Despite occasional lapses in taste compared with our more refined northern hemisphere’s and their irritating rising inflection and clipped vowels, you’ve got to hand it to our colonial cousins down under. In two quick steps they have pitted themselves against the world’s biggest brands.

Kiwi schools lose parrots and eye-patches
New Zealand’s Ministry of Education has just announced that Microsoft software has to be removed from the 25,000 Apple Macintosh computers in schools, here. The reason behind this is to save the $2.7 million, roughly £1 million or £40 per computer, that Microsoft want to charge for the licences.

Education Minister Steve Maharey told the New Zealand Herald that Microsoft demanded a licence fee for each copy of the software, not a massively unreasonable request one would think. Steve went on to explain that the free NeoOffice was available for schools as was a ’similar’ Macintosh program. Without discussing whether the software should have been on the computers in the first place one assumes that New Zealand wouldn’t be pirating Microsoft Office, would they?

One critical voice has been from school principal Julian Le Sueur, who complained that the NeoOffice website warned users to expect problems and bugs. No change there then from Microsoft Office’s err… idiosyncrasies.

Next Aussie millionaires in the making
Google has a careful eye on a small Melbourne company who have announced it is about to make existing search engines obsolete. Robert Gabriel developer of MyLiveSearch told The Age, here, they will be going live with a public beta this month.

According to Gabriel the new search engine, the result of two years work with his younger brother Mark and systems engineer Mende Jurukovski, will give better, more relevant results because it will include the 80% of the web that Google doesn’t index. Current web search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live all send ’spiders’ which crawl through billions of web pages a year, indexing their content. They cannot include the most up to date information or sites where the information is created for each individual browser.

MyLiveSearch works as a small web browser plug-in that uses the results from a search engine as a starting point, crawling through hundreds of web pages connected to those starting points to find the most relevant information. Results are gained in seconds and are always richer, more detailed and useful than a standard index-based search. Plus the results include the invisible web of dynamically-generated pages that search engines have trouble indexing.

Google have a track record of loving the Aussies, Google Maps coming from another small Australian start-up company, and especially if the technology could help a competitor. A recent new employee at Google’s HQ is University of NSW graduate Ori Allon who sold them his advanced text-search algorithm.