Hostile Takeovers Lead To Hostile Behavior

ahem PeopleSoft Oracle

Brain Drain at Microsoft et al.? The corporate hiring picture looks to be picking up--at least if Google has anything to say about it. That seeker-of-all-stuff-search-related has raided the ranks of Sun, BEA and Microsoft according to this NY Post report. Most interesting of late is Google's snag of Joe Beda, one of Microsoft's lead developers (not the lead, as he points out in his blogged correction to the Post story) of Avalon, the promised Microsoft presentation services "pillar" of Longhorn. Longhorn--well the client version anyway--lost one of its promised three pillars when WinFS slipped into the future. The other leg or pillar is Indigo. Maybe Microsoft should start using metaphor police. The world knows that any structure with three supportive legs becomes unstable when one disappears. Interestingly, MSDN is now touting the two remaining pillars. The O'Reilly Windows Devsite has a good description of the original three pillars.

Beware of Vendors Offering Freebies. At least one pundit advises caution when it comes to believing all you hear about "freebies" in and around the open-source realm. David Berlind says that the "freely deployable" Express version of Sybase ASE really does sound too good to be true.