Month: February 2005

New Cringely Column

Another great column today from Bob Cringely, this time on the subject of the resignation/firing of Carly Fiorina as CEO of Hewlett-Packard.

Usually I come up with my own column topics, but sometimes readers simply demand that I write about this or that. This week, the pull is coming from two different directions — those who want a take on the Toshiba-Sony-IBM Cell Processor announced this week, and those who want my reaction to the firing of Carly Fiorina as CEO of Hewlett-Packard. These would seem to be very different topics, but if you stand far enough away and squint, they look nearly the same. The Cell Processor represents a technical revolution that is about to take place in high-tech business, while Carly Fiorina represents management that was poorly prepared to lead or even adapt to that revolution. It was a smart move to let her go, though the real test for HP’s board will be finding a proper successor.

John Naughton blogs the subject here.

Good News / Bad News for Firefox

Computer Weekly reports that large companies are being warned off switching to Firefox.

The Gartner report said Firefox’s growth, so far, was “unsustainable” as many of the features that had made it popular were primarily aimed at individual users not businesses.

A simple case of FUD?

Better news, however, is that Yahoo! are offering a version of their toolbar for Firefox users, as reported by MediaPost.

The initial Firefox toolbar is specifically designed for Windows, and will not include Yahoo!’s spyware-fighting Anti-Spy tool, which was added into the Internet Explorer toolbar last year. A company spokeswoman said that Yahoo! plans to build Mac OS X and Linux versions and extend Anti-Spy to the Firefox toolbar in the near future.

Yahoo!’s search blog cautioned Thursday that the beta has some wrinkles that need smoothing. “Like any Firefox extension, it may cause your browser to misbehave in unexpected ways,” reported Duke Fan, Yahoo! toolbar product manager.

Comment Spam

In my absence I have been deluged with comment spam.

Comments are now moderated, but I hope to get to them quickly. Not that there are terribly many…

Google to host WikiPedia?

Interesting post on Wikimedia here.

Google Inc. has made a proposal to host some of the content of the Wikimedia projects.

The terms of the offer are currently being discussed by the board. The developer committee has been informed of some of the details via email. A private IRC meeting with Google is planned for March, 2005.

Please note that this agreement does not mean there is any requirement for us to include advertising on the site.

More details will be put here when the offer is allowed to be made public.

Could this be a case of Google taking the fight to Microsoft? MSN Search, of course, offers recourse to Encarta.

Apologies

I haven’t touched this thing for ages. Apologies all round. Have been shockingly busy at work and at home recently, and the PC at home just hasn’t been turned on for days now.

Am also neglecting Palimpsest, which is naughty of me.

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