Inso &heart; Synex

Tongues are wagging over Inso's having snapped up Synex. Inso, under the monicker EBT, used to pretty well own the electronic-text-display biz until Mosaic came along. Inso used to pretty well own the spelling-checker biz until MS bought out the contract; they sank some of the money into EBT.

Inso has the "Dyna" family of products, generally regarded is pretty good; their pricing model, on the other hand, has been unfavorably compared to Attila the Hun's foreign-relations policy.

Synex is 3 guys in Stockholm who are some-time students, but have a pretty cool SGML display engine that appears in SoftQuad's Panorama and in fact every other SGML display product in the world that isn't sold by Inso.

Inso insiders are doing a pretty decent imitation of being puzzled; only the most cynical would suggest that Inso is trying to lock up the market by grabbing the core technology out from under the competition...

Head-Hunting

We hear whispers that Adobe, under its "Frame" hat, wants into XML big-time, and is out there snagging senior people from leading mouldy-old-SGML oops dynamic-young-XML companies, and have attack-trained headhunters ringin' them bells on the world's MOS-oops-DYX desktops.

CNgroup What?

On the subject of hiring, turn an eye to the South Valley, where, within spitting distance of PARC, mouldy-old-SGML oops dynamic-young-XML exec Bob Glushko is importing a wave of MOS-oops-DYX hacks to The Company Soon To Be Formerly Known As CNGroup.

I hear they have not only got some reasonably plausible XML+ecommerce stories to tell, but much more difficult, have actually locked down a mellifluous and unused 3-letter Internet domain name!

X-Actly Who?

So there's a Major New Industry Consortium called X-Act, that's XML Active Content, boys 'n' girls, we hear it's going to usher in a new age and energize the Web. On the other hand, it could just be a DataChannel marketing ploy... opinions are divided.

Rolling On The Floor Laughing

Which MS marketing droid was heard to emit this gem to a crowd of 300+ at a recent conference? "HTML tags don't have any semantics; the advantage of XML is that XML tags have semantics".

Which NS marketing droid was heard to tell a C|Net reporter, when being asked about XML, "Don't say 'XML', say 'RDF'."?