Early June Links

It’s been a while I haven’t posted anything here (over 15 days!) . It all of a sudden got very busy again for Ars Aperta and here I am again in early June. My apologies to you dear readers, I’ll try to make up for it this month! Some interesting links to visit for this beginning of the month:

• Excellent post by Jean-Louis Gassée (French software genius, inventor of BeOS and former Apple employee) on Microsoft’s troubled future.
• There is, in a related but previous post, some hope about that though. I tend to agree with Mr Gassée here: I simply do not buy into the whole all-cloud, no-desktop system. It simply does not work no matter how large your bandwidth is. This being said, it will be interesting to see how Microsoft’s strategy with respect to cloud services and office suite evolves. As for OpenOffice.org, you might ask… Well, that one could also end up being interesting as well. But make no mistake on that one: Fat, Monolithic clients are out.
• Great post on combining some microformats, in this case OpenID & OAuth. Microformats are extremely important in Cloud contexts and are the most pragmatic tools to fight off cloud and social lock-in by companies like Facebook.
• The UK Government promotes open data. If only we could do the same over here…
• Don’t miss Steve Job’s & Steve Ballmer’s interview on All Things Digital, starting tonight at 6 pm California time!
• Last but not least, OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 is almost out. Last RC is looking good, so be prepared to download it.