ZDNet blogtracks: 09/18/05

A busy week that was. At the Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft rolled out enough material to keep us busy for the week and more. Richard MacManus writes that Microsoft is trying to transform its software platform into a web platform, but it's nowhere near Apple's level of sophistication. Dana Gardner blogs about Microsoft's RSS bear hug. George Ou has a Open Office vs. MS Office shootout. David continues his deep dive into Vista.

The cryptic Steve Gillmor captures the big picture with this sentence from his recent blog, "The plain cold truth is that everyone, as Jon Udell said about Microsoft, is on their game these days, protecting their flanks, charging back up the middle, and consolidating ground gained in this fundamental reboot of the converged technology landscape."
At Spyware Confidential, Suzi Turner demystifies EULAs. George creates a stir by asking if the Firefox honeymoon is over on his blog, and Dana Blankenhorn says that Mozilla faces the curse of popularity. Paul Murphy asks if the Linux desktop is 'stuck on stupid.'

One of our newest bloggers, Roland Piquepaille explores the frontiers of science and technology. His most recent posts:  Glowing mice to accelerate cancer research, Nanoscale optics for data transmission and 100GB of storage for your cell phone. Remember the Secret Life of Plants? Roland also blogs about the secret life of cells in his post Conversations within cells.

Russell Shaw thinks that Amazon should get into the phone business, and notes that the six most visited sites have IP voice offerings. He also get into the eBay/Skype deal. Phil Windley thinks Skype is good for eBay.

Dana B. also blogged about Oracle's new position in the 'open' world, and Dana G. blogged that it's time to Larry Ellison to resurrect the network computer.

I wrote about the CRM mashup (Oracle, Siebel, salesforce.com, Microsoft, etc.), and the war of words between Siebel executive Bruce Cleveland and salesforce.com's Marc Benioff. Phil Wainewright explores salesforce.com's new Appexchange here and here.