No more Groceries:
No more Groceries: After 4 years of being the poster child of danish e-commerce, supermarket chain ISO is pulling the plug on their on-line grocery sales, according to this little bit in ComputerWorld. Having been involved in various more-or-less visionary projects, including the venerable "fridge with a screen" in Ballerup, I'm sorry to see them give up. Apparently, while people shop and revenue grows, there hasn't been any profit in the 4 years of running the service. It'll be interesting to see what this does to competing supermarket chains plans to finally deliver e-commerce during 2002.
AOL for Geeks: Elsewhere rumours abound that media giant AOL Time Warner is looking to buy Red Hat, the largest distributor of the Linux Operating system. According to the Wired article (and I agree completely), one good reason for AOL to buy into Linux, is because of Linux' flexibility in running on various devices from Set-top boxes for interactive TV, over web tablet computers, PDA's (See my earlier comment on the Sharp Zaurus SL-5000) etc. How does a company like AOL expand it's reach even further? By appearing on many of the new devices that will be our primary Internet devices within the next 3 years. If the rumour is true, I can't say I blame them, and since I'm a mandrake user anyway, I won't miss Red Hat much ;-) All I can say is that I would be looking forward to seeing linux move on to various devices, as well as looking forward to seeing one of the only companies that can actually compete with Microsoft (in a sense) offer simple-to-use web access.
