GripeLine: Ed Foster is aiming to balance his Worst Vendor of 2006 reader poll with a Best Vendor of the Year. I’ll not reveal the pair of winners but, suffice it to say, there are surprises in this one — including the presence of a fistful of companies that also peppered the Worst Vendor list, including Apple, Dell, HP, Microsoft, and Verizon. Columnist’s corner: This week’s Off the Record begins with a riddle about rewriting applications and ringing cash registers. Before solving it, our author notes in hindsight that he should have picked up on some of the hints that disaster was pending — such as when company owners sent for pizza, and his boss’s decision to write the specs for a new application herself, rather than tracking down feedback from users. “The first boulder hit us when users explained that the product was useless unless it could talk to multiple back-ends.” Next thing he knew, our author was in an endless loop of coding and recoding. “Okay, so every programming shop has issues,” but there’s hope that other have markedly different problems. The news beat: Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, testifying before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, says U.S. Congress should raise the cap on skilled-worker visas. IBM and Cisco join hands to create an industry wide unified communications and collaboration platform, which the companies say aims to attract a large of number of developers more effectively than a smattering of options from several vendors. Google refreshes its enterprise search tool with new security capabilities, a preview feature, alterations to the interface. And the Liberty Alliance publishes guidelines enterprises should consider when networking identity systems and Web applications. Software Development