Among the many interesting quotes in the recent Business Week Online Article regarding Microsoft’s Midlife Crisis, I found the following quote suggesting that one of the features scrapped from the initial release of Longhorn will be in the updated file system (WinFS).

In particular, it appears that WinFS will not include the ability to index and search corporate file systems.

“Longhorn will now ship with a scaled-back version of the file system. The current plan, in practical terms, means people will be able to search their PCs for documents and information related to each other, but they won’t be able to reach into corporate servers for similar files.” (link via John Battelle)

Excluding this feature from the initial release will certainly give MSFT more development time, but I also think it may be a way of pushing the features into a separate product such as SharePoint Portal Server.

Whatever MSFT’s reasons, the end result is that this exclusion provides another opportunity for Enterprise Search companies (such as Google) to get entrenched in the corporate infrastructure long before Longhorn hits shelves.

A back in my day, we surfed the net with rodents…

Via Wired News: “Back in 1992, when “yahoo” was something cowboys yelled and “ebay” was just pig Latin, the University of Minnesota developed a new way of looking at data on the Internet. Their protocol, called “gopher” after the UMN mascot, allowed archivists to present the mishmash of information in a standard format, and enabled readers to navigate documents on a world of servers using a simple visual interface.

For a while, it seemed as if gopher might open the Internet up to the nontechnical masses and usher in a new era of online communication. It very well might have, if the Web hadn’t come along and done it instead.

Mention gopher to a newcomer to the Web and you might get a blank stare. Mention it to an old-timer and you’re likely to see a nostalgic smile…”

Indeed. Before NCSA Mosaic hit FTP servers and made the WWW usable, Gopher clients/servers were all the rage.

One thing I’d like to point out that the article neglected to mention was the fact that Wired Magazine had its own Gopher Server, which existed back in the days before its web site.

After reading a bit about, Paper Airplane, my first impression is that it sounds a bit like Groove, but differs in that it’s integrated into the browser (Mozilla/FireFox currently) and built on-top of the Java JXTA and P2P Sockets framework. I haven’t tried it yet, but it seems worth a look even in its early beta state.

“Paper Airplane is a Mozilla plugin that empowers people to easily create collaborative communities, known as Paper Airplane Groups, without setting up servers or spending money. It does this by integrating a web server into the browser itself, including tools to create collaborative online communities that are stored on the machine. Paper Airplane Groups are stored locally on a user’s machine. A peer-to-peer network is created between all of the Paper Airplane nodes that are running in order to resolve group names, reach normally unreachable peers due to firewalls or NAT devices, and to replicate content.”

At work, when I evangelize the benefits of using InfoPath as a tool for structured data collection and distribution, I talk about how, IMHO, InfoPath will someday unlock all the black-box business intelligence stuffed into Excel, Word, PowerPoint et al. In addition, I mention that it’s primarily an end-user tool that doesn’t require developers to implement any of those simple form-based workflow processes that deluge most corporations with endless forest killing paper forms.

Invariably I get a response back asking if this can be done in the browser or if users need InfoPath installed on their desktop to enter data into forms. I regrettably say, “For now, the answer is yes, but I think that will change.”

Well, it has been roughly a year since I first started playing with and touting InfoPath’s virtues. Unfortunately however, it appears that a ubiquitous InfoPath runtime is still not available.

Apparently, I’m not alone with this gripe either.

Today Jon Udell quotes an anonymous InfoPath user regarding this missing element:

“I believe a primary requirement of a forms application is to make it possible for the form to be completed by a wide audience of people from whom I wish to gather data. A key driver, at least in the world of my customers, is to be able to distribute the form widely to people who aren’t necessarily connected to the network and get them to fill it in and return it. I don’t want to authenticate these people in my network. They won’t install software on their computers just to fill out my form. They don’t want to learn a new application.”
…
“There is no ability to save the form template as an ASP.NET web form.”

I think the last line is killer and doesn’t seem to be technically difficult.

For a little over a year I have been using a modified version of Julian Bond’s Google News to RSS script to pull news searches into my aggregator. I even had it pulling news feeds into a corporate intranet until the feed was deemed too “unfiltered” for corporate consumption.

If Google’s API included news (and other services such as Froogle, Groups and even Images), I, and I’m sure many-many others, would switch to the sanctioned API service in a heartbeat! Until that time, I’ll likely still use the script.

Frankly, like Julian, I’m surprised that Google hasn’t extended its API to include News and other services.

Julian Bond: “I shouldn’t really complain as I’m fairly clearly breaking their terms. However, I’m getting increasingly fed up that they don’t have an XML (RSS or Atom) output from their search results. It’s also become pretty disappointing that their SOAP API still only covers the main search engine and hasn’t been extended to support the other parts of Google.”

Clearly there’s demand as this hubbub demonstrates. Come’on ‘G’ cease with the desist letters and extend your API!

BTW, If you’ve been annoyed as I have with ./’s half-hearted RSS feed, which only includes a brief summary of each post and none of the threads, then you’ll be keen on AlterSlash’s full post Slashdot RSS feed that includes high-karma comments for each post.

Nice!