Summary: The race to refine people's digital profiles (for personalised/targeted advertising) reaches E-mail and Free/libre substitutes do exist
MICROSOFT is hoping to destroy Google, which is a big user of GNU/Linux. Microsoft has managed to wrap its tentacles around Yahoo! in hopes of harming Google's main source of revenue (search and advertisements), but as the Wall Street Journal puts it, the value of Yahoo! to Microsoft keeps declining.
Drop In Yahoo Search Share May Trim Microsoft Deal's Benefits
Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) expects to close its search deal with Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) early next year, but the benefits of that partnership might already be eroding as Yahoo's search share slips with each passing month.
An interesting battle where neither Google nor Microsoft deserve a place is E-mail. Sadly enough, institutions and businesses are gradually selling their staff and students to a monopolist,
passing all their mail to an untrusted third party which will be scanning people's communication and profiling based on it. The Chicago Tribune has
this new article about it, titled "Microsoft vs. Google"
With university endowments and public school budgets still feeling the pinch, the competition between Google and Microsoft to convert the nation's colleges, universities and schools to the companies' free e-mail and other information technology services that run on the Internet "cloud" has grown fiercer.
The common choice these days has become somewhat of a duopoly, with
quite a few Australian universities surrendering their personal data to Microsoft. We wrote about a few of them before and we have already explained why universities should use neither if they care about the autonomy and privacy of those who pay tuition [
1,
2]. For the time being, it seems safer to
cautiously accept Google, rather than give Microsoft a penny.
"For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time."
--Richard Stallman
When it comes to online office suites, there is a
third player that does not receive much attention because it's not a big brand.
Zoho Reports, the web-based productivity suite’s business and data intelligence tool, is ripping off the beta tag and officially launching today with a new pricing model and set of features. Zoho Reports, which was formerly known as Zoho DB, provides developers and database administrators with better ways to manage, digest and understand their data. It’s similar in theory to Microsoft Access but that the application is online.
Those who want a hosted service of this kind should preferably use
Feng (formerly OpenGoo). It is Free software, so the server side can be deployed locally, modified, and redistributed too. Here is another article about
Los Angeles moving to Google Apps (and away from Novell). We
wrote about that before, but for other reasons with emphasis on Groupwise.
Lastly, we have been trying to determine whether
this video of a Bing firing was real or just staged. According to
this Seattle-based site:
Apparently, this guy was just a little too laidback in his response for Ballmer, who screamed “You’re Fired!” and without skipping a beat pointed at another guy.
Unfortunately, the video is unverified. The chap who uploaded hasn't responded yet for comment, and this piece will be updated when I know more. What do you think: real or fake?
There is a really embarrassing (and authentic) video of Steve Ballmer taken in September,
but it was pulled and we never found it. Microsoft tried to limit footage of Steve Ballmer on stage, maybe because he is very tactless (and
candidate for exit).
⬆
Comments
thenixedreport
2009-12-22 15:14:14
Roy Schestowitz
2009-12-22 15:23:52
Robotron 2084
2009-12-22 03:49:17
your_friend
2009-12-22 07:52:57
Proper privacy in email and other personal communication will only come through the use of encryption and roll backs of terrible laws. Every ISP is an "untrusted" third party that can store your communications even if you run your own servers. Encryption and TOR offer some small measure of protection. Evil laws like the Patriot act require email storage for later privacy violation and US law allows ISPs to sell their customers with impunity. The main difference between Google and other ISPs now is that Google lets the user browse much of their stored information. There should be laws against collecting email and other private communications, much less mining and selling it, without user consent.
dyfet
2009-12-22 13:56:22
My recent work has been on GNU SIP Witch, which is free (as in freedom) software that was developed to fit in a very specific role to better facilitate people to communicate privately. It does so by enabling people to locate and call each other using standard compliant PC telephone applications or even SIP telephone devices while maintaining pure peer-to-peer media connections between endpoints. This enables it to manage and connect users directly who use the ZRTP protocol, and hence facilitates the wider use of intercept-free communications.
your_friend
2009-12-23 07:23:14
Yuhong Bao
2009-12-22 04:49:53
Roy Schestowitz
2009-12-22 09:21:40
Microsoft -- being a sociopath -- happens to have attacked a lot of companies throughout its history. That was a corporate choice. Other companies realise that being respected is important to revenue too.
Yuhong Bao
2009-12-22 06:49:40
And Larry Page took from that a lesson that you have to keep your secrets close. You don’t share the algorithm of Google. And you need to create a powerful business in order to protect and advance those secrets. The funny thing is, the original BSD license had a clause requiring users of the code to give credit (that is for example how we know there is BSD code in Windows), but that was later ditched (for one reason, it was incompatible with the GPL): http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html
Roy Schestowitz
2009-12-22 09:23:03
Different cultures and mindsets value money differently.
Yuhong Bao
2009-12-23 00:35:27
Roy Schestowitz
2009-12-23 10:40:08
Yuhong Bao
2009-12-22 06:51:18
And Larry Page took from that a lesson that you have to keep your secrets close. You don’t share the algorithm of Google. And you need to create a powerful business in order to protect and advance those secrets."
The funny thing is, the original BSD license had a clause requiring users of the code to give credit (that is for example how we know there is BSD code in Windows), but that was later ditched (for one reason, it was incompatible with the GPL): http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html