cnbuddha.org

Zimbra Desktop's e-mail interface should be familiar to users of either Outlook or Yahoo Mail. (Click for larger version.)

There's still work to be done getting Zimbra to run as a standalone application. This is the error message that I got after complications minimizing the application.

One feature I liked, similar to Gmail’s conversation view, shows a small triangle next to e-mail messages that are part of a back-and-forth exchange. Clicking on the triangle expands the e-mail header list so you can see all the messages of the exchange.

But Zimbra Desktop, while using browser interface technology called Ajax that can give Web browsers an elaborate interface, actually runs as a standalone application. It employs Java software to store data locally, and it’s a hefty download–38MB for Windows, 34MB for
Mac OS X, and 44MB for Linux.

(Credit:
CNET News)

Zimbra’s tags and Gmail’s labels didn’t synchronize, though. And tags are specific to an e-mail account, so clicking on a tag will show only a subset of messages within one

Yahoo’s Zimbra and Yahoo Mail programmers now are working more closely together, though, and the two projects will be converging somewhat.

Unless you instruct it otherwise, Zimbra Desktop will synchronize your in-box but not folders where you may have filed message. You can manually sync folders when you click on them, but the process worked erratically for me.

And right now Zimbra customers only can run the software by installing it on their own servers. Yahoo is working on a hosted version that Yahoo itself will run, he said, that will launch in coming quarters.

Also, Yahoo Mail customers can’t use the Zimbra browser-based interface yet, so they won’t get access to Zimbra features when borrowing friends’ computers or using airport kiosks.

The first real fruits of Yahoo’s $350 million acquisition of Zimbra are becoming apparent with the release Thursday of the Yahoo Zimbra Desktop. The e-mail software, available as a free download for Windows and Mac, works when the user is offline, and it offers options for basic online word processing and spreadsheets, task management, and file storage.

So why use Zimbra Desktop when regular e-mail client software has provided offline access to e-mail for well over a decade?

The software can be used to connect to Yahoo Mail and also to other accounts such as AOL or Gmail that support remote access via POP (Post Office Protocol) or the newer IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol).

Zimbra Desktop’s productivity suite elements are workable but nothing to write home about. Unlike Google Docs,
Microsoft Office files can’t be opened, and there’s no presentation software. The spreadsheet is extremely spartan, and runs awkwardly inside the word-processing application.

Robb confirmed that address book and calendar synchronization don’t yet work. “We believe those are mandatory features to make it generally available,” he said.

Other top priorities are making the documents better and endowing Zimbra Desktop with the instant-messaging feature available in the browser-based version, Robb said.

Yahoo has formed a new group focusing on cloud computing, in which services available on the Internet substitute for local applications. But until the day when a reliable, fast Internet connection is available anywhere, offline access to applications is a significant feature.

“We’ve aimed to blur the line between an Ajax Web-client and a conventional desktop application, and this release is a leap towards reaching that goal,” Zimbra’s Mike Morse said in a blog posting Thursday.

Zimbra Desktop means that Yahoo beat out Google in the race to provide e-mail that also works offline, but it took a different approach to get there. Google looks to be adding offline access through the open-source Gears project, a plug-in that augments a Web browser’s abilities.

Any of the 263 million Yahoo Mail users who were antsy for change now have something they can sink their teeth into.

Zimbra Desktop shows an icon in Windows’ system tray, but not as an application in the Taskbar. I had one significant problem: When I was trying out a spreadsheet and minimized all my applications, not even the system tray icon was visible. Manually terminating the process didn’t work either; an error message indicates Zimbra Desktop is still running somewhere on my system. Hello, reboot.

Zimbra Desktop can handle multiple accounts; I had no trouble setting up access to my Gmail account.

Web e-mail comes full circle
Existing Zimbra customers can use the e-mail application through a regular browser, letting them access their e-mail from a machine that doesn’t have Zimbra Desktop installed. But the Web client version doesn’t offer offline access, said John Robb, Zimbra’s vice president of product marketing.

Zimbra Desktop gives access to basic word-processing abilities, with documents stored online. (Click to enlarge.)

Another feature I was glad to see is tags, which, similar to Gmail labels, let you describe e-mail messages in a more useful way than filing them into folders. Folders are better than nothing, but I hate having to decide which folder to use for a message that belongs to more than category–travel, photography, and family, to pick one example.

Test-driving Zimbra Desktop
I had no trouble installing, configuring, and running Zimbra Desktop to send and receive e-mail. As with Yahoo’s Webmail interface, it mirrors Microsoft Outlook’s look and keyboard shortcuts.

“You should see a lot of synergy between the Yahoo Mail team and the Zimbra team. This is a first example,” Robb said. “You’ll see Zimbra technology appearing in many parts of the Yahoo Mail experience, and things from Yahoo Mail will come over to the Zimbra side.”

After many months of quiet integration, Zimbra’s ascent within Yahoo has been apparent. As part of a major reorganization in June, Zimbra leader Scott Dietzen was named to run all of Yahoo’s messaging and communication work.

Update 11:03 a.m. PDT: I added more comment from Zimbra. Update 9:25 a.m. PDT: I added more background and details about my hands-on test.

(Credit:
CNET News)

However, it’s not perfect. It didn’t seem connected to my Yahoo address book for contacts or calendar for events.

Webmail is a compelling facet of cloud computing, letting people reach their e-mail from any number of computers or mobile devices. But from a user’s point of view, Zimbra Desktop’s approach–a downloadable application that doesn’t run in a browser–is actually more like traditional e-mail client software such as Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird.

“The exciting thing is you’re getting the Zimbra features that haven’t been available to people without the Zimbra server,” Robb said, specifically mentioning conversations, tagging, small applications called Zimlets, and rich searching features such as the ability find all messages from a particular person and with a PDF attached.

Stepping up his one-man PR offensive, activist investor Carl Icahn described as “completely disingenuous” Yahoo’s contention that disagreements over price torpedoed acquisition talks with Microsoft.

At the same time, Icahn remained unenthusiastic about any of the alternative deals being bruited about between Yahoo and Microsoft in lieu of an outright acquisition.

“Sue Decker says today ‘We’re doing everything we can but the price isn’t high enough.’ It’s not high enough because of (a proposed severance) package,” Icahn said in an interview on the CNBC program, Fast Company. “And it’s a bit worse than you’re alluding to because one of the things that Microsoft, I would imagine, needs here is the workforce. And how do you then go in and tell them (Microsoft’s) paying $45 billion but we’re incentivizing this workforce that you want to leave? I mean, it’s sort of–it’s sort of incomprehensible what they’re doing here.”

“I tell you I’ve rarely seen (a management team) where the company has gone to such lengths to entrench themselves and it’s a sad commentary.”

Resistance is futile: My kung fu is stronger than your kung fu

Icahn also said a partial sale would leave Yang and the current board in charge, which he said “would be terrible for shareholders.”

“Sometimes, you have to have patience,” Icahn said. “But I believe if it’s not this month–it’ll be six months from now. But it’s crazy for the company now to do this alternative deal and give the store away because obviously, an alternative deal is a poison pill. Because once you’ve done an alternative deal and given search to Microsoft, you don’t need Microsoft to buy you anymore. So, that would be a poison pill.”

Icahn, a veteran negotiator, broke an uncharacteristically long silence by talking to the media this week to rally anti-Yahoo opinion. Yesterday it was The Wall Street Journal, today it was CNBC.

The proposed Yahoo severance plan, which comes out to roughly $1.60 a share, was seized upon by critics who said it presented an obstacle to any potential deal with Microsoft. In a letter he sent today to Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock, Icahn demanded that the board rescind the severance plan, which he described as “the largest impediment to a Microsoft deal.” Icahn said that decision would free up approximately $2.4 billion and possibly even more that could be added to the bid.

In the meantime, Icahn used his CNBC appearance to deride Yahoo’s management as lacking accountability. On Monday, he again urged the dismissal of Yang, who Icahn said stood in the way of a fruitful negotiation with Microsoft. In mid-May, he filed a proxy slate to unseat Yahoo’s board.

In the past year Cisco has acquired PostPath, which enables it to move Exchange users to its Linux-based, drop-in Exchange clone (PDF), and Jabber, which adds presence and instant messaging. It already had WebEx and more, giving Cisco a well-rounded collaboration story that mimics Microsoft in key places, like Exchange/e-mail, but surpasses it in others.

We typically pit Red Hat or IBM against Microsoft, but is Cisco Microsoft’s most determined competitor?

commentary

I’m not sure how Cisco has managed to fly under the radar for so long, but I imagine Microsoft is keeping a close eye on Cisco. Unlike Intel and others that would like to shed their dependence on Microsoft, Cisco has little need to placate Microsoft, because the bulk of its revenue doesn’t depend on Windows. That’s a frightening proposition for Microsoft, and one worth watching.

But there’s another company that is increasingly setting its sights on Microsoft, and it’s doing so largely unnoticed. The company is networking giant Cisco, which through a mix of open-source software and collaboration technology is launching a credible campaign to deep-six Microsoft’s desktop dominance.

It’s not just in applications that Cisco increasingly competes with Microsoft. Cisco has been overtly targeting Microsoft with Linux, and has become a top contributor to the Linux kernel. The only thing it lacks is a desktop operating system, but in the cloud-based future that may well be a strength, not a weakness.

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

Who is Microsoft’s biggest competitor? Some say “itself,” and with good reason, as Computerworld points out. Microsoft’s biggest Windows competitor is pirated Windows.

Twitter has been hiccuping all day, it seems. Earlier, some users (myself included) noticed occurrences of the service’s notorious “fail whale”–the cartoon that pops up when Twitter’s servers are overloaded–and later, some members began to report that their profile pictures had disappeared and were replaced by Twitter’s default icon.

The Fail Whale ate your Twitter user icon for lunch and now it's too heavy to lift.

Well, not really. Twitter CEO Evan Williams acknowledged the issue, saying “if you’re missing your icon/avatar, please excuse — will be back shortly!” in a Twitter post. As of Monday afternoon, some of them are still MIA, and Twitter hasn’t said what the exact issue is. But, from what it sounds like, the avatars are not gone forever.

As they say at Fark, everybody panic!

The irony? I navigated to Williams’ profile page shortly after 4 p.m. PT, and his own avatar was down. Maybe it was just for solidarity.

(Credit:
Twitter)

Update: We wanted to note that the “fail whale” art was created by Yiying Lu.

Twitter’s outage problems were notorious in its early days, regularly downing its servers and spawning rumors that hardware issues had led to the ouster of one of its top engineers. Major outages are now rare at Twitter.

Tomorrow: remove unwanted items from your Send To menu.

I’ll keep looking for a way to add Google Docs to my right-click menu (either via the Open With or Send To submenus, or directly on the context menu), and when I find it, I’ll let you know.

Well, I wasn’t able to figure out how to do this. So instead, I created a shortcut to open Google Docs, and then I browsed to the file and opened it the old-fashioned way.

Now you can open the service by pressing the keyboard shortcut you just entered. Once it opens, choose Upload in the top-left corner of the window, browse to and select the file, give it a name (or use the existing file name), and click Upload File.

To create the shortcut to Google Docs, log in to the service, copy the URL in the address bar, right-click the desktop or any folder window, choose New > Shortcut, paste the URL in the Location field, click Next, type Google Docs (or the name of your choice), and press Enter (or click Finish).

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Give your Google Docs shortcut a keyboard sequence to open the service in a flash.

Now navigate to the shortcut you just created, right-click it, and choose Properties. Click in the “Shortcut key” box, and type your preferred keyboard shortcut (I chose Ctrl-Alt-G).

Google Docs limits your HTML and text files (including Word’s .doc and .rtf) to 500KB, presentations to 10MB from your computer, and 2MB from a Web site (500KB as e-mail attachments), and spreadsheets to 1MB (spreadsheets can’t be uploaded as e-mail attachments).

Alternatively, you can copy the unique e-mail address Google Docs generated for you under E-mail Your Documents and Files, open your e-mail program, paste the address in the To: field, and add any other recipients you want to send the file to. The file will be attached to the message automatically.

What I really want to do is add a link to Google Docs on the right-click (context) menu in Windows Explorer. That way, I could open a file in Google Docs by right-clicking it in Explorer and choosing Send To > Google Docs.

This won’t save you a lot of time, but at least Google Docs makes it easy for you to transmit the file to the service as an e-mail attachment. And, of course, you can send the file to other e-mail recipients at the same time.

There have been 516 large security breaches this year to date, according to the ID Theft Resource Center, with 30,382,786 consumers potentially exposed.

However, the 30 million customers whose records have been exposed this year may not all be affected by ID fraud; the affected companies may provide credit monitoring services which may stop fraudulent activity before it spirals out of the control. Furthermore, there may be duplicates in the information listed. (One person’s information may appear in multiple breaches.)

That number is significant, because it’s greater than the record number of breaches reported in 2007, said the ITRC, which released its report (PDF) last week. Part of the rise is the result of increased disclosure to consumers affected by breached organizations, as required by state laws. The ITRC also attributed the increase to its ability to access state attorney general notification lists; these often contain breaches that were not reported via media or other sources.

A February 2007 survey from Javelin Strategy and Research reported around 8 million actual victims of ID Fraud in the U.S., and the amount of fraud had decreased from 2006 to 2007.

The partnership, which is designed to increase Yahoo’s ad revenue, is “still on track,” a source familiar with the partnership said, and an announcement is expected next week. That aligns well with reports in the New York Post and Reuters.

Take this schedule with a grain of salt. I’ve been snooping around on this particular deal for a while now, and plans to announce it have slipped several times. Jerry Yang and Yahoo’s other top executives are reckoning with Icahn, which has to be consuming a lot of time.

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer lambasted the Yahoo-Google ad deal as handing over even more search-ad dominance to Google and, in effect, making Yahoo vastly less desirable. And there are antitrust concerns, though Google executives seem to think it’s not a big worry.

Even if the deal goes through and Icahn’s agitating yields a new deal with Microsoft, it’s possible that Yahoo could just switch it off without too much harm done. Even a short-term deal might well the engineers who worked long and hard on Yahoo’s Panama search-ad system to spruce up their resumes, however.

Carl Icahn notwithstanding, Yahoo’s deal to use Google search advertisements is still a go.

(Credit:
Nick Desai)

First came mobile social networks, then came geotagging. Since location-based features take advantage of your ever-portable mobile phone to pin your activities to a place, we weren’t surprised to learn that on Wednesday JuiceCaster (reviewed) added automatic geo-anchors to its multimedia sharing service.

A final tidbit called “Who was here?” attaches further meaning to a place. Selecting it from the menu will call together a list of photos and videos for that most-wanted location. You’ll be able to browse through the content or add your own. You’ll also be able to seek out geotagged photos and videos by location, which may muscle up JuiceCaster’s searching accuracy.

The city and state appear on the player shown on CEO Nick Desai's JuiceCaster page.

Soon JuiceCaster photos and videos that are auto-posted to Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Blogger, YouTube, and other sites will share the individual’s street name and city. Friends who keep a close eye on geotags can use that to gain contextual understanding of the scene or use it to “bump into” friends nearby. In an important distinction, JuiceCaster’s location feature is designed to be optional and visible only to confirmed friends.

JuiceCaster’s new location-based functionality will become available “shortly” for GPS-enabled cell phones running on the BREW platform before rolling out to other carriers’ GPS phones.

Updated at 2:30 p.m. PDT to include more details about how location information is displayed and gathered in JuiceCaster, and more specific information about the feature’s launch.

commentary (Credit: Roy Schestowitz)

This may very well be true, but it misses the point, as noted. If the cost is the same, buy Linux. Linux doesn’t come with a monopoly attached to it. Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words, as this one provided by Roy Schestowitz does.

About 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don’t pay for the software. Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.

In short, I believe Microsoft’s sponsored TCO study may have many flaws, but only one that really matters: it overlooks the cost of buying a one-way ticket into Microsoft’s walled garden. The cost of entry may in fact be quiet low. But what’s the price of exit? Open source makes the cost of exit as close to free as the cost of entry is. It’s a software development methodology and a CIO risk mitigation strategy, all rolled into one.

Microsoft, of course, has only dropped its prices to play catch-up with open-source pricing and to stave off piracy, piracy which company co-founder Bill Gates admits helps Microsoft as much as it hurts it in such markets.

First, to the research. As Microsoft’s James Utzschneider, general manager of Marketing and Communications for Unlimited Potential (Microsoft’s euphemism for emerging markets), suggests, the study reveals that Windows is more expensive to acquire but that the cost of Linux-savvy administrators offsets that expense, making it a financial wash over five years.

But who wrote it is somewhat immaterial here. The problem is that the research fails to acknowledge the biggest cost of working with Microsoft: the cost of exit.

Microsoft has been a little quiet on the “independent TCO (total cost of ownership) study” front for at least a week now, so it is perhaps not surprising to see the company promoting a new TCO study comparing the cost of deploying Linux and Windows in emerging markets. Vital Wave Consulting, that paragon of research (no, I’ve never heard of it, either), published the study.

That Gates quote was taken from a 1998 article in Fortune, and should be enough to clearly describe why inbound acquisition cost is the wrong way to measure a financial decision to purchase Windows over Linux. Indentured servitude is not what most IT departments are looking for in an operating system.

Update 10:32 a.m. PDT: Added more comments from Gates in his interview and a late morning trading price for Yahoo.

Gates’ prediction comes as he prepares Friday to wrap up his last day of full-time work at Microsoft. Come Monday, he will serve as non-executive chairman and work part time at the software company he co-founded.

Microsoft’s Bill Gates, in an NBC interview with Tom Brokaw, said a deal with Yahoo is unlikely, according to a CNBC report Friday.

Yahoo shares fell 2.81 percent to $20.77 in late morning trading, as the broader markets also slumped.

During his interview, Gates said “I don’t think that one is likely,” in reference to a Microsoft-Yahoo deal. He added, however, that he believes Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will find “plenty of other opportunities.”

Shares of Microsoft were essentially flat, trading up 0.43 percent at $27.87 a share in morning trading.