As we reported on Jobwire, OpenID thought leader Dick Hardt announced Friday that he has joined Microsoft. Hardt's hire will be added to a recent history of the software giant making controversial hires from among its presumed opponents, advocates of open source and open culture. Is this assimilation or are we seeing a company change, with the infusion of new and different DNA?
This week we ran a poll asking which word processing tool you primarily use. We wanted to see if things had changed much since we ran the same poll one year ago.
So are ReadWriteWeb readers, many of whom are early adopters of Internet technology, using online word processing services now instead of desktop software? Er, no.
We ran a poll a year ago asking which word processing tool you used the most. What we were really driving at was: how many of you are using an online word processing service (Google Docs, Zoho, ThinkFree, etc) as your main tool, instead of a traditional desktop one (MS Word, OpenOffice, etc). The results surprised us a bit: MS Word got an overwhelming 46% of the vote, with OpenOffice next on 17%. The best of the online breed was Google Docs, with 11%. Perhaps we shouldn't have been surprised, given that Web Office is still relatively new and not entirely reliable yet. Still, we're keen to know if things have changed over the past year. Please participate in the poll below...
This week's RWW Live podcast show (Monday 3.30pm PST) is on the topic of online music. We have 2-3 very special guests (so far we have representatives from Yahoo and Imeem, please email me if you're interested in coming on the show, we have 1 final place to confirm). We've been writing a lot about online music lately. Last week Marshall asked: What would the perfect streaming music look like?. We got some great comments to that. But we're also interested in what your current favorite streaming music service is.
One of our favorite Australians, Lachlan Hardy, twittered an interesting question today: What are the three things online that are exciting you most? Lachlan was asked this question as part of a newspaper article in the Sydney Morning Herald. His own answers were interesting, but he also got a great response from commentors on his blog. So we thought we'd ask the same question (well, slightly re-worded) here on ReadWriteWeb.
This week we announced a new feature for our community: ReadWriteWeb Predictions, a Predictions Center that we hope will enable you to tap into the collective intelligence of RWW readers. The first prediction is about the battle for users and mind-share that has emerged this year between Twitter and FriendFeed. Here are the results, along with results for our two polls this week...
In this post we provide data that shows how public market investors see 7 of the Internet bigcos we listed in our current poll (repeated below). In particular this data provides some background insight into the the "sound and fury" surrounding Yahoo.
We looked at 7 Internet bigcos, chosen from the RWW poll list and with the addition of Cisco (per a suggestion from one commenter). This is a list of publicly traded companies. We have not included AOL - if we did we'd also have to include all of Time Warner, which makes them very far from an Internet company. We also can't include Facebook, Mozilla or LinkedIn - as none are (currently) public companies.
We've reached the halfway point of 2008, so time for a half-year assessment of the Internet bigcos. Below is a poll, asking for your picks for best bigcos so far in '08. We did a similar poll last July - and Facebook just edged out Google for the RWW popular vote. At the end of '07 we named Facebook our Bigco of the year. We also ran the poll in 2006. Note that this poll is multi-choice, so select only the companies which have impressed you.
Due to demand in the comments, 3 new IM clients have been added to the poll. You can now vote for Pidgin, Miranda, and Apple's iChat. Apologies for omissions! Our poll this week focuses on IM clients. This weekend Corvida wrote that interoperability between popular IM clients is happening, albeit slowly.
Earlier this week we ran a poll about the latest version of the iPhone announced at Apple's WWDC event in San Francisco. The results were a little surprising, in that only half (52%) of respondents thought iPhone 2.0 was a solid release -- just over 1 in 5 of those thought it was revolutionary. But overall, 20% thought it was 'meh' and about 25% were unimpressed.
