An Unsurprising News Day

22 Feb ’07

Today brings three three stories that are each ‘news’ only in the sense of being headlines. In each case, the news has been long expected and the headlines are entirely anticlimactic.

First, Google has formally announced its desktop application suite. Cheap, as ubiquitous as the web, packaged with an SLA and 24/7 support option, and soon, presumably, provided with a client app for use off the web. Details, well details pretty much everywhere, but you can start here, only because just about everyone else is now. Marshall Kirkpatrick notes that Techcrunch has been asking for months whether users would trust Google, given its past problems with security lapses. Better, I suppose, to leave one’s data to the laptop and perhaps let the FBI handle security. Er, well, maybe not. How about service providers to the health care industry – they have mission-critical security. Sigh. Well, what about the Government – they’re famously tight-lipped – they must have iron-clad security. Well, perhaps Google wouldn’t be so bad after all …

Next up, Apple has settled with Cisco over the the use of the word “iPhone”. In a shocking development, both now have the right to use it, on terms that are (also predictably, and perhaps by now also famously) entirely obscure (news flash: they will “explore opportunities” together).

Finally, Telus has scrapped its plan to rebrand itself as a mobile purveyor of porn. What was next, a line of Nokias with trenchcoat-shaped phone covers? Perhaps the only thing about this story stranger than its appearance was the fact that just about everyone else in the country knew before Telus itself that Telus would eventually have to dump this plan.

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