The Senate Standing Committee for Communications is currently reviewing [pdf] the Communications Legislation Amendment 2007. Microsoft had an interesting submission.

Inman Grant was Microsoft's representative at the committee hearing. She said:

Our interest in the content services bill and the current bill is to ensure that we can continue to provide our content services to consumers on a global basis on substantially the same terms and that Australia's approach harmonises with that of other jurisdictions.

This is nothing really new, it is in the self-interest of companies with global interests to avoid having to follow disparative regulations that can potentially add burden and overhead. However an earlier sentence by Grant included:

Given Australia's role as a policy bellwether in the region - particularly in the internet safety space - we believe that the precedential impact for future laws and regulations developed in the Asia-Pacific is very important and tied to the outcomes of the development of this bill.

Which exposes the lobbying strategy of companies with global interests. We have seen this with the DMCA in the United States. As the biggest economy and most politically influential country on the planet, lobbying the US for legislation can indirectly lead to law 'harmonisation' in other markets.

An aspect of US Free Trade deals has been the inclusion of intellectual property laws including DMCA like provisions. In fact, any nation that is willing to give in on agricultural quotas and harmonise with US property laws has pretty much got an FTA.

Grant's statement to the committee suggests that this strategy of lobbying influential legal systems to become 'bellwethers' for convention has indirect benefits. It should be noted that Microsoft wasn't originally included in the consultation, but I have no doubt Ninemsn was.

I don't consider it conspiratorial, however nation-states that aren't global or regional 'bellwethers' might want to bear the process in mind when making decisions.

Via cafeconleche a quote from Robert Cringley, "Bill Gates used to worry about Microsoft losing its monopoly overnight because of a technical mistake. We all laughed. We laughed because Microsoft had such financial and sales clout and had the executive suite of nearly every customer company so snowed that they seemed unassailable. But on some level Gates was correct and we've seen that proved by Google."

Which is a pretty lazy analogy. Microsoft still has its operating system monopoly. For all of Apple's success it has made very little inroads into the operating system market. Firefox is an outstanding product but it is no more than 20% of traffic on most sites.

Microsoft is still an operating system and office productivity behemoth. The only thing Google and Microsoft have in common is that they are big tech companies; but they are not in the same market. Google is an advertising reseller, while Microsoft actually sells bundled code into products. They are two different markets.

Microsoft has been trying to get into the search market with Yahoo!, but even there, it is more like Microsoft is buying Time-Warner as Yahoo! is a massive media company, not a search one.

Because Google got big so quickly it has gathered all sorts of mythical attributes in modern media. It was an innovative company, it re-created what we expect from search engines, but also managed to sustain that search functionality through a well executive advertising business model.

Then again mythos sells, in the same way that sensationalism and drama does. Lazy analogies will consistently be the domain of the writer who has to appeal to a mass audience.

What a rubbish operating system Vista is. This machine is constantly doing a run on the hard drive. I do not know why but the whole time I am using it response times are slow as the hard drive is being slammed. I have tried to remove the causes, but to no avail. This is why we never use it and choose the Macbook over it every-time. This desktop was for my business and due to having to do some windows development it was the only reason I bought this waste of money. I am sure many people love their Windows machines but I don't have the patience anymore to hunt down all the crap or to tune it so that it isn't crap. There is a reason my personal computer is a Macbook and that I develop on a Mac Pro at work. They are best of breed at the moment.

According to this article, Steve Ballmer threatened to move more Microsoft jobs offshore if US tax rates increase. The article has how Microsoft tax dodges anyway by transferring their technology through Irish subsidiaries.

I know it is intended as a political threat, but moving jobs offshore isn't an issue. Many of the Bay area companies have great difficulty competing with the likes of Google for talented tech people and as a consequence they end up paying a lot for less talent. The result is that Bay area companies open up near shoring operations in cities like Phoenix, Portland, Denver, Salt Lake City and Texas.

I am sure Washington area software companies have a great deal of trouble competing with Microsoft for talented technologists and software engineers. Microsoft sending more of their labor overseas will only open up the market to Washington area software companies.

Another issue is that what companies can send overseas, they will, and in most cases have done already anyway. The arguments become if it is worthwhile or not, not arguments over whether to do it or not. So as a threat it is really not, though I am sure some nationalist politicians who don't have libertarian economic streaks in them will quiver in their boots at the threat.

We have a legacy application that is used internally which is based on ASP.NET. It will disappear this year, which is a good thing as we are now completely a java shop and we don't have the technical expertise to fully support it or improve it. Those that are working on it - including me - are not experts in C#, instead we know enough to fix bugs and fix things but not where we can claim that we are C# developers working in ASP.NET.

Given that we have to include this system in our continuous integration and deployment process I read this with interest. Ironically the deployment of the ASP stuff has been low maintenance as the build and deployment process through MSBuild copies it directly to the IIS Server.

You might be wondering: what's wrong with using a Build Server to deploy your site? Well if you try to use Microsoft stuff completely you'll end up doing something exciting like installing Visual Studio on your Build Box.

For weblogic J2EE projects Oracle recommends that you install a weblogic server instance on your continuous integration server. When that was mentioned as a solution to me, I was horrified. Especially as you can create a weblogic client jar through scripting. What I ended up doing was using a cool tool called Jarminator and loading it up with all the jars that are in the ~/bea/modules/ directory. Using jarminator I was able to identify all the ClassNotFoundExceptions and load the jars to our nexus repository as third party jars. There is no way I wanted a weblogic install on the bamboo server it is plain inefficient and ugly.