Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Microsoft is not a company renowned for helping serious competitors. However, the head of the software company's open source software lab, Sam Ramji, has said publicly in an online blog that he will help the open source Firefox browser and Thunderbird email client teams to get their products running on Windows Vista.
In fact, Ramji has said that, as an advocate for open source, he has
actually set aside office space space and make Microsoft engineers
available to the Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird teams should they
decide to take up the offer.
Mozilla has yet to reply and there is no doubt that this is an
unexpected and highly unusual offer. The rationale behind it is not
immediately obvious.
Firefox in particular has emerged as a serious threat to the dominance
of the Internet Explorer browser and continues to gain marketshare
around the world. In some places, such as Germany, Firefox is now in
the same ballpark of user acceptance. This competition is being aided
in no small way by the tight collaboration between Mozilla and Google,
which is pushing Firefox for all its worth.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer has trailed Firefox in the technology
stakes for some time. Firefox is faster, more fully featured, more
secure and has had the advanced functionality such as tabbed browsing
and toolbar search that Internet Explorer 6 has lacked.
Microsoft is now playing catchup with its latest browser IE7, which is
now in Beta 3. However, there is not much in Beta 3 that Firefox hasn't
already had for sometime in its highly successful 1.x versions. Now
Firefox is once again pushing ahead with version 2.
Some cynics might be tempted to wonder whether Microsoft wants its
engineers to meet with the Firefox team for a few days to see what they
can learn from an obviously very talented bunch of developers. Other
cynics may raise the possibility that Microsoft is actually on a
poaching expedition to see whether they can lure across the cream of
the browser development crop with the promise of fame and fortune.
Then of course, Microsoft may just want to help the Mozilla team to
integrate their products with Vista in the name of furthering the cause
of open source development. Does anyone actually believe that?
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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