If you haven’t heard already - Microsoft has made a major leap forward towards open source. See this article from O’Reilly Radar.

I am not sure if the right words are “leap forward towards open source”. I think it is more of an acceptance of open source. There are far too many applications, OS, products on open source. From a pure ecnonomics MS is never going to be able to compete with the price point that open source provides - free or near free. And no matter what, the legions of open source programmers are not going away.

I am a very happy open source user. While I haven’t donated money back to any open source projects (when I went to give OpenOffice some money they would accept only PayPal), I have become a huge proponent of open source and am regularly recommending it to my customers (if it meets their needs).

I am not sure what to make of the approach MS is taking with open source. You can read more about it on their new open source site. They are touting VS Studio Express edition and MS SQL Server Express editions. Which is great that those products are free and available to everyone, but the real power of open source is that the source code is available freely too (under GPL or some other open source license).

My prediction - over the coming years, most if not all the software applications will be a) hosted (which means annual subscription); and b) be available as a free basic version, along with two or three paid versions, each stair stepping the prices higher.

I have built alot of Flash presentations in my lifetime and they can be really effective at getting a point across, especially if you have a complex story to tell.

The problem was that developing those presentations either in house or outsourcing it to an agency quickly costs a lot of time and money. They were “nice to have” but always fell into the ever elusive “3rd Phase” when talking about our phased online strategy. No one ever wanted to commit the resources and budget to it.

Lately I have been marketing a lot of software and putting together an effective presentation whether it is in Powerpoint or Flash has become as important as ever. An online demonstration can help prospects a great deal when they are narrowing down their selection. The more info you can show them…the better.

So thats why I was very impressed when I came across this little tool called “Wink”. Its extremely simple to understand and use…and the best part is that its free!

You can get up and running almost instantly. You just download the application, fire it up, and press play. It will immediately start recording your mouse movements and you can narrate by simply talking into your microphone. When you are done, you can add descriptions, pictures, arrows, sounds, interactive buttons, and even links to urls to help you further tell your story. It makes putting together an effective presentation quick and easy!

What do you have to loose? Go try it out!

First off - I am a rabid Firefox fan…not because its open source (I love that too) but because its a very thin application that you can build out and customize.

Being a marketer, I find that I have rapidly accumulated a ton of tools to help me with everything from search marketing, web design, usability, social networking, and competitive research. I have way too many to list in one article - and some are more of a personal preference than practical, but I thought it would be a good place to share my favorites… and more specifically those integrated with Firefox.

Web Developer 1.1.3

Its safe to say that I use this application daily. It is the ultimate companion for any website designer/developer. This tool is so versatile that covering everything it does would be impossible to do here -it could be its own article. If I had to sum up what I use it for mostly would be for its validation ability, real time style sheet editing, visual guides, and document control. Go here to see everything this awesome tool can do…

IE Tab

I no longer open up separate explorer windows for websites and applications that only support IE (i cant believe they still exist either…) Its also great for doing some quick browser testing. A must have if you are still forced to use IE every once in awhile.

FireFTP

I have grown very close to this add on. I used to use any number of free-ware applications to ftp files into my sites, but since integrating it into my browser - I have not gone back. Its a simple yet powerful tool for those people who have a handful of websites that they want to ftp files into and don’t want to leave their browser to do it.

Rankquest SEO Toolbar and Search Status

The combination of these two add-ons are perfect for keeping track of your website and competitor websites in search engines. They offer pagerank and alexa rank in the status bar and one click access to an array of traffic details. If you want to get serious about SEO, these tools are absolutely required.

Colorzilla and Measure It

These little add-ons come in really handy when I am designing. I can click a small eyedropper or ruler in the status bar to easily get everything from website color values to pixel measurements of anything online.

Dictionary Search

If you are anything like me you probably aren’t a walking resource library and come across words every day that you don’t know their meaning. The cool thing about this little tool is that you can double click any word in a web page and instantly pull up its dictionary meanings in a small pop up window. Efficient!

Google Preview

This is a great little feature that adds a web page thumbnail to Google search listings. Its especially helpful for when you are doing multiple searches and need a quick visual to help guide your clicks.

Like I said, there are alot of others that I use - but these are the cool little ones that make my day a little easier. If you have some that you love share them here!

Luke Newton (who has his own blog here) made a good comment about my earlier post. Luke mentioned how several companies are switching over to free or open source apps.

I personally considered something similar when I had to buy my new laptop. I was thinking of going all thin client - in other words, use only hosted applications. So I would use Y! Mail or something similar instead of Outlook; use Google Apps online instead of Word/Excel. Adobe plans to come out with an online version of their product. All my work would have been done through a IE or Firefox window. However I have taken a more prudent approach. I tried out Google Apps and found it quite lacking in functionality. And my biggest problem was always on Internet connection. I did not want to be left in a lurch if I was in a spot where the Internet connection was weak.

I still like the idea though. I don’t want to carry my data around with me and worry about back ups every week and such. Maybe in a few years….

Several weeks ago when I was getting ready to buy my new laptop, I started to research what it would cost me to buy a new laptop. What I quickly realized is that in addition to buying just the laptop itself, I am going to have to spend significantly for the software - Microsoft Office, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and my favorite application Outlook; my development tools such as Visual Studio and SQL Server, anti-virus software etc. etc.

The MS Office suite costs about $500, not terribly expensive but definitely on the high side. Instead I decided it was time for me to try out OpenOffice - the open source word processing, spreadsheet and presentation authoring software. They even have a Access-like database and a couple of things beyond that. My experience has been very good so far. Not once have I had to go back and open a document or spreadsheet or PPT presentation in MS Office! I have gone out and done it just to make sure they look exactly the same - and they did every time. The user interface of the OpenOffice products is very similar to the Office XP suite of products. All the same options are available. They are pretty much in the same place an called pretty much the same thing too. Only thing I miss is the huge bank of templates that Microsoft makes available on it’s site.

I am sold on OpenOffice. I am going to give it 30 more days. If I don’t run in to any issues I am going to a) uninstall Office from my laptop, and b) make $$ contribution to OpenOffice.

MS Word –> OpenOffice Writer

MS Excel –> OpenOffice Calc

MS PowerPoint –> OpenOffice Impress`