Dams pointed us to a little story about Zend and PHP, on Red Herring. As the contents is somehow correct, they did not succeed to make a stupid mistake:

Zend’s business model is to give away an open-source scripting engine and sell a “closed-source” line of PHP development tools. Its main competition comes from PHP.net, a site where developers download free PHP tools.

Guys, what’s about making your job of journalists and get a clue about what you are talking about? This question is not only for the author of this story, but to all journalists writing about PHP without having a damned clue about it.

Note to self, there is however a little hope:

Zend Technologies founders Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski did not invent Personal Home Page, an open-source scripting language used to create dynamic web applications, but few would argue that they deserve credit for its growing popularity.

• Zend on Red Herring

The last time I saw a spreadsheet tool I can use in seconds (like not having to look in dozen of menus and buttons to change a damned font and insert a formula) was in the good old DOS times Google did it again, and did it well. They did not invent anything but reduce the features to what many people need, and it works (for a beta, it works even very well).

The interface is clean and intuitive. A bit slow but that’s a javascript problem more than the fault of this specific tool. Is it finally the end of bloated destop apps? I do not know, I’ll not like to have all my applications and tools online in some third parties companies. Especially not when I have no control on what they do with it, but that’s another topic.

Congrats guys, impressive work