I was surprised by IE 7. I did not expect anything great because I’ve always found IE behind Firefox in security and features. And I’ve always hated developing sites for IE in Dreamweaver because of the way it treats development standards and CSS tags. But working in a MS environment with Exchange 2003 and Outlook Web Access the use of IE has clear advantages in the functionality of OWA.
I also tried out Google Office this week. All I can say is now I officially have little reason to close my browser with the exception of Trillian. I firmly believe that by 2015 the icon driven OS desktop as we know it will be a thing of the past. It may still be there in looks but it’s all going to be on a TCP/UDP port highway with modifications for legacy app support. So to will your entertainment stream to you this way.
This week I saw an article on Slashdot where some who’s-who know it all CFO was predicting the coming demise of data centers as ASICs and memory grow smaller. BS I say. We’re going to have higher demand for warehouses of digital data than ever before in the near future. Even if the storage devices shrink we’re not going to put every episode of Gilligan’s Island at 1280×1024 or higher resolution on a memory stick. It’s going to take redunant storage arrays of some kind even if it’s on battery backed flash drives. It will only take one rack of storage instead of ten to house all the bad 80’s movies I want to watch on my fiber from the curb. The CEO of Pack-Rat, Bob Poirier, already has fiber to his house from Verizon. Then again he also lives right down the street from Steve Case. Mabey that’s why he has all that AOL BS on his laptop?