, with help from several posts on the forum, that my D2 did not like the old (2003 vintage) WPA encryption on my Microsoft wireless router. I tried WEP and D2 didn't like that either. There were no firmware upgrades. MS got out of the WiFi hardware business years ago.

Today, I installed a Belkin 750 DB wireless router with WPA/WPA2 encryption and now the D2 connection is solid. Obviously, the recent upgrade to Gingerbread was the culprit...or Moto's implementation of it... because Froyo had no problems connecting on the MS hardware.

In any event, automatic smartphone software upgrades should be backward-compatible with all encrypted WiFi networks because there are so many of them out there.

Default Choices Are Hard to Resist, Online or Not - NYTimes.com

I use both the Chrome and Internet Explorer browsers. Just for the hell of it, I set Google as the default search engine on IE and Bing as the default on Chrome. I find both are excellent.


I guess it's just not in my psyche to be defaulted.


I wonder if there's a correlation for those that accept the 'system' defaults and not voting in elections?

"...Most economists agree that Google’s default deals aren’t anticompetitive. Rivals like Bing, the general search engine from Microsoft, and partial competitors like Yelp, an online review and listing service for local businesses, have their own Web sites and other paths of distribution. Choice, in theory, is one click away.

But most people, of course, never make that single click. Defaults win..."

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Windows 8: How Microsoft's PC Overhaul Will Take on Apple's iPad | PCWorld

This reviewer believes that Microsoft has a shot at becoming a serious Apple competitor with its new Windows 8 that will run on tablets and desktops. This may be so in the long run, but for the next two years, Android tablets will be the only competition for the iPad.

"Whereas iOS gets out of the way, Windows 8 wants to be part of the action, connecting apps in ways that the iPad does not. Whether that's actually useful depends on developers and the apps they create. At the very least, Windows 8 has gone in a different direction from the iPad's other competitors. It doesn't simply rely on having more apps than the iPad or a better interface for moving between them--as Apple's other competitors have proven, those battles are lost from the start. It instead tries to improve the very nature of apps by connecting them to each other, to the OS, and to the cloud."

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Microsoft Introduces Tracking Protection to Its Browser - NYTimes.com

This new capability in Microsoft's IE9 browser, already a fast and efficient piece of technology, is good news for users. Users should have the ability to be tracked or not. Data and information that we generate should always be ours to share or not.

Google Chrome: Redefining The Operating System

Google Chrome: Redefining The Operating System

Inertia is on Microsoft's side. The people who pay them money will be reluctant to move to an online-only world for all their apps. The trick for MS will be to manage their revenue streams during the transition to a 'fully' online world. It's clear that Google wants to penetrate the enterprise marketplace for its Apps and this new OS aims for it, but that process will not go quickly.

I'l bet my dollar to your donut that MS has their own version of an OS that is geared to online browser-based use of hardware. They'll introduce it when the timing is right. Meanwhile, Windows 7 will launch this fall. My guess: Google's OS announcement is timed to interfere with the uptake of Windows 7, reportedly a very solid OS, due for release this fall, a resort to the old IBM FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) approach.

Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint in the Cloud

Google Docs has me captured. Well, Writely captured me and Google Docs inherited me when the bought Writely. I have >1000 documents on Docs. Also use Microsoft live spaces and have played with Live Mesh, but so far I come back to Google.

However, if MS delivers a much richer browser interface and an easy way to move my documents over, I surely would consider Office Live particularly with the rich interface shown above.

But Google won't stand still and let MS eat their online lunch. Yet, what will they do? The have no desktop app, only the ability to work offline. I don't think that's enough.

Like it or not, cloud computing is the wave of the future - MarketWatch

Like it or not, cloud computing is the wave of the future - MarketWatch

In this piece about 'cloud' computing, Therese Poletti presents the arguments of Richard Stallman against cloud computing and those of Nicholas Carr for the concept now being deployed by heavyweights Amazon, Google, Microsoft and others. Stallman argues that those embracing it give up control, privacy and security. Carr compares cloud computing with the electrical grid and the efficiencies for computing are equivalent to the electrical grid that developed shortly after widespread on premise electrical power generation. My guess is that Stallman is more or less a control freak and distrusts 'BIG' enterprise.

I believe the cloud will eventually win out, but not to the total exclusion of premise based computing. We'll see a mixture just as we see a mixture of premise and grid power generation. I have already embraced the cloud in that my use of Google services, especially Docs and Spreadsheets, but many others, too is rising dramatically.

Now that Microsoft announced Windows Azure 0n October 27, 2008, there's absolutely no doubt that cloud computing has a future in the enterprise. MS has committed huge resources to the cloud concept to make it usable for present software developers and the applications they already have built.

The huge risk I see is global catastrophe or war on a massive scale that interrupts the global fiber network of several data centers at the same time. Given the reliance the global economy and culture will eventually place on this massive infrastructure, the consequences of catastrophic failure is mind-boggling.

Microsoft unwraps Windows Live desktop suite | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

Technorati Tags: PC,Web 2.0

This is a test blog posting from the new Windows Live Suite toolbar. I like the new Writer window and features...cool.

Microsoft unwraps Windows Live desktop suite Tech news blog - CNET News.com