CeBIT - Join the Vision? Just look at EPIC, 8 years from today
CeBIT 2006 started today - arguably the worlds largest and/or most influential computer fair, if it's not just the E3 you're interested in. Their slogan "Join the Vision" prompted me to do so. Buzzwords include UMTS and HDTV as has been the case for some time. Computers are coming to the living room and cellphones and PDAs and laptops are getting closer to each other. Duh. The focus on SMEs with a genuine SME forum is more interesting - but maybe not for most of you folks. So what is new?
IBM might completely switch to Linux and canceled contracts with Microsoft? At least their IBM Workplace client is based on Eclipse, OpenOffice.org and Firefox, and runs on Linux just as well as on Windoze. Fine. And at least no decision to use or offer Windows Vista has been made yet - but as they state many customers still rely on customary use of MS Office, so they will have to offer that - and I know from my inside knowledge that there always was a very strong pro-Windows group inside IBM, so there will still be some in-house lobbying going on. We'll see.
Important in this regard is the use of the document format. It has been annoying, to say the least, to find Microsoft always changing their document formats to make new a word.doc unreadable for an old version of MS Word (and sometimes vice versa). For the time being IBM uses PDF and RTF for interoperability of their documents with other users on their Workplace Client, but they joined the new OpenDocument Format Alliance together with Novell (Suse), Red Hat, Corel, Oracle, Sun... and the likes of the American Library Association ALA and -of course- Massachusetts, which decided to only use OpenDocument format starting from 2007.
I'm always happy to see efforts to dent, hammer or break the Microsoft monopoly - you can see the rate of domination on the internet in this nice Webhits link with cute graphics (bits of German text, but the graphics are self-explanatory). 73.8% for MSIE, 89.3% for the various Windows versions (63% XP). And what about your privacy on the web? Seems like 98.3% do not care about their privacy as they generally have Cookies enabled. What this means if you use -for example- Amazon, you already know from the recommendations you get. What this means if you're one of the 84.4% searching with Google you will probably not be aware of, but especially with the Google toolbar everything you search is collected and you agreed to that. Add all pics on your computer with Picasa, all your email from the next ten years with Gmail, and all files on your computer with Google Desktop Search (something Microsoft plans to imitate in their next version of Windows) plus your Blogger blogs and your TiVo habits in one hand, and you get a pretty complete picture of a persons life in the hands of one company which forgot all about it's "Do No Evil" idea when shareholder value came into the picture (see Google.cn and the censorship question and their stated willingness to hand over all your data to local government officials). Scared yet? See GoogleWatch. Maybe you need not be, but "concerned" would be a good state of mind. Conscious of what is happening and will be.
Time Warp to this day in 2014: EPIC comes from GoogleZon, the Amazon/Google Merger.
Deutsche Zusammenfassung: Die CeBIT in Hannover ist eröffnet. Was gibt es neues? UMTS, HDTV, beides mit tollen Fernsehbildern von der Fussball-WM, wie originell. Interessanter ist die Meldung dass IBM alle Verträge mit Microsoft gekündigt haben und jetzt ganz auf Linux setzen soll, was sie so direkt aber abgestritten haben. Jedenfalls setzen sie sich mit RedHat, Novell (Suse), Corel, Oracle, SUN und vielen anderen Firmen und Gruppen in der OpenDocument Format Alliance dafür ein, dass ein offenes Format allgemein eingesetzt wird - und damit die proprietären Ärgernisse namens Word.doc (nicht lesbar mit älteren oder viel neueren Programmversionen) ablösen. Ich setze für myraworld derzeit alternativ das OpenOffice.org Format .odt und das noch verbreiterte Acrobat Format .PDF ein.
Ich bin ja für alles, was das Microsoft-Monopol zumindest etwas eingrenzt. Zum Stand des Microsoft-Monopols im Internet gibt es übrigens diesen schönen Link: http://www.webhits.de/deutsch/index.shtml?/deutsch/webstats.html - dieser Link bringt auch schön sichtbar die Marktbeherrschung von Google beim Suchen mit sich. (Siehe dazu diese Links von SuMa e.V.)
Und was bringt die nun die technologische Zukunft? Sie bringt die Google-Gesellschaft. Heute in 8 Jahren, am 9. März 2014, startet EPIC - und wer den kurzen Film dazu auf Englisch nicht sehen mag kann sich die deutsche Hörspielfassung beim SWR.de/Wissen Podcast anhören. Oder die Datei zur Sendung als RTF-Dokument herunterladen.