It's Toronto based so it can't be all bad
All Hail Qnext
By JACK KAPICA - Tuesday, October 4, 2005 Posted at 2:44 PM EDT
Associated Press and Canadian Press
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The big news today will come from California, where Sun Microsystems and Google are scheduled to announce a partnership that pundits speculate will amount to a full-frontal assault on Microsoft. (See Mathew Ingram's column for the story.)
I wish they wouldn't make such predictions - there have been so many such predictions in the past that a new one had become little more than a cliche.
But it could be a fascinating partnership, and one with pockets deep enough to make something happen, even if it isn't toppling the Redmond monolith.
As a hint of what's to come, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's blog of Oct. 1 mentions a series of technologies that he thinks are ripe for a future not based on Windows - among them Skype, Google Earth and his own StarOffice. "There's a resurgence of interest in resident software that executes on your desktop," he said, "yet connects to network services."
Then he added another one: QNext, from a Toronto-based company. It's a small, Java-based peer-to-peer application combining instant messaging and file-sharing (though not on a network level).
QNext is an interesting program, and could well be on its way to a bright future. And how much brighter can you get than an endorsement from Sun Microsystems' CEO just before announcing what might be a major assault on Microsoft?
E-Mail Jack Kapica at
jkapica@globeandmail.ca