The month's subscriber (not newsstand edition) has an article profiling 37signals. This is the link to the online version.

Quoted: 37signals isn't shy about dispensing one thing without charge: advice to small-business owners. On the company blog, Signal vs. Noise, Fried shares what he's learned about the art of streamlined teamwork with more than 65,000 readers. First, kill all your meetings; they waste employees' time. "Interruption is the biggest enemy of productivity," he says. "We stay away from each other as much as we can to get more stuff done." Use asynchronous communication and software instead to exchange information, ideas and solutions. Next, dump half your projects to focus on the core of your business. Too much time and effort are wasted on second-tier objectives. Third, let your employees decide when and where to work so they can be both efficient and happy. As long as their fingers are near a keyboard, they could as easily be in Caldwell, Idaho, as in Chicago.

An excellent response on TechDirt to the unviersal Google library article I dotted earlier today from the New Yorker.

This is a better and much more detailed article on the Google strategy to enter the enterprise market. I've excerpted one of the interesting bits below.

Right now, it looks like the largest "Achilles's heel" would be that the Google apps work only when a user is online. You need to export to Word, Excel, etc. to work on something locally. It's only a matter of time, however, before web constraint becomes a moot problem. Web penetration continues its advance and will acheive ominpresence for the vast majority of us within the next several years.

Couple the web presence argument with the fact that I can work locally on all of my docs using free Open Source apps like OpenOffice and we're already talking about free solutions available today which will do the work that more than 90% of us actually need it to.

The article points to Microsoft's weakness being in collaboration. I have to say I think that Microsoft has software that has tons of collabrative features that nobody knows how to use or which force bad choices (such as forcing a browser) on people. At work, we use Sharepoint for sharing a lot of docs. It works pretty well and thank heavens we have someone in the office (MIke), who knows the product really well and can show us all of the features that are in there as we need to use them.

As a Firefox user, Sharepoint's collaborative functions don't work (they require activex in ie). I had to download an extension for it to work there. On my mac, the extension is not available - so that just sucks.

I think Microsoft should spend some time crafting some new interfaces for the existing products. Put different faces on it for different markets and solve particular use cases really well. How hard would it be for them to cobble together a little Sharepoint, Outlook, and Project into one of the most kick-ass pieces of Program Management out there? You could get people buying more of the product they already own if you enable all of it online in some nice interfaces! Think 37signals and you have enough fun software to build for many millions of end-users.

Quoted: Google's plans include prompting people who send Microsoft Office documents using Gmail to translate those files into Google's formats for editing on Google.com, presumably in a forum where ad space is up for sale. Gmail messages that include attached files currently prompt users with links to download the documents or view them on the Web.

A very simple slide show breaking down how Google's Marissa Mayer like to get things built.

Google is rumored to be working on an API that will allow sites to incentivize their users to create content by kicking back to them using adsense...

Interesting... this is how they made the Opera browser free...

In light of the fact that Microsoft is having their all-hands meeting a few hundred yards away from where I work today, this is interesting. Google's ambitions are certainly becoming more clear by the day...

Quoted: Microsoft's nightmare inches closer to reality | Ten years ago, execs feared the Internet could become a software platform that threatens Windows. They were right. |