They've been flying around the cubicles for months. And today is the day the axe falls for about 100 employees at CTB-McGraw Hill in Monterey, CA. As the employment climate in Monterey County is very tight, I expect a lot of these folks will finds themselves having to leave this beautiful area for more lucrative climes
Just in! Exciting news courtesy of Andreas Ramos' Google Adwords User Group:
Yep. Google Office.
Google will partner with SUN to deliver a complete suite of software to compete against Microsoft Office. This will include a word processor, spreadsheet, etc. It will be based on SUN's OpenOffice, which is open source.
If you've tried NetOffice, it's a Microsoft Office clone. It works just like Microsoft. And it works with Microsoft files. You can replace Microsoft Office ($600 or so) entirely with OpenOffice, which is free.
This was announced an hour ago (NOTE from CK: approx. 11 am PST) in a joint press conf at Google by Scott McNealy (CEO of SUN) and Eric Schmidt (quasi-CEO of Google).
This is a declaration of war between Google and Microsoft. MS Office is Microsoft's cash cow. By releasing G-Office, Google will undermine MS's revenues.
The new Flickr group Katrinarefugeeneworleans is a public group to "Let folks know you got out and where they may contact you."
Re: the Flame,Blame and Shame session discussed below:
Moderator: Liza Sabater, publisher of culturekitchen.
Panelists:
Judith Meskill, Editorial Director of Weblogs, Inc.; personal blog here.
Ellen Spertus, assos. professor of computer sciences at Mills College. Named Sexiest Geek Alive in 2001. Personal page here.
Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, best selling author of the Dirty Girls Social Club. Home page here.
On Saturday, 30 July, I attended the BlogHer confab in Santa Clara.
I missed the morning sessions and got there in time to have lunch during the Flame, Blame and Shame panel. Favorite moment? When Mena Trott (co-founder of SixApart with her husband), sitting in the audience at a table very near me, never got a chance to respond to an implicit criticism of Movable Type. The scene went kinda like this: The panel turned, as these blog discussions often do, to the issue of spam. A complaint from audience member Heather of News.com regarding the enormous amount of spam comments she gets every day (about 300) inspired commentary from the audience moderator --"Is Mena here?" she asked -- that she was moving to Drupal because of how well it deals with spam. And she went on. Many eyes were on Mena- was she going to get a chance to respond? She did not. And I, like her pals at the table, rolled our eyes when the panel moved on and she never got that chance. She got flamed!
And just like another panel member mentioned earlier, women, unlike men, flame softly.
Oh by the way, the soon to be released v3.2 of Movable Type has much enhanced spam fighting capabilities, according to what I've been hearing.
(Note-I'm writing this from work and don't have my conference notebook in front of me. Apologies to those of you I've referred to anonymously. Stay tuned for more.)
