Category: Uncategorized

In the past week or so, I’ve received a number of phone calls from friends who are also experts in the screen reader segment of the AT market.  Some calls, from friends who work for GW Micro’s competitors told me about all of the security loopholes that are opened up with the new Window-Eyes scripting facility.

 

I then read up on the feature and agreed that, indeed, it did have some holes.  Last week, I posted a message to the blind programming mailing list which started out by celebrating all of the power that is now available in the Window-Eyes 7 beta and that I was excited to see what the community will make of this major advance in screen reader technology.

 

I also mentioned that there were some security issues in the feature that users should be aware of.  I overemphasized the security issues as the notion held center stage in my thoughts on the matter resulting from the calls I received from friends who work for GW competitors, definitely not an impartial group.

 

After posting the email to the BP list, I got some emails and phone calls from Window-Eyes aficionados, equally expert in the often nuanced ins and outs of the screen reader biz.  This group scolded me for bashing GW and felt that my email to the blind programming list was unfair.  After rereading my post, I agree with the Window-Eyes supporters, accept that I overstated the security problems and, with this post, I would like to retract my Chicken Little, “the sky is falling” statements.

 

The Window-Eyes people also reminded me that one can build some very nasty malware in JAWS scripts, especially if the interface DLL is used.  They are correct in this assertion and, once again, I’m eating a bit of crow as my email to the BP list was clearly unbalanced.

 

I do feel strongly that the new scripting facility in Window-Eyes is one of the coolest and most important steps forward in the screen reading business that we’ve seen in quite a long time.  People with the ability to program in a wide variety of languages can make some pretty amazing software using this model and I expect we’ll see an explosion of creativity from the community of users in the recent future.

 

Virtually every program that exposes a COM interface can now work reasonably well with Window-Eyes and programs like MS Project, dropped from the JAWS radar a number of years back, can be supported by the community and, therefore, more blinks will be able to get promotions into the jobs that require project management tools.  There are a ton of programs out there that a Window-Eyes hacker can really make sing in a manner that no screen reader could in the past.

 

I would like to recommend that as many WE extensions as possible be distributed under GPL or Mozilla or one of the other free software licenses and, of course, include source code.  As we learned above, all such scripting facilities can open security holes and, if we have the source code, we can ensure that none of the predatory sorts of software vandalism can be performed by said program.  Also, open source and free (as in freedom with a lower case “f”) software provides the community with the ability to control our own future and design our technological destiny rather than keeping it in the hands of sighted CEO types who report to sighted boards of directors who only seem to care about the profit line.  GW Micro, Serotek and the guys who make the iCon remain, as far as I can see, the most user centric companies in the biz and also deliver real innovation.  Humanware deserves an honorable mention for their recent book reading devices which are truly the bomb.

 

Finally, I haven’t worked for FS nor held an executive position in any AT company in nearly four years.  I work on some very cool projects for some very cool people but just because I was a VP of Software Engineering at the biggest screen reader company around doesn’t make my statements on any of this technology any more valuable than any other so-called expert.  Thus, if you read an email or blog post that I’ve written, please remember that I’m just one voice in a crowd and that you should read opposing opinions as, god knows, I’m wrong at least half of the time.

 

— End

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Over the past few weeks and months, the AT family has lost a number of people who will be missed for a long time to come.

 

A couple of months back, Eric Damery lost his father.  Eric’s dad had a major influence in an entirely indirect manner on the history of access technology for people with vision impairment (PWVI).  He did not invent anything nor did he define new and exciting features; what he did was give us Eric Damery. 

 

Eric, already a resident of this part of Florida went to the Henter-Joyce office to buy a copy of OpenBook for his father.  While there, the HJ staff was so tiny that Ted handled the sale himself and then gave Eric a demo of JAWS (the DOS version back in the Paleolithic era of AT).  Eric was so enamored conceptually by the power of the screen reader that he practically camped out on the HJ doorstep until they hired him as their only full time sales person.  Eric then went to as many places that would have him, he would sleep on friend’s sofas or at the cheapest motels around.  Eric believed in the future of PWVI in the workplace and while competitors spent much less time educating the population, Eric went on a mission which resulted in a vastly greater acceptance of screen readers and PWVI in the workplace.

 

So, if Eric’s dad didn’t need a copy of OB, the zealousness and verve of Eric’s effort may never have been sparked and, observing the history of the industry, I cannot find another evangelist with so much energy and such a deep belief in the future of these products who would have picked up the ball the way Eric did.

 

Susan (my lovely wife) and I sent our condolences directly to Eric but everyone should remember that the kismet that caused an explosion in JAWS sales and a huge reduction in unemployment for we people with vision impairment was started by Eric’s dad who caused the dominos to start falling.  We all owe Eric’s dad and Eric himself a great debt of gratitude as, without them, the real advances in screen reading, mostly invented by HJ/FS may never have happened.

 

By now, most of us have heard of the death of GW Micro salesman Clarence Whaley.  Clarence was one of the real sweethearts of the access technology family.  With him, it was never about competition (which we all took seriously) but, rather, when off the clock, we were all buddies.  His charm and friendliness helped a lot of us lower our stress levels and enjoy the after hours times at many a conference.

 

 

Stephen Guerra, the commissioner of beep baseball and the greatest salesman at ILA lost his mother to a heart attack last week.  I don’t know anything about Stephen’s mom other than she raised a really terrific son and we at BC send our heartfelt condolences to Stephen and his family.

 

Peter Scialli, a founding employee of Benetech, home of Bookshare.org, also passed away last week.  About Peter, Jim Fruchterman wrote, “Peter’s impact on the field of access technology for the blind was major. He moderated email lists, organized conference sessions (I particularly remember Dueling Scanners) and wrote articles for the journals in the field. Peter believed strongly in the power of technology to help people with disabilities, became an expert in the field and then committed himself to sharing that expertise widely.

 

His knowledge, sense of humor and dedication will be sorely missed.”

 

BlindConfidential sends its deepest condolences to all of the families of these dearly departed individuals.  If anyone has an address to send a contribution to a charity in memory of any of our recently departed please post it as a comment to the blog so we can send what we can afford.

 

— End

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By Will Pearson

 

[Editor’s Note: Although the blog has been mostly writing for entertainment value lately, I still work in the field and enjoy hearing various theories about user interface.  Will is one of the most well studied in this field and one of its most insightful thinkers.]

 

I’ve recently found some time to continue with my work on simulating human visual attention using audition.  This involves using multimodal user interface
techniques to simulate or provide the characteristics of a particular human behaviour, which in this case is visual attention.  Working on simulating behaviour
has caused me to think about how the approach of providing accessibility by simulating behaviour differs from the current approach of treating accessibility
as a synonym for application compatibility. 

The main problem with taking the approach of treating accessibility as a synonym for app compat is that it turns accessibility into an infinite set of problems
with no end in sight.  Software developers are continuously producing new software products or modifying existing ones, and these have to be made to work
with assistive technology or vice versa.  So, accessibility becomes a continual problem and the only beneficiaries of this are members of the accessibility
industry as they are guaranteed a continual revenue stream. 

Providing accessibility by synthesising human behaviour has a significant advantage over the current approach of app compat.  Humans have a limited set
of behaviours that need to be synthesised, and this means that accessibility can be viewed as a finite set of problems.  Having a finite set means that
we can view accessibility as something that has an end point rather than something that is continuous.  If we can find ways to synthesise all of the behaviours
that a particular disability affects then we would find ourselves in a situation where everything was automatically accessible to people with that particular
disability.  Simply put, providing accessibility by synthesising behaviour makes complete accessibility an achievable goal rather than one we can never
achieve because to solve it requires that we solve a problem set of infinite size. 

Unfortunately, when talking about computer based accessibility we do need to retain the idea of app compat in one instance.  Assistive technology generally
acts as a translator that participates in the process of communication by translating between different types of sensory stimuli and or different lexicons
and sets of perceptual symbols.  Communication involves passing messages between different parties.  In the case of computer based assistive technology
the only party that the assistive technology really needs to communicate with is the operating system, and so the notion of app compat between assistive
technology and operating system will need to remain even if the view of accessibility changed so that accessibility was provided by synthesising behaviour;
however, if accessibility became a synonym for synthesising behaviour then we could eliminate app compat everywhere else. 

— End

 

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“All we are saying is give peace a chance…” John and Yoko Lennon.

 

I gave Tebbers a boost up to the lowest branch and Red did the same for me as a line of young, mostly male punk rock looking types climbed a tree in Central Park.  On the distant stage, Ravi Shankar and Zakir Hussein two of the world’s finest musicians played mournfully in the traditional sense of Indian classical music.

 

I sat beside Tebbers on a healthy feeling branch and we listened to the music quietly.  Red asked, “Is there room for three?”

 

“Probably but not safely,” I replied.

 

Red moved to the other side of the tree’s trunk and found a solid limb on which to sit comfortably and within chatting distance.

 

Tebbers looked around and started pointing in all directions.  Curious, I started looking at that which he found so interesting.  “Holy shit,” I mumbled.  Our tree grew out of Shepherd’s Lawn in the central part of Central Park.  People stood, sat, lay For as far as our eyes could see from our perch.  Later that night, Walter Cronkite would tell us that CBS estimated the crowd at 1.25 million, maybe more as it was too hard to determine how many people packed the side streets in upper Manhattan.

 

Ravi stood up from his sitar and, with his very recognizable accent, said a short prayer followed by, “God bless John Lennon.”  He and Hussein left the stage which we could see at a distance and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street band set up as Alan Ginsburg read his requiem for the former Beatle.

 

The poet left and Bruce and Linda Rondstadt took hold of microphones and jumped straight into what I thought must have been the greatest version of “Devil in a Blue Dress” that I’d ever heard.  My memory jumbles up events from that era, did this incredible duet happen at the No Nukes rally lead by Nobel Peace Prize winner Helen Caldecott or did they play at the John Lennon Memorial service?  I know I sat beside Tebbers in trees at both events and can’t remember whether The Boss jammed out at which event or both.  I suppose some historian of the counter culture could tell you but I’m too lazy to even wikipedia it right now.

 

After the band left the stage, Yoko Ono, the grieving wife slowly approached the microphone.  Every night since her superstar husband took the bullets from the deranged Mark David Chapman’s gun, she passed through a crowd of hundreds if not thousands standing in front of her apartment building wanting to express their grief and support for this wonderful woman.  Rather than letting her body guard goons rush her inside, she stopped and thanked people for coming, for sharing her grief, for the rare occasion that a large group of New Yorkers would gather in a collective act of love.  Yoko refused autographs but gave me and others who asked a hug and helped many others wipe away tears.

 

On the stage in Central Park, Yoko spoke for about ten minutes pouring her heart out to what may have been the largest gathering of people in New York City for any reason at all.  Then she asked the crowd for five minutes of silence in memory of John.

 

More than a million people stood, sat, reclined or took a position that worked for them and said nothing.  No busses, sirens or automotive traffic could be heard.  A few birds cooed and chirped but they seemed confused at a large chunk of Manhattan falling silent. 

 

Nothing seemed real as we sat in a tree in a part of the park the city would later rename Strawberry Fields.  Five minutes of silence, interrupted occasionally by the hum of the engine on the Goodyear blimp while surrounded by more than a million people brings one’s mind to a place that even large doses of LSD 25 can’t reach.  The notion that we gathered out of love, peace, respect, honor made it all the more queer.

During those five minutes, if the sky had opened and John Lennon returned to his wife’s side, no one would have been surprised.  As the five minutes ended, the millions started, softly at first and then rising to a near deafening loudness sang “All we are saying is give peace a chance,” as Yoko cried silently on the stage.

 

— End

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“New York, New York, It’s a hell of a town, The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down, the people ride in a hole in the ground…”  Sung by Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly in the classic musical, “On the Town.”

 

I ran up the stairs in the Newark Railroad station, taking two at a time to get to the PATH train platform before the next train to mid town pulled out, which would have caused me to wait about fifteen minutes for my next chance to get to 9^th St. where I would continue running to campus so as not to arrive too late for class.

 

I rammed my hard plastic Samsonite briefcase into the subway’s shutting doors and heard someone yell at me, “What are you?  A fucking retard?”  I didn’t waste my time with a response and started looking for something to hold onto.

 

The train lurched forward and I hadn’t taken my subway surfing stance yet.  I bumped into an attractive young woman who immediately called me, “Fucking pervert!”

 

The train took a hard turn and I crashed through someone’s Wall Street Journal.  “Fucking asshole punk!”  He said to me and I tried to right myself again.  I didn’t get my legs entirely until flying around, crashing and thrashing into other commuters.

 

When the train stopped at

Christopher Street

, I saw the first guy who called me a retard getting off.  I couldn’t hold back my NJ/NY attitude any longer and yelled, “See you later Frank!  Good luck beating that rape charge.”  People stared at him, a few laughed but most just let their mouths drop open.

 

Of course, planning my revenge distracted me from finding a strap to hang on and I didn’t get  into my surfing stance before the train leapt forward and, this time, I didn’t land on a relatively soft human but, rather, hit the floor pretty hard causing a lot of amusement for my fellow commuters. 

 

When we pulled into

9^th St

.

, I had already gotten up and, somewhat embarrassed at my demonstration of a lack of subway skills, I got off and started running to

Washington Square

.

 

Afterward

 

This is another entry for the daily exercises on the BSO writing club.  I banged it out pretty fast yesterday but hope you find it amusing.  To be upfront about everything, I stole the “Good luck on beating the rape charge…” line from David Sedaris, one of my very favorite writers who attributed it to his sister Amy.

 

 

 

— End

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I just joined the writer’s club on “Friends of Bookshare” which posts a topic to write about for every day to keep us in practice.  Today’s story with the topic: Before I Was Born follows.

 

 

 

Before I was born, Kaye, my would be mother, said to Arnie, my future father, “Let’s have a baby.”  Arnie, a very nerdy chemist scratched his head and said, “Why not?”  So, after a few sessions of the old in-out, in-out one of Arnie’s sperms became friendly enough with one of Kaye’s eggs and they decided to fertilize.

 

At that point, Arnie and Kaye lived a pretty quiet life in Manville, New Jersey.  Arnie worked for American Cyanamid, a huge and environmentally disastrous chemical company who, in a big way, helped Jersey gain its reputation for poisonous rivers and amazing spectroscopic sunsets, and Kaye taught at a local grammar school.  On weekends, Arnie and Kaye would often go to Jersey City to visit one or both sets of their parents or into the Village to hear the beats read and the be-boppers jam.  Their life had few problems and even fewer fears.

 

Then, one day the sperm met the egg and they joined together to form a family which is how we became the BC bunch.  This didn’t occur immediately, the sperm and egg spent some time as a zygote and, for reasons of their own, caused Kaye to puke often.  After a while the sperm and egg decided to move into a bigger apartment and chose a fetus as their new home as such can easily support expansion. 

 

The fetus had all sorts of rapid additions grow forth from what once had just been a sperm and egg.  Loads of child, grandchild, great grandchild and beyond cells joined the fetus and, after a while, the fetus became me.

 

Arnie and Kaye felt a lot of excitement about becoming parents for the first time.  I, the fetus, didn’t much care about the future.  Arnie would say, “If the baby comes out as a girl, we should name her Audrey.”  At that point in his life, Arnie had a major league Audrey Hepburn fetish and often had to run off to masturbate when one of her movies would air on television.  Kaye didn’t like the name Audrey and replied, “No, we’ll call her Elizabeth,” the name my younger sister got six years later. 

 

When they discussed boy’s names, Kaye might suggest something like “Ignatz is a good name, we can name him after my uncle Ziggy.”  As I had no notion of the forthcoming David Bowie album that made Ziggy into a cool name, I would kick pretty hard at Kaye’s innards.  Arnie would say, “What about Christian,” a name I thought pretty cool and ultimately ended up with it attached to me.

 

For what seemed like an eternity in the warm dark place, I enjoyed sloshing around, kicking and punching for fun and to correct something Kaye might have said that disturbed me, especially when she would run down a list of extremely ethnic Polish names that I knew for certain would get my ass whooped at some point in the future.

 

Arnie and Kaye continued going to the nightclubs and visiting their parents but Kaye, for no reason apparent to me, stopped drinking the red wine that I so enjoyed.  After a while, the warm dark place started growing pretty dull.

 

On July 4, 1960, I ruined my mother’s doctor’s Independence Day Party by deciding to throw one of my own.  Dr. Dommer spent hours in the delivery room with Kaye trying to extract me from deep in the cavern in which I lived for my entire life.  Arnie paced back and forth in the waiting room smoking Marlboro cigarettes and looking like he had witnessed a train wreck.  Kaye pushed and pushed and, at last, I popped out and flew into the awaiting catcher’s mitt that they used to gather babies as the flew out of the shoot back in those days.

 

Dr. Dommer announced, “It’s a boy!”

 

“No shit,” I thought, “these big people have a solid grip on the obvious.)  Then, the bastard spanked me for reasons I still cannot understand, he was probably some sort of infantapheliac S&M pervert.

 

He handed me to Kaye and Arnie came into the room.  They had big smiles on their faces but I found the bright lights and noises quite annoying so I screamed for them to tone it down a bit but, not understanding the language of an infant, they kept making coo like sounds that one would ordinarily associate with a pigeon during mating season.  All I wanted was the lights turned down but everyone who could perform such a trick just smiled and made senseless noises at me.  Life hasn’t changed much since.

 

— End

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Yesterday, Blind Confidential,, after posting 294 articles since we went online 2 years and 135 days ago, received visitor 500,000, a number that continues to grow.  I know that BC’s popularity among the community of people with vision impairment consistently grows but I’m not entirely sure why.  I enjoy writing the posts but BC hasn’t exactly informed too much in the past six months but, apparently, it has entertained.

 

For the most part, I have avoided writing about screen readers as my critics from two opposing camps either say I treat FS too kindly or that I write too favorably about JAWS and its fellow products.  I have found a few bugs in the latest JAWS update but reported them directly to FS and didn’t bring them up in a public forum.  I find that ignoring FS causes me much less anxiety than when I write about their successes and failures alike.  I still use JAWS 9.0.xxx on my XP machines but, by default, I use System Access on Vista.  I’m doing a lot of research into no cost and free screen readers for my job but still have little feel for that category of programs but will learn soon.

 

So, I suppose BC readers weren’t terribly compelled by stories about screen readers as they continued to read long after I stopped publishing stories about them.  I have written some items about AT products – mostly the Vic which I really love and hope others like too. 

 

I would like to make one suggestion about the Vic though.  Specifically, in the information that is read when one hits the zero key repeatedly, the Vic announces the time for the entire book and the time remaining.  I can not believe that it would be too difficult to add an option to speak the total and remaining time counts based upon one’s speech rate.  If I’m running at 300% normal, the time indicators  should be divided by 3 and, for example, be announced as, “time remaining 1 hour 24 minutes at the current speech rate.”  Knowing the amount of time remaining at the default rate is really not too useful unless that is the rate at which one is listening.

 

I get regular email from fans of the Gonz Blinko stories and may make an attempt to pull them together into a cohesive bit of fiction to be published on the oft promised but never actually existent hofstader.com web page.

 

I would like to thank all of the readers as I’m really blown away by thinking that a half million times my blog was visited by people who enjoy the dumping of the contents of my mind over morning coffee.  Maybe they don’t enjoy it but feel drawn to BC for some other reason but the hit count continues to grow.  Please keep visiting and I’ll keep writing and maybe it will all make sense someday.

 

I would like to thank certain people specifically.  Will Pearson has been a regular reader since day one and has provided us with some of our most insightful comments.  When Jamal Mazrui started his CSUN presentation by asking his dueling operating system contestants to sign up for our RSS feed, we enjoyed a spike in subscriptions and new readers.  Chairman Mal has provided us with our most entertaining comments providing laughter, fear and loathing in the way only a truly gonzo mind can do.  Joe Clark has provided us with serious issues to debate and has brought over a lot of readers from his blog to BC.  I really enjoy all of the private emails I get from people in the AT biz thanking me for making some ballsy statements about their employers, products or competitors.  Now that I’m out of the biz for nearly four years, I think and write about it less often and keep information leaked to me under my hat as I don’t need the aggravation, I’m a lazy slob…

 

I do find the growth of interest in and work going on in the free (as in freedom with a lower case “f”) segment of the AT world very interesting.  NVDA and FireVox, two programs I’m just now studying, have impressed me in a way that I haven’t felt too often in the recent history of AT software.  I love the free software, GPL model for this market as it provides the community with the liberty to invent our own technological destinies rather than relying on a hope and a prayer that a closed source and closed minded AT company will get around to fixing our favorite bugs, supporting the applications we need or want to use and creatively innovating into new areas discussed on this blog and others.  The Diaspora of blind hackers can, if we work together, create some tremendously cool stuff that would be cut out of a specification as too risky by the AT companies.  With NVDA and other programs, we have a good platform from which to launch what will be the next few generations of the AT we need.

 

Well, I’m off to get a yellow Labrador tattoo of the likeness of my guide dog on my left forearm.  I hope you have fun days as well.

 

— End

 

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Our phone rang a few minutes ago.  As I sat next to a receiver I answered.  A young woman came on to inform me that my wife has a medical appointment with a “Doctor Smith” tomorrow at ten.

 

My initial thought, “Yeah, Doctor Smith, that’s your real name,” nearly came out of my mouth but this is the kinder, softer and gentler BC who still startles himself when he withholds a perfectly obnoxious comment.

 

I called Susan, my lovely wife, to the phone and then thought, “Hmm… Doctor Smith, ‘Warning, Warning, Will Robinson, Warning, Warning…” and thought of asking if he might have gotten himself lost in space at some point in his lifetime.  Then, based upon the sound of the receptionist’s voice, it occurred to me that our ages probably differ by about 25 years and that her birth may have happened after “Lost in Space” stopped running in reruns.

 

How many cultural cornerstones did I grow up with that people who have grown to adulthood have missed altogether?

 

Recently, on cable channels, Time/Life has been pushing the complete first season, including the rare color pilot of “Man From UNCLE” for a mere $29.95 if I act now.  Do younger adults have a clue as to how wonderful this show was back in its day?  What of the Avengers and its S&M overtones, did those reruns last long enough to inform and pervert this new group of adults?

 

Do these younger adults realize that Morticia Addams was, without a question, the sexiest woman in the history of television?  Do they understand that Eartha Kitt as Catwoman and Natasha Nogoodnik, a cartoon character, tied for second place?

 

Maybe Jeanie and the still beautiful Barbara Eden on “Love Boat” reruns may have sunk in as they seemed to be replayed for years.  Did Dawn Wells do anything in her post Gilligan years?  Her Mary Ann beat Daisy Duke hands down for the hottest butt in cut-offs.  Julie Newmar and Lee Merriweather the other Catwomen deserve a solid mention and Bat Girl, even though she appears in only a few episodes, taught us eight year olds the true meaning of serious leather.

 

Sure, Tuesday Weld tantalized as a good girl but it was the bad girls that caused that inexplicable feeling of warmth in our shorts.  I’m sure I’m missing quite a few from that era so please send in comments on your favorite hotties in television history.

 

To be fair, I’m a heterosexual male so my list is made up entirely of women.  The gay men and female readers should add male hotties as I never found Earnest Bourgnine nor Gomer Pyle terribly attractive.

 

— End

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For what seemed like an eternity, the battle for mainstream software was fought over office suites and for primary AT over how well they supported office applications.  No major software vendor could not have a suite even if it comprised little more than a bunch of marginally related programs held together by a bungee cord.

 

Around 1994, Perfect Office from WordPerfect Corporation and Microsoft Office from MS dominated the market but Lotus SmartSuite: 1-2-3 for Windows, Ami, a weird word processor that didn’t understand the WYSIWYG concept terribly and some random and long forgotten database program that I can’t recall anyone actually using still had inroads into professional environments where 1-2-3 remained king.  Not to be outdone, Borland bundled Sprint, a really bad word processor, with Quatro Pro for Windows (which actually contained some code I wrote), Paradox and Sidekick for Windows which the Accessories that ship with Windows more or less obviated.  Another oddity involving Borland was that Quatro Pro and Paradox were also the spreadsheet and database in Perfect Office through their partnership with the WordPerfect guys.

 

Soon afterward, WordPerfect was, in what would be the largest acquisition of a private company up to that point in history, was purchased by Novell for $1.1 billion.  Novell knew a lot about selling complex networking systems to corporations but nothing about marketing works packages to end consumers.  A few years later, Novell would sell the WP division to Corel for $100 million.  I sent Bob Frankenberg, then CEO of Novel an email suggesting that the next time he wants to spend a net one billion dollars and get nothing in return that he should call me and I’d save him the headache of a lot of legal wrangling involved in such large transactions.  Bob didn’t reply.

 

Meanwhile, the Borland board of directors forced Philippe Kahn, the heart and soul of the company out of the business and PK went off and started Starfish Software which he would later sell to Motorola for a bundle of cash.  The new Borland leadership hadn’t a clue and, today, the company, after a few name changes, still exists and is called Borland again but no one can explain what they actually sell.

 

A little more than a decade later, the search engine has replaced the office suite as the top dog in the drive for dominance in the software world.  Google clearly leads the pack but, in Vista, it seems that I can’t hit a TAB or do much else without landing in something that will search my email, my desktop, my hard disks my documents (inside and out) and nearly everything else one might accidentally misplace. 

 

Searching the Internet is a really important task that grows more important as the web increases in content And complexity.  The sheer enormity of data on the web makes finding almost anything popular nearly impossible as one will get more hits than they could read in a lifetime.  Google seems to do a better job of this than anyone else but common search criteria, for instance, I searched for a friend of mine who is now a Catholic priest.  Have you any idea how many guys named Father Kelly live in or around the New York and Boston areas with their huge Irish immigrant populations?

 

All of the big players seen to think I need a search button bar or control in nearly everything I own.  Saving a new file in MS Word or, even worse, trying to open one, provides me with a bazillion search options.  I’m a really organized guy.  All of our PCs back up daily to our home server and the big back up disk backs up to another for redundancy sake.  I have loads of files and folders that I find easy to navigate and the files for which I want to read or edit at any given moment.  Does everyone else forget the names of their files and folders and just leave them strewn about their disks?

 

On the other side of the coin, while Microsoft tries to muscle its way into the search biz, Google is building an office suite.  Thus, we’ll have MS Office and MS Live Search plus Google Office and Google searches to help us find the things we misplaced on our local computers and home networks.

 

Competition is great but it also seems that MS and Google are trading blows in a manner that could be more innovative way.  Before MS got heavily into search utilities, they made a really good Office suite; before Google got into the office suite biz, they had a really great search facility.  Why don’t these very rich companies try to go out and build new technologies that are currently not served very well rather than trying to grab a piece of the other guy’s sandbox.  Go to the beach, there’s enough sand for everyone there.

 

n  End

 

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