EcoblogIT

Garr Reynolds highlights the different presentation style of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Even if you can't ever see yourself presenting anything to an audience, you should read this. It brilliantly highlights the problem with Powerpoint, or rather, the problem with the way that most people use the tool.

Remember, if you're presenting, you want your audience to listen to you, not to read what's behind you on a screen nor to be distracted by whacky effects.

ZDnet report that Discount-licensing.com have a successful business model in selling second hand volume licenses by exploiting the ability to transfer a perpetual software licence from a downsizing company to an active one. This is legal as long the terms and conditions of the relevant software vendor (in this case Microsoft) are adhered to.

What Ozzie thinks of Microsoft's web strategy

The leaked memo is neatly summed up on ZDnet.

Kahuna

Microsoft's announcement the other day included a preview of Kahuna - the codename for the AJAXed version of Hotmail. Microsoft are a bit late to the AJAX game with Google claiming to have popularised the technique with Gmail (Google Mail in the UK!) and Yahoo! having already delivered an AJAXed version of Yahoo! web mail. The live.com portal page looks like a beta of the alpha start.com page and it's still not clear exactly what will be live - Outlook 2003 is one product, certainly, but what else is not apparant.

Office speculation

Specualtion is mounting that an announcement from Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie today will be about a hosted form of Office. Google and Sun recently skirted around the issue of OpenOffice on the web, but now it seems that Google are hiring programmers to further develop OpenOffice....

The big plus for Microsoft in having bits of Office online is that it could help counter piracy. It's not clear whether this will be the case, though, or whether you'll just be able to store files using a Microsoft service online.

It doesn't seem like it would be in Microsoft's interest to move people away from an overbloated desktop, but having web-based word processing and spreadsheets would certainly make it far easier for novices. If all you need is a browser, you don't need to know how to use XP or keep it virus-free etc. etc - Microsoft could run a cleaning service at their end.

We'll know tomorrow.