Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Om Malik is complaining that he stopped by two separate Cingular stores looking for a BlackBerry 8800, only to be told that they were sold out, and that there was a waiting list.

No worries, Om.  They’re available on EBay.

$1500 big ones… it’s a bit like Tickle-Me-Elmo, but for adults.

I had to drop off a parcel of documents to the courier yesterday, and decided to stop in for a sushi lunch at Ebi, which is right next door to the little post office around the corner for us. I ordered the sashimi lunch special. Over a steaming hot bowl of miso soup, it occurred to me that next week's ETel Conference in San Francisco is a bit like a bento box — full of small portions of really delicious stuff that will no doubt leave you hungry for more.

From a technologists perspective, ETel was easily the most innovation focused show I went to last year. It has a totally different flavor from VON (where you'll see the largest carriers and equipment manufacturers talking about their deployments) or Internet Telephony (where a lot of business gets done between even small vendors right on the show floor). ETel is the event where the Web 2.0 crowd in the Valley hangs out with the communications crowd. It's a mixing pot where the future of communications technologies can be discussed, debated, and dissected. Some of the sessions I'm really looking forward to this year include:

• Stowe Boyd and Debi Jones — Communications Underload: a Contrarian Approach
• Greg Unrein — XMPP and Voice: a New Way to Chat
• Om Malik's Launch Pad, where iotum partner Flat Planet Phone Company will be demoing their service.
• Om Malik — The Business of VoIP
• Ndiata Kalonji — Social Networks Need Social Networks
• Kaliya Hamlin — Empowering People and the Coming Identity Layer of Everything
• Lee Dryburgh — Autobuddies: Connecting Relevant Strangers
• Ram Fish — Next Generation of WiFi Handsets and Services
• Jeff Bonforte — Where Will Voice 3.0 Take Us?
• Mark Simpkins — New Opportunities from Socially Responsive Design in Mobile Communications Systems
• Jyri Engestrom — Ambient Storytelling: Social Communication Through Handset Presence
• Martin Geddes — Wake-Up Call to Telcos
• Wendy McMillan — the Future of Voice
• Norman Lewis — You Ain't Seen Anything Yet Mate: Digital Children and the Future of Disruptive Innovation
• Mark Spencer — the Future of Asterisk
• Juergen Fay — Mobile Devices: Past, Present and Future
• Ajay Madhok — How Consumer Identity Powers the Next Telecom Wave

See you there!

$50 / year for an office suite sounds like a pretty good deal, doesn’t it?  Google is hoping you’ll think that too, as they tempt users to sign up for their new Google Apps bundle.  Various pundits are hailing this move as Google’s entry into the office productivity space, with headlines such as Google Targets Microsoft, Google Package Challenges Microsoft, and Google Battles Microsoft Head-On. 

So what do you get?  Well, everything that’s currently in the Google bundle you use today - mail, calendar, spreadsheet, word processor, RSS reader, and a dashboard (which I haven’t yet tried) - plus up to 10 Gigs of storage, your own domain name, 24/7 support, service guarantees, and the ability to strip out the Google ads. 

In other words, not much more than you already have for free.

How does it compare to Microsoft Office?  Poorly.  There’s a reason why Office costs what it does.  It includes more, like Powerpoint presentations, for starters.  The Office applications are far more powerful, more usable, better integrated, and produce better results.  And lastly, they run faster, because they’re not hosted.  In terms of functionality, the Google Apps bundle is much more like Microsoft Works, the downscale package Microsoft has sold for 20 years now to students, families and small businesses.    Works sells for …. $49.95, direct from Microsoft.  You can get it for $35 at retail.  That’s a one time license fee, not an annual fee.

It’s that old rich client / thin client argument all over again.  A couple of guys named McNeally and Ellison cooked that doozy up over a decade ago.  The problem is that we can all see that the offerings just haven’t been that great, and Googles latest isn’t a lot different. Nobody can figure out why we should rent low value software from them, when we can just go and buy the real thing…

Om Malik said it best: “Will Google be successful? Who knows - it is fun to watch though!”