I’m not surprised Apple took inspiration from QuickSilver, it’s pretty good stuff. However the idea of desktop search is not new, and Spotlight has the advantage that it gets kernel events telling it whenever a new file has been created or saved, so it can index on-the-fly.

Re desktop search, have you tried Quicksilver? It’s where they got the idea for Spotlight from, and remains far superior and much more versatile imho.

Dunno if it could replace Word entirely, though.

For what it’s worth I came across this extensive list of web2.0 apps this morning, haven’t looked through them yet, but maybe one of these could do the job equally well yet remain open source.

In Google’s praise I must say that GMail is one of the very best pieces of software I’ve ever used. It is just so good. They’re welcome to my data.

Maybe there’ll be a little Troppo patch in WP for posterity.

Upgrading software like WP is not the same as upgrading other software like MS Word where you end up with a bloated product with 100s of ‘features’ never used by most users. I still prefer the DOS version of WordPerfect for long pieces of writing. With WP you might get a few new features (obvious V2 benefits are the wide range of plugins, increased security and the Askimet spam trap. I haven’t had one piece of spam get through since the move from 1.5 to 2.0.) but mostly its ‘under the bonnet’.

But you do need to insert the “br/” “p” “/p” tags within the blockquote because otherwise paragraphing within the quote simply isn’t displayed. And that seems to be the case even with the WYSIWYG option disabled. That is a defect compared with Wordpress 1, where paragraph formatting was preserved within a blockquote without any need to manually insert any tags at all. In any event, if you’re effectively forced to disable the WYSIWYG functionality, what other significant substantive benefits does Wordpress 2 offer?

As I mentioned in a previous comment, you do not have to use the WYSIWYG editor. You turn if it off in Users > Profile.

Upgrading is a simple process and can be done in an hour or two. Follow the instructions: http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress

Don’t go anywhere near WP 2. It’s a nightmare if our experience is anything to go by. Look at the formatting of Ken’s Post. Ken’s fastidious about formatting, but has given up, in the face of WP 2’s army of gremlins.

1. As Nicholas points out, Google is ad-supported. It is viable for them to buy up services and put them out for free. I expect that anything written in Writely will have advertising somewhere onscreen, probably picking out words in the document a la Gmail.

However JavaScript, or ECMAScript as it is formally known, is not the ideal language for writing a you-beaut heavy duty application in. I know that Firefox and Thunderbird do so, but they also get access to various underlying libraries supplied by the Gecko Runtime through XPCOM - most definitely not available to anything which must run on Internet Explorer. Ditto using ActiveX to access Windows functionality.

Whereas Word for Windows and Word for OS X can safely assume the presence of full operating system functionality, rather than a cut down ECMAScript environment. The upshot? The Writely guys need will need to replicate OS functionality not present in the browser, and to do so will cost them more time than programmers of Word, OO Writer etc etc. It will also be more wasteful of resources.

I very much expect that it will remain “lightweight”, but very popular, in the same way that stuff like this site run Wordpress and enterprises use Documentum or other industrial DMSes.

2. If Microsoft didn’t have competition for IE, they wouldn’t set a price on it: they’d just stop upgrading them other than to force customers to upgrade IIS from time to time. That’s what they did to IE on the Mac: it languished for years until competitors turned up on OS X.

3. If you want good desktop search, get a Mac. OS X Tiger has “Spotlight”, by far the most technically elegant, extensible and successful such system I’ve used. It’s also the quickest.

Your piece is very ‘either/or’ about OSS. Open and closed source will continue to be competitors in the software and IT ecosphere and in so doing will bring benefits to consumers.

I find it hard to believe that Microsoft Office apps will be as dominant in ten years time as they are now, and I expect open source will be a very important part of that process. At least Word is a quite good program. But MS powerpoint has always been pretty crappy. It gets where it gets through packaging. This is how MS will be trying to maintain its dominance - and maybe it will as interoperabiiity and ease of use is rightly prized.

Personally I find some of Google’s strategies pretty mystifying. As I mused in a post here I wonder why they don’t go after some traditional advertising markets like job search. And I wonder about their taboo on charging customers. Personally I’d be very happy to fork out - say - $50 for some rich client Google like search capabilities on my desktop. I find Google Desktop pretty crappy. Maybe that’s because I haven’t looked into it sufficiently, but how do you limit searches to specific folders, or specific file types or words only in file titles? Maybe it’s all easy - but I would have found out on a rich client search program I suspect. I can use Microsoft’s search, but then I have to wait around while it does the search.

Once their dominance is established, the strategy changes to “lock in” users through cross-promotion. Typically, this involves providing a suite of services that all complement each other (for Microsoft, Windows and Office including Sharepoint and SQL Server; for Google, suites such as Google + GMail + Picasa + Blogger, and soon to be Writely).

The major difference is that almost all of Google’s services are free, but ad-supported. This means that Google doesn’t rely on customer sales, but on creating the most compelling user experience possible in order to draw eyeballs for advertisers. By contrast, it is in Microsoft’s interest to hold off feature improvements until the next iteration of software can be sold for a healthy price.

… I know which strategy looks better to me as an end-user.

“Could it be that open source is a good strategy to permit survival against the big boys, but that traditional copyright remains the preferred model for those aspiring to true mega-tycoondom?”

It’s certainly true that open source has proven to be the one model which is effective at competing against a software monopoly.

However, it’s not the only thing that open source is good at. In no particular order, open source promotes:

a) easy adding & removing of features, aka modularity
b) compliance with documented standards
c) reusable code “engines” to perform standard tasks
d) shared responsibility (vs the growing ligitation culture)

These have advantages beyond the mere price tag difference which seem to be the focus of most people in the Open Source debate.