Sunday, June 4, 2006

Why did Microsoft back down in Adobe confrontation? The other thing bothering me about the Microsoft-Adobe thing: Microsoft took on the DOJ and in losing, won. Microsoft is taking on the EU and daring them to the brink of Microsoft's oblivion. Microsoft settled with Burst.com. Microsoft settled with Novell. Microsoft settled with WordPerfect. Microsoft settled with Stacker. How is Microsoft is unwilling to wrestle with Adobe? Not because they were certainly. That hasn't been a problem for them in the past. No, there's something else going on. I wonder what. 5:01:27 PM    comment []

MIT's OLPC: Too Cute! Ethan Zuckerman blogs "It's cute. It's orange. It's got bunny ears. An update on the One Laptop Per Child project." They are cute. The OLPC project intends to sell these in lots of millions to third-world countries and school systems. They intend for these to be owned by school children and distinctly colored to disuade commercial trade in them. This will be quite the challenge. These aren't laptops as we use them, but internet appliances. I could envision lots of uses for them. 10:51:47 AM    comment []

Microsoft announces another dropped feature: PDF? InfoWorld: Top News posts Microsoft to pull PDF, XPS support from Office 2007. "Microsoft Corp. has decided to delete from its next version of Office an automatic way to save documents in PDF (Portable Document Format) after Adobe Systems Inc. threatened to take legal action." How strange. There must be more to this. PDF output is included with Apple's OS X. OpenOffice.org has the option to save files as PDF on Linux, OS X, Windows and everywhere else it runs. PDF output is free for anyone willing to dig around for it, from the free Ghostscript to PDFCreator. Either Microsoft was infringing on Adobe's extensions to the basic PDF, or something else was in play here. I'm looking forward to some followup article that might shed more light here. Another day, another Microsoft announcement of a dropped feature. Boy, the company is building an impossibly difficult hurdle to shipping new products. 9:39:14 AM    comment []

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