Wednesday, June 20, 2007

A little background info is in order. A couple of months ago Google made a confidential complaint against Microsoft to the Justice department over Microsoft’s indexing software. Google’s complaint was that Microsoft doesn’t make it easy to turn off the default indexing software in Vista (“Instant Search,” which allows you to search your hard drive) if you chose to use a competitor’s product like Google Desktop. So you would be wasting system resources by running 2 indexing applications.

Last week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that Google’s claims were “baseless”. Well it seems that Microsoft and the Justice department have come to an agreement and will make changes to Vista that will allow users to select a third party application as the default search program. This update will be available for testing by the end of the year.

Google has bought Zenter, a company that provides software for creating online slide presentations, as Google says. Already, Google’s Gmail includes a web-based PowerPoint preview feature, and Google said they want to go live with a web-based presentations editor by this summer. The Zenter homepage doesn’t reveal much anymore: it’s mostly blank, reading “Google has acquired Zenter.”

Another day, another acquisition... it’s interesting how Google’s snapping up several presentations-related companies (Tonic came before)... or can we have reason to believe Google is just removing competition (or clearing the field from acquisition candidates for larger competitors)?

[Logo via TechCrunch.]

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