From the Standards Blog | Post-Gates: Microsoft, Competition and the Semantic Web Microsoft has made many acquisitions for many reasons over its history - 122 to date, according to the list maintained at the Wikipedia. Almost 100 of these have been consummated in the last decade, as the company that triumphed in operating system and office productivity software has sought (often unsuccessfully) to achieve similar success in other domains. Other purchases have demonstrated pragmatic "build versus buy" decisions, serving to add functionalities to products that needed them more quickly and efficiently than in house efforts could achieve.
In its earlier days, Microsoft was much more likely to mimic the products of other companies rather than buy them, in part reflecting its engineering-driven culture, and in part its hardball approach to competition. When it did add features this way, it invariably added them for free into its existing products to make them more desirable. The result was often to drive the originators of those features out of the marketplace, since who would buy what they could get for free? Sometimes, the motivation was more desperate, as with the crash development, and bundling, of Internet Explorer in Window, when Netscape threatened to open a critical breach in Microsoft's control personal computing.
If that sounds vaguely familiar, it should, since Google is following the same course, albeit in a kinder, gentler way, as it adds service upon service, all for free, and all in the service of racking up more and more ad revenues. That's disturbing, because when your goal is ad revenues and not great technology, you may not necessarily produce great technology. But as Google's dominance continues to grow, who will be able to credibly compete against it in those technologies, to ensure that innovation continues? ...Full Story
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Developing a Standards Office for Google Stephe Walli
Once More Unto the Breach July 8, 2008 I've been thinking about this since I published the Standards Primer a month ago. In the next two to five years, Google will be challenged by a technology standards effort that it will need to encourage or manage in its mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Such efforts cannot be erected quickly (as demonstrated most recently by Microsoft), and preparations for that day should begin in the near future. Google is also in a unique position to turn the standards development process on its head.
Here are a number of ideas for how Google can plan for the future in the most flexible and cost effective manner, and contribute a unique and valuable re-think of the standards development process. ...Full Story
Faster Wi-Fi draft is one year old, but some concerns remain Faster Wi-Fi draft is one year old, but some concerns remain
ComputerWorld July 8, 2008 The Wi-Fi Alliance celebrated the first anniversary of the 802.11n Draft 2.0 certification last week and said the faster Wi-Fi technology's "upward trajectory ... continues unabated."
Despite such confidence, adoption of the technology has been slower than some analysts and vendors had predicted a year ago. That's mostly because some early adopters have found that the 802.11n radios draw more power and provide network speeds that are slower than expected. ...Full Story
UN says new global tomato standard will ensure buyers get high-quality produce CanadianPress.com July 8, 2008 GENEVA — You say tomato, I say substandard agricultural product.
A UN food safety meeting has agreed on the first global quality measure for tomatoes after more than six years of wrangling over the popular red fruit. "The standard regulates ... quality and handling issues, and even just definition" of what is a tomato, Tom Heilandt of the Food and Agriculture Organization told reporters Friday....
"It's not forcing all tomatoes to be the same, but it also recognizes that tomatoes have to have certain characteristics in order to be transported internationally," Heilandt said. ...Full Story
New proposed mileage standards draw critics on both sides Kat Glass
McClatchy Newspapers July 7, 2008 WASHINGTON — Automakers charged Tuesday that proposed new mileage standards are too tough while consumer groups complained that they're too lenient.
The Consumer Federation of America, an alliance of advocacy groups, wants to raise the standard well above the hike the government is proposing. The government's proposal would require automakers' fleets of cars to average 35.7 miles per gallon by 2015. Light trucks would have to average 28.6 miles per gallon....The Consumer Federation of America proposes 39.5 miles per gallon for passenger cars and 30.9 miles per gallon for light trucks by 2015. ...Full Story
Google finds itself playing catch-up Elise Ackerman
Mercury News July 7, 2008 ....As Google scrambles to release its mobile-phone code sometime later this year, a non-profit consortium of some of the world's biggest telecommunications companies and handset makers has quietly beaten the search giant.
The LiMo Foundation, created in 2007 by Vodafone, NTT DoCoMo, Motorola and four other telecom giants, delivered its first phone in February. It now boasts 18, including the Motorola RAZR2 V8 and MOTO Z6w....Executives from around the industry said they want to ensure that mobile devices do not follow the path of personal computers and become dominated by one or two gatekeepers. ...Full Story
BSA slams EC's 'narrow-minded' interoperability vision Kelly Fiveash
The Register July 7, 2008 An open standards row is brewing between the EC and a lobbying group for software multinationals over a proposed European framework on interoperability – a draft of which is due to be published on 15 July.
The Interoperable Delivery of European e-government Services to Public Administrations, Businesses and Citizens (IDABC) arm of the European Commission presented an outline of version two of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) at a meeting in Brussels last week ...[calling for]European governments, firms and users [to] “be prepared and volunteer to share and reuse,” and “adopt open standards and specifications”.
However, the Business Software Alliance (BSA) has slammed the EC for continuing to tout what it sees as “narrowly defined open standards” in its fight to achieve interoperability among government IT departments. ...Full Story
Dispute about Europe-wide definition of open standards Stefan Krempf
Heise Online July 7, 2008 A dispute has been sparked in Brussels about the definition of open standards to promote the interoperability between eGovernment services. According to drafts for a revision of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) which were recently presented by the European Commission's Directorate General for Informatics, the specifications of open standards have to be made available either free of charge, or for a specified nominal fee. If a standard, or parts of it, are protected by patents, the revision stipulates that these parts have to be "made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis" for third party use. This has caused protests by IT business associations like the Business Software Alliance (BSA), which counts Microsoft and Intel among its members. ...Full Story
First look: KOffice 2.0 Alpha 8 Rodney Gedda
Techworld July 6, 2008 One of the release goals of the next-generation KDE office suite, KOffice 2, is to make the package run on Windows and Mac OS X in addition to Debian Linux.
Just this week KOffice 2.0 Alpha 8 was the first KOffice release with binary packages for all three operating systems, and TechWorld decided to give it a run to see how it is taking shape before the final 2.0 release. ...Full Story
Regarding the future of Open XML Gary Knowlton
Gray Matter (Blog) July 5, 2008 As I troll the blogosphere and reporting on Open XML and ODF, I notice a question has surfaced regarding the future of Open XML that is probably worth addressing.
Many have asked or speculated that the recent announcement of ODF in Service Pack 2 is an indication that Microsoft is quietly stepping away from Open XML. Some ask… "Is Microsoft abandoning Open XML?"
In a word, no.
Microsoft will continue to support the development of the specification and the adoption of the Open XML formats, in addition to the other work we are driving around document formats in Office.
I hope this is as unambiguous and clear as it is intended to be.... ...Full Story
ODF keeps on winning: Uruguay Bob Sutor
Bob Sutor's Open Blog July 5, 2008 The Agency for the Development of Government Electronic Management and Information and Knowledge Society of Uruguay have now published their recommendation that public documents use either ODF or PDF. The former should be used for documents in the process of being edited and the latter for documents in final form....The recommendation document (PDF, Spanish; ODF, Spanish) states in the introduction [roughly translated]:
"This paper lays the foundation for the reasons why we propose to use ODF and PDF open standards for the creation, storage and exchange of office documents within state institutions and their relationship with rest of society." ...Full Story
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