Journal: Microsoft Ad Trashes OpenOffice.org

Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Standards, Strategy, Technologies, Tools

A recent Microsoft video suggests the company considers OpenOffice.org a significant threat to its own Office suite.

Titled “A Few Perspectives on OpenOffice.org,” the video features a series of horror stories from customers who tried the open-source productivity suite and suffered from excess costs as well as IT resources, performance and compatibility issues.

A series of customer quotes flashes across the screen in the slickly animated video, read aloud by a series of unseen narrators. “If an open-source freeware solution breaks, who's going to fix it?” according to a statement ascribed to a school district official in the U.S.

“When we returned to Microsoft Office after our experience with OpenOffice, you could practically hear a collective sigh of relief across the entire district,” states another comment attributed to a U.S. school system official.

Comments are not enabled on the video's YouTube page.

Microsoft is facing competition from OpenOffice.org on multiple fronts, from the commercial version sold by project owner Oracle, as well as offshoots like the recently announced LibreOffice.

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Phi Beta Iota: Google is in more trouble than Microsoft.  Oracle will not scale, and IBM is not as imaginative as it likes to believe.  Microsoft, however, has no strategy at all.  Attacking OpenOffice in an era of Open Everything is a sure sign that Microsoft leadership is struggling–and this tracks with the decline of the company under Steve Balmer.  We believe there will be a need for Bill Gates to take the helm again, or Microsoft is going to start falling apart and will fail to use the time it has right now–the next two years–to bury the competition by innovating itself into the future.

Guest Comment:

“Microsoft as a corporation is disgraceful. The classic case is when they bribed Nigerian Officials to replace Linux with Windows on school computers. http://www.facebook.com/l/8396a;www.geek.com/articles/news/mandriva-ceo-calls-out-microsoft-ceo-steve-ballmer-2007112/ I prefer to work with an operating system with a Social Contract  http://www.facebook.com/l/8396a;www.debian.org/social_contract or code of conduct: http://www.facebook.com/l/8396a;www.ubuntu.com/community/conduct

Tip of the Hat to Paul Harper at Facebook.

Robert Steele's response:  Quite right. Not sure we can turn a pig into a cow, but miracles do happen. I predict Bill Gates will return to run Microsoft, the question is, has he learned to listen to others? Jury is still out on that one.

Journal: Information Overload & Leadership Failure

IO Sense-Making, Methods & Process, Standards, Strategy

Information Overload – Too Much Of A Good Thing?

October 11, 2010 – Everyone has seen the commercial on television. Someone asks a simple question, and then everyone in the crowd starts spewing forth all these facts that have been found via the Internet. This makes for some very clever and funny advertising, but let’s face it. Information overload is a real problem. The magic formula is to deliver the right information to the right people who are searching, at the right time. Sound simple enough, but how many avenues have you been down yourself just because you are looking for a certain recipe for brownies? In a closer look found here, some of the problems that contribute to information overload are discussed.

These include defining findability, an object-centric perspective, an actor-centric perspective, and filters that promote findability. Interesting read.

From the source:

The question is however, is it the abundance of the information that is the problem, or a general lack of maturity in approaches to designing effective organization and access mechanisms? In his presentation at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City, Clay Shirky referred to this idea as “Filter Failure”. He describes information overload as the normal case and that it’s not necessarily the quantity of information that’s the problem, it’s our ability to filter through what’s there that’s the real issue.

Tip of the Hat to Marjorie M K Hlava at LinkedIn.

Phi Beta Iota: It is not a filter failure.  It is a leadership failure…leadership lacking integrity in the holistic sense of the word, too eager to rush to pay for technical collection solutions that increase the size of their firehose but ignore both the fact that the fires we need to put out are small scattered ones, and the people we need to support require both back office and desktop tools.  All this was well known in 1985 and the solutions fully articulated by 1989.

See Also:

Graphic: Balance Matters

Worth a Look: 1989 All-Source Fusion Analytic Workstation–The Four Requirements Documents

Reference: Emerging Open Source Database Giant

Blog Wisdom, Methods & Process, Standards, Tools

The best open source database?

Ever since Oracle got its hands on MySQL via the Sun acquisition, many in the open source community have been hoping for a new open source database champion to emerge, notes Alan Shimel. With the release of version 9.0, it looks like PostgreSQL is stepping into the void. Some say PostgreSQL is the world's most advanced open source database. Alan Shimel interviews two of the projects leading contributors. They discuss many of the latest, greatest features in 9.0.

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Source Site Open Source Subnet

Journal: Open Mobile, Open Spectrum, Open Web

Augmented Reality, Autonomous Internet, Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Geospatial, Methods & Process, Mobile, Real Time, Reform, Standards, Strategy, Technologies, Tools
Open Moko Home

Openmoko™ – Open. Mobile. Free.

Openmoko™ is a project dedicated to delivering mobile phones with an open source software stack. Openmoko is currently selling the Neo FreeRunner phone to advanced users and will start selling it to the general public as soon as the software is more developed.

Phi Beta Iota: We've had our say on “Open Everything” GNOMEDEX and again at “Open Everything” UNICEF, and it just keeps getting better and better.  The cell phone is the principle device for Hacking Humanity, in part because it enables micro-everything including directed micro-giving and micro-trading with Open Money.

Below are two related items:

Updated Chart on Mobile Phone Applications (by sunset eastern)

Trip Report from Burning Man's Open Cellular Network

EXCERPT: Today I bring you a story that has it all: a solar-powered, low-cost, open source cellular network that's revolutionizing coverage in underprivileged and off-grid spots. It uses VoIP yet works with existing cell phones. It has pedigreed founders. Best of all, it is part of the sex, drugs and art collectively known as Burning Man. Where do you want me to begin?

The Open Source Subnet
Cell towers that blend vs. those that offend

“We make GSM look like a wireless access point. We make it that simple,” describes one of the project's three founders, Glenn Edens.  The technology starts with the “they-said-it-couldn't-be-done” open source software, OpenBTS.

Journal: Consortium Seeking Multilingual Web Standards

Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Earth Intelligence, Standards

Full Story Online

Multilingual Web should be a priority for India: W3C chief

Six months into his new job, Jeffrey Jaffe, Chief Executive Officer of the World Wide Web Consortium has his work cut out

The World Wide Web Consortium or W3C, as it is better known, is where the industry meets to set standards for the Web. And Jeffery Jaffe – an IT industry veteran who held prominent positions at Bell Labs (Lucent Technologies), IBM, and more recently at Novell – as its CEO not only oversees the W3C's largest project in progress ( HTML5 standards group) but is also trying to ensure that the Consortium sharpens its focus on multilingual web standards for countries like India.

Tip of the Hat to Marjorie M K Hlava at LinkedIn.

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