Larry Dignan and other IT industry experts, blogging at the intersection of business and technology, deliver daily news and analysis on vital enterprise trends.
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic.
Andrew Nusca is a writer-editor for ZDNet, contributor to CNET and the editor of SmartPlanet, ZDNet's sister site about innovation. In 2013, his coverage will focus on enterprise startups. He is based in New York.
Rachel King is a staff writer for ZDNet based in San Francisco.
Ray Lane was the guest on this week's Gillmor Gang, hosted by the Steve "I Plodius" Gillmor and joined by myself, Doc Searls, Dana Gardner and Mike Vizard. Lane, who served as president and COO of Oracle before become a VC with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, talked about Web 2.
In this latest episode of the Dan & David Show, we discuss how Microsoft lost its battle, at least for now, with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts over whether Office file formats are open enough to be included in the state's Enterprise Technical Reference Model, which favors the OpenDocument Format (ODF).
Three weeks after Massachusetts ratified its latest Enterprise Technical Reference Model -- a statewide standard that, starting January 1, 2007, disallows the use of Microsoft's Office file formats in favor of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) -- Microsoft is taking its case to the court of public opinion.
It's what will support the revenue model on top of the pipes that is the prize that the new AOL bidding points to.
Maybe I'm crazy. But if you ask me, there's a super big picture that's begining to form when you start to look at all of this week's announcements, or maybe-announcements involving Google, AOL, Real, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Sun and more.
When spreadsheet co-inventor and now Software Garden CEO Dan Bricklin saw my blog about how ODF could be the new frictionless document DNA of the Internet, he called to say he thought I was right and went on to say that there's just one thing missing before ODF can really take off. One of the things that has made Microsoft fantastically successful is the way the company's development tools make child's play out of developing Windows applications.
My fellow ZDNet blogger Jason O'Grady just wrote how thin is in with the new iMac. I'm not sure what this is, but it probably wasn't his idea of thin when he wrote that.
By way of one of IBM's Bob Sutor's blog entries that came through my RSS firehose this morning comes this damning report on FoxNews.com regarding Massachusetts' adoption of the OpenDocument Format (ODF).
In his blog, Sun director of Web technologies Tim Bray has spotlighted my Just say no to DRM series on inDRMpendence. In that blog, Bray offers an alternative meaning for the DRM acronym to the one I've been using (Digital Restrictions Management).
If you've never heard of the Digital Living Network Alliance, now is a good time to get hip to it. The DLNA is a multivendor alliance that's promoting the idea of standards-based wireless and wired interoperation of everything from computers to hifi gear to multimedia-enabled phones.