Which Word Processor Do You Use? Does it Matter as Much?

Microsoft Word is the word processor of choice, but GoogleDocs now is used by 20 percent of users while OpenOffice is favored by 18 percent of users, according to a poll taken by 535 ReadWriteWeb readers. About seven percent of users reported a text editor, such as Microsoft's "Notepad," is the word processor of choice.

A couple of things got my attention here. Respondents were asked which text editor they "mostly used." My immediate impulse was to say "Microsoft Word." But then I thought about it. Looking at the text entry I do in a day, the number of occurrences is dominated by email messages, not an actual "word processor" application.

The other reflection is that, as a heavy blogger, I now use "notepad" or text editor apps, or the actual text entry areas of blog software more than the word processor itself. In fact, the clear pattern is use of email, notepad and blog word processing tools every day, Word for the few days a month when I actually prepare long-form magazine articles.

Add in other forms of text entry, such as short message service and traditional "word processing" doesn't get used, except for preparation of print magazine stories. All the other text is SMS, notepad, email or blog software. As I am on a temporary "get less connected" jag, I avoid starting up my IM clients. But that's another contender for text creation and editing.

I guess I hadn't really thought about it much, but my use of text tools has changed dramatically over the past few years, driven by blogging. I suspect most of us can cite similar or additional ways our use of word processing or text manipulation has changed over the past decade or so.

Cable, Internet Ad Spending Caveats

At first glance, opportunities for new providers to grab significant ad revenue generated by linear, multi-channel video would seem promising. According to Nielsen Online, about 24 percent of current ad spending goes to cable television.

So telcos ought to be able to tap a significant share of that revenue at some point, the logic would be.

The issue is that most of the cable television ad revenue is captured by programming networks, not by cable companies. Cable companies get about seven percent of their revenue from advertising.

If one looks at the share of online video ad revenue, Internet gets about seven percent. Same issue there: nearly all that revenue is earned by application providers; very little by ISPs.

250 Gbyte per Month Caps: Comcast

Comcast will cap Internet usage of its broadband subscribers at 250 Gigabytes per month starting Oct. 1, 2008. Typical users will not be liable for any hard caps, at that level. Comcast says median usage these days for its residential customers is about two to three gigabytes a month. To trigger the cap, a user would have to be watching a fair amountof video. Comcast says the cap would be hit if users watched 125 standard-definition movies.

Assuming a two-hour average movie duration, that works out to about 250 hours of streamed video, equivalent to eight hours a day, 30 days a week. That could get to be an issue at some point, but few human beings have time to watch that much streamed video and do much of anything else related to work, school, exercise or friends.

So far, the only users already "close" to the 250 Gbyte cap are less than one percent of heavy movie downloaders, one suspects. Comcast says less than one percent of its current users are "even close" to 250 Gbytes a month of usage.

EU Commissioner Proposes Billing Changes

European Union telecommunications Commissioner Viviane Reding does not like the way some mobile operators are charging by the minute rather than second for calls made while traveling between EU countries.

Mobile operators obviously don't relish the thought of new rules that would force them to bill in seconds or fractions of minutes. .

In France, Spain, Lithuania and Portugal, operators have to bill by the second, but national legislation is not practical for roamed calls, the Commission spokesman said.

The EU has already adopted a law to cap the price of roamed voice calls for three years, with the cap due to be lowered on Saturday and in August next year before the law expires in 2010. The EU is expected to renew the caps for another three years in October, and also might introduce new caps on text messaging charges when users are roaming.

EU nations and the European Parliament would have to approve the changes.

Broadband: As Good as It Gets

Competition in the wired network broadband space is currently about as good as it’s going to get for the foreseeable future, and could even backslide, according to Blair Levin, Stifel Nicolaus analyst. That accords with the thinking of analysts at the Phoenix Center, who have argued for some years that robust competition between cable and telcos, while not as good as having more facilities-based competitors, is as much as can be expected in the U.S. market, and offers the practical hope of delivering competitive benefits to users, despite hopes for more.

“Prospects for the long-heralded ‘third pipe’ appear dim and dimming,” Levin says, as reported by Telephony Online. There has been no shortage of possible contenders over the last 30 years. Wireless always tops the list. Then there are the electrical utilities, municipal networks and broadband-over-powerline technology, none of which have made much of a dent.

One wag quips that "wireless is the technology of the future, and always will be." But Clearwire appears set on building a facilities-based, national third pipe. And fourth-generation networks, overall, might shift share away from wired alternatives, many believe.

“The market is as competitive as it is ever going to be, as far as we can see," says Levin. At least on the wired network side of the ledger, that likely is true.

But Levin says 4G wireless rollouts in 2010 or 2012 could represent a significant change in the competitive landscape.

100 Mbps Wireless Broadband by 2010?

Mobile broadband could hit 100 Mbps before fiber to home access is widely deployed in many markets, according to the GSM Association. Japan and South Korea, as early as 2010, might be followed by access at those sorts of speeds in the European market by 2012.

That doesn't necessarily mean wireless broadband will be a fully-functional substitute for fixed broadband for every application. It does point out that the "race" to enhance fixed network broadband speeds is important for competitive reasons beyond the tactics of competing wired network providers.

AT&T Launches Nationwide Tech Support Business

One more example that the demarcation between "network" and "user premises" steadily is being erased, in the office or the home, AT&T has launched a nationwide "Geek Squad" or "Firedog" service for customers in all 50 States, whether they are AT&T customers or not.

The “ConnecTech” service will help consumers configure computers, set up networking, and install home theaters and mount TVs. Prices range from $69 for basic remote troubleshooting of a PC or home network support to $179 for at-home support.

Those are flat-rate prices, not per hour. It can cost $849 for a technician to mount a flat-panel TV over 32″ on a wall, connect audio and video components, conceal cables in the wall as construction allows, and demonstrate to how to use the whole system.

A simple PC set-up, where the tech hooks it up to a home network, downloads updates to Microsoft Windows and hooks up your printer will cost a flat-rate $119. An Apple Mac set up costs $159.

In the world of IP communications and digital devices, no service provider forever can ignore the need to operate on both sides of the network interface or firewall.