hilarious, but technically the machine isnt getting any more intelligent.

Robot Wars

In case anyone hasn’t noticed, two announcements, one from Microsoft and the other from Adobe, has marked the beginning of a war over what technology consumers will user to play back videos on their computers. This is a war that will be difficult for Microsoft to win.

In a nutshell, Adobe intends to take its ubiquitous Flash technology widely used to play video in web browsers and enable users to download videos to a Flash player on their desktops. What’s more the desktop player will provide superior quality video to what users are currently gettting in their browsers, including full screen video.

But wait there’s more! The new Adobe Media Player, currently on show at the NAB 2007 expo, will enable content producers to embed advertising in downloaded videos, thus enabling them to monetize and protect the value of copyrighted content.

So what has Microsoft got to offer? A new browser-based video technology called Silverlight that it believes can outshine Flash (forgive the pun - there have been so many). It is a competing technology but it’s not a paradigm shifter or market disrupter

The way I see it Adobe would appear to have the upper hand here. On the web, Flash absolutely dominates. It is the video technology already used on the world’s most popular social networking sites YouTube and MySpace, among others, and it’s a proven technology most developers are comfortable with. There is an increasing demand from consumers to be able to download videos from the web to the desktop for offline viewing and to do that they will need a Flash desktop player. Thus, the market is there for Adobe media Player.

Now what has Microsoft got to offer with Silverlight? In essence, an alternative browser based video player format to Flash. To be sure it is compatible with the three most widely used browsers but Microsoft has to build the market by convincing web publishers and content developers to use its technology instead of Flash. Where is the incentive for that?

Microsoft can talk until it is blue in the face that Silverlight is superior technology to Flash. The fact is, however, that Flash has a dominant market position and all the momentum. As would-be competitors to Windows can attest, those factors are hard to overcome.

http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/11412/1023/

Speaking at Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, announced a new addition to Google Docs and Spreadsheets: Presentations, a Web based alternative to MS PowerPoint. According to Google’s blog the new service will be based on the technology developed by Tonic System, a company Google acquired.
“First of all, we want to welcome the team from Tonic Systems to Google. Tonic, which we’ve just acquired, is based in San Francisco and Melbourne, Australia. They have some great technology for presentation creation and document conversion, and it will be a great addition as we add presentation sharing and collaboration capabilities to Google Docs & Spreadsheets. We’ve already freed those of you working in teams from the burdens of version control and email attachment overload when going back and forth on word processing and spreadsheets. It just made sense to add presentations to the mix; after all, when you create slides, you’re almost always going to share them.” wrote Sam Schillace, Engineering Director.

The launch date of Presentations is set for the summer and at Web 2.0, Eric Schmidt used a beta version of this new app to present his slides.
Even Google Presentations may be considered a direct competitor of MS Powerpoint, Eric Schmidt said the two products are not competing.

“We believe we can bring presentations to a new level of user satisfaction,” Schmidt said quoted by AP. “We don’t think it competes with Microsoft, because it doesn’t have all the functionality of Office. It’s a different way of sharing information, more casual, and a better fit to how people use the Web.”

Erich Schmidt didn’t provide any details about Presentations or its capabilities, but product manager Rajen Sheth said for AP that users would be able to store documents online and let anyone with a free Google account view the slides.

In February, Google Apps has taken the step forward from a non-commercial application, geared towards individual users, to a business software package: Google Apps Premier Edition, which is being offered primarily to small and medium businesses for an annual fee of $50. Google Apps has been available as a free service since August 2006. It includes the large storage-capacity service Gmail (where you can store not only emails, but chat history and even files from your desktop, with the help of a Mozilla plug-in), Google Calendar (shared calendaring), Google Talk, which is an instant messaging and voice-over-IP application, and the Start Page feature for creating a customizable home page on a specific domain.
Google Apps Premier Edition offers over its free precursor 10 GBs of storage per user, APIs for business integration, 99.9 % uptime, 24×7 support for critical issues, advertising is optional, and the cost is $50 per user account per year.

Until Presentations will be included in Docs&Spreadsheets here is a list of features currently available:

- Upload Word documents, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML or text (or create documents from scratch).
- Invite others (by e-mail address) to edit or view your documents and spreadsheets .
- Edit documents online with whomever you choose.
- View your documents’ revision history and roll back to any version.
- Publish documents and spreadsheets online to the world, as Web pages or post documents to your blog.
- Download documents to your desktop as Word, OpenOffice, RTF, PDF*, HTML or zip.
- Import and export of .xls, .csv, and .ods formatted data (and export functionality for .pdf and .html).
- Enjoy intuitive navigation and editing, like any traditional document or spreadsheet.
- Use formatting and formula editing in spreadsheets so you can calculate results and make your data look the way you want it.
- Chat in real time with others who are editing your spreadsheet.

http://www.playfuls.com/news_07024_Google_To_Add_Presentations_To_Web_based_Tools.html

Dont know whether its true but its hilarious and sensible…….

courtesy: http://xkcd.com