Stories by: Preston Gralla

As I've written about in my column, Google has lost its mojo. Now even more evidence comes along: Google has eliminated its much-hyped free dinner policy. This is more than a merely cosmetic change. It may represent a turning point in the way Google treats its employees, and its ability to attract new ones.

Google went from startup to behemoth in record time. But there are increasing signs that Google has become just another fat, happy, and even arrogant company, no longer the lean, industry-changing giant of the past. And that spells good news for Microsoft.

OpenOffice 3.0 shows that you don't have to pay a bundle for a great office suite -- in fact, you don't even have to pay a penny.

If you think that you always get what you pay for, the just-released beta of OpenOffice 3.0 should convince you otherwise. This free, open source software suite provides most of what anyone could want in an office suite, including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation program, database, drawing tools, and math equation editor.

Mac users have long gloated that the Mac OS is safer than Windows. The gloating should stop: There's plenty of recent evidence that Vista is, in fact, a safer operating system than Mac OS X.

I've put the latest betas of Firefox 3 and IE8 to the test, and the results are clear: Firefox 3 is the superior browser. Its new features make browsing the Web easier, faster, safer, and easier to customize --- and the memory leak problem seems to have been fixed. IE8, on the other hand, offers some flashy new tools, but for everyday browsing, Firefox remains superior.

No matter what browser you use -- whether it be Internet Explorer, Firefox 2, or any other -- you need to switch to Firefox 3. The most recent beta shows off a browser that's the best yet for customized browsing, better downloading, and faster surfing. I've got five reasons why you should switch.

Microsoft held out the peace pipe to the Open Source community when the company announced that its offering free access to its most important APIs and formerly proprietary protocols, and will offer more support for open standards. Why has Microsoft seen the light? I have a one-word answer: Google.

What good is a browser unless you can tweak it, hack it and bend it to your will? No good at all. The more you can hack it, the better it is. And that means that Firefox must be a great browser. It's infinitely customizable, via editing a text file called userChrome.css, making changes via a command called about:config, and using free add-ons to extend the features of the browser.

Amazon.com is making a big bet, but it's not on selling books, CDs or holiday gifts. Instead, it wants to sell you all the processing power you can eat. Rather than competing with your local bookstore, it's taking on the likes of IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems.