The big thing for me in Apple’s announcements yesterday- the new box is nice, and the new ipod is fun, but to me the significant and interesting announcement is that Apple is continuing to replace Office.
I find it fairly hard to be jealous of proprietary software developers. By and large, I love what I do and I particularly love hacking around with a big, fun group of community folks. But I have to say that right ATM I’m jealous of the Apple people. Specifically, I’m jealous of their very ballsy approach to MS. They currently have the confidence (arrogance?) to not just attack microsoft’s lock-in jewels (IE and Office) but to do it by going simple and offering a radically different experience. (Seth’s mention of Office hints in this direction in an MS context, without mentioning that Apple is effectively doing this.) Firefox is headed in that direction (without the good OS integration, so… exactly how far it is going is debatable :) but OpenOffice is not, and it seems like while Abi and Gnumeric are going lighter, they aren’t really doing anything terribly different yet. Sadly, even if they did, it seems unlikely most of the distros would have the guts to seriously push it- note what the distros have all done with Epiphany. Apple is afforded this arrogance, of course, by making lots of cash and having Office standing by. We have no such luck. So, yeah, I’m jealous of this.
WRT the GUADEC CFP… after the success of the micro-talks and BOFs at the Summit, I’ve decided I’m not going to submit any full talks. I will however submit three BOFs, two with associated 10-20 minute introductory talks. I think we need a GUADEC that is more interactive and more fun, and less ‘I’m sharing my expertise from on high’, so I’m going to submit stuff that follows that personal guideline.