Topic: Microsoft

(The Gillmor Gang on IT Conversations) It's CES week and The Gang is joined by guests Sam Whitmore and Robert Scoble. While the old-guard media talks about the latest gadgets premiering at CES, The Gang explores what's going on behind the scenes. Will Robert defend Bill Gate's Communism remark? Is HP hedging its bets by supporting both Microsoft and Linux-based entertainment systems? What about the architecture: Will there be PCs in our living rooms, or will they just be entertainment peripherals? And will anyone buy this media-center stuff or is it really too expensive?

TiVo will take a hit as PVRs are built-into TVs. Doc reports that the FCC is well aware of what might happen and what restructuring of telcos and cable may be required when the demand side (people) become suppliers of programming. And there's a hint that cars could become open systems -- backplanes for multimedia and other devices.

Podcasting at CES? Not this year. Few seem to have even heard of it yet. (Are iPods and iTunes Apple's Roach Motel?) The Gang looks to the future and how distribution and syndication will change. Will BigMedia companies adapt? And how will the entertainment industry change when the demand side competes with the supply side for shelf space?

Scott Mace's Opening Move on IT Conversations: Scott interviews Kim Cameron at Digital Identity World. Kim leads the development of Active Directory and Microsoft's other identity initiatives. They talk about Microsoft's new Infocard initiative, which aims to provide a common identity creation and management experience on Microsoft platforms. Scott also talks with Cameron about the lessons learned from Passport, the shortcomings of today's digital certificates, federated identities, and Cameron's own blogging plans.

The Gillmor Gang: Google Desktop Search is this week's hot topic even though Doc isn't happy that it's not available on either Mac or Linux. No doubt it's a powerful personal tool, but what does it mean for IT departments? If it sneaks in at the desktop level, what about security and privacy? For that matter, what does it mean that "the application sends non-personal information about things like the application's performance and reliability to Google?"

Does Microsoft continue to have a blindspot for search? There were rumors of a pending Google browser. Is this even better for the company and for us? What's the commercial value for Google, and will Yahoo! follow suit? Finally, is GDS just a platform for additional services?

All of this plus the podcasting phenomenon on another chock-full edition of The Gillmor Gang. This week's special guests are Scott MacGregor (Mozilla Thunderbird architect) and Brendan Eich (chief architect) of the Mozilla Foundation.

The Gillmor Gang analyzes today's hot news: Microsoft will ship Longhorn in 2006 as originally announced, but without some important components. Is this good news or bad? Consider that they made the announcement late on a Friday. The Gang considers what this means for Microsoft, IT customers, open source and competitors.

Dave Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati, and Mary Jo Foley, author of Ziff Davis' Microsoft-Watch.com, join The Gang. Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, is our special guest this week.

Are the venture investors back? Are they putting money into open-source software? What about Java--is it still an important platform? Should Sun make it open source?

With special guest Mitchell Kertzman, Partner at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, the Gillmor Gang tackles these questions as well as DRM, and of course RSS.

Web services, SOAs, commodity IT and open source. Which vendors will survive and how will they do it? Why are they pushing suites when web services were all about best-of-breed components? This week's special guest is Dan Farber, ZDNet Editor.

Guest: Mary Jo Foley, author of Ziff Davis' Microsoft-Watch.com

Mary Jo Foley and Steve Gillmor talk about Microsoft.

Guests: Mary Jo Foley, Bram Cohen and Andrew Grumet talk about Microsoft, BitTorrent and RSSTV, an extension to RSS that works sorta like a TiVo.

Microsoft is sharing source code with customers, partners and governments worldwide through its Shared Source Initiative. More than 700,000 developers are now working with shared source code, covering technologies such as Windows, .NET and Windows CE. Jason Matusow, Microsoft's Shared Source Manager, discusses the effects of the open source software model and how the benefits of this model may be applied to commercial software.