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I see many comments by people worried about the Windows requirement thing, the registration requirement thing, and the losing files thing. Now worries:

At the bottom of SimIndiana's page is the info that it is powered by SimDesk. Go, there, click on Products, and you'll see this:

Even though our focus is singular, our products and services are diverse and far-reaching. We help you create, store, and share. We help you reach out to others, and our tools let others reach right back to you.

We're looking to the future, but we're always grounded in the present. We've found that this position enables us to confront new challenges while we solve current needs.

Diverse yet far-reaching, highly sophisticated yet decidedly uncomplicated - it's how our products are designed to work for you.

Nothing with that mealy-mouth description could possibly be any good...

The provider is SimDesk, providers of www.simchicago.com and www.simmagicjohnson.com. SimDesk is based in Houston and most of their testimonial quotes come from City of Houston employees.

I guess it would take longer to download OpenOffice than to set up a simdesk client, right?

Is there any real value to this software? The TOS say that they can delete your email if you don't log in for 90 days. Thanks for taking the hassle out of data storage, Magic/Houston/Indiana!

-ac

Okay, sorry for double posting, but the site seems to have come back up (or perhaps something flaky happened to my net connection, but at the Signup page, you can select any state! I just signed up as an Indiana resident (forged, of course) and then went back and created a new account, and selected Idaho as my home state, and it still accepted my registration!

My guess is, they're using some template form, and they forgot to take out the state box. Anyone want to double check?

Very old news : http://www.simdesk.com/pressrelease4.asp

The Chairman and CEO of SimDesk, Mr. Waters, is "responsible for the strategic direction and management of SimDesk".

Mr Waters was founding chairman and CEO of Browning-Ferris Industries, Inc. (BFI) and served BFI from 1969 until 1997, when BFI was sold to Allied Waste for $9 billion in cash. During the 1980s, BFI pleaded guilty to charges of price fixing. More details:

In 1987, a group of commercial business customers filed a national class action lawsuit against Houston, Texas-based BFI and Oak Brook, Illinois-based WMI, alleging the highest echelons of both companies had orchestrated a nationwide price-fixing conspiracy. In one important document, the business customers detailed a number of antitrust cases across the nation and the involvement of key corporate officers from both firms. In 1990, both firms agreed to settle the case for a total of $50 million plus $13 million in attorneys fees, while denying any wrongdoing. All evidence in the case, including some "4 million pages of documents," was sealed.

They would seem to have the makings of a worthy successor to Microsoft.

The contract ain't new (press release dates June 5, 2002), to is there any houston resident to confirm this, or even give us a hands-on report?

Several patents have been filed for SimExplorer, including a recycle bin available on the Internet. SimExplorer moves deleted data to a virtual recycle bin and allows users to recover or restore that data if it was deleted by mistake. Previously, this functionality was only available on Microsoft© platforms: SimExplorer now makes it possible on all computer platforms.

Cheers...

From their web site:

SimDesk Technologies, Inc. (STI) was founded in 1999 to develop a revolutionary way to deliver software applications using the Internet. STI offers SimDesk(TM), an office productivity suite of applications that provide a word processor, spreadsheet, personal organizer, and e-mail client. All SimDesk Technologies' products run on the World Wide ServerTM (WWS), a groundbreaking means for economically and efficiently transporting applications, connecting millions of users to one server.

Using the WWS, SimDesk(TM) disperses the load so that a task can be completed with a fraction of the bandwidth and server power normally needed. Using a patented proprietary transport layer protocol and load-balancing technique, the SimDesk(TM) product suite is able to support millions of simultaneous users with a small fraction of the hardware normally needed in networks today.

SimDesk Technologies is a privately funded company. All products are developed in-house and are protected with numerous patents, trademarks, and copyrights. There are no license fees paid to outside software companies, which allows us to offer extremely attractive pricing models to end users.

From their web site:

SimDesk Technologies, Inc. (STI) was founded in 1999 to develop a revolutionary way to deliver software applications using the Internet. STI offers SimDesk(TM), an office productivity suite of applications that provide a word processor, spreadsheet, personal organizer, and e-mail client. All SimDesk Technologies' products run on the World Wide ServerTM (WWS), a groundbreaking means for economically and efficiently transporting applications, connecting millions of users to one server.

Using the WWS, SimDesk(TM) disperses the load so that a task can be completed with a fraction of the bandwidth and server power normally needed. Using a patented proprietary transport layer protocol and load-balancing technique, the SimDesk(TM) product suite is able to support millions of simultaneous users with a small fraction of the hardware normally needed in networks today.

SimDesk Technologies is a privately funded company. All products are developed in-house and are protected with numerous patents, trademarks, and copyrights. There are no license fees paid to outside software companies, which allows us to offer extremely attractive pricing models to end users.

From the SimExplorer page on the SimDesk site:

Several patents have been filed for SimExplorer, including a recycle bin available on the Internet. SimExplorer moves deleted data to a virtual recycle bin and allows users to recover or restore that data if it was deleted by mistake. Previously, this functionality was only available on Microsoft© platforms: SimExplorer now makes it possible on all computer platforms.

Sorry, but it's already out there for multiple platforms. All they did was put it behind the familiar "Recycle bin" interface. This isn't so different from the Amazon one-click patent.

*Look* at all the unnecessary foo-faw SimDesk provides. You really think the digitally deprived need a spreadsheet, a contact manager and remote printing capability?

This looks more like taxpayer money applied to a dot-com bailout than anything of real use.