Live @ Sax.net

/n Software has built a very interesting new product called “RSSbus“.  It does two things:

1. RSSbus turns business data (FedEx tracking, file system info, SQL data, Amazon, QuickBooks info etc.) into RSS feeds.
2. It lets you combine and process these feeds into new feeds that do exactly what you want.

The result is something very powerful, open and simple. Because it’s all based on RSS, the integration possibilities with existing applications and websites are endless. Here’s a video and the free desktop version.

John Backus was the B in BNF and leader of the team that invented Fortran, the first high-level computer language. He received the Turing Award and the National Medal of Science. He died a few days ago in his home in Ashland, Oregon at age 82.

I met John about two years ago and we got to know each other pretty well. Except, it wasn’t until I read his obituary in the New York Times that I realized he was a computer science legend. Over the years I’ve spent countless hours looking over Backus-Naur Form specifications for different languages, and only today did I realize that the Backus in BNF referred to John’s last name.

However great a computer scientist John was, he was an even more stellar human being. I loved how he looked at the world, including himself. He helped me realize a few things about life that will stay with me for as long as I live. I love you John, and I’ll miss you.

There has been some controversy over books. Google is scanning and indexing everything they can get their hands on, Microsoft is only scanning works with expired copyright or works it obtained permission for. 

Dave Winer has posted some very thoughtful comments about the issue.

Google is playing of the Fair Use card and it reminds me of Napster. We used to have a some very reasonable fair use conventions before Napster came along, claiming that massive copying was all just fair use.

The end result was an intense and very effective lobbying effort by the recording industry that significantly increased the restrictions on music. Google’s attitude risks putting us in the same bind with the printed word, which would be a very tragic outcome.

Mr. Rails offers some good advice:

” Treat cute, clever, and cool as spices. [They] are are all important ingredients in a delicious application experience. But often their role is over- or understated. Too much and it’s hard to stomach, too little and it’s all bland. “

… as in “WOW, I can’t believe this is it after five years”. During the past few weeks I have been having TONS of Vista problems, related to display drivers, docking, and power management.

Two months ago, Jim Allchin made a promise:

” With Windows Vista there won’t be any more sinking feelings when the airplane is at 10,000 feet and you reached into your laptop bag to find the laptop all cozy and warm because it didn’t go into power saving mode when you were running for the plane — caused because some device, service, or application wasn’t well behaved. “

Well, I’ve had that sinking feeling almost every day during the past two weeks, courtesy of Windows Vista, using various permutations of the latest drivers from Microsoft and hardware vendors. Other times, my Thinkpad’s LCD display remained black, even though I could see all the lights flashing and I could cause a beep typing on the keyboard. Opening and closing my laptop is now an experience filled with more stress and suspense than a Hitchcock movie. 

The web is filled with reports from experienced power users who are experiencing similar problems using the final (non-beta) version of Vista. Some have given up already.

Our only hope that Steven Sinofsky, who led the Office division through a most excellent release of Office 2007, has replaced Jim Allchin to take charge of Windows. A miracle service pack release would be most welcome.

This is funny.

Update: Well, I guess Apple lawyers didn’t share my sense of humor. The screenshot of a PocketPC with iPhone welcome screen was removed at Apple’s request.

First there was the stock options problem.  Now Cisco is sueing apple over the iPhone trademark. Apparently, when Apple and Cisco couldn’t reach a final agreement the night before the keynote, Steve Jobs decided to call Cisco’s bluff and pretend Apple was fully entitled to call its new product the iPhone. Shareholders should be concerned and the board should reprimand Jobs for this. Shame, shame shame.

Macworld Expo is only five days away, and here are a few predictions.  Many of these I have not seen anywhere else, so I’m curious how many of them will come true:

1. MacPhone will not ship for several months and will look like a long, slim full-screen iPod. First model will be GSM based. It will have a touch screen interface with controls around the edges and content in the middle. Focus will be on music, multimedia IM, and voice. MacPhone Pro will not be announced until a few months from now, with a focus on business uses such as email, todos, and calendars.
2. iLife and .Mac updates go hand-in-had to position them as a beautiful, tasteful MySpace. Easy sharing of pictures, videos, voice notes, wikis, and blogs. Mac owners will use iLife to create great-looking content effortlessly. Non-mac owners will have full viewing access and, by comparison, very limited content creation capabilities. Also: effortless content synching on mobile devices such as MacPhones and iPods, including calendars, blogs, and pictures. Think of .Mac as iTunes with content by you.
3. iTV will ship very soon and will NOT include any intelligence or storage other than for caching (to keep the price low, and let iTunes do all the hard work on the Mac). Think of iTV as a Video Airport Express and iTunes where all the action is, delivering content to your device of choice: iPhone, iPod, TV, or Mac. Possible names for iTV: Airport/AV, Airport Video, Teleport, VideoPort.
4. Google partnership announcement to deliver Youtube and/or Google videos to both iTV and possibly iTunes/iPods. Google mail and calendar will not be included in the partnership and will continue to compete with .Mac.
5. Boot Camp update supports Vista but will stay away from virtualization. Why? because it comes with too many support issues and device and driver issues make it inherently impossible to deliver a flawless customer experience. There may be a ROM update that lets you switch in a few seconds between Mac and Bootcamp, essentially hibernating either OSX or Windows.
6. iWork: Aside from full support for Office 2007 file formats and a new spreadsheet app, the big focus will be on collaboration. Pages will have much better team features, including much-better-than-Word revision-marking. The new Keynote will make hosting presentations on .Mac effortless, either live or recorded.
7. New hardware: Two new models: a smaller MacBook Pro, and a bigger Macbook. New LCD monitors with built-in iSight and, possibly, microphones (yes, that’s plural).
8. Leopard: Much better integration of Mail, Contacts, and iCal. Very innovative parental controls, also for teenagers. Better use of functional animation, including wobbly windows. Safari bookmarks become much richer, focusing on the content of pages, rather than their URLs. iChat will be able to call landlines, and your MacPhone will also function as a blue-tooth headset for your Mac, so you can use iChat without using cellphone minutes.

Wishful thinking? Only time (as in, five days) will tell…

Microsoft today signed away custody of its third-born child: All the file formats for Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are now under the custody of ECMA, an independent standards body. ECMA has accepted custody by declaring OpenXML an official ECMA standard and has gone one step further by putting OpenXML on a fast track to be approved as an ISO standard.

What does this mean? It means no single company controls the internal format office documents. There no long is an internal format, it’s all open and available for anyone. Microsoft doesn’t control the standard any more than Adobe, IBM, Novell, Apple, or any other company.

Why would Microsoft sign away custody of its third-born child and second-biggest cash cow? (my apologies to all children and cows for mixing metaphors here) OpenXML certainly gives Office competitors a big opportunity to more powerful and user-friendly products that inter-operate 100% flawlessly with Office. So what’s in it for Microsoft?

First, as an truly open standard, the the Office XML file format (ie: OpenXML) become a standard, a platform for building more powerful applications. So we’ll see a whole new wave of innovative applications built on top of this standard. From Wiki-companies to SAP and Salesforce.com, everyone can now add value and deeply integrate with OpenXML.

One of the most exciting apsects of OpenXML is that you can extend the format by embedding your own application-specific XML in it. At first they may seem counterintuitive: If companies can put their own extensions in OpenXML documents, doesn’t that take away from the openness of the standard? And the answer is no, quite the opposite: because even if you embed your own data in a format, that data will simply be ignored and handled gracefully by other applications.

The second way Microsoft may benefit from this is that it really blows away the Open Document Format (ODF is the Open Office XML format). ODF will continue to exist as Open Office’s native file format, and there will always be an army of open source purists who will have nothing to do with anything that originated from Microsoft.

ODF’s biggest weakness is that it was built from inside Open Office without much regard for exact backward compatibility with older Office documents. While a ODF’s 90% compatibility solution may have been good enough for some, that last 10% can be very, very annoying to customers. So for a while, both ODF and OpenXML will exist and ultimately the end-users will decide which standard comes on top. My guess is that they will prefer the backward compatibility of OpenXML, especially if companies like Adobe and Apple start building applications that compete with Office.

I am not sure if anyone really realizes how big this is for end-users. It means interoperability between competing applications. It means preservation under an open standard of all the information stored in literally billions and billions of documents. And it means deep integration with non-office applications in new, innovative ways. This is bigger than the Web 2.0.

The Novell-Microsoft agreement has generated lots of buzz in our industry. Analysts, bloggers, and journalists are all speculating on the wider implications, the strategic impact, what it all means, and the deal has even spawned a conspiracy theory or two. While playing these kinds of fantasy games may be lots of fun, I frankly don’t really care to join the ideological debate. What I do care about are the practical implications for my business.

How does this agreement affect my business? Without hesitation, I can say that the impact is 100% positive. Like many businesses, we have a foot in both worlds, relying on both proprietary and open source software. When two giants from separate worlds decide that it’s time to do what’s right for their mutual customers, I believe that is a Very Good Thing. I don’t have to worry about getting caught between finger-pointing support agents or law-suits that impact the products I use. I can choose the best tool for the job. As a customer, I’ll always choose companies who choose innovation over litigation.

Check the ACT blog for more interest commentary.