But does it have a talking “Search Dog?“
Google in talks with Korean company ThinkFree
Looks like Google is thinking about acquiring ThinkFree, the online MS Office Clone:
[Kang Tae-jin, ThinkFree’s CEO] who studied in Canada, maintains ThinkFree is closely compatible with Microsoft Office and its key Word, Excel, and PowerPoint applications.
“If you know how to use Microsoft Powerpoint, you already know how to use ThinkFree Show,“ Kang said in a recent television interview. “There’s no learning curve.“
Microsoft could be a little like the gulf oil states around the time when alternative energy sources become practical. It will be interesting to see if they can adapt.
Google may be spreading itself thin. If they don’t watch it they will be the next evil empire.
Posted by James Old Guy on 12/19/06 at 11:00 AMCould be. At least they’d be an evil empire with some sense of interface design.
Posted by george.w on 12/19/06 at 11:13 AMOMG, yet another way to create boring presentations?
Posted by WeeDram on 12/19/06 at 05:56 PMCould be. At least they’d be boring presentations that didn’t make Micro$oft any richer.
Posted by george.w on 12/19/06 at 05:59 PMThey could turn evil. At least they’d be an evil empire with free software.
OMG, yet another way to create boring presentations?
Too true! It’s amazing how people think PPT makes them a good presenter by default. I sat through a PPT presentation in a graduate class where the student read right from the computer monitor. And worse than that, she had about 150 words per slide. NO JOKE! I thought something that atrocious would never be seen by graduate students…
Posted by webs05 on 12/19/06 at 10:55 PMI saw a presentation by an extremely expensive Noo-York lawyer that made most of those same mistakes. Pretty funny, if the university hadn’t paid big bucks for him to be there and bore everybody to death.
Posted by george.w on 12/19/06 at 11:15 PMUpdate: Here is Information Week’s review of the ThinkFree suite. Now I’m wondering if a database component would be a security concern. Also, the suite comes with a social-networking component, which if implemented in a large company (along with Google talk) would be a sea change in communication methods.
The suite runs in Java, which is IME much faster on a Linux machine than a Windows machine. I don’t know why that is, and it could be just the machines I have used Java applications on.
Posted by george.w on 12/21/06 at 09:47 AM
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