Results tagged “Matt Asay” from CLICK

I wondered why the search box and my saved searches disappeared from the Twitter.com page. But knowing that the deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett were straining the entire Internet in general, I knew that the prone-to-overloading Twitter didn't stand a chance.

Turns out that's exactly what happened, according to this mocoNews item.

Anybody who's used Twitter knows that the exponentially growing popularity of the microblogging service means that it's a major news event or two away from collapsing entirely.

As my fellow blogger Matt Asay says, what do you expect from a free service that's not even trying to make money?

I won't blame everything on Twitter. The whole Internet is feeling it

10:30 p.m. update: Twitter search has returned. (The fact that I'm noting this at all means I am sorely in need of getting a life.)

Why do I have to do anything when Matt Asay is writing all the good stuff?

I'll just do a link dump:

WSJ's Walt Mossberg: "Firefox is the best"
Google embrace OpenOffice? Probably not
Google gets serious about the Mac
WSJ to Microsoft: You need to open source Windows
The eBay "fad" is wearing off
Would we hate Microsoft if it were Apple?
The most important open-source projects...to Google
Does OpenOffice's speed even matter?
When all else fails, try porn

Matt is a big wheel at open-source company Alfresco, but he isn't afraid to write about his own company: Try doing this with proprietary software

Here he hints at his almost-working for Microsoft and former position at Novell:
Why I won't work for Microsoft:

Several years ago while still working for Novell, I considered going to work for Microsoft in Europe. (Had I waited long enough, I could have worked for Microsoft while still at Novell, but that's another story, albeit one that is paying off well for Novell.) I thought I could help the company figure out open source and navigate the thorny issues that prevent it from embracing open source.

I gave up on that quixotic quest, and in retrospect it was the right decision. Sam Ramji, Bill Hilf, and others are doing a far better job of nudging Microsoft toward open source than I would have. But the bigger reason is that Microsoft has placed an apparently insurmountable hurdle in its path to fully engaging the open-source community, and to my ability to fully support its embrace of open source:

Patents

A few more links:

The Mac's allure for open-source developers
Twitter is the Wonderbread of intellectual nutrition

Microsoft didn't get where it is today by being stupid.

And they've got a plan. From the Novell deal over intellectual property in Linux to the company's less legalistic initiatives, Microsoft has its hands in the free, open-source software pie, and it wants to dig even deeper.

Here are a few things to keep an eye on:

• CNet blogger Matt Asay writes about open source in The Open Road from a decidedly business-friendly perspective. He's pretty cozy with Microsoft. And he's all over the Sun/MySQL story. So when it comes to FOSS and the huge corporations involved in it, Matt has a lot of info that we would all do well to keep track of. Again, his apparent closeness to Microsoft might rub you the wrong way, but Matt's perspective is a very important one -- to me, anyway. From Red Hat to Sun, Google, MySQL, IBM and more. I find him less biased and way more realistic than a lot of writers out there. He did work for Novell, and now he's an executive at Alfresco, a company that bills itself as "the open-source alternative for enterprise content management," and if the point doesn't get across, there's this from the Alfresco Web site: "Our goal is to not only provide an open source offering but to surpass commercial offerings such as Documentum or Microsoft® SharePoint® in terms of features, functionality and benefits to the user community." He may be cozy with the huge companies that have interests, positive or negative, in open source, but somebody's gotta be on the inside.
• O'Reilly has a Microsoft-sponsored open-source page called Port 25. It's yet another page we would all do well to keep track of.
• And in the "Microsoft is smart" category, the company, along with Novell, is starting to push Moonlight, an open-source version of MS' Silverlight technology. Silverlight is seen as a competitor to Adobe's Flash, and an open-source version of the software, even if it originates from Microsoft, could gain some significant traction ... or it could prompt Adobe to open-source Flash. (If open-source Flash clone Gnash would work for me, I'd say there's another Flash-killer in our midst, but I need to see an app that actually shows a damn YouTube video ... or anything else).

The average Linux geek isn't going to buy any of this, but Linux geeks in the proverbial basement aren't who this is aimed at.

Instead, Microsoft wants to reach the free-spending people in the enterprise who are now using a mix of proprietary and FOSS solutions. Those IT managers want everything to work better -- and especially to work better together -- and they want to keep people happy, both their users and the people who sign off on their budgets.

In other FOSS news, Microsoft is also pushing Novell's SUSE Linux pretty hard ... in China, as I learned in this Matt Asay post.

I don't think we're going to see an open-source version of Windows anytime soon, but you never know what's going to happen with Microsoft.

So Port 25 and Matt Asay's The Open Road -- both things I need to add to the blogroll.