Lately it is kind of popular to trash Google. Very much like Microsoft, people love to complain about companies that take an important part of their daily life. Google is now an integral part of our life not only for search but for many other things. A good friend saw me convert foreign exchange on Google search and was very surprised you can do that. So here is a list of things I do in Google search which are not search related.

Looking up What’s the Time in Other Places Around the World

Living in a far away island in the pacific with friends in Europe and America, this tool is a great help.

Common pitfall – “I am not sure what to do.... let’s make it configurable”

You hear this all the time in software companies - Some business analysts, developer or product manager trying to solve a dilemma in software development by pushing the decision to the end user side. “Let’s make it configurable” seems like a get-out-of-jail free card if you can’t make you mind about colors, screen layout and many other hard choices we have to make many time when designing our software.

In an interesting blog post about New Zealand education system moving from Microsoft to open source. I have noticed that the advertisement picked for the blog post, indicates that automatic-advertisement finally developed a sense of humor:

I hope I get the same kind of advertisement and then we can have a recursive blog post.

Free software means that computer users have the freedom to cooperate with whom they choose, and to control the software they use. To summarize this into a remark distinguishing libre (freedom) software from gratis (zero price) software, Richard Stallman said: "Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of 'free' as in 'free speech', not as in 'free beer'.₁

The reality is quite different from this philosophy. Up until now open source software was, for most people, free beer rather than free speech. Well, the beer party is over, and cooperate companies have a new business model strategy called SAAS.

In one of the press conferences I attended 6 months ago, Steve Bulmer was asked “Why can’t Microsoft be cool like Apple?”

His reply was simple and to the point:

“I rather be popular than cool”

He further explained that Microsoft business strategy is to try to reach EVERYONE and not only the cool guys.

I suggest that we, as the open source community, employ the same logic:

“We rather be popular than the good and righteous”

Let me explain why we should be popular rather than right.