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CC license
Differential Progression by Alex Kavanagh is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Category Archives: Business
So Microsoft is buying Skype …
Yesterday (10 May 2011), news broke that Microsoft is paying $8.5B for Skype (or roughly £5.2B in English). Skype is a rather good, if proprietary, telephony/conferencing app that is multi-platform. It currently works on Windows, of course, but also on … Continue reading
Banks: the problem with ‘too big to fail’
We hear it time and again. Such-and-such bank is too big to fail. To me, that simply means too big. A bank failing needs to be like a ripple in a pond not like a tsunami crashing all before it … Continue reading
Lawyer gets it: the free ride is over (and never really existed)
I just read this article. To quote: Open source software had its origins in the free software movement. By now, most open source users understand that free refers to freedom, not to price. The new lesson is that the freedom … Continue reading
BSI UK’s standard body sells out?
Prior to the BRM the BSI voted no. At the BRM the BSI indicated that the specification wasn’t ready. Prior to the vote, the BSI’s technical committee said no; the BSI group still voted yes. Against the advice of the … Continue reading
The myth of multiple “competing” standards
A cracking post from Rob Weir about the myth that having multiple document standards is ‘good’ for the consumer and that the market should be left to decide. I particularly like this bit: How many spreadsheet formats does Microsoft use … Continue reading
Microsoft OOXML- why is it so wrong?
OOXML; Office Open XML. Even the name is false as it clearly isn’t ‘open’ in the sense of non-discriminatory, particularly against GPLed implementations. It’s not at all clear whether a GPL implementation of OOXML can be done. Then there’s the … Continue reading
OOXML is a failure as a “standard”
It goes without saying that I’m staggered, and appalled, at the recent events with the OOXML standardisation process. Others, more informed than me, have written extensively on the subject at sites such as Growlaw, <NO>OOXML, Open Malaysia, Bob Sutor, Rob … Continue reading
Born Global
I was reading the June/July 2007 edition of the IET Engineering Management Journal and was struck by a piece of research that’s been done in Finland by a Siv Karlson around companies that don’t bother to develop their national markets … Continue reading