Google Gears now works on my Ubuntu 8.04 installation, at least almost. For Google Docs the little green symbol appeared after I had installed Google Gears for Linux. Then I headed to Google Reader, but there the symbol for offline support did not show up.
I do not know, what is going wrong, but my Google Reader just does not support Google Gears, somehow. I will keep on trying, but at least Google Docs work. That is one step ahead.
UPDATE: Seems like currently I am blogging too fast! I just added a new feed to Google Reader, and the little pop-up for activating Google Gears for this website appeared. It seems to work perfect.

Imagine a company which produces sound cards. Their sound cards do not work properly under Windows Vista. At least not as good as they were working for Windows XP. So, there comes a young programmer and develops new drivers that actually work.

You would guess that the company offers this guy a job, right? Not so Creative. They blame the young Brazilian to “steel their goods”. Oh man, no wonder those guys make losses. If they themselves would make their products work, this young programmer could do something more “creative” in his spare time, than fixing drivers of sound cards (that should actually work out of the box).

To me it seems like Creative designed those Vista drivers with certain flaws as a business strategy, so they can sell more “premium products”, which are probably the same, just with a driver that actually works. From a legal point of view, it might be their right to “castrate” their sound cards (I am not a lawyer).

But from a business point of view I wouldn’t call it clever.

The actions of their vice president of corporate communications, Phil O’Shaughnessy, might do more harm to the company than they might help. I am not sure if all those PR guys are already prepared for a world WITH internet. Things that might have worked for the last 20 years of PR might not working so well any more. Things have changed and PR guys should learn that, I guess.

Wake up! Welcome to the 21st century!

Customers communicate worldwide. We ALL have to live with globalization. I just hope for the guys at Creative that their shortsightedness might not have a too negative impact on their business.

I am not too sure if those things are really well thought by the companies. For my part I won’t buy a sound card of this company. I don’t like how they treat people that help others to make stuff work. I am not sure how long customers will cope with practices like this.

A few days ago the guys at Synovel released Spicebird. It integrates the excellent programs Mozilla Thunderbird (email), Sunbird (desktop calendar) and Xmpp4moz (instant messaging). I am using the first two myself on Ubuntu 7.10. Well, instead of Sunbird I am using Lightning, which is integrating in Thunderbird as a plug-in. » Read the rest of the entry..