Good Week
Earlybird Christmas shoppers with deep pockets gained some great options last week. If you’ve got a few hundred pounds to spare, this year’s most desired gewgaw will surely be the “oPhone”, Apple’s iPhone on the O2 network. Fine if you have the cash, although a bit of a disaster if you haven’t because the kids aren’t going to be too impressed with that old thing that comes free with the ultra-budget tariff when Santa comes calling this year. Similarly, the launch of the OQO model e2 will spark stifled moans of desire among teenagers. The catch is that this will cost about a grand. It’s still only September but it might be a good idea to start saving now.

Bad Week
Microsoft Office is under siege. First, Google made its move into presentations software with a web-based slideshow capability. Then IBM said it will give away Lotus Symphony, a suite of disk-based software based on the OpenOffice.org open-source project. OpenOffice is not new, of course, but IBM’s support could make it attractive to corporate customers jaundiced by Microsoft’s spotty record on pricing and security. Office has been targeted many times before and has lost none of its ability to attract billions of dollars in revenues. However, it’s fair to say that the mother of all cash cows is under more duress than ever before.

Word of the Week
Smiley. The :-) emoticon is 25 years old and shows no sign of fading with age. The absolute necessity of such symbols is questionable given the vast richness of English and other languages, but the smiley has survived as a way to reassure recipients that, even if our emails are full of veiled aggression, we are fundamentally nice people.