About a year ago, Microsoft introduced the idea of something called .Net My Services — an ill-defined collection of sort-of-business-related online services. Customers didn’t bite.

Now, CNet says, Microsoft is planning to incorporate My Services into its next version of Office, its near-monopoly application bundle. (You know: Word, Excel, Powerpoint.) The company tried something similar in the current version of Office, Office XP (not to be confused with Windows XP, which is an operating system and not application software — as if Microsoft wanted you to be able to tell them apart).

Office XP has something called Smart Tags, an interesting innovation that actually gives you a lot of control over how your text is formatted. But the initial release of Smart Tags let Microsoft do things like take an address and send it to a Microsoft-owned web site that could map it, or take an e-mail address and with one click automatically link to a Microsoft-owned e-mail service. Supposedly, any vendor could write code that would send users to their own site, but guess which company had their hard-wired?

Anyway, there were predictable screams and Microsoft backed off that particular application of Smart Tags. It now looks like they’ll be back for another pass.

And speaking of nefarious, Microsoft is also in the midst of rejiggering the way it licenses software to big companies. Apparently, many companies will see their software costs jump, and an important deadline is looming. This is why Sun Microsystems has released a paid (read: supported) version of its Office-compatible application package StarOffice.

StarOffice had been free, but without manuals or real support. Corporations have a hard time dealing with free software — and with reason. If you build your business around a piece of software, it’s important to know a) who it’s from, b) that it’ll be around tomorrow. Sun’s charging even the nominal $79 indicates that StarOffice may actually become a business — and apparently, clients are sniffing around. It’ll be interesting to see what happens.

From CNN:

The carrot is to return to its roots when it goes on sale in what’s said to be its true colour of purple this summer.

Growers say they have dug up the vegetable’s original colour and will revert to the new hue this summer for the first time in Europe in five centuries.

It’s not April 1. I checked.

One slow July 4 weekend when I was with UPI, the Hartford, CT bureau produced a story about a farmer who had grown a crop of red white and blue pickles. They’d picked the story from a local weekly. The regional bureau in Boston thought this was a terrific story and made it available to all UPI clients in New England, as well as alerting the national and international desks in New York.

While those desks were pondering this item, the Photo desk realized that they really need a picture of these pickles to move on the wire. So Photo asked Boston, which asked Hartford, which got on the phone to the weekly, which got on the phone to the stringer who wrote the original article: the UPI Photo desk in New York thinks this is a terrific story and they want a picture to send to their clients around the world.

You’re k idding, the stringer said. It was a put-on. Who the hell believes you can grow red white and blue pickles?

The retraction stories were entertaining.

And somehow, no one got fired.

This is just way cool. My friend Mike Elgan found the world’s smallest metronome — the Korg MetroGnome.

It’s a bud headphone that hangs in your ear. Weighs two-tenths of an ounce. Won’t bug the neighbors or other musicians.

I have no idea how well it works, but the gadget value is off the scale.

From The New York Times:

Dr. Hugh Francis Hicks, a dentist whose fascination with light bulbs is said to have begun when his mother tossed one into his crib and culminated in his owning 60,000 bulbs, died on May 7 in Baltimore. He was 79.

<snip>

Not infrequently, patients had to wait as he welcomed people interested in seeing what he identified as the biggest and smallest light bulbs in the world ÷ to say nothing of the floodlights used in an Elvis Presley movie or the headlamps from Hitler’s Mercedes-Benz.

The dumb bastards killed another one. PC Computing is finally dead. Ziff killed it yesterday.

PCC had been troubled from the start, about 10 years ago. It began as a technology magazine that was more about computing than computers — a difficult distinction that company execs and advertisers didn’t get. That iteration lasted not very long at all.

Lesson learned, PCC re-invented itself pretty much every year to 18 months, becoming the magazine for the latest buzzword. This required the circulation — which eventually reached 1 million — to constantly churn, since readers who cared about laptops may well not care about multimedia. As a place to catch excess ad dollars floating around the market, however, it worked brilliantly. Big circ, constantly changing market looking for visibility, perfect. Replacing the circulation was expensive, though, and the title never made much of a profit.

Editorially, it was quite good. Bright layouts, strong voice, the least geeky by far of all the major titles. But one was never entirely quite sure what the magazine was about.

Things reached a nadir about two years ago. Ziff Davis, which was then owned by Softbank, agreed to sell to the investment bank Willis Stein. Between the agreement and the actual sale, and apparently without consultation with the new owners, some genius decided to change the name and focus of the magazine. PC Computing became Smart Business, which was a problem because there already was a Smart Business magazine.

Instead, PCC became “Smart Business for a New Economy,” and then “Ziff Davis’s Smart Business.” As the title might suggest, if you read that far, it was a New Economy magazine. Except it wasn’t. Not really. It was sort of a cross between PC Magazine and Business 2.0, and may have turned out to be to techie for business types and too soft for techies.

But the real problem with the mag wasn’t editorial. It was the lack of a core identity. There was, finally, no There there. Screw with a product enough and people will eventually turn away.

Jim McGee, an entrepreuneur and professor at the Kellogg School of Management, has some interesting comments about this item, which ran here on the 12th. The crux:

Certainly in learning settings it’s nice if someone knows something to get the ball rolling, but it isn’t necessary. I’d argue (naturally) that the scientific method is essentially a set of rules for how to argue about things you don’t understand in order to understand them better.

Hard to disagree. Perhaps where we’re getting hung up is in the interesting difference between “understanding” and “knowing something about.” I’d suggest (argue? heavens, no!) that “understanding” proceeds from “knowledge,” and it’s damned near impossible to reach the former without first acquiring some of the latter.

On this day, May 15, in 1911, Standard Oil is ordered to break up.

Moi? I have no point.

William Grimes of The New York Times asks the right questions:

1. Why does espresso in New York City suck? and


2. Where can you get a good cup?

Good food writing is so much better than good technology writing, it makes me want to weep.

My colleague Mitch Wagner (who provided me the tools to program the e-mail dialog over on the right) has a good take on the collapse of RealNames — a not-so-great idea that finally cratered.

Of particular interest is the CEO’s weblog painting Microsoft as the villain. It’s a role that Microsoft is particularly well suited for, and the weblog has been a huge instant hit over the last couple of days. But read Mitch’s piece, which observes that not even Microsoft can save a bad idea.

FCC Chairman Michael Powell had an op-ed piece in the Washington Post yesterday, challenging all parts of the TV industry step off the curb and do their part to adopt digital television. He suggested, quite rightly, that all piece of the industry — programming, transmission, and receivers — have been unwilling to commit unless someone else goes first. Powell’s suggestion: “for all the industries to link arms and take one step forward — together.”

How sweet. But what he left considerably less than explicit is what he plans to do to should the industry not be cajoled. After all, the broadcasters got public spectrum to broadcast DTV for free, and set manufacturers and transmission equipment builders stand to profit hugely from digital retrofits. Given all the merger-and-acquisition activity in the media industry over the last five years, maybe this is one more place where Wall Street is paying more attention to The Deal than The Product.