2/22/07: Goo-Goo-Google-y Eyes on Office

Hosted services are heating up (again). Google’s updating its hosted productivity suite, Google Apps, to include a new Premier edition. It’s coming at an interesting time, just as Vista and the new Office suite start blowing the doors off IT refresh plans.

So…upgrade your Office suite with better productivity tools but imperfect unified comms for $100-400 per seat (depending on volume and how well your corporate purchasing folks negotiate), or go to Google Apps for $50-100 per seat and get a tad more unified comms but productivity apps. (Or spend about $40/month on OfficeLive and get somewhere in between).

Personally, I think we’re headed for a major consolidation between mashups, dashboards, home pages and productivity apps. I doubt it happens this year, but it’s coming. Most everyone of my acquaintance has a personalized home page from Google or Yahoo–how natural is it to simply add the apps and services you need and find them wherever you go? MSN lags behind in this respect (which makes no sense at all–they need to get moving).

OTOH, Microsoft’s got the edge with an enormous userbase for the Office suite, a foray into hosted services with Live (and the promise of much more coming from the “Live” brand of apps and dev environments), and MSN, but Google’s got, well, Google. Both have massive piles of cash to fund R&D and marketing efforts. (OK, well, Microsoft may have a billion and a half less in spare change if the Alcatel-Lucent decision stands.) Gonna be an interesting next couple of years.

Don’t mess with the old folks. Muggers who held up a tour bus full of senior citizens in Costa Rica got their just deserts–one bandit’s clavicle was broken and another was killed when the seniors fought back, according to this CNN report. Costa Rican authorities declined to prosecute the seniors, who got back on the bus, boarded the ship and resumed their cruise.

Gosh, they promise romance and adventures on those cruises…glad to see they deliver.

Dolly the sheep is 10 years old today. For those of you born on the moon, Dolly’s the first successful example of cloning a higher order mammal, and she caused all kinds of hoohah (and fraud) when she was born. Among other things, scientists predicted she was only the beginning of a glorious period of cloning bloody near everything.

Sadly, she appears to have been more fluke than herald–cloning’s still in the dark ages and–given GWBush’s reluctance on the cloning front, she probably will stay that way in the US.

MP3 players just can’t catch a break these days. First a New York senator proposed banning them from city streets. Now police in Santa Fe have blown two of them up, thinking they were bombs.

Somebody apparently duct-taped three MP3 players under the pews in a Roman Catholic chapel, and set them to spew nasty language as the congregation gathered for Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent. The words were apparently explosive enough that the cops sent for the bomb squad. I’ll bet the whole episode gave the good folk involved all kinds of ideas as to what to give up for Lent, MP3 players at the top of the list.

Fascinating pronouncement from virtual community pioneer Jaron Lanier; according to BBC News he’s coined a new phrase “digital Maoism,” to describe the homogenized, “dumbed down” state humans achieve when they buy into the collective Web 2.0 consciousness and become a mob.

I’d be the last one to argue against the whole mob phenomenon (look for an upcoming post on flash mobs, in fact), but I doubt that Web 2.0 is doing any more homogenizing than any other communication medium. Popular media has been writing for the second-grade level audience for years and years. Anybody who thinks a new medium will change that is bound for disappointment.

In fact, I think the opposite of “digital Maoism” is true–the fact that it’s easier to host your own platform means we have more sharper, smarter voices than ever. Of course, whether the masses will seek them out and be enlightened is another matter.

More on that later…cheers.

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