In a document more thoroughly laying out its position on Open XML, Google says the core problem with the specification is that it’s redundant with ODF. The company also says it’s too specific to Microsoft Office and that it’s of insufficient quality.

Microsoft executives have contended over the past two years that Open XML is not entirely controlled by the company, pointing out that Apple, Novell, and large customers are on the committee at Ecma International, the standards body submitting Open XML to the ISO for standards consideration.

Bhorat said Open XML should be subsumed into the existing standard–OpenDocument Format, or ODF–which is backed by Microsoft rivals, including Google.

Rather than have one document standard, Microsoft’s view is that there should be multiple document standards with different purposes.

Update: in response to a reader’s comment, here is added text that reiterates Microsoft’s position.

“As ISO member bodies around the world work on possible revisions of their vote previously submitted, the deadline of March 30th approaches fast. I invite you to pay close attention, and heed the call of many for unification of OOXML into ODF. A document standards decision may not matter to you today, but as someone who relies on constant access to editable documents, spreadsheets and presentations, it may matter immensely in the near future,” he wrote.

Delegates from international standards bodies are meeting in Geneva this week to resolve technical comments submitted after Office Open XML (OOXML) failed to pass as a standard last September. The results of the five-day ballot resolution meeting are critical for Microsoft’s two-year bid to get International Organization for Standardization, or ISO, certification.

The head of Google’s open-source programs on Monday urged international delegates to vote against certifying Office Open XML as an ISO standard, saying the Microsoft-led effort poses a risk to users who want unfettered access to documents.

“Submitting such a proposal makes a mockery of the standards process,” according to the Google assessment.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin launched his personal blog on Thursday with some sobering news: he carries a particular genetic mutation that means he’s much more likely than average to get Parkinson’s disease.

“I feel fortunate to be in this position. Until the fountain of youth is discovered, all of us will have some conditions in our old age, only we don’t know what they will be. I have a better guess than almost anyone else for what ills may be mine–and I have decades to prepare for it,” Brin said. And, he added, “research into LRRK2 looks intriguing (both for LRRK2 carriers and potentially for others).”

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

“I know early in my life something I am substantially predisposed to. I now have the opportunity to adjust my life to reduce those odds (e.g. there is evidence that exercise may be protective against Parkinson’s). I also have the opportunity to perform and support research into this disease long before it may affect me,” he said. “And, regardless of my own health, it can help my family members, as well as others.”

Brin’s mother and her aunt both have Parkinson’s, and recent research has uncovered a genetic link in some cases of the disease, Brin wrote. And through the services of start-up 23andMe, co-founded by his wife, Anne Wojcicki, and Linda Avey, he found that he carries the same mutation. The research is still early, though, he said. And he had an optimistic take on the news.

Brin said the knowledge gives him some power.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin

The inaugural post on Brin’s blog, too.blogspot.com, is titled “LRRK2″ after the gene that he found carries a mutation called G2019S, which, “while rare even among people with the disease, accounts, in some ethnic groups, for a substantial proportion of familial Parkinson’s,” Brin said in the blog post.

My in-laws were in town this past weekend, escaping the Wisconsin snowstorms for a few sunny days in Silicon Valley. Hanging out with them was a welcome break from all the usual nonsense we call day-to-day life.

Unfortunately, the status quo is the path of least resistance. As a result, reassessment and change – whether it’s about life or corporate strategy – isn’t easy and it doesn’t happen by itself. It requires honest answers to difficult questions. It requires objectivity. It requires commitment and hard work.

It got me thinking about how infrequently we take a step back from our gadget-filled, workaholic lives to gain some perspective. How often do you ask yourself if you like what you’re doing, if you’re on the right track, or if you should be doing anything differently?

Sure it’s tough, but the alternative is far worse.

Some say that point may already be too late, that people and companies should be asking themselves those deep questions periodically all along. Who knows?

For individuals, it’s waking up one day and realizing you’re miserable, filled with regret, and it’s too late to do anything about it.

The same goes for companies. After all, companies are made up of people. Executives and directors are people. How often do they step back and assess the company’s technology, products and services, and strategy with respect to the competition?

In both cases, the result can be tragic. Perhaps what’s most tragic is that, in both cases, the result can be prevented.

You can only plod along, putting one foot in front of the other, for so long before external conditions change or something happens to make you wonder if you shouldn’t be heading somewhere else or doing things differently to get there.

Companies milk a business model until someday revenue growth begins to decline or margins begin to shrink. You know, stuff happens. The competitive landscape is never static, especially not in the technology world. That’s when companies should ask themselves some penetrating questions and consider some changes.

So once in a while, get some perspective. Just to be on the safe side, do it whether you need to or not. Or you may fall prey to a saying my father-in-law’s stepfather – Mahalio Peric – was fond of saying: “Too soon old, too late smart.”

The bottom line is that, when things change, your strategy and plans may need to change too. And to do that, you need perspective. Perspective is important. It’s the same for people and companies.

Sometimes you wake up after a couple of decades of hard work and decide you need a breather. Maybe you’re not getting the same fulfillment from your career you got years before. Or perhaps you’ve been successful and there’s something new and different you’ve always wanted to try and never had the opportunity or the guts.

For executives or boards of directors, it’s waking up and realizing you’ve run your company into the ground and disappointed thousands of employees, customers, vendors and shareholders.

What games do you think are missing from the Wii Virtual Console? Sound off at our discussion board!

(Credit:
nintendolife.com)

This week brings Dr. Mario to the DSi and Wonderboy to the Virtual Console.
DSiWare
Dr. Mario Express (Nintendo, 500 DSi Points): The classic color-matching puzzle game makes its way to the Nintendo portable in Dr. Mario Express. Play alone or against the computer in the race to fight off viruses.
Master of Illusion Express: Deep Psyche (Nintendo, 200 DSi Points): Continuing the series of magic tricks for your DSi, Deep Psyche will ask you a number of questions in order to reveal a startling truth.
WiiWare
Crystal Defenders R1 (SQUARE ENIX, 800 Wii points): See how many encroaching monsters you can hold off by deploying soldiers and Black Mages. Test your skills over various levels with different layouts and difficulty settings.
Virtual Console
Wonder Boy III: Monster Lair (1990, Sega Genesis, 900 Wii points): Monster Lair is a Japanese import that never saw the light of day in North America until now. Use your sword to defend Xenobia with a friend or endure the battle alone.

Now Motorola is looking toward the future. The company is expected to release several new phones, including ones with touch screens, in time for this year’s holiday season. The hope is that these new products can help put new life into the company’s tired device lineup. And with Jha at the helm of the mobile-device unit, the company can move forward with the planned split, which is expected to be complete in the third quarter of 2009.

(Credit:
Qualcomm)

Sanjay Jha, co-CEO and head of mobile devices for Motorola

Motorola has picked an industry veteran to take the helm of its troubled cell phone divison.

On Monday, the company announced that Sanjay Jha will be co-chief executive and head of the mobile-device business. Motorola said earlier this year that it will separate the mobile-device business from the rest of the company. And since the split was announced, it had been searching for someone to head up the division.

Jha will certainly have his work cut out for him. Over the past year and a half, the company has lost market share and seen its stock price plummet amid heavy losses as it struggles to find a hit product to replace the Razr. Last year, it fell from the world’s second-largest supplier of handsets to third.

Jha, 45, is a smart choice for Motorola, as it tries to turn around its cell phone business. For the past 14 years, Jha has been at cell phone chipmaker Qualcomm, where he most recently ran the company’s CDMA division. Qualcomm’s CEO, Paul Jacobs, wished him well in a press release, saying Jha had been instrumental in helping Qualcomm become “the No. 1 wireless semiconductor supplier.”

Last week, Motorola surprised Wall Street with a small profit for the second quarter. But the company’s handset division continued to drag on earnings. Most of the gains in the second quarter came from cost cutting and from its Internet and cable businesses. Still, the company managed to hang on to its market share position, a surprising result, as many analysts had expected No. 1 Nokia and No. 2 Samsung to pick up share.

Topix is on to a big idea, and so if Tolles or any other start-up can shake up the media landscape, more power to them. Too many important stories are passing by without notice.

(Credit:
Trinity United Church of Christ)

(Credit:
Topix.com)

The formula’s working. ComScore now rates Topix just behind The New York Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today in terms of individually branded Web sites. Knight Ridder, the Tribune Company, and Gannett liked what they saw and bought up a 75 percent chunk of the company.

This is how Tolles put it to me: “As we’re seeing all the time, newspapers, which once were local monopolies, are watching that one-time windfall go off to money heaven. When newspapers go on the Internet, they make 10 percent of what they used to make. I’m giving Molotov cocktails to the mob. If the sheriff is a bad guy in a small time, what you want is some guy who just got shafted to go online while he’s still hot and say this jerk sheriff, etc. etc. You want a platform for opinions that can speak truth to power for the individual.”

At the Web 2.0 Expo last week, I had a long conversation with Tolles, who runs Topix.com, about the fragmentation of media and where technology is taking it. If you’re not familiar with Topix, get to know it.

Let me see if I’ve got this right. Oil’s hovering near an all-time high, rising prices combined with food shortages are responsible for riots around the world, and we’ve got ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN are literally wasting hours on the existential significance of a Chicago pastor. As we used to say in Brooklyn, give me a frigging break.

Does anyone seriously doubt that we’re at a point where the need to talk back to the talking heads is super-important? The orgy of idiocy surrounding the Jeremiah Wright coverage is a perfect case in point. I thought I was inured to the banality that informs the punditry of Matthews, Joe Scarborough, Sean Hannity, and the rest of the blabatocracy. Not even close. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think the electronic media had collectively adopted the new corporate slogan: “All Jeremiah Wright, All the Time.”

Chris Tolles

Most people in New York and San Francisco many not be using Topix, but Tolles has a bigger audience in mind: most of the folks between the coasts, who are increasingly underserved by corporate media.

Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.

I’m generalizing here, but it’s safe to say that vapid television coverage that’s less and less relevant to their lives has become the norm, rather than the exception, everywhere in this country–especially outside the big urban population centers.

My hunch is that most mainstream media would choke at the prospect, but you want the most people participating.

Tolles operates on the sound assumption that the media outlets with the most engaged audiences will thrive. Nowadays, about 60 percent of the content on his site consists of original user content. Reader opinion gets featured prominently next to regular news feeds. In addition, Topix uses a network of volunteer editors (around 4,400) who package and post news tailored to their localities.

In the Twitter developer blog on Thursday, an engineer said that Ruby on Rails still rocks as a Web development platform. The service’s woes are due more to a creaky architecture, he said.

Ruby is a scripting, or dynamic, language, which means that it can be slower than Java or C for some applications. The trade-off is that in general it’s faster to write code with. Rails, meanwhile, is a Web development framework optimized for speed.

Many people have questioned whether choosing to write the application using Ruby on Rails was a smart move and whether Twitter should shift to a different Web development technology.

Twitter performance problems have brought heaps of scorn from the busy Web 2.0 digerati. That has prompted the company to disclose more technical details like today’s Q and A format blog.

We have some limits, and we’re adding more. Legitimate users should never notice them, but these new limits should help mitigate the worst case failures and attacks.

The outages and slow performance are due to “popular” members of Twitter with many followers who “tweet” a lot all at once, according to Twitter. Because of that, the company says will put some limits on what some users can do, but it should not be noticeable.

We’ve got a ton of code in Ruby, and we’ll continue to develop in Ruby with Rails for our front-end work for some time. There’s plenty to do in our system that Ruby is a great fit for, and other places where different languages and technologies are a better fit. Our key problems have been primarily architectural and growing our infrastructure to keep up with our growth. Working in Ruby has been, in our experience, a trade-off between developer speed/productivity and VM speed/instrumentation/visibility.

Ruby still makes sense for much of what Twitter does–essentially sending messages around the Web–but the company has left the door open to using other languages. The Twitter developer blog says this:

Remember gDocsBar (download), that handy
Firefox extension we checked out a few months back? It got a pretty neat update today that lets you do things that might not have been originally intended for Google’s Documents and Spreadsheets service. The first is called Webclips, which is a fancy way of saying automatic copy and paste. If you find a big chunk of content you like, you can simple copy it, then drag it into the toolbar. gDocsBar will create a new document out of whatever you’ve highlighted, and preserve, as much as possible, the formatting and links.

(Credit:
gDocsBar.com)

The other new feature that power users are going to enjoy is templates. You can take any document you’ve made, or create a new one, and set it up to be a template in Google Docs. This will likely come in handy to spreadsheet junkies who repeatedly use a particular form or document with formulas built in. Using templates would save you some of the hassle of copying and pasting over the data from an existing spreadsheet and doing it again.

You can read more about the update on the gDocsBar blog. If you’ve got an earlier version of the extension installed, click on Tools > Add-ons then click the “check for updates” button.

Make and re-use templates in Google Documents and Spreadsheets with the gDocsToolbar.

Like two teenagers trying to figure out if they like each other, Yahoo and Microsoft are back at it again, trying to determine if a relationship can work. In Wednesday’s edition of the Daily Debrief, I spoke with CNET News.com’s Ina Fried about this latest round of talks and who is more desperate for the partnership.

commentary

The problem? It won’t run on my iPhone:

In sum, the news is bittersweet. Mobile Firefox is coming, but it’s deployment will be hobbled (for me) by Apple.

For the
iPhone, Apple’s licence can not install software to have an interpreted language. But Firefox includes JavaScript, which makes it legally impossible to carry on the iPhone….For Android, Webkit is integrated into the OS, and only Java applications can run. And Firefox is not written in Java. So that’s why [Fennec will not run on Android]. However, in both cases, things may change in future, but it does not depend on Mozilla.

It will be hugely disappointing if Apple forces the world into its Safari browser. I like Safari and used to prefer it (until CNET forced me to use Firefox, much to my belated delight), but I’d prefer to use Firefox on my mobile device, just as I do on my
Mac. Long term, Firefox is going to be where the innovation is.