Tom Purves – Product Management, Fintech & AI

# If you haven’t noticed New music PodCast is up on the podcast page. This one covers the best of the last winter season. Enjoy!

# I’m really enjoying the Good the Bad and the Queen. Some are reportedly depressed by this album, but I find tremendous inspiration in it. Just the fact that a guy like Damian Albarn a thousand years after Blur, and with the help of a bunch of legends possibly older than time itself, can decide that now, yes finally now is the time to prove himself spectacularly right. Album best listened to in sequence in it’s entirety. Stick it in your iPod.

Thanks to Mark for getting this blogswarm going. Net Neutrality is a crucial problem because of this simple fact. The only providers offering you connectivity to the network (your cable co, telco and mobile co) are the exact same companies with the most to lose by giving you equal access to services on those networks.

Now that we have IP networks, from a theoretical perspective, everything you are used to: your local phone service, your voice minutes, your 500 channels are now nothing more that artificial restrictions on your access to the greater network. Artificial restrictions that that your provider charges you every month for the privilege of keeping in place.

Here’s one more example.

The idea behind Net Neutrality is to try and ensure an open competitive environment for network services through regulation of connection and telco providers.

Note: There is still (valid) debate out there as to whether “Net Neutrality” per se is the best solution to this problem – or, if so, what exactly it means and how it should be implemented/regulated.

But that’s a debate we need to start having. (Paging the CRTC…)

I only bring this up because

1. I wouldn’t want you, dear reader, to think this blog must always be flaming Microsoft. I got nothing against them I swear. In my experience, I swear, the microsofties themselves are really nice and highly professional people. (Hi Farhan!)

2. I really think I may be the last blogger left alive still using a PC. So I feel I have some strange obligation to cover this stuff for good or bad, or else how would you ever know?

The User Interface in the new Office is just plain fantastic. It’s a radical break from the old menu driven interface, and the biggest MSOffice upgrade in the better part of 10 years. The new ribbon-based UI is an amazingly *clear* way to expose each applications features. And the new default typeface + anti-aliasing in Microsoft word makes me actually happy to anything write in it. Vista may already be falling short of expectations for MS, but watch for Office2007 to be a big success for the company – even in the face of many, and ever more compelling, online competitors.

(They do they say html rendering is badly broken in the new Outlook, but then *cough*, who cares about email, or desktop calendar apps any more?)

My advice: if you have only so much money to spend on MS products, by all means, do not go past the Windows isle, go directly to Office 2007 before you spring for the Vista upgrade.