Mitch Kapor's Weblog: Making Design Decisions Great goals for Chandler. Lotus Agenda might still be around today if it had been similarly guided.

Pew Internet & American Life Project": Counting on the Internet "With over 60% of Americans now having Internet access and 40% of Americans having been online for more than three years, the Internet has become a mainstream information tool. Its popularity and dependability have raised all Americans’ expectations about the information and services available online. When they are thinking about health care information, services from government agencies, news, and commerce, about two-thirds of all Americans say that they expect to be able to find such information on the Web. Internet users are more likely than non-users to have high expectations of what will be available online, and yet even 40% of people who are not Internet users say they expect the Web to have information and services in these essential online arenas."

Economy Intrudes on Dreams of New Services "The coming year, cellphone evangelists say, will be the year of 3G in Europe. Of course, that's what they said about 2002.
3G, or third-generation cellular service, which uses high-capacity networks to deliver multimedia services in addition to phone calls, has become the perennial tease of telecommunications — its arrival eagerly awaited and endlessly predicted, yet seemingly always further in the future."

WSJ.com - Risking a Flop, Microsoft Places Bets on 'Longhorn' "... The massive Cairo project simply "imploded under its own weight," says Gartner Inc. analyst David Smith. Still, some aspects of the failed system did make it into other Microsoft products, and Microsoft says Longhorn will contain innovations that weren't in Cairo. Microsoft Group Vice President Jim Allchin, the company's Windows czar, acknowledges the similarities between Cairo and Longhorn, but says the previous effort failed because "we didn't have the technology we needed to pull this off ... Now we think we do."

Beyond "Couch Potatoes" "The fundamental challenge for computational media is to contribute to the invention and design of cultures in which humans can express themselves and engage in personally meaningful activities. Cultures are substantially defined by their media and tools for thinking, working, learning, and collaborating. New media change (1) the structure and contents of our interests; (2) the nature of our cognitive and collaborative tools; and, (3) the social environment in which thoughts originate and evolve, and mindsets develop.
Unfortunately, a large number of new media are designed from the perspective of seeing and treating humans primarily as consumers. In personally meaningful activities, the possibility for humans to be and to act as designers (in cases in which they desire to do so) should be accessible not only to a small group of "high-tech scribes," but rather to all interested individuals and groups. While the core message of the article applies to cultures, mindsets, media, technologies, and educational systems in general, my examples are mostly drawn from computational media, and more specifically from human computer interaction as a particular domain."

Microsoft Loses a Round to Rival Sun "Had Microsoft not undercut Java the way it did it would likely be more popular on desktops today," said David Smith, an analyst at Gartner Inc. "But now there are other alternatives. This is certainly a plus for Java and a negative for Microsoft, but the fact is you can't turn the clock back."

WSJ.com - Microsoft to Carry Sun's Java After Judge Rules for Its Rival "Judge Motz, who during the hearing compared Microsoft's behavior against Java to skater Tonya Harding's knee-capping attack on rival Nancy Kerrigan, rejected those arguments. His written opinion also seems broadly skeptical of Microsoft executives; in one footnote, he credited the testimony of a Sun executive who failed to persuade Judge Kollar-Kotelly, while dismissing two other Microsoft officials for sharing "what some might characterize as their employer's imperialistic inclinations."
Two other judges have been removed from government cases involving Microsoft for showing bias against the company. Sam Miller, an antitrust lawyer with Folger Levin & Kahn in San Francisco, called the must-carry decision "unusual," and a "strong rebuke" to Microsoft that might also help the case filed by AOL's Netscape unit. But Mr. Miller didn't think Judge Motz's opinion could necessarily be construed as biased, noting Judge Motz also has ruled in Microsoft's favor in a consumer class-action case against Microsoft."

Microsoft’s Top 10 Challenges for 2003 Predictions/projections from Directions on Microsoft

NY Times: Many Tools of Big Brother Are Up and Running "The early version of the Total Information Awareness system employs a commercial software collaboration program called Groove. It was developed in 2000 by Ray Ozzie, a well-known software designer who is the inventor of Lotus Notes. Groove makes it possible for analysts at many different government agencies to share intelligence data instantly, and it links specialized programs that are designed to look for patterns of suspicious behavior."

Company Men (washingtonpost.com): 'Bad Boy Ballmer' by Frederic Alan Maxwell and 'Sloan Rules' by David Farber "What drives this intensely driven man? With no real answer to this central question, Maxwell resorts to vague insights drawn from pop psychology, suggesting that "competition addict" Ballmer may really be driven by an unfulfilled childhood need to be loved. Even by pop-psych standards, that's not much of an answer. Ballmer may come across as a manic buffoon, but he didn't get where he is today on enthusiasm alone. Unfortunately, the book that truly explains the secrets of his success remains to be written."

NY Times: Bush Administration to Propose System for Monitoring Internet "The Bush administration is planning to propose requiring Internet service providers to help build a centralized system to enable broad monitoring of the Internet and, potentially, surveillance of its users."

I, Cringely | The Pulpit: Go to the Back of the Bus -- Intel's Plan to Crush Competitors by Making More and More of Your Next PC "It all comes down to earnings growth. In order to keep its earnings growing in a market that is no longer enjoying 20 to 30 percent annual revenue growth, Intel has to make sure it makes more and more of the next computer you buy. The ultimate goal is to make sure that computer has an Intel processor with Intel support chips on an Intel motherboard. Then it is only a short step to having Intel make the whole computer, which they will gladly do. Maybe it will work, but this strategy is going to lead to interesting responses from Intel competitors and customers alike. Fortunately, such responses can only be good for the consumers, for you and me."

"The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Japanese supercomputer dashes past competition It's a machine so fast it performs more computations per second than there are stars in our galaxy. It's so large it's housed in a building the size of an aircraft hangar.
Running 35.6 trillion calculations per second, the Earth Simulator is the fastest supercomputer in the world, almost five times faster than the next best one and as fast as the top five U.S. supercomputers combined."...
"IBM, flush with a $290 million government contract to build two supercomputers, says it will regain the No. 1 title in 2004 with a 100-teraflop machine that would be nearly three times faster than Earth Simulator.
Seattle-based Cray has won a $90 million contract to build a supercomputer for nuclear-weapons simulations at Sandia National Laboratory, also by 2004. And it has taken on a government challenge to create, by 2010, a computer that will be measured in petaflops — 1,000 trillion calculations per second."
The supercomputer leapfrog game continues...

Boston Globe Online: Sharing the riches -- Mitch Kapor uses his personal fortune to create free software he says will outdo Microsoft Outlook ''One of the certain things in the marketplace is that Microsoft products tend to advance when they are challenged,'' Marc Andreessen, a creator of the Netscape Communications browser that prompted Microsoft's abrupt shift toward Internet-based software, said in a recent interview with the Globe. ''It won't necessarily put price pressure on them, but at least it will cause them to maybe innovate.''

The Register: VB developers take back seat at BEA "BEA Systems Inc is back-pedaling on efforts to attract Visual Basic developers to its WebLogic Workshop Java programming environment, in what appears a strategic reversal, writes Gavin Clarke.
After 12-months' rhetoric, San Jose, California-based BEA told ComputerWire Microsoft Corp's Visual Basic developers are no longer a priority as the company now focuses on building grassroots market share against Java rivals like IBM."

Xbox Sales Surge "Microsoft said Tuesday that sales of its Xbox video game console have surged in the past 30 days, an indication that the system might be gaining ground on competitors such as the Sony PlayStation 2 and Nintendo GameCube. In a letter to analysts, the software giant said that it sold 468,000 Xbox units in November, nearly double the number it sold the previous month. The company also reported sales of 2.4 million Xbox software titles, with five titles topping the 100,000 units sold mark. Finally, Microsoft reported that the Xbox Live Starter Kit, which enables Xbox users to play games online with people around the country, has sold over 136,000 copies.
Still, market leader Sony posted numbers that, predictably, leave Xbox in the dust. The company reported sales of over 1 million PlayStation 2 units "in the first couple of holiday shopping weeks," and says that its network adapter, which is required for online games, will sell over 400,000 units by the end of the year."

"Office 11" for Developers "Office 11 smart document technology will enable developers to create solutions that give users more useful, contextual, and customized content in the Office task pane. Developers can create these document-based solutions by using underlying XML schemas—which define the structure of a Word 11 or Excel 11 document—and a custom DLL. As users navigate through a smart document, the solution will detect the cursor location, and then in the task pane display the most relevant information—such as context-sensitive actions, help with the current task, suggested content, or supporting data or links to related information. The applications respond to user input and offer a significantly enhanced user experience."
Includes useful summary of new XML and smart tag features as well.

SONICblue Introduces First of its Kind Networked DVD Player "SONICblue™ Incorporated (Nasdaq: SBLU), introduced the world’s first Networked DVD player, the GoVideo® D2730. Besides top quality, standard DVD playback, the D2730 brings all the pictures, music and video clips stored on your computer onto your TV. The user-friendly PC software included makes set up incredibly simple, and TV viewing is as easy as pressing a button on the DVD remote control. The product is so exciting that the Consumer Electronic Association (CEA) recently selected it as a 2003 Innovation Award winner."

xmlhack: Microsoft Office embraces XML Some details:
"Word 11 has been transformed into a XML editor and can be used to edit any XML document, assuming you can write a W3C XML Schema for it. The presentation can be configured and the validation is done on the fly like spell-checking. A standard XML format has also been added for "regular" Word documents.
Excel XP already exports documents as XML. Excel 11 adds support for arbitrary documents and maybe more interesting the possibility to import values from XML documents as can be done with DBMS. The selection of the values to import is done through drag and drop and the links are stored as XPointer expressions.
XDocs is a new application to define and use document-oriented forms which are more similar to the forms in Lotus Notes than to those on the Web. User input may be stored together with the form in a XML document after a schema defined by Microsoft or in external XML documents with arbitrary schemas.
Access 11 can export its content as XML using your own schema.
Visio has its own XML format and can also read arbitrary XML documents and display their content in its drawings. Visio is the first Microsoft application to support SVG, and can load and save SVG documents.
Front Page 11 includes a WYSIWYG XSLT editor to define XSLT transformations through drag and drop."

Microsoft unveils entertainment software - Tech News - CNET.com "The technology, called Microsoft Plus Digital Media Edition for Windows XP and part of the Microsoft Plus product line, is designed to give users of standard PCs more features for editing and playing with media files, without turning to entertainment-friendly Apple iMacs or upgrading to more expensive systems like Microsoft's own Media Center PC." This $19.95 addition must annoy some of the recent Media Center PC customers...