Friday, September 23, 2005

Leveling the scales

A friend of mine just sent me a link to an article on ZDnet about how Google is giving Microsoft a run for their money. Microsoft is being forced to reinvent themselves in order to keep pace. Some in the Linux community look at an article like this, and see the giant beginning it's decent. However, I don't see evidence like this as evidence that Microsoft is finished. Microsoft isn't going anytime soon, nor would I want them to.


Fair competition keeps us on our toes. What I see is a leveling of the scales. When you grow as large as Microsoft it becomes difficult to stay agile. It is an inevitability. We may even see a day when Microsoft begins to have offshoots, that can grow on their own.


One thing that Microsoft can't seem to let go of is associating everything back to the Microsoft name. Making it part of the borg. They incessantly purchase other companies or start new projects, immediately roll it into Windows, and re-brand it. They hang on to that association like the egotistical old man that names his own children after himself with the thought that this will make him live forever.

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Sun needs to get a clue

Just read an article entitled, "Sun make peace with the Linux world" I think there needs to be some type of temperature gage that measures Sun's position on Linux daily. Maybe even hourly!

"Today Sun's position is:  <insert-johnathan-schwartz-comment-here>".
Make up your mind, Sun, and stick with it.

Cool new blogging tool

This may make things easier for me. ;-) I'm running the final release candidate of SUSE Linux 10.0, and there is a cool applet in GNOME to add a blog entry! There have been so many things to blog about in the last few months, but I "...haven't gotten around to it."


Most notably I attended the KDE World Conference, aKademy, in Malaga, Spain. I know it sounds odd that a GNOME person would attend a KDE development conference, but I was doing a talk on the usability study my company conducted earlier this year. I learned a lot about their community, and the way KDE works. I found my talk was very well received, and it is encouraging to see so much interest in usability from both the KDE and GNOME communities.


After that I was home for a few weeks, and flew back to Spain, Barcelona this time, to attend Novell Brainshare. The food was wonderful. :-D


Hopefully this cool blog tool will help me blog more (with more interesting stuff...). Check out the upcoming SUSE Linux 10.0. You can download it for free!