What To Remember After Labor Day

It's been a busy summer, with tech companies doing their best to weather the storm or, in some cases, take advantage of their inherent strengths to batter their less fortunate competitors. So lots of noise, but how much of what happened in the past few months is worth remembering as we return to work in earnest on Tuesday?

The Good:

• Apple shipped the 3GS to enthusiastic reviews and even more enthusiastic customer adoption, and also struck a deal with China's second largest carrier;
• Google introduced developers to Wave, a collaboration platform that could jump-start its online applications business while changing how we think about enterprise IM, document sharing and other forms of collaboration;
• Google also introduced Google Voice, and the iPhone version of Google Latitude, marking its serious entry into the world of Internet-based (aka VoIP, or voice-over-IP) and mobile telephony; and
• Twitter announced that it will start offering commercial accounts for businesses.

• Apple managed to raise the ire of the FCC by blocking Google's voice application from the iPhone, and has had to face down an exploding battery issue;
• Google's Latitude compromise with Apple (shipping a Web-based version of the app that most people consider "lame') and its kerfuffle with Apple over Google Voice effectively ended the friendship between the two companies;
• Microsoft announced that Office 2010 would include free online versions of Word and Excel, but it turns out it's only free if you've already paid for the offline version, unless you're willing to accept a vastly inferior version of Office, or something like that. In other words, Microsoft flubbed an opportunity to remake its image and now seems greedier and more disinclined to play nicely online than ever;
• Microsoft lost a patent suit to i4i and could end up having to pull Office 2007 off the market; and
• Twitter got hit with a massive outage and is struggling to fight spam; the most recent Google outage also spilled over onto Twitter's servers as Gmail users Tweeted their outrage.

• a new Apple tablet (maybe as soon as Wednesday, maybe not);
• Google Wave being offered to some businesses and educational institutions;
• private clouds as an alternative to unreliable public clouds,
• the use of online productivity tools to get a jump on the nascent economic recovery; and
• technology stimulus kicking in to support broadband, electronic health records and the so-called smart grid.

[Image source: Voxphoto via Flickr]