I am still working on Stafford Masie's talk at the CITI conference, I hope to have that fully transcribed perhaps later tonight and then there is a lot to discuss, believe me. If you haven't grabbed the audio and had a listen yourself, it's worth an hour (Links to OGG and MP3 in this story).

In the meantime, it is an unwritten rule, no blog can go for a full month without running a Google story. So, just in under the deadline...

Google Patent Search

Google has a new feature, in Beta (what else?), called Google Patent Search. I have honestly been playing with it for much of a day now, not getting much writing done as a result. It is a fascinating tool, complete with drawings and all, very interesting and could have some use in the effort to address "legitimate questions about patent quality".

IBM, Yahoo! go After Google

IBM and Yahoo! are teaming up to undercut Google in the enterprise, with a software solution that may put real pressure on Google's Mini.

Google currently charges $9,000 for a specialized search appliance - a piece of hardware called Google Mini - that can index up to 300,000 documents. The IBM-Yahoo offering undermines the market viability of the Google box in its current form, or at least at its current price, and also poses a threat to the efforts of corporate search specialists like Autonomy to expand into the small-business market.

It also provides another small bit of evidence that, in an age of cheap computing, hardware wants to be software and software wants to be free.

Isn't that a great way to put it?