Rattleblog: Tales from the blogosphere

12-02-2007

by Damien Mulley

Apple to be run by Google, Google's acquisitions not going well and Microsoft taking on Visa and Mastercard. These are some of the chatterings going on in the world of tech blogs this week.

It seems Steve Jobs can actually do wrong, or at least might have to take a break from Apple while an investigation finishes on whether it was inappropriate to award him a lot of cheap shares in Apple. An off-the-wall rumour via Nathan Weinberg is that Google CEO Eric Schmidt will step in to run Apple. I'm sure that'll please Microsoft no end. We're dreading the new "Mac versus PC" TV ads if Google is in charge. Google loves to take people out of the equation, so picture no actual actors but just an ugly text ad with garish green and blue.

Staying with Google, it seems that it's not the only internet giant enamoured with MySpace owner Fox. Michael Arrington reports that Google is currently renegotiating its quite recent advertising contract with Fox, but there's a snag; it seems eBay is interested in working with MySpace to allow its users to auction items on eBay directly from their MySpace profiles. Google isn't liking this, especially considering its Google Base website directly competes with eBay. Whatever happens though it's a win-win situation for Fox.

In further not-so-good news for Google, John Battelle reports that the founders of DMarc have cashed out their Google shares and left the company. DMarc is an automated radio advertising system which was purchased by Google in recent years.

Now some good news for Google and possibly bad for Microsoft: the GoogleSystem blog has discovered that Google is working on a competitor to Microsoft PowerPoint. With Google already releasing free clones of Word and Excel, the addition of a PowerPoint competitor means that the game is really on to bring Microsoft Office users over to Google's online system. Expect that "Google Docs and Spreadsheets" will soon get a simpler name. Google Office anyone?

Microsoft might not mind too much though as it could unveil a rumoured direct competitor to the trillion dollar credit card market. Arstechnica reports Microsoft is working on a PayPal-like transaction system that will take on the credit card companies head to head. Would you let Microsoft mind your credit line?

Staying with the software giant, it seems that Microsoft ended up demonstrating its Vista operating system on a Mac after forgetting to turn up with its own demo hardware. The Vista hardware vendors would not be pleased hearing this after all the money they're spending on co-marketing this new operating system. Nice marketing for Apple though. Again.

In console news it seems that it isn't just the Xbox 360 that can be hacked and modified. Engadget reports that even the cute little Wii can be modified to play games from all over the world and to do things not conceived by Nintendo. The obsession with this games console continues unabated.

Turning to online games, Valleywag reports that while Second Life is getting all the hype and attention, the online World Of Warcraft (WOW) game is where the real money is. WOW has a far greater number of users and takes a monthly fee from all the players. Unlike Second Life.

In a contrarian view however it seems eBay loves Second Life and will allow auctions of virtual goods from the online world but will not allow auctions of items from the World of Warcraft game.

And now two oddities which just go to show that consumers would buy anything and researchers would create anything. You can now buy a treadmill for your doggy, or if you want to get out into the fresh air you can now run around the earth with your GPS-powered running shoes.

More tech and even more oddities from the blogging world next time on Rattleblog.

Damien Mulley is an Irish blogger and works as a technical writer in Cork.