IE: Most influential product of past 25 years?

Notes from the field: “It’s been a good week for Microsoft and surveys,” Cringe opens Doing the Microsoft mash. According to one the company owns the most valuable technology brand in the world and, in another study, IE was named the most influential product of the past 25 years. MS Word ranked second, followed by Windows 95, then a tie between the iPod and Excel. “You get the impression these guys have been walking around handing out Rolex watches?” Cringe wonders, all the while watching a mashup of CEO Steve Ballmer’s infamous monkey dance.

Gripe Line: One reader was mortified when realizing that his new Linksys wireless VPN router doesn’t support anything close to the 50 VPN tunnels it promises and, worse, no one at Linksys seems to care. “Since it’s rated to do 50, the reader assumed 16 users would not be a problem,” Ed Foster reports in Linksys router comes up short. But a problem it was. “A few weeks after I first heard from the reader, he’s decided he has no choice but to get his client another router.”

The news beat: Dell buys ASAP Softwarefor its software asset management products. Google shows manufacturers a cellphone prototype that could be available within a year. OpenMoko may be an unlikely candidate to become an iPhone killer, but it is an intriguing one nonetheless, as the first phone based on it, FIC’s Neo 1973, is expected to be widely released this fall. And researchers seek formal EU sponsorship for Project WOMBAT, a threat management system that will serve as an early warning mechanism.