Google yells, Ms blinks

YEAR-END REVIEW : WORLD

Google yells, Ms blinks

While you partied for New Year 2007, there was another one of those bloodless, gentle coups for your own good; Google took over the world, but don't worry, the velvet-gloved giant has graciously announced you can continue living here.

Google yelled, Microsoft blinked, and just like that the world had a new bully, much like the old bully; Microsoft backed down when Google threatened to push its suit that Microsoft was not being fair to the intrusive Google Toolbar by building better desktop file-searching software into Vista; Microsoft talked big but backed down and make Vista worse to make Google happy.

Google's YouTube broke its own New Year's resolution to get anti-piracy software into action by Jan 1; the inexact truthfulness of that promise cost Google a few lawsuits with big TV companies by the time it finally got the system online in August; those will be settled with cash, something Google has lots of. As its stock passed $700 and set off earthquakes in the San Francisco area, Google passed IBM in company size and worth. Google announced the GPhone, which turned out to be software, but Sprint and Verizon Wireless of America, which is partly owned by Vodafone; were interested to say the least in a phone with a Google operating system, Google Internet browser, Google calendar, Google maps, Gmail and Google online payment on the cheap phone, with mash-ups and other tools on the phones of escalating price and consumer entrapment.

For years, Google swore it would never make nor market an online office suite for businesses and challenge Microsoft Office; it was a mark of the credibility of Google - or maybe of all Big Business - that no one was surprised when Google announced it had made and was about to market an online office suite for businesses to challenge Microsoft Office; Google Apps Premier Edition costs $50 per user per year or 1,670 baht in real money, but the lines to take a subscription were mangageable to say the least, and they still called them personal computers; Forrester Research advised the IT Department to have a look, because Microsoft Office is simply too high-priced.

The question of "which Google to believe" finally came up, as it does in all big companies which cannot keep track of their exaggerative extravaganzas; Laszlo Bock, Google Vice President of People Operations (sic) testified under oath to the US Congress that because of the shortage of H1B work visas, "Google is regularly unable to pursue highly qualified candidates;" but Google CEO Eric "I Know Jack" Schmidt told the public when he was discussing Google performance in the second financial quarter that the drop in operating profit was "due in part to the company hiring more people during the quarter than it had anticipated;" as the old song goes, "One of these things is not like the other."

Madonna signed a contract with concert promoters Live Nation, because as a sharp businesswoman she realised the old music industry system is outdated and essentially doomed; she was 25 years with Warner Music, but look: Now, "For the first time in my career, the way that my music can reach my fans is unlimited," and doesn't depend on men in tight ties trying to jail children as international pirates. Sir Elton John, who is an old guy, took note of this new Internet thingmy and predicted it would never fly; sample quote from his rant: "Hopefully the next movement in music will tear down the Internet. Let's get out in the streets and march and protest instead of sitting at home and blogging. I do think it would be an incredible experiment to shut down the whole Internet for five years and see what sort of art is produced over that span. There's too much technology available."

A poll by the Computing Technology Industry Association rated the Top 5 Most Influential technology products of the past 25 years (please sit down) as: 1. Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser; that was followed by Microsoft Word, Microsoft Windows, and Microsoft Excel; the Apple iPod was fifth.

Microsoft announced a Service Pack 1 upgrade and improvement for Windows Vista - next year, but the new operating system still got horrible reviews.

Microsoft gave up, cosied up to EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes at a secret dinner in a lovely, small, Dutch restaurant - and handed over 500 million Euros so that the European Union would make its 10-year battle go away; this was not anything like two people agreeing to corrupt intimidation, because that would be illegal.

Having declared Microsoft excessively rich and successfully demanding tribute, the European Union looked around for the next victim, which is: Apple, Inc; that's the scum that bundles iPods and iTunes and uses Digital Rights Management on the songs it sells; this is a pretty open-and-shut case of monopolising the market and hurting consumers on the Dying Continent so badly that it can only be set right by Apple's agreement to provide carload after carload of tribute, until the EU eventually says "Stop."

Okay, okay, so Ver 1 of the Microsoft Zune music player wasn't an Apple iPod killer, but Version Two? Now, that is one sweet little lethal weapon because: It has the iPod look and feel and specs, it has the iPod price - so the Microsoft Zune should kill the iPod, right? Right? Well, the Zune has some cool features like music videos and a touch-sensitive navigation button (compared with that old, old touch-sensitive navigation screen on the iPod), but a year into the Zune, and there is still nothing like iTunes, although you are way too foreign to use it.

Sir William of Gates and Steve "President for Life" Jobs conducted an experiment which proved that the space-time continuum can hold the two biggest egos at the same time; if you think propeller hats are k3w1 and your pocket protector is secured, Mr Sitthichai says you can watch the Gates-Jobs video collection at (d5.allthingsd.com)

Zinger of the Year (Rim Shot) award to Steve "President for Life" Jobs of Apple Inc: "I wish developing great products was (sic) as easy as writing a cheque. If so, then Microsoft would have great products."

There is no such company as Apple Computer, announced Steve "President for Life" Jobs, it's just plain old Apple Inc; and he had a really big cell iPhone he'd like to sell - but not to you, you are way too foreign; it has precisely one button, with everything else on a touch screen, and of course you can listen to music, take pictures and connect to the Internet with it, all on a platform using OS X - plus you can't change the battery; Mr Jobs said iPhone will "revolutionise the industry" and he started on a campaign to corner a full 1 per cent of the one-billion-phone world market within two years.

Apple Inc (formerly Apple Computer) and Apple Corps proved that all you need is love - and lawyers; the company overseen by Steve "President for Life" Jobs and the firm run by Paul McCartney agreed to give peace a chance with a marriage that ended the 1981 divorce over trademarks; the question being asked around the world is: Who really cares whether The Beatles come out on digital?

Linux for consumers got a boost like it never got before when a consortium of companies agreed to boost the Open Source product; IBM, HP, Intel, Oracle, Novell and others said in effect: Don't buy Microsoft Windows Vista, download Linux for the desktop, a place rarely achieved by the otherwise popular operating system. Indonesia economist Faisal Basri said that if Indonesia weren't spending $2.5 billion a year on Microsoft software, it could spend all that money on poor people, hungry people, people in need; open source development would save exactly $2.5 billion, he reasoned.

US Federal Trade Commission Chairman Deborah Majoras respectfully told the European Union they were crazy as loons to take a harsh stand against Microsoft when the US court order to supervise the giant was so clearly better that even a fat, rich, innovation-free continent should be able see it; Philip Lowe, No 2 of the European Commission's competition department, explained that the US was a big poopoo and even a blind female bureaucrat could see that the EU had tried to reason for years with Microsoft before deciding that the American way was crazier than a Robert Mugabe economics plan. British Office of Fair Trading Chief Executive John Fingleton said the problem was that everyone was not showing respect for each other.

Finally, the deprived children of the world started to get their chance at equality with the better-off, as Nigerian school children got test versions of the cute little One Laptop Per Child machines and discovered online pornography. No country including Thailand bought any of the OLPC machines, and Intel began selling its $225 Classmate as competition for the $100 laptop, which actually costs about $200 unless you buy 10,000 at a time.

Larry Ellison of Oracle, whose ego is bigger than yours, also has a lawsuit bigger than anyone's; Oracle sued German archrival SAP, charging SAP had hacked into Oracle's customer support and downloaded 10,000 proprietary files; the fraud and abuse suit alleges SAP used expiring accounts of customers of TomorrowNow, which by huge coincidence SAP bought after a bidding war against Oracle's Mr Ellison.

The most powerful supercomputer in the history of the world was unveiled and it turned out to be the Sony PlayStation 3 game console; that's because Stanford University formed Folding@home, where PS3 owners were asked to leave their consoles on and hooked up to a distributed computing system to simulate protein folding; this hugely CPU-intensive endeavour is involved in fighting diseases like Alzheimer's, where proteins malform; the worldwide supercomputer formed by the PlayStation network was doing 493 teraflops (trillion calculations per second), compared with the sickly, former champion IBM Blue Gene, capable of a measly 367 'flops; (think Seti@home, only with the seven-CPU PS3s instead of one-chip PCs and Macs).

Novell CEO and Linux evangelist Ron Hovsepian told the LinuxWorld believer's conference that all they need to conquer the world was a few useable programs for the alternative operating system; too many Linxnauts ignore the fact that "the application is what drives the final customer decision;" he said the multiple versions of Linux must be standardised so that programmers can develop reliable apps that work across the spectrum; with Windows, he noted, "application availability is far and away their biggest advantage."

Commercially speaking, Albert Fert of France and German Peter Gruenberg won the Nobel Prize for physics for your hard drive; their parallel discoveries of giant magnetoresistance (GMR) showed that weak magnetic changes cause huge differences in electrical resistance; that meant the hard-drive industry could use more sensitive tools to read data from disks, meaning much smaller hard drives holding far more data; the geeks are 69 and 68 years old respectively, and their reward for a half-trillion-dollar discovery is the Prize's fame and $750,000 each - less than 26 million baht in real money.

Online retailer Amazon.com released its own digital book reader, called Kindle, isn't that precious, and for just $399 or 13,500 baht in real money, too.