Comments on: Friday Afternoon Grab Bag

By: tecosystems » Can You Say Analysis for the People, By the People?

tecosystems » Can You Say Analysis for the People, By the People? — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 16:13:47 +0000

[...] 1st saw me make two promises to all of you. First, that I would weigh in on Project Indiana. That came a week [...]

By: Ric

Ric — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 15:33:48 +0000

Oh - my bill from AWS? $0.02 … you obviously have more data in the cloud than me! And I’m with Daniel - I’m not sure how seriously I’d take an MS viewpoint about any other document formats … however many formats we might or might not need, we need lock-in at the data level even less than at the software level.

By: Ric

Ric — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 15:30:29 +0000

You raise a very interesting point about last.fm - what if the community doesn’t like the deal and leave the service? $280M won’t look so cheap then … I know I’m worried about ads/DJ’s/other monetisation methods, because they’re why I haven’t listened to broadcast radio in years. Sean Park (http://www.parkparadigm.com/) had an interesting alternative source of funding - thinking of something like Zopa for community underwriting for music creation via last.fm …

By: Daniel

Daniel — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 22:42:29 +0000

I could be wrong, but I think his reference to Google having its own format was an attempt to spread confusion. As in– he’ll probably try to posit that because Google’s implementation of the Open Document format is imperfect, and doesn’t allow for 100% full fidelity round tripping with Open Office, it therefore is a separate format. (I just tested round tripping on a few files I had lying around and it worked almost perfectly, preserving all the formatting with the exception of some margin errors; however, I have read that for more comlpex files Google doesn’t do such a great job, particularly with styles.) I think Microsoft is trying to be as loud as possible about any issues like this, which could actually be a good thing if it were done honestly as it would point out where there were problems that could be fixed (e.g., like when when the MS-hired open source converter team members rightly pointed out that Google had screwed up their implementation of .odt in the original release of Google Docs, thus prompting Google to fix it in a matter of weeks), but it’s bad when it’s done in a dishonest manner to try and obscure the issues, as I think Jason was probably trying to do. Perhaps I’m wrong, and there’s something I don’t know about, but given the sort of half-truths I’ve seen coming from the company regarding document formats, they definitely don’t get the benefit of the doubt from me.