A glance at the weekend's headlines revealed three stories dominating world attention, not necessarily in this order:
- The Superbowl
- The US Presidential Primary Campaigns
- Microsoft's $44 billion bid for Yahoo!
And one thing was made perfectly clear: We are neither in Kansas, nor in pappy's Office anymore.
1.*
A warm welcome to
OZ.2008 - as I type, the site is
being redesigned by Omar and his cadre of developers using Sharepoint, Silverlight and a raft of Microsoft expertise. We're looking at a launch of the new site quite soon.
There've been some changes already since
speakTECH acquired OZ late last year. We're updating the news sections daily, with a broadened focus that includes everything from technical resources for developers of Sharepoint to global perspectives on the direction, economy, and vision of the Net.
That's my job - as a journalist with a background in business/tech/web editing, do what journalists do when dealing with the strange flora and fauna of the world of software: let the experts do the talking.
Right now, they're buzzing - it's all
MicroHoo, or Yah!Soft - and of course, what's Google
doing about it? Behind that steamy if ephemeral front page tale, there's a
war for the hearts and minds of developers, business partners and end users the world over. It's being fought out in boardrooms and in code under rubrics like Web Standards, Open Source, Cloud, CRM, SAAS,
Ajax,
VSTO, Silverlight,
MOSS,
BI, ERP,
OOXML,
OO,
GTD, OOBL, ROFLCOPTER (couldn't resist), gadzillions more.
Some of the people whose minds and hearts are at stake in this battle either write for OZ, or are aggregated here. They come to talk about what they know -- really know, from daily practice. They come to share. They come to explore the potential synergies of the various languages and modalities now available to anyone designing or coding for the millions of offices, office workers and Office users around the globe.
As with any war, the
stakes are high: reputation, credibility, the financial future of entire
sectors of many significant economies, and lots and lots of money.
We live in interesting times. The Superbowl was an upset,
Giants walk the earth. 2008 is a year of change, of new leadership, of old applecarts giving way to undreamt mobility.
Two footnotes, and one sad reminder that not everything happens by design:
*1. No, that's not me nor my office there. It's from the
award winning series of portraits of bureaucrats around the world by
Jan Banning entitled The Office; the man seated at his desk is Surendra Kumar, record keeper of the High Court of Bihar, India. If nothing else, this series speaks of how much of the working world lives -- of how office workers used to live, before tech. And, it speaks volumes about what offices do.
2. I'm Tom, the webmaster here. Got something to contribute?
Let me know -
Finally, a personal note of regret at the passing of Marc Orchant, who for years curated the
Getting Things Done zone on OZ. With sincere condolences to his family and friends -- Marc will be sorely missed.
More anon.