Cal Jacobson’s Blog

No, I’m not even talking about IronPython…just honest-to-goodness Python scripts hosted by Microsoft that tackle a fairly wide range of Windows tasks.  Who would have thunk it?

Joe Kraus of JotSpot announced today that his company is the latest acquisition by Google.

I’m not a JotSpot user — in fact, I’m not certain I heard of them before today. But after checking their site out I’m not surprised they were snatched up by the big G. Look at this page, which contains a bunch of wiki applications that JotSpot offers. Compare with some of the web apps Google has come out with in the last couple of years. See anything familiar?

One thing Google didn’t have up until a month ago was a product that enabled users to create their own communities online. Now that they’ve acquired YouTube and a wiki application that supports forums they have all the tools to create the next MySpace if they wish: post your photos in Picasa Web Albums, videos on YouTube, chat in real-time with your friends in Google Talk (or a next-gen version of GTalkr in a web page), use Gmail for your e-mail needs, create a knowledgebase about your favorite topic using the JotSpot wiki and Google Base, provide a real-world context by linking things to Google Maps and access everything through your mobile device via dodgeball and some of the other technology Google acquired in 2005.

Geez, now all they need is to purchase some machine translation technology so these communities aren’t limited by language….whoops, looks like they’ve already got that covered.

So what the hell is Microsoft doing? By the looks of things, they’re stuck on the desktop.

Update: Scoble describes the wiki market as “white hot” and says the MS Office team should be asking themselves what Google is up to. I disagree, Robert…they should be asking their managers what Microsoft is going to be up to. Google’s plan is clear: to dominate the field of web-based applications so it’s no longer about where you are or what OS you’re using.

My family and I were in Best Buy this weekend, purchasing a digital video camera. On our way out, I noticed a couple of young men wearing white shirts and black clip-on ties: kind of like the Blues Brothers only without the hats, rhythm or good grooming. It took me a second to realize that these guys were “members” of the Geek Squad, most likely returning to home base.

I was reminded of this when I came across Sean Alexander’s chilling Geek Squad Halloween Tale this morning. I had been aware of the somewhat negative opinion online geekitude (the O.G., yo) had of this organization, but I didn’t know things were quite this bad.

Now I realize that everybody has to start somewhere. Hell, I did tech support too once upon a time (though it was for the U.S. Department of Defense and I didn’t have to wear a tie). But I have to wonder: is a job where you’re providing technical support and you’re officially called a geek and you’ve got to adhere to a rejected corporate dress code from the 1950s and you may be required to drive a clearly-marked nerdy vehicle as part of your job quite possibly the lowest rung on the Information Technology career ladder?

If so, it may explain Sean’s story.

Other career fields have similar rungs; for example, in the Culinary world I imagine the equivalent is either being a pizza delivery boy or a McDonald’s employee. In Consulting, it’s the guy who runs the mailroom. In Sales, it’s the person who works in the shoe store. In Broadcasting, it’s the disk jockey. In I.T., I’m assuming it’s the Geek Squad guys and the tiny fellows who have to run Cat-5 cable through ventilation ducts in large buildings on weekends.

Am I wrong here? Does anybody have a good experience to report with Geek Squad, aside from Larry King and Vanilla Ice?

I saw here that the Microsoft Internet Explorer team sent the Firefox team a cake in celebration of Firefox 2.0’s completion.  A bit odd, but I suppose if you don’t try to read into it too much it was a nice gesture from one group of developers to another — after all, who else could appreciate the painful march to a browser code release like a bunch of people who just recently did the same thing?

See?  I’m trying hard not to make a snarky comment.  Not everybody at Redmond throws chairs and rubs their hands together gleefully while hatching sinister plots to take over teh Intarweb. 

Still, I have to wonder…will the friendly relationship still exist a year from now, when Firefox 2.x and IE 7.x are the dominant browsers and each team is pushing hard to outdo the other?

I’ve posted another Ruby script to ConnectedText Scripts; this script merely pulls some records from an Access database via OLE and populates a ConnectedText topic (page) with the result set.