Ozzie Was No Wizard For Microsoft In Massachusetts - InformationWeek

Chief software architect took over five years ago, but R&D in Bay State never quite meshed with Redmond. By W. David Gardner ,  InformationWeek
October 19, 2010 04:01 PM After Bill Gates and Paul Allen created their first Microsoft software program in Cambridge, Mass., it’s been mostly downhill for the company’s R&D in the Bay State. The latest blow came Monday with the announcement that chief software architect Ray Ozzie would leave Microsoft.

Appointed five years ago to fill the software architecting void left by Gates’ move to chairman, Ozzie, a close friend of Gates’, was named to take Microsoft in new profitable directions and to reinvigorate the R&D facilities in Cambridge. The drive immediately took on a competitive flavor because Google was developing its own R&D operation in Kendall Square, near Microsoft’s offices in the shadow of MIT.

Almost immediately, problems surfaced for Microsoft in Cambridge. There was litigation with database provider InterSystems, which battled Microsoft over office space at One Memorial Drive.

The company’s Startup Labs operation, which had started promisingly, ran into early difficulties when its director, Reed Sturtevant, suddenly left in October 2009.Like Ozzie, Sturtevant had worked at Lotus Development Corp., which rode Ozzie’s Lotus Notes to fame and fortune. Microsoft said the Startup Labs would be combined with its Rich Media Lab, both to be run from Redmond’s MRS Creative Systems.

Lili Cheng was named to head the new operation and report to Ozzie. The bicoastal life led by Ozzie seemed to fly in the face of cohesive management, as Microsoft struggled to coordinate several operations in Massachusetts, and Ozzie reportedly couldn’t properly coordinate with rebellious units in Washington State.

At the same time, the pressure on Microsoft to develop facilities in Massachusetts was mounting. In a controversy over ODF standards precipitated by the Massachusetts state CIO, IBM and Sun Microsystems pointedly noted that Microsoft had relatively few employees and facilities in the Bay State, putting pressure on the software giant to beef up its Massachusetts operations. The controversy has faded, and so has pressure on Microsoft to create more jobs and facilities in Massachusetts.

SEE ALSO:

Ray Ozzie Explains Cloud Computing For The Enterprise

Microsoft Opens Research Center In Cambridge, Mass.

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Coons, O'Donnell debate First Amendment - NECN

(NECN/CNN) - Delaware Senate candidates Christine O'Donnell (R) and Chris Coons (D) clash over the Constitution.

At one point during their debate Tuesday, O'Donnell appeared to question Coon's assertion that the First Amendment calls for the separation of church and state. They'd been discussing whether creationism should be taught in public schools

Coons: The 1st amendment establishes the separation, the fact that the federal government shall not establish any religion, in decisional law by the Supreme Court over many, many decades.

O'Donnell: The 1st amendment does?

Source: WDEL-AM Wilmington

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The Rent Is Too Damn High Party: Jimmy McMillan Shows Dems How It's Done - Death and Taxes

Jimmy McMillan of the Rent Is Too Damn High Party stole the show at last night’s New York gubernatorial debate.

Yesterday we wrote a piece about how ineffective Democrats were this year at fighting back against the conservative Tea Party candidates. Maureen Dowd’s “Mean Girls” article about the Mama Grizzlies only reinforced their perceived strength by calling them mean. If you don’t like the things your opponent is saying, we argued, you have to change the conversation.

Reinforcing the meanness of your successfully mean opponent is not a conversation changer. “The rent is too damn high”—now that’s a conversation changer.

Last night Jimmy McCmillan, head of The Rent Is Too Damn High party, and that party’s candidate for Governor of New York, showed mainstream Democrats how you effectively change a conversation. Gawker has a great report on McMillan, but it suffices to say he’s an eccentric Brooklyn candidate who wears gloves on his because he was exposed to agent orange in Vietnam (but, he says, “it could be psychological”) and who focuses his campaign on a singular issue with brilliant clarity: the rent is too damn high.

Jimmy McMillan will not win the governor’s race. Not by a long shot. But he does stand for progressive Democratic values (“the Rent Is 2 Damn High Party feels if you want to marry a shoe, I’ll marry you”) and he holds a valuable lesson for more mainstream Democratic candidates who actually stand a chance of winning: Political winners set the conversation, and political losers respond to the conversation.

Like them or hate them, the Tea Party has been highly effective in the last two years at setting the conversation. Democrats would do well to take a look at Jimmy McCmillan and learn from what he’s doing. Though they may not want to start the exact conversation he’s choosing to, they should take note of how many people are talking about him this morning. It’s not because he called Carl Paladino “mean.” It’s the oldest trick in the book: if you don’t like the argument on the table, change the conversation.

Below check out a clip of McMillan from last night’s debate. Below that, check out four glorious minutes of McMillan sitting on a stoop, ranting.

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Mozilla Proposes Open Web App System - InformationWeek

Just days before Google plans to launch its Chrome Web Store to distribute Web applications, Mozilla has decided that it wants to see more Web app stores.

The open-source software organization, which just announced a new CEO, said on Tuesday that it wants to create a way to simplify the discovery, acquisition, installation, and use of Web apps while simultaneously helping developers monetize said apps.

Mozilla is not the first organization to come to the realization that software distribution needs to be rebooted. There are currently dozens of stores hoping to replicate the success of the iTunes App Store, mainly for mobile apps.

In a post on the Mozilla blog, VP of products Jay Sullivan announced the availability of technical documentation for a proposed open Web App ecosystem, which is intended to work with any modern desktop or mobile Web browser.

Such browsers include Firefox 3.6 and later, Firefox for mobile, Internet Explorer 8, Chrome 6, Safari 5, Opera 10 and WebKit mobile.

Web apps are applications that run in the user's Web browser; they may or may not require network access or local storage. The installation process is akin to making a Web bookmark, though the experience has been reimagined in a way that makes it feel more like installing a desktop application.

Mozilla isn't planning to open a Web app store of its own or to provide payment infrastructure. Rather, it wants to create the code necessary to support free and paid Web app installation by individuals and distribution by developers.

Mozilla motivation for doing this is because the vertically integrated experience pioneered by Apple in its iTunes ecosystem presents "problems such as an opaque approval processes, lack of choice for developers, platform lock-in, [and] high(er) development cost when going cross-platform," the company explains on its Web site.

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Faster Forward: HP plays its Palm cards: WebOS 2.0, Pre 2 - Washington Post

Six months after it bought Palm, Hewlett-Packard showed its first big plans for that purchase when it unveiled updates to Palm's webOS software and Pre phone.

The new webOS 2.0 -- officially "HP webOS 2.0" -- adds a "just type" feature that lets you start such actions as composing an e-mail or launching a Web search by typing out text. It enhances the Synergy feature, which lets you view calendars, contacts and messages from such sites as Google or Facebook, by letting developers write plug-ins supporting other services. And webOS 2.0, like Google's Android but unlike Apple's iOS, will include Adobe's Flash 10.1 player.

Weirdly, HP's press release leads off its list of webOS 2.0 features with a mention of "true multitasking." That's been part of webOS from the start -- and is still one of its strongest features, as Palm's software makes it simpler to see what apps are open and switch among them than iOS or Android.

HP plans to offer webOS 2.0 as an over-the-air upgrade for Palm's older Pre and Pixi phones "in the coming months," but spokeswoman Leslie Letts didn't say whether it would be a free upgrade.

The Pre 2, pictured above, will first ship in France on Friday but will come to Verizon Wireless later in the year. It doesn't look like an enormous advance over the device I reviewed last summer; its 1 GHz processor and 5-megapixel camera improve on earlier hardware, but many of its other specs remain unchanged.

PCMag.com's Sascha Segan has a good hands-on report on both webOS 2.0 and the Pre 2, which notes usability issues with Just Type and Flash and concludes that what Palm needs most is a renewed lineup of hardware. I agree. And I'd add that in addition to new phones, it could use a tablet computer -- to which webOS 2.0 seems far better suited than Windows 7, the software used in a different HP tablet project.

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