Within months we'll start hearing: 1. Low-end users - those who don't generally works at desks - will be the primary users of Google Apps. 2. Most of their desk workers will continue to use Microsoft Office. They'll use Google Apps for email and sharing Word, Excel and PowerPoint docs. 3. The total cost of this move will probably be higher than using on-premises mail servers or using servers. 4. There will be another GMail/Google Docs outage that will piss people off. And, I'd say there's a 50-60% chance that they'll back off this experiment within a year or two and use Google Apps in a much more limited way.

Dvorak is pissed that Microsoft PR flacks no longer kiss his ass. He's irrelevant and knows it. If Microsoft assigned a personal PR person to him he'd undoubtedly change his tune. I wouldn't if I were them.

Have you actually used Windows 7? Apparently not. I have Win7 running on a $400 acer netbook with an Intel Atom processor, 2 gigs of RAM and plain vanilla on-board video and it runs just fine.

Microsoft has already implemented this in Bing (www.bing.com/twitter/) and Google is just announcing...vaporwarwe? That's sort of funny.

This is modded funny? Really? This is just another of the un-original and un-interesting thoughts shared on /. Have you ever actually had an original thought? How about I lower the bar - originality is hard. Have you actually had a thought that had not already been expressed less than 10,000 times on /. in the last year? In this case...no.

If 6 in 10 business have no plans to deploy Windows 7 in the next year is bad news then I want some of that! Let's see...what would the comparable headlines be? 9.9 in 10 businesses have no plan to deploy Linux (desktop)in the next year! 9.4 in 10 businesses have no plans to deploy MacOS in the next year! Microsoft would undoubtedly be thrilled if 4 in 10 businesses deployed Windows 7 in the next year. Any other software company in the world would be thrilled with that result. Time to move along.

Why would IBM and Cisco be better positioned than Microsoft in the cloud? That makes no sense. Microsoft is still the leading or one of the leading developer platform providers. 10's of thousands of companies and millions of developers use Microsoft frameworks and tools for software development. Yes, there are lots of great alternatives (Java, Php, Ruby etc. etc. etc.) and that's a good thing. But all things being equal I'd probabyl rather be Microsoft right now than pretty much any other company trying to establsh itself in the cloud except perhaps Amazon and Google. In addition to the developer platform assets, they have the capital to build lots of big/expensive datacenters, the network of partners/ISV's who use their platforms and lots of mindshare. IBM, from what I can tell, is essentially just doing the same thing they've been doing forever - offering good but expensive outsourcing services for very large businesses who have too much money to spend.

That's /. for you. I'd go further: I'd venture that more people have bought more than one copy of Vista than have ever used Linux on the client. ;) Think of all of the people who have bought more than one PC since Vista shipped.

I'd bet $1000 that more people have DOWNGRADED from Vista to Windows XP than have ever used Linux as a client OS.

Is it just me or is the Linux Foundation site not working? Hmm... They must be running Windows Server. ;)

It's pretty low class of MLB to slam Silverlight. Flash and Silverlight both have strengths. Flash's biggest strengths are ubiquity and a fairly large number of "developers" who know how to use it. Flash's weaknesses is that it's a hariball with no real programming model. Silverlight's strengths is that it's a real platform - an extension of .NET - with good and improving tooling support and huge numbers of potential developers who know .NET. Silverlight's weaknesses are tjat it is not yet on as many machines as Flash (but it will eventually...Microsoft won't give up) and that it's just more immature. For MLB to throw around innuendo about the performance or reliability of Silverlight is low class and obviously not credible given how well Silverlight worked for the Olympics, NCAA's and in many other places. If I were Adobe I'd be worried. Flash will lead for a while longer but Silverlight is fundamentally better as a platform and Microsoft won't give up.

I'll explain how Windows share of netbooks can go up but sales go down using very simple numbers for math challenged /. readers. Microsoft likes to sell higher priced versions of Windows Vista...Home Premium, Ultimate and Enterprise...more than they like to sell Vista Home Basic or Windows XP. Netbooks are often (but not always) low-powered machines that run OS's with lower system requiremetns. If the percentage of PC's running more expensive versions of Windows Vista decreases in favor of netbooks - which tend to run Windows XP or Windows Vista Home Basic then Microsoft's revenue (and presumably profit) decreases, even if they have a larger percentage of netbook sales year over year.

How do you figure anyone is making money except Google in the pages I linked to?

You're assuming that most people look for news on Google by doing to http://news.google.com/. Most people go directly to www.google.com and search. For example, I'm looking for news about the death of extreme skier Shane McConkey so I do this: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Shane+McConkey&aq=f&oq= At the top of that page is a news link (with ads to the right). When I click on the news link I'm taken here: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=Shane+McConkey&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=pUfSSarBE52ctgOA8PjHAw&sa=X&oi=news_result&resnum=1&ct=title That's a Google News page with a summary of a wide range of news topics on Shane McConkey...including ads to the right. Hence, Google is monetizing news content that they don't pay for.

My inclination is to say yes, Google shoud be required to compensate news producers because they're monetizing their content. Google is sort of the ultimate bottom feeder. Their only money-making product produces value - making it easier to find stuff - but all built on the back of other people and companies. If the New York Times or your local paper are going out of busienss because you and I are finding our news on Google News then either we should pay or Google should pay. I vote for Google. On the other hand, you have to wonder whether this is really something that could be implemented in a reasonable way and whether there would be unintended consequences. How will it impact the economics of news gathering? One would hope for the better but I could be wrong.