• The Web apps will be free if you have a Windows Live account.  However, they will feature ads.
• The apps will feature “easy viewing and lightweight editing”, meaning you’ll probably have to rely on desktop apps to create documents first, then upload them to the Web.
• The Web apps will work with IE, Firefox and Safari, but not Chrome. (Take that, Google!)
• Eventually all the Web apps will feature real-time collaboration, so two people can simultaneously edit the same doc.

Is there anything here that would make me want to switch from Google Docs or Zoho? In a word, Nah.

Win7 is a breath of fresh air after Vista. Why are companies so skitterish about it?

“Forty-two percent said their biggest reason for avoiding Windows 7 was a ‘lack of time and resources’. That dovetailed with another part of the survey, which found that 35 percent had already skipped upgrades or delayed purchases to save money. But there were reasons other than money for staying away from Windows 7. Another 39 percent of those surveyed said they had concern about the compatibility of Windows 7 with existing applications.”

Lack of time and resources to upgrade the OS. Saving money. Compatibility issues. Now who’s been talking about addressing these problems lately? Right, I remember now … Google.

“The paper’s ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, said in a blog post that ‘reduced traffic played a big role’ in the decision. Fred Hiatt, the editorial page editor of The Post, told The City Paper that ‘his traffic had gone way down.’”

IMHO much of Froomkin’s problem stems from the fact that he was a one-trick pony. He made his rep by attacking the Bush Administration. In hindsight, I guess it was inevitable that his page hits would go down after the inauguration in January.

But not me. I love everybody. OK, maybe not Microsoft all that much. But everybody else. So spread the love and help me with my page hits.

This title provides useful guidance, practical advice, relevant statutes, and case law for addressing school security and safety issues. Topics include interviewing children, identifying volatile situations, and techniques for intervention. Additional administrative tools include expertly drafted checklists on issues from hiring procedures and attendance to addressing bomb threats, making this title an all-in-one resource for attorneys, teachers, principals, sheriffs, superintendents, school board members, and anyone else dedicated to making their schools safer.

“… fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web.”

And what would an OS announcement be without a shot at Microsoft?

“We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates.”

Google says their new OS will be available in about a year. I’ll convert my new netbook to GCOS as soon as I can. Where’s the link? I’m ready to download.

• Bird 1 is happily chirping away.

• Bird 2, next to him, thinks Bird 1’s chirps are laugh-out-loud funny, so he repeats them to all his friends and characterizes them as “funny bird noises”.

• Bird 3, listening to all this, is like, “Huh?”

So I got it. But I wondered how many other people would also get it. And so I devised a totally un-scientific experiment. I asked the following group of people to tell me what the comic meant:

1. Daughter, 21, pharmacy student
2. Daughter’s friend, 25, fellow pharma-geek
3. Son, 15, King of Texting
4. Wife, let’s call her “mature”, territorial Mac user
5. Boss, also “mature”, has no patience with most social networking tools
6. IT Whiz Kid, 22, annoyingly smart

Only IT Whiz Kid got it. Everyone else was clueless about what Bird 2 was saying. Which got me thinking: Twitter is touted as being so simple to use, yet Twitter-speak is still complicated for most people.  It actually reminds me of typing DOS commands back in the day. On the other hand, text-shorthand is sort of universal at this point.  Everybody got what Bird 3 was saying. So I’m wondering if Twitter will ever catch on with the general population the way SMS has.

Just a thought …