First up is Amazons deal to buy Audible for nearly $300 million. If you’re not an audible user, then you probably will not care about this deal, but for those of us who are, then this deal is huge. It will allow Amazon to sell paper books, ebooks and downloadable audio books through its shop window. OK, this might not sound like a big deal, but with Amazon releasing the kindle, the user now has greater choice on how to consume literature. Kindle already supports the subscription model, therefore audible will sit nicely on the kindle as an add on.
Next up is Microsoft’s proposed take over of Yahoo!. This has got a few bloggers running scared, not least google. I have to say that I’m not that bothered. Yes it’s a huge deal, but it real terms, we wont know how it will impact on net users for at least 12-18 months. This deal is disguised as a defence to googles advertising and search monopoly and will easily pass anti competitive measures. But, it’s not just about advertising and search. Yahoo and Microsoft together have over 500 million email users. They also have a huge instant messaging presence, which means that together they will dwarf all other email and IM services. By contrast gmail only has around 50 million users. The implications for this part of their business is unknown; will yahoo mail become live mail for instance?
I’ll be posting a follow up article in a couple of days.
I have to say that if anyone had suggested to me 5 years ago that I would be a campaigner for open source software and open formats, that I would not have had one clue as to what they were talking about. But as it is, here I am today…
Open Source software is usually provided at no cost to the end user and the code is openly available for anyone to view and to play around with. Essentially open source is a community movement which aims to make good software available to anyone who wants or needs it.
Open Document Format takes this a step further, by setting standards that will ensure that documents saved in such a format will be available to everyone for ever, no matter what changes are made to software.
So why is this important? Well think about. How many people are using Microsoft office? Too many to count. Microsoft’s file formats are proprietary and therefore are a “locked” format. Therefore we are in their mercy. Now I’m not knocking Microsoft, but surely something that is this important (from a historical point of view) should remain in the hands of the people? This is why the ODF alliance are campainging. Every company that writes software that produces documents should all support one same format, this way, documents will stand the test of time.
You can help by switching to OpenOffice.org which is a free office suite comparable to MS Office. This suite supports ODF and will also allow you to open and save your work in Microsofts file formats, should you wish to do so.