The Weekly Round-Up: 16.04.2004

To begin with, many thought it was an April Fool's joke.

Google's new Gmail service promised free 'email for life' with a gigabyte of online storage - hundreds of times that offered by rivals.

Were they mad? Just thinking about the sheer number of terabytes of data required was a dizzying experience, particularly for those people selling enterprise storage solutions.

Then it turned out it was the real deal – much to the relief of silicon.com and countless other news sites who had covered it as a straight story (see here).

The 1 April launch was just a clever bit of marketing aimed at provoking debate about whether the service was real or a hoax. And it worked.

However, a few days later it became clear that the privacy conditions of the service were making a lot of people quite upset.

Then it turned out that the name of the service - Gmail - had made an entirely different group of people upset too.

In fact the only people who seemed genuinely pleased by the news are lawyers. Unhappy people make for happy litigation.

Let's take a moment to skip gaily through all the melancholy.

First, there are the privacy advocates. They're not pleased because the free email service is subsidised by advertising.

No problem there, except the service searches for keywords in 'private' emails and adds adverts it thinks are relevant to the context of the message.

In addition, there's the issue that emails are never actually deleted.

The service states in its terms and conditions: "Residual copies of email may remain on our systems, even after you have deleted them from your mailbox or after the termination of your account."

Meanwhile, London-based investment research outfit Market Age is claiming it owns the "Gmail" trademark and fully intends to keep it.

The firm claims around 1,000 customers, representing some 300 banks, have signed up for its online service - of which "Gmail" is a core product.

One of Market Age's execs checked with the US patent and trademark authorities and found the Gmail name hadn't been registered by Google. Seven hundred dollars later it was the research firm's trademark.

Whoops.

Google has already stated it will reconsider its stance on the various privacy debates (see here), despite receiving encouraging news from UK courts that Gmail is set to get British clearance (see here).

However, while the privacy debate could be resolved with consultation with beta users and lobby groups (and their lawyers) and the Gmail name could be licensed from Market Age, this ultimately hasn't been great publicity for the groovy company everyone loves to love.

Especially as it creeps towards a possible IPO later this year.

Failing a successful resolution of the various sticking points, Google's chiefs might take a leaf from the Microsoft PR book of practical japery and pretend Gmail was just a big April's Fool after all (see here).

In which case silicon.com ends up looking daft for running a hokum story, we're all stuck with paltry storage limits on our webmail addresses and Market Age has spent its Xmas party kitty on a duff US trademark.

But at least everyone's happy. Except the lawyers...

Romantic, ode-spouting midget John Keats once wrote of art: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

It's clearly a sentiment that IT managers subscribe to as they've been declared one of the UK's most aesthetic categories of professional.

According to the latest research commissioned by Lexmark, IT managers came top of those polled on a series of questions on classical art, with most successfully identifying Monet as an Impressionist and Michelangelo as a Renaissance man.

However, IT professionals weren't too hot on modern art. Could this be indicative of a more refined aesthetic sensitivity?

IT staff also lose out to builders when it comes to identifying Jackson Pollock, which is odd considering the striking similarity to Pollock's trademark squiggly paintings and the myriad cables spewing across the floor of some server rooms.

Overall, IT professionals came in second place behind accountants, who clearly escape the notorious drudgery of their profession through an appreciation of artistic loveliness of all sorts.

But the less said about healthcare workers the better: four per cent thought Rory Bremner was an Impressionist painter.

What a bunch of Pollocks...

To listen to Sun CEO Scott McNealy over the past 10 years or so you'd get the impression he didn't think too highly of Microsoft.

Take his description of the software giant as "the beast from Redmond" and "the evil empire".

Commenting on Microsoft's efforts to entice developers to .Net, he said: "You can take the offer from the dark side. The first hit of heroin is free."

Meanwhile, he rechristened Ballmer and Gates as "Ballmer and Butt-head". Not much ambiguity there.

(You can enjoy an extended list of McNealy's outbursts, as well as a few Ballmer rebuffs here)

But having heard him speak at the joint Sun-Microsoft press conference announcing their $2bn hatchet-burying deal, those present could be forgiven for thinking the years of animosity had just been some elaborate, over-long dream.

Much like the famous scene in Dallas where Pamela Ewing wakes up and finds previously-thought-to-be-deceased-husband Bobby in her shower - except in this case it's Steve Ballmer.

The press conference was surreal. Ballmer beamed and boomed and McNealy stammered and faltered as they spoke about their long friendship. And then swapped shirts.

(Signed hockey shirts, not the ones they were wearing - the cumulative shock of the latter would probably have finished the assembled journalists off.)

Ballmer claimed the settlement, which honours their "mutual interest in intellectual property", was initiated by McNealy.

And hadn't everyone known, asked McNealy, that the two men had been friends way, way back when they grew up together on the mean streets of Detroit?

The deal settles the outstanding lawsuits between the companies and sets out a 10-year commitment to working together on interoperability (see here).

There was still more good news for some 3,300 Sun employees who are about to spend a lot more time with their family in return for a 100 per cent pay cut.

Those employees still left at the company may be left wondering what the hell just happened.

The blog of one Sun staffer highlighted the loss of corporate identity - if the company had now joined forces with its bitterest enemy, what did it now stand for?

On a related note, analysts think the game may be up for McNealy. Can he continue to front a company that has changed its philosophy so dramatically (see here).

After all his talk of "evil empires" and the threat of the "dark side", did Scott just lost the will to ignite his light-sabre?

The IT world is going to be a duller (though considerably more interoperable) place from here on in...

An online bidder in China has paid an astronomical amount of money for a 'lucky' mobile phone number.

The buyer has paid nine million yuan (a cool $1.1m) for the number on a Chinese auction site. The deal was confirmed this week, after around 70 bids were received for the number.

The number in question - 135 8585 8585 - apparently has a similar pronunciation in Chinese to "let me be rich, be rich, be rich, be rich".

Which sounds a bit like spending a couple of million pounds on the National Lottery in an attempt to win the jackpot.

Of course his luck may be about to change when you consider the following:

1. He has a vast disposable income

2. He's not afraid to spend ludicrous sums of money on 'luxury' goods such as lucky phone numbers

3. The world and his dog now knows his phone number.

The Round-Up's guessing that if you call now you'll probably get through to his answer machine...

And finally this week, take a moment to vote in our latest poll, where we ask you to choose a leading industry figure you’d like to share a beer with.

The early voting in our virtual drinking den indicates that the chap nursing a warm half in the corner by himself is SCO's Darl McBride.

The man obscured behind the celebrating Ballmer and Gates at the bar utterly failing to get served is Scott McNealy.

Meanwhile Larry Ellison is telling Linus Torvalds that while he might have received more votes than him so far, his wife is far prettier and his jet plane is much nippier than the open source guru's.

On current voting, Apple's Steve Jobs is the man getting lots of cider (what else?) bought for him - it must be that 'reality distortion field' working:

"Isn't it your round, Steve?" "I think you'll find it's yours." "But didn't I get the last... because I thought... oh right... same again then, Steve? "Good man."

Cast your vote here.

After that, why not take a moment to browse the headlines of the week?

Best of the rest of the week...

Good cause of the week: Will's Web Watch: Give us your money
Go on, go on, go on, go on....

Stupidest directive of the week: 'Porn spam must be labelled as such': FTC
Yep, that'll work. Now go and stand in the corner...

Hot topic of the week, part one: Google to keep top-ranking anti-Semitic websites
Right to free speech or just plain insensitive…?

Hot topic of the week, part 2: Websites failing disabled surfers
80 per cent of websites are "next to impossible for some disabled people to use..."

Least celebrated birthday of the week: Spam: 'Happy' tenth birthday
But why are there 419 candles on the cake?

Depressing snapshot of the state we're in of the week: Brits mad for latest tech – and one in 20 get it by fraud
Scamming insurers for latest mobile phone now national pastime, binge drinking second...

Déjà vu story of the week: Microsoft may be illegally entering search market, says US
Nothing to see here, just a glitch in the Matrix...