Connecting the dots ...
While outgoing Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is being egged in Budapest Fake Steve Jobs is already running a poll to find his replacement. Ex-Microsoftie, current Uber-Blogger Robert Scoble seems to have a solid lead:
Congrat’s, MicroScoble! 
Update: Robert did not hesitate to declare his first move as CEO: Why Microsoft will buy Facebook and keep it closed.
Just as soon as the Microsoft CEO started his speech at the Corvinus University (my Alma Mater), a protesting student wearing a “Microsoft=Corruption” shirt stood up and threw eggs at the Microsoft CEO. Not exactly a sign of the famous “Hungarian hospitality”.
(If your feed does not show embedded videos, please click through to watch it in the blog. Update: Originally I had the index.hu video here, but as it started to slow down, I uloaded it to youtube and am now embedding the youtube version. A day later this vid received over 223K views)
On second thought, perhaps it was fair enough. After all, his boss, Bill Gates received a full cream-pie in the face ten years ago in Belgium – Ballmer only got some of the ingredients. 
Another ironic moment comes at 0:38m in the video: as other students stand up to give way to the departing egg-thrower, the camera closes in on one of them holding up his shiny Apple – and not the pie variety.
Update: The search is on for Ballmer’s replacement.
Another video from a different angle, and it ends with the Gates Pie Scene.
Update#2: OK, enough of the fun part. As the story circulates people start wondering what may be the background, and since the only sources are in Hungarian, here’s a summary of the circumstances:
A Hungarian Government bid, worth $25B Hungarian Forints, roughly $157M was allegedly skewed towards MS. (A ‘competitive’ bid with wording that all but ensures only Microsoft meets the requirements.) A Hungarian Watchdog Body (sort of like the FTC in the US) challenged the bidding process via the Court system, and a trial date was set for today. The trial was suddenly and unexpectedly rescheduled just as Ballmer arrived in Budapest. So there may be a perception of the Bully lobbying there.
That said, they could have protested with banners, without eggs. Or displaying more of those flashy Macbooks.
Great performance has always been an obsession at Google and it’s something that we think about and work on everyday. We want Gmail to be really fast, and we keep working on ways to make it faster
– says the Official Gmail Blog. They go on:
One of the areas we worked on was the initial loading sequence: everything that happens behind the scenes between the time you press the “Sign in” button on the login page and the moment you land in your inbox. While the improvements we made won’t resolve every “This is taking longer than usual…” message you might see when loading Gmail over a slow connection, we’ve seen a real reduction (up to 20%) in overall load time compared to when we started.
Hm…so the initial loading sequence got faster. Great news – I have only one question: Why do I now always see this previously unknown progress bar every time I sign in to Gmail?
Btw, I created the account specifically for this test, so it has absolutely no email to be pre-processed. Truth be told the progress bar flashes up and disappears quite fast in the empty account, but it stays there long enough in my real accounts with a lot of data. Not exactly a sign of progress, if you ask me (pun intended).
Update: A sure sign that Gmail must have gone through some changes is that the very popular Gmail Manager Firefox add-on is now knocked out: it is unable to login to any Google Apps email accounts. Regular Gmail accounts appear to be unaffected.
Update#2: I guess I should point out the positive side of the story: this approach is a lot better (transparent) then the Microsoft approach to their slow copy problem, where Vista SP1 improved (perceived) performance partly by rethinking the progress-bar. 
… from almost two decades ago. A found this gem amongst a bunch of old photos I saved by digitizing them. This was a rookie consultant’s SAP knowledge base. Search wasn’t quite as powerful as it is on SDN, Wikipedia or just about any Knowledge Management tool today
. Oh, and it was quite local: you either had to right binder with you or not. SAP Consultants typically bought big heavy pilot cases trying to carry at least 3 binders for Client visits. If they lucked out, the correct three …
It was quite a good workout though.
Today’s equivalent: a laptop? Perhaps an iPhone?
Update: The Evolution Of User Manuals
I am a life-long Z-lister, no doubts about it. But today I found myself on a much different Z-list: The Industry Standard’s Top 25 B-to-Z List Blogs:
These are the blogs you won’t see on the Techmeme Leaderboard, Technorati’s Top 100 blogs, or the CruchBase BloggerBoard … at least not yet. They include VCs, entrepreneurs, coders, experts, and observers, and they bring a delicious mix of insight, experience, and passion to their blogs. While they may not have the right amount of link love, they need to be on your radar screens.
I’m really-really humbled. Last time I felt like this was when the Economist’s Business Intelligence Unit included me in their Thought Leadership list. Frankly, I had no idea what I was doing in such esteemed company, and I feel the same way now.
Writing “good” blog content is a tricky task. My favorite posts, which I consider more thoughtful, analytical often get quoted, but generally don’t attract a lot of readers. Then I have some of the quickies, like the Gmail import guide which become all time hits – at least in terms of traffic. I also have ‘accidental’ traffic, like two days ago the tragic earthquake in China sent me over 10k readers – unfortunately, as they really did not find what they came for. (more on this later).
Anyway, the part I really enjoy are the longer analytical pieces – which I don’t often have the time to afford. But back to The Industry Standard list: thanks, guys, again, I am very-very humbled, and appreciate it. And as a bonus, I am especially pleased to be featured together with fellow Enterprise Irregular Vinnie Mirchandani.
Wow, again… all I can say, I’ll try to keep up with the The Standard. 
There’s nothing new or unexpected in this Technorati Monster screen:
In fact I see it so often, it feels like a standard Technorati feature. Perhaps it’s time to remove “right now” from the title. Technorati is borked. (period)
My favorite Twitter app, Twhirl died on me two days ago. Actually, it’ snot Twhirl itself, the error message clearly identifies Adobe Air, stating the installation is damaged.
Fixing it should be easy: just reinstall Air. Except… I can’t. Adobe installer says: This version of Adobe Air is already installed on your system. Yeah, thank you, I know, but it’s corrupted.
Oh, well, next step is uninstalling Air, then installing it again. Except… I can’t do that, either. A quick search shows I am not alone: several users report that in Vista Adobe Air does not show as an installed application, hence you can’t uninstall it, either.
Catch-22.
I hope Adobe proves otherwise.
Update (5/16): I found a forum tip: run the Adobe Air installer from a command prompt with the -uninstall parameter. It worked, I got Air off the system, then installed it again. Guess what: Twhirl still reports damaged Air file. Next I thought I would uninstall Twhirl – I can’t. Unlike Air, this one is listed in the Control Panel, you can click on Uninstall – nothing happened.
I’ve been off twitter for several days now, have seen evidence of users reporting this issue but received no response whatsoever from either Twhirl or Adobe yet. This s*cks, big time.
Update (5/16): Adobe Support came through, the recommended the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility. It helped, although not in a straightforward way. Steps involved:
In the end, after several days and many hoops, I am back on twitter (twhirl) again. Still like twhirl as a product, but their support sucks. 
Non-existent – at least on the very media they live and die for: twitter. 5 calls for help over 5 days left unanswered. I received better support from Comcast on Twitter.
I often need to share a document with a few reviewers / contributors, and I hate sending attachments. Attachments are redundant, wasteful, and if you start marking up different copies of the same document, then emailing them around, you’re in for a major version-control nightmare.
The clean solution: share an online document. But which platform to use? I use Zoho applications, widely recognized to be the best. But until today, there’s been one obstacle to unlimited, open collaboration: users had to create a Zoho account first. Not that it was complicated (30 seconds?), but some people will stay away from apps requiring account registration as a principle.
The solution? Well, if you have any sort of online presence, chances are you already have an account either with Yahoo or Google. From now on you can use these credentials – yes, your Google / Yahoo account – to log in to Zoho applications. No more worrying whether the other party can access your shared documents.
The Zoho team points to a poll ran by Lifehacker last year. Obviously there are more Google than Zoho users. But look at the reason: most already have a Google account, and refuse to create another one for Zoho. Those who actually tried both system prefer Zoho by a 3:1 margin. So it clearly made sense for Zoho to remove the bottleneck and open up to their systems.
But I suspect this is just the beginning. TechCrunch France Editor Ouriel Ohayon and ZDNet’s Dennis Howlett raised the issue of mass importing one’s Google documents to Zoho. I think it would make sense, although I don’t necessarily like importing – it’s a one-time shot.
Why not just make all documents available to online users, no matter where they were created? You should be able to list your Google and Zoho documents, open them, edit them, and save to whichever format (and storage) you want to.
Either way I’m sure we’ll see more open access and collaboration coming soon.
(Disclosure: I’m an Advisor to Zoho)
OK, OK, so SAP’ s annual conference was supposed to set everything on fire – but did they have to take it literally? We barely made it home and now Florida is burning. Oh, and one lucky person owns a miracle home: everything is charred except his house and lawn.
Do you think it’s Photoshopped? That’s what I thought, too, but Orlando Sentinel photographer Joe Burbank says he took the shot from a helicopter tour of the area.
Update: I did not think the photos would need explanation. Presumably everyone recognizes HP CEO Mark Hurd, but no, the guy on the right does not work for EDS. For younger readers: there was (is) a Very Blue, Very Big Corporation, that once made the transition from hardware to a services company, and the guy on the right is the turnaround CEO.
OK, that was the fun part, for real analysis read these other articles:
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