With 11 years at Microsoft under his belt, it’s surprising to learn that Keith Curtis is betting on open source software to triumph over proprietary software. In his recent book, ‘After the Software Wars’, Curtis pins his hopes on harnessing the wisdom of the crowds to achieve common goals with increased efficiency, speed and less resource consumption.

Microsoft has not looked fondly at open source over the years, even claiming that free and open source software (FOSS) violated over two hundred of Microsoft’s patents. Recalling this mudslinging makes ‘After the Software Wars’ all the more ironic, as the author’s biography flies directly in the face of his Microsoft heritage.

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Several opinion-makers trying to influence President-Elect Obama’s technology policies thorough blogs. Part of the intent, no doubt, is to simply use a historic election and a public focal point to aid mass communication. But it does seem like these bloggers seem to be nurturing long-shot hopes that they’ll actually be heard. Here are three examples:

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The easiest way to predict the future, as Alan Kay said, is to invent it. Some friends of mine, over at a stealth design/innovation startup called WilsonCoLab, decided to start a site dedicated exclusively to this task at www.cloudworker.org, which beta-launched today with a neat contest (seriously flattering to have a word you coined taken this seriously!). Cool logo, eh?

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The New York Times reports this morning that Facebook is set to expand “Facebook Connect”, the controversial service that reports your activities on external sites to your Facebook profile. Facebook caused a stir a while ago when it launched this service without giving users the ability to control updates, leading to people finding out that their shopping habits were now open to their Facebook friends. While Facebook has addressed privacy issues, this move is sure to spark a wider war for ownership of on-line identity.

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Now that Microsoft has officially launched SaaS versions of Exchange and Office, they’ve begun making plans to deliver the next version of Office via SaaS as well. Microsoft’s move into the SaaS space is in some ways reactionary, as they look to fend off challenges from Zoho and Google, but it is also going to create concerns for the hundreds of companies that offer their own suites of hosted Microsoft apps.

As a recent convert to OpenOffice I’m still not sure the SaaS market for office apps is going to replace thick versions of document, presentation, and spreadsheet applications, but I do look forward to the continued ability of SaaS-based office productivity suites to enable easier document collaboration.

Over the last two weeks, I read two books on how marketing, like every other enterprise function, is changing under the onslaught of 2.0 technologies. One, Spanning Silos: the new CMO imperative, by David Aaker was a serious surprise. It underpromised and overdelivered. I felt educated. Though written in a classical, non-2.0 idiom, it is extraordinarily smart and analyzes its topic solidly. You can read my review/summary at the link above. But the other — and there is no other way to say this — just made me very very sad. It is Seth Godin’s Tribes (free audio book here).

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As Melanie posted yesterday cloudworker won the contest to replace telecommuter in the Plantronics contest. As you might know, that was my dog in the fight, so obviously I am pleased about winning. This is the beginning, not the end.

But what I am really posting about is an exciting stealth nonprofit effort, being developed by an innovation/design company, WilsonCoLab, to do more with the cloudworker idea. I can’t say much more right now, but their vision is very exciting,  and of course, I am pretty pleased that the idea inspired somebody to actually do something interesting. I am helping them launch by donating most of the prizes I won ($1500 worth, of the $2000 grand prize bundle).
So watch this space. It should be an interesting effort! And thanks all who voted. You can follow developments on the cloudworker front by keeping an eye on this page (where I am posting blogosphere reactions and additional details), or by following me on twitter.

And p.s. — the Social Media vs. Knowledge Management debate shows no signs of dying down, but I am probably not going to post more on that unless people REALLY want to hear more about that slugfest :)

To most the Internet represents a black box, it’s worked fairly well for all these years, and lots of companies are investing lots of dollars in delivering Internet (or cloud) based services, so it should work just fine forever, right? Not exactly. Nemertes just released a freely available update to our 2007 study on Internet infrastructure, this time looking at not only bandwidth and congestion issues, but growing challenges in maintaining basic connectivity between networks as the Internet struggles under the dual strains of rapidly growing routing tables coupled with decreasing availability of IP addresses. Our conclusion: by 2012 the reliability of the Internet begins to suffer. Companies basing their future on the web would be wise to educate themselves on what goes on inside the box.

At least, you are according to the most popular entry in a contest sponsored by Plantronics to find a term to replace the so-20th century “telecommuter.” According to a survey also conducted by the vendor, there are a lot of us cloudworkers out there–more than half of respondents said they work from home at least one day a week–and half of them say they are more productive when they do so. Also, 36% of knowledge workers say they’re traveling less, and 40% are spending more time in teleconferences (cloudconferences?).

The NY Times reports this morning that President-Elect Obama will likely be forced to give up his BlackBerry, which he relies on for both voice and e-mail communications. They note that he hopes to at least have a laptop on his desk, becoming the first President to have a computer in the oval office though his staff prepares clippings for him so he doesn’t spend his day reading news sites and blogs.

It’s simply unimaginable what it would be like to work without a computer in today’s day and age, especially when one is shielded from being able to use the Internet to seek out their own sources of information. We wonder why our political leaders are so isolated from the “real world” and here we are denying the leader of the free world access to the most important tool for unfiltered information gathering of this age. Hopefully President Obama will be able to find a way to stay connected in cyber-space despite the concerns over FOIA and potential subpeonas.