Vultures are circling

The headlines are grim:

• Palm teeters

• Palm at a crossroads

• Palm Circles the bowl

Seems like a long time ago when the "newness" of the Pre ushered in a wave of hope that sent Palm's stock rocketing. But sales have been lacklustre, and what went up has surely come right back down.

And so, I mourn.

Google Wave - I get it

Collaboration is a remarkable thing. I remember trading hockey cards as a kid - at recess, in the schoolyard, we'd huddle, whip out our collections wrapped in elastic bands, and start shuffling through them, looking to trade multiples of one player for cards we were lacking, so we could say we had every one of the 1978-79 New York Islanders. As one kid started shuffling his doubles, kids would should "got'im, got'im got'im, NEED'im!" and then the bartering would start as that kid shuffled through his for a card the other kid needed. There was jostling, and no adults chaperoning the mayhem, yet, like a stock market trading floor or a fish market, there was order to the chaos, and in that fluid environment, deals were made and folks left the scrum better off than they came into it.

Can a piece of software possibly replicate the dynamic fluid collaborative environment. Google Wave is one more product that is trying to do so.

From one extreme to the other, both bad

Palm has sent a cease and desist order to Tealpoint to stop distributing its nifty launcher TealOS. I'm not the only one absolutely mystified by such a move. This is outrageous on several levels, and here's why.

I hate Lotes Notes

I hate Lotus Notes.

I will admit that it isn't the fault of the developers, not totally, anyway. After all, they'll be the first to admit that it was not designed as an email client first, which is how most people (especially those like me who hate it) interact with it.

Searching for sympathy, I found the website Lotus Notes Sucks (site was taken down; here's an old copy of it). It's a shame that the creator of the site appears to no longer be updating it. What is available on the site, however, is still sufficient to justify the simmering hate that users feel when they are unwittingly subject to the madness that is Lotus Notes.

My take on the Pre? I'm keeping my Treo 680 for a bit yet

OK, we've seen, we've heard, we've liked what we saw...and yet...and yet...

I can't quite wrap my head around this new paradigm...