xmz - Xavier Muñiz’s weblog |

It’s said that we are living an information revolution, just like the industrial revolution of two hundred years ago, and this revolution is affecting the way we look at the media, the entertainment, the society overall, and of course, the productivity.

In the IT world (IT is a concept that was born to the information revolution) this is kind of a cycle looking to benefit the productivity: We achieve great technological developments motivated on the need for better tools to manage more information, and the data flow becomes wider every day because we can deal with more loads of data. Then, if we can manage and understand more information, we can manage more resources to do more things.

The personal computer clearly has played an important role in this cycle during the last years, and there are just a few smart men leading this development, like Bill Gates.

I don’t say Bill Gates is the author (or the big hero) leading the modern phase of the information revolution, but I think that much of the world as we know it today is the consequence of his great and early vision.

Bill Gates co-founded and during the last 30 years has conducted the company that defined how is composed the modern office desktop, and much of the automated business processes. He thought computers would be in near every place, and he acted as a facilitator to reach that idea.

He is a dreamer, and when his dreams have not been reached, he certainly has transformed the world in that hope.

The work he is doing now in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is remarkable; now he is following other dreams, those of a mature Bill Gates compromised with the part of the world that could not evolve on his past enterprise; that’s an example we all should take too.

Here’s to you Bill, thanks for your vision and your passion.

I’m talking about the press conference given by Apple yesterday, when full iPhone support for Microsoft Exchange OTA sync (a-la Windows Mobile) was announced.

There are some users (myself included) on the consumer side with necessities from the corporate world: Instant push email and instant calendar and address book sync, who surely would be jumping to the iPhone and leaving Windows Mobile devices and Blackberries back.

The only missing piece for the corporate ecosystem on the Mac side, is truly and reliable iCal and Exchange integration. Some dreamers think Apple could bring Exchange support to iCal, just as they did with iPhone, but I think this is less than improbable because:

1. There’s already an Exchange client on the Mac: Microsoft Entourage.
2. Apple said they licensed ActiveSync technology from Microsoft, and that makes me think they are paying a royalty to Microsoft on each iPhone sold. I don’t think they want to do the same for every Mac.

So we’ll have to stick to our current solutions and wait (Groupcal: Will you work someday on Leopard? Will you do it right?), and who knows, maybe I’m wrong; some days ago nobody thought the iPhone would replicate Windows Mobile devices’ friendship with Exchange.

Maybe it’s about time for my Treo 750 to prepare for an early retirement. Well, of course I have to wait for the iPhone to come to México in a legitimate way… and with 3G… and with bluetooth network sharing… and… bah.