With ChromeOS, Google is betting the sever farm on a new model of computing that leaves applications on web servers and trades power for ease of use and reliability. Optimized for web work and little else, ChromeOS devices will be zippy browsers. But without the ability to run native applications, ChromeOS devices may not have the necessary power and flexibility users need to produce web content. If this is the model Google sees for the Internet's future, the web will be a quiet place.

In two days, IBM will have finished preparations to transition all of its employees away from Microsoft's Office suite to their own version of the OpenOffice.org suite, Lotus Symphony. By Monday, every IBM computer will have Symphony installed, and the company will begin creating and sharing only open format documents. The move marks the most significant shift away from Microsoft's de facto standard office suite and proprietary document format by a single company, and—if well documented and supported—could help many other businesses do the same.

Note: The following article was originally written for Communicate or Die - the labor and technology blog run by Prometheus Labor Communications.


The Communication Workers of America just released their 3rd annual Speed Matters report on broadband upload and download speeds by state across the U.S. Like their last report - that I wrote about in these pages a while back - this year's report makes the rather obvious case that America needs better and faster broadband internet coverage. They indicate that we're only number 28 in the world in average internet connection speed - still a shockingly low number considering that the internet was primarily created by the American military together with American research universities with public money.

The French Constitutional Council's recent decision against that nation's "HADOPI" Internet copyright law, which required ISPs to disconnect users after three purported copyright violations, naming Internet access a universal human right and bringing France into alignment with the rest of the European Union, which already rejected such "three strikes" laws last month.