April 18, 2007

wfzimmerman's review: "Another prescient title from O'Reilly. A historical memento of the beginning of an Internet era."
O'Reilly Media, Inc. (2002), Paperback, 264 pages
tags: first edition, blogging, computer books, tech fun

wfzimmerman's review: "Old school -- very cool."
J. B. Lippincott (1944), Hardcover
tags: first edition

Official Google Blog

To that end, we are truly excited to announce our acquisition of DoubleClick. DoubleClick provides a suite of products that enables agencies, advertisers, and publishers to work efficiently, that will enable Google to extend our ad network and develop deeper relationships with our partners.

Chomp! Pac-Man eats Doubleclick.

Official Google Blog: We’re expecting

Well, we tried to keep it a secret as long as we could, but to be honest, we’ve been dying to tell you about the bun we’ve got in the oven. We’ll soon be welcoming a new addition to the Google Docs & Spreadsheets family: presentations.

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. Now students, writers, teachers, organizers, and, well, just about everyone who uses a computer can look forward to having real-time, web-based collaboration across even more common business document formats.

Our due date is this summer. We promise to share family photos just as soon as we can.

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Why is this an awful idea? Because Google knows better. Google, which prides itself on its technical savvy, is wantonly ignoring the well-documented deleterious effects of the “powerpoint culture” on organizational culture and, let’s face it, rational thought.

Strictly a “me too” business decision. Google would be doing the world more of a favor if it deleted *.ppt from its index.

Technorati Tags: Google, powerpoint, Google Presentations, Tonic Systems