Technology

Dearly beloved, we gather here today to mourn the loss of two pioneers in the Google hardware universe — two names near and dear to many of our hearts, and names whose final spark has now flickered and faded.

This virtual funeral honors the memory of both the Nexus and Chromebook Pixel lines of devices — the inaugural Google-branded flagship products for Android and Chrome OS, respectively. The two have now joined their cousins Google Reader, Google Lively, and Google More Messaging Services Than Any Semi-Sane Person Can Possibly Count in the severely overcrowded Google graveyard.

BARCELONA & Atlassianco-CEO this week apologized to HipChat and Stride users facing disruption as a result of a decision to discontinue the team chat apps.

The Australian software vendor sold the intellectual property for the chat assets to Slack in late July for an undisclosed fee; in return, Atlassian & which also owns a range of business collaboration tools including Jira, Confluence and Trello & will make a small equity investment in Slack.

[Disclosure: Microsoft is a client of the author.]

One of the common mistakes made by companies is that both they and their customers often take upgrades and improvements for granted. They don&t promote them, we as users often don&t use them and, even if we do, unless the changes are heavily marketed we tend to take these changes in stride and devalue them.

This is a problem when a competitor emerges or when it comes time to upgrade to a new version of a product, because we&re likely to try the competing product or avoid the upgrade…because we don&t see the value of either the existing product or the improved offering.

Apparently, Microsoft is moving to address this problem with something called the &Coming Soon& preview pane. I recently received this as a heads-up as part of my Office 365 subscription. I&m intrigued with the idea, because it seems to address the problem of folks taking Outlook for granted. If successful, I expect this capability to move to the rest of Office and become a far more common practice both within Microsoft and other firms as well.