Posts by Techwriter10

I'll defer to you on copyright law when it comes to who owns what, but when it comes to those videos on YouTube, this is exactly the kind of backward thinking I'm talking about.

Sure, those videos technically are a violation of copyright law, but if you look it at that way, you completely miss the entire concept of viral marketing. No you aren't getting paid, but you will make your money indirectly and that's the key to understanding how YouTube can drive sales. If all you do is look at strict adherence to copyright law, you aren't going to get anywhere. Sure, you are technically in the right, but there are lots of people who get that this type of promotion primes the sales pump.

I also get that people are using MySpace and other venues to sell themselves as musicians and recording companies are finding new artists there. As usual, it's the musicians who lead the way and the record companies found them there and have begun copying their successful techniques.

But just as you have done that with this type of marketing, you have to understand the value of those types of YouTube videos. It's not about being paid for these things, it's about driving interest and interest drives sales.

What is happening and is what will continue to happen unless you fast forward to 2009 is that record companies will become increasingly irrelevant. Musicians don't need you to sell their music anymore …

Thanks for your comment. It's good to get some push back. To answer your critique: First of all, I don't condone music stealing, but I think there are many better ways to handle this than the RIAA has done over the years. By taking steps such as ordering cell phone videos of a concert off of YouTube shows a distinct lack of understanding of how the internet marketing business works. Those videos don't have an impact on the artist's (and any other interest parties) bottom line any more than when I hear Whole Lotta Love on the Radio. I may hear it and think I want to buy that song. It acts as a stimulus to business, not a deterrent.

As for ASCAP and BMI, I understand they pay songwriters and publishers, but that's often the artists themselves. This isn't 1960 where you have Tin Pan Alley song writers selling their wares to singers. Today many artists (and bands) write their own material, so while I might have generalized I'm not ignorant of the process.

Finally, the industry may be working at this, but it still doesn't get it, and when its very visible association continues to pull stunts like these, it only makes the industry look old and slow of foot.

While I understand your frustration, don't shoot the messenger. You need to take a long look at your industry and see why sales continue to plummet. Song stealing is a small part of it, and …

The time has come to drag the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) kicking and screaming into the 21st century because it clearly has a lot to learn about marketing on the internet. The RIAA had a good news/bad news announcement on Friday.

The good news was that it would stop persecuting, er I mean prosecuting, individual file sharers, a strategy that to me was just foolish in the first place. The bad news is it has hooked up with ISPs to form a corporate file sharing police force, which could potentially deny internet access without due process to users it labels as illegal file sharers. That's not power I want to put in the hands of ISPs and the RIAA, and it doesn't deal with the real problem, that the RIAA still doesn't understand how to use the internet to conduct business.

It's Coming Around Again

This is not a new problem. When radio came along in the 1920s, the recording industry worried that people would never buy records again when they could hear the music for free on the radio. As it turned out, the radio worked to drive sales, not diminish them. The recording industry formed ASCAP and BMI to help protect artist copyrights and it all worked out for the next 70 years or so until the internet came along and we had another problem.

Instead of looking at the internet as an opportunity, the recording industry immediately saw …

Joe "Zonker"Brockmeier is the Community Manager for openSUSE. He has been involved with Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) since 1996 when he discovered FOSS while a college student and was hooked. For most of his career he has worked as a technology journalist covering Linux and open source topics. Most recently, he was Editor-in-Chief of Linux Magazine prior to joining Novell in February of 2008.

I asked him about his role in bringing this release to light and how the open source community drives this type of project.

Tell me about your role as openSUSE community manager?

Sure. The community manager role for openSUSE involves a number of things -- spreading the word about openSUSE, helping to ensure that the community has what it needs to work effectively, and being an
"ombudsman" for the community.

Largely, my role since I joined in February has been focused on the first part -- spreading the word about openSUSE in general. That's everything from helping to organize our presence at community events and so forth, speaking at conferences, working with press, and so forth.

Over the next year, that will continue, but I'll also start focusing on really ramping up our contributor programs and making it easier for people to collaborate with Novell on openSUSE and giving the community a stronger voice in development.

What's new in openSUSE 11.1?

Tons. :-)

More specifically, we have a lot of new software --

Ken,
Apple reportedly has more than $25 billion dollars in cash reserves (and growing). They are gaining market share in the desktop market every year. Their brand is as solid as you are going to find. I'm trying to figure out what string of poor decisions they have made and still be so successful. I don't think your idea is a bad one, but I don't think it's likely to happen either because so many of the company's products are based on OSX and its underpinnings.

Nice idea though.

Ron

Cnet reported the other day that Microsoft has placed an app, Seadragon, in the Apple AppStore, even before releasing it on the Windows Mobile platform because, get this, the iPhone is the only phone platform with the graphics chops to handle the application.

There is such delicious irony in all this of course, the kind that make a writer like me stand up and rub his hands together with glee. Microsoft, the company that gets so upset at the Get A Mac ads that make such well-deserved fun of Vista, releases advanced technology to Apple users first because Apple offers superior technology to handle it.

Seadragon: Up Close and Personal

Seadragon, according the App Store description, lets you "browse large quantities of high-resolution imagery." What's cool about it is that you can do what's called deep zooming, which lets you go to incredible zoom depths, while maintaining crystal clarity without a hint of pixelization.

The free app includes several nice examples that demonstrate the potential of the technology including sophisticated photos and mapping technology, not unlike Google Earth, that lets you continuously zoom down to a location on the map (although it does pixelize at building level). These examples are apparently only a starting point and could lead to much more refined applications as the technology develops. The folks at Microsoft's Live Labs, who produced this app deserve a big virtual pat on the back for what they have done.

Apple …

In a wide ranging interview with Tech Crunch's Michael Arrington on Wednesday at Le Web in Paris, Google's Marissa Mayer talked about all things Google, but what I found most interesting was when the conversation turned toward the future of search. Mayer said the key to the future of search lies in personalization. This harks back to my post the other day called The Online Information Pardox regarding how we can find ways to deal with online information overload and get at the information that matters most to us as individuals.

Search certainly has a key role in helping us sift through the mountains of information and semantic search, where the search engine has a sense of the meaning and context of our search, which is essentially what Mayer refers to when she cites personalization, could be the key to helping us access the data that's most relevant to us.

Make it Personal

Mayer said in the future, Google (and presumably other search tools) will understand more about the user and be able to deliver more relevant information based on that knowledge. "We think that when you look at the winning search engine in 2020 and what traits it's likely to have, we think the one thing that will be true is that it will understand more about you the user." What this means, she says, is that the search will understand more about your preferences and be able …

Hi Ken:
Great list. By the way, you can get an Eee for a lot less than $675. You can get one back a couple of revs for half that and a decent one for $400. As for TiVo I highly recommend it. I love it and wonder how I ever lived without it.

Thanks Dan, Julie and Ken for your thoughtful comments. It's all so complex and hard to deal with and do justice to in 500 or so words, but I'm glad we have started a meaningful dialogue. As Dan pointed out there are so many layers to this and finding the best information remains a challenge.

I like to think in a future semantic web, the best information will find us. That content will understand context and to a certain extent meaning. I wrote about this recently in EContent Magazine in an article on Semantic Web content delivery. We're only at the beginning of figuring this out, but I think the future lies in intelligent interfaces, which use our social interactions to learn about our likes and dislikes will deliver the best content. It's a huge task, but there are companies out there already beginning to scratch the surface.

Thanks again for your comments. It will certainly be interesting to see where this all goes.

Too much information running through my brain
Too much information driving me insane
~Police, Too Much Information.

Yesterday, Seth Godin wrote a post in his blog called, Warning: The Internet is almost full. It's not of course, and he had is his tongue planted firmly in his cheek, but he brought up the very serious idea of information overload.

It's hard not to feel it--there is just so much going on online, so much to see, so many people to connect with, so many blogs to read and comment on. Then there's Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn (oh my!), not to mention the never-ending avalanche of content including articles, video and pictures. It's by turns wonderful and terrifying because we know it's out there for us, but how we can we ever keep up with it?

It's All There

At the same time we are feeling bombarded, there's something incredible, empowering even magical, about having access to all that content, even if it's hard to stay focused and to keep on top of it. It's comforting somehow just knowing it's there, realizing that you can enter a simple set of keywords into Google and access information about just about anything you can imagine any time you want.

In a recent video, Google CEO Eric Schmidt addressing The New America Foundation, discussed the wonder of having all of this information available to us and put it into context. "One …

Very cool, Ken. I would love to play with that when it comes out and choose the options that work best for me.

Thanks, for the comment Dan. I agree, the universe of apps is so huge, it's overwhelming. Just another case of info overload and we are left to devices such as this, social networking, to help us sort through it and find the best ones (although these are just examples, not necessarily the best ones in the genre by any means).

Thanks. Maybe they feel they don't have to because the App Store takes care of it for them, which is the idea behind the Developer Network, but you're right in that these features are part of the standard offering in some phones and eventually Apple will need to add this functionality to compete in the future.

I love my iPhone, but like any device, it's far from perfect and there are several missing pieces. Fortunately, the App Store gives third party developers the opportunity to fill in these holes. Today, I'm going to review five tools that provide functionality missing on the standard iPhone.

Flash for the Camera

Last weekend I was trying to take a picture with my iPhone in the dwindling twilight of late autumn in New England. I found myself surprised at how grainy the photo was until I remembered there wasn't a flash. No flash, no problem with the Night Camera app available for .99 in the App Store. You have to hold the camera steady, but the software cleverly uses the accelerometer in the camera to determine when there is no movement and snaps the picture.

FM Radio

Surprisingly, the iPhone doesn't have an FM radio, but you can access hundreds of radio stations, including local and specialty stations with the AOL Radio application available for free in the App Store. There are stations as specialized as all Clash and 90s pop or Jazz mix, Big Band, you name it. There is literally something for everyone's taste here. (Also check out Pandora Radio, which lets you discover new music based on your taste.)

Voice Recorder

The iPhone makes it really easy to use your fingers to make things happen, but it's not so great at using your voice for commands, but the App Store has …

I like to follow news about Apple and its products as much as anyone. It's interesting and fun and watching the speculation is a kind of voyeurism, a way to get inside a company that keeps a tight lid on information, but much like baseball trade rumors, which I also love to follow, most of them turn out to be dead wrong. Yet we continue to insist on speculating and this week was no different as rumors flew about the health of the company and new lower-end devices.

What Ever Happened to the $800 Mac Book?

Regular readers of this space may recall my post just prior to Apple's big Mac Book announcement in October called: If True, Apple's $800 Mac Book Couldn't Come at a Better Time. As it turned it wasn't true, even though it was widely reported and speculated upon by pundits and analysts alike. Everyone thought they knew, but nobody really did.

This week we have the news that Apple could be releasing a 4GB iPhone to be sold at Walmart. As with the $800 Mac Book, given the current economic conditions, such a move makes sense on some level, but do you really believe Steve Jobs wants to race to the bottom? It's not Apple's style. We've also heard persistent rumors about a low-cost Apple Netbook to compete with the rash of such devices that have hit the market in the last year.

It's the Economy, Stupid …

With much fanfare Sun announced its new JavaFX platform yesterday, but curiously in a video introducing the platform, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, made the browser the enemy of content owners, and set up JavaFX as the platform to give developers and content owners direct access to users. I'm not sure I agree with his basic premise.

What's So Bad About a Browser?

In his presentation, Schwartz said that the browser developers themselves have become competitors with the web developers and content owners, competing for revenue and attention. "It's been our experience in talking to content owners and network service providers" Schwartz said, "that they've begun to see browsers as a competitive environment. The dominant platforms, which represent the bulk of distribution into the marketplace are owned by competitive technology companies."

He suggests that these companies, and he displays a graphic showing (oddly) Firefox in the same boat with Google and Microsoft, want to own the search experience, the traffic and the monetization vehicles. Schwartz goes on to say that this puts content owners in second place behind these efforts, but does it?

To bypass what he purports to be a hostile relationship with the browser, he suggests that JavaFX offers a new way, a way to simply drag and drop the content to the desktop, where viewers can watch rich content outside the browser and forge a direct relationship with the viewer.

Browser As the Enemy

I'm not convinced that the browsers, …

Yesterday Adobe announced it would be laying off 600 employees worldwide, which represents, according to published accounts, 8 percent of the workforce. Reports suggested that Adobe was a victim of the overall economic slow down and the lower than expected earnings were due to selling fewer copies of the new Creative Suite 4 (CS4).

Could Adobe, a large company with a loyal customer base and full control of the creative and web development software market, be technology's version of a canary in coal mine? It's hard to say with any certainty, but it doesn't bode well for the first half of next year.

First, a Look at the Numbers

Although everyone is focusing on the layoffs, it seems all the numbers were actually not that bad. According to a San Jose Mercury News article on the announcement, the layoffs were only part of the picture. The company made money, lots of money, just not as much as they thought they would. According to the article the numbers work out like this:

[Adobe] said it expects to report sales between $912 million and $915 million for its fourth quarter, which ended Nov. 28. That is slightly higher than the $911 million in sales reported for the same period last year, but less than the company's target range of $925 million to $955 million.

Adobe said it expects earnings per share to be 45 to 46 cents, which is better than its target range of 39 …

Today is Black Friday and people are going a bit insane standing on sidewalks overnight waiting for the the big deal on their desired electronics. Everyone from WalMart to Target to Best Buy to the Apple Store is getting involved. And so are online retailers like Amazon.

And to be sure there are some good deals to be had out there, but there are also some questionable ones and it pays to make sure you shop carefully today. Just because it's labeled a Black Friday deal doesn't mean it necessarily an outstanding deal.

Make Sure It's a Deal

Charles Arthur, the Guardian's Technology Editor posted on Twitter yesterday about an advertised deal for an HDTV in England:

"Our new 46 inch D65 TV has been reduced from £699 to £684.13 - saving you £14.87!" Wow, I'll take two."

This post illustrates that not every deal is a good one. Conversely, Dell has a heck of a deal on a Sharp 42" LC42SB45U LCD HDTV (Thanks to Jason Perlow for this one).

There Will Be Other Deals This Season

Unlike other years, with the economy tanking this year and retail sales expected to be severely depressed, chances are Black Friday is not going to be the only day you see deals, so don't necessarily feel pressured into making a purchase today. Retailers are going to be under serious pressure this year and looking for ways to lure …

Oops. That's a bad mistake. Thanks for pointing that out.

I agree that Google understands open web search better than anyone out there.

Hi Tracyanne:

Good point. They have either bought or copied others' ideas. It seems that these days their own lack of innovation has finally caught with them and they are paying the price. And they are trying to cover up or paper this over with PR, ad campaigns and name changes.

According to a recent TechCrunch article, Microsoft is planning to rename its Live Search product, Kumar, which means cloud or spider in Japanese. What Microsoft needs to learn, and what the Get a Mac ads have captured so well, is that it's not about PR or branding or the name of the products, it's about the products behind the brand. Until they learn that, they are just going to wallow in corporate mediocrity and be subjected to well-deserved ridicule.

Seinfeld Didn't Change Vista

This obsession with the surface seems to go back to last summer when Microsoft decided that the problem with Vista, was not that it was an awful operating system, but that it had an image problem. Microsoft concluded that the way to solve that image problem was to hire a has-been comedian to act as its spokesperson. This smacked of bad idea from the get-go As I wrote at the time in Microsoft Seinfeld Strategy is Pathetic:

First of all, the problem is not just one of perception. A PR blitz suggests that Microsoft has produced a dazzling product in Vista, but the foolish masses have failed to grasp how good it is. All it will take is a funny ad and we all be lining up to get Vista. It's simply not going to work because the problem is that Vista is a flawed product and everyone realizes that.

As it turned out the ads did nothing …

Yes, I figured out how to rearrange icons, which means I can put my favorites on the first page, something I've already started doing, and then I can use the button to access my favorites more quickly. First thing I did was put my camera icon in the first row right next to Maps. :-)

Another pet peeve that didn't make it on the list, was the lack of a shutter button on the side for the camera. Annoys me that I have to open the app to take a picture, but having it in the top row where I can easily find it, makes it easier.

Right. There are no multimedia text message options on the iPhone. As I was I writing this I did learn how to order the Favorites list, so there is that.

And it turns out you're right about organizing the apps icons too. You need to press and hold one of the apps and they start to wiggle. You can then drag and drop them across pages or within the page.

When you do this, an X appears next to each icon, enabling you to delete the ones you don't want.

Thanks for stimulating me to find this. I tried doing this earlier and nothing happened. I just didn't press and hold long enough.

I've had my iPhone for about a month now and for the most part I'm very pleased with it, but if I could have a meeting with Apple engineers, there are a few things I would tell them to change:

1 Protect the Glass Out of the Box

Perhaps my biggest pet peeve is the exposed glass front. I tried one of those silly protective plastic layers, but I couldn't get it to line up right or get rid of the air bubbles. It ended up in the trash in about 2 minutes and I bought a Marware case from Amazon, which protects the glass in my pocket, but it adds significantly to the bulk. It's a trade-off I was willing to make, but it would be better if engineers would provide a permanent protective layer out of the box and not force me to try to apply one.

While they're at it, maybe Apple engineers could try to figure out a way for the glass to be self-cleaning. I'm going to need to take out stock on the makers of iKlear because I'm constantly cleaning the finger prints off the glass. Seems those clever Apple engineers could come up with a way to protect the glass from scratching and finger prints. That would be something.

2 Enable 1-touch Dialing

One thing I loved about my previous phones was the ability to assign a key number to my most frequently-called numbers. …

There you go. Introduced to a pain reliever on DaniWeb. :-)

It's been about a week now since the now infamous Motrin ad hit the air waves. It caused a social media firestorm the likes of which the internet might never have seen and that's saying something. If for some reason, you haven't heard, you can go to parenting.amuchbetterway.com and see the ad for yourself along with a couple of comebacks. In fact, there have been many comebacks to this ad. My friend, copywriter extraordinaire Julie Roads, wrote her own ad, then recorded a podcast. Of course the ad was condescending to parents (not just Moms) and it was stupid, but I've been thinking maybe that was by design.

What if the ad agency behind the Motrin ad was counting on social networking to take a condescending message, let it float in the blogosphere, let the Mommy bloggers pick it up and get people talking about Motrin? What if they were operating on the premise that there is no such thing as bad publicity? What's if they were thinking it's easier to apologize afterward? Is it possible? Anything's possible.

What is Viral Marketing?

The idea behind any viral marketing campaign is to get people talking about your product. Motrin has certainly had people talking about their product. It had people analyzing the ad, dissecting the ad, parodying the ad, attacking the ad. You name it and it was there everywhere you looked. It was all over Twitter for about 4 days with people going …

Nice thought Ken. Use the razor and cell phone theory of sales. Give away the device or sell it at well below cost, then make money on a subscription model. Very clever, sir. Very clever, indeed.

Ron

All good points. Thanks for posting.

In a report on enterprise open source usage released this week, Gartner research director Laurie Wurster stated in rather strong language that companies could face a big intellectual property issue because they are using the software without understanding the IP implications of the licensing language. But is she exaggerating the danger and is there less complexity with open source licenses than with proprietary ones?

What's The Matter Here?

According the Gartner press release announcing the survey results, Gartner found that 69 percent of companies surveyed still have no formal policy for evaluating and cataloguing open source software usage in their organizations, a situation they claim, opens up "huge potential liabilities" related to intellectual-property violations.

In fact, Wurster admonished companies who were purchasing open source for not having more formal policies in place. "Just because something is free doesn't mean that it has no cost," she lectured. "Companies must have a policy for procuring [open source software], deciding which applications will be supported by [open source software], and identifying the intellectual property risk or supportability risk associated with using [it]. Once a policy is in place, then there must be a governance process to enforce it."

Is This Really a Problem?

This is probably a sound idea regardless of whether you are using open source or proprietary software, but the question remains whether she is overstating the problem. I asked Pamela Jones, who covers open source legal issues at the Groklaw blog, …

Google announced on Friday that it was adding on-demand indexing to its hosted Google Site Search product, giving customers the ability to instantly re-index a site after adding new content.

This gives web site owners running Google Site Search much greater control over the indexing process than in previous iterations of the product where customers were forced to rely on a pre-defined Google algorithm to determine how often content got re-indexed, a method that proved problematic for customers who wanted to index whenever they added new content.

Lot for the Money

Nitin Mangtani - Lead Product Manager, Google Enterprise Search - says that search has become an integral part of a company's online marketing strategy. "Search is not just a technical feature, but a core marketing feature to improve conversion rate and online sales." To that end, Google offers an ad-free Site Search with access to dedicated enterprise mail and phone support, all starting at $100 per year. But even given the price, Mangtani says, customers were asking for more power over the indexing process. Google has added an 'Index Now' button that enables customers to index whenever they add new material, thereby giving site visitors access to the latest and most relevant content.

Must Have Feature

Susan Feldman, an analyst who covers enterprise search at IDC says that this is an absolute must for a hosted search product. "I think that on-demand indexing is a requirement for hosted search--or any site search. You …

Web 2.0 has always been about giving the individual the power to publish without having to beg a media company for access. From blogs to podcasts to services like YouTube ordinary (and extraordinary) citizens have been able to publish their work for the world to see. Now Flixwagon lets you broadcast live from your cell phone, assuming of course, it has a built-in video camera, giving the citizen broadcaster the greatest power of all – live video blogging – and the possibilities are quite intriguing.

Testing it Out

I was lent a Nokia N95 cell phone recently for the purpose of testing the Flixwagon service and I found it simple to use and fun. With two clicks, one to access the service and one to start broadcasting, I was able to begin streaming live from the phone. The phone itself is an extraordinary device equipped with a camera that captures video and stills with a sophisticated 5 megapixel Carl Zeiss Lens.

By default, the video broadcasts and gets saved to your personal space on the Flixwagon web site, but you can also broadcast directly to your blog or even YouTube if you wish. Each video is saved as an original file, and because you are broadcasting to Flixwagon’s servers, not saving locally, you are not limited by the cell phone’s memory.

Power to the People

These services, whether it’s Flixwagon or Qik make every person a broadcaster. We are …

I can only tell you that I've used Vista on a number of different machines with a number of different configurations. I've even run it on a virtual machine, which was completely clean and it was still a dog. I know anecdotally that some people have had good experience with it, but most people I've heard from, and this includes some highly technical people, have had horrible experiences with it.

The fact that even Microsoft has pretty much abandoned it at this point should tell you that even they don't believe in this product and have decided to move on. The question now to bring us back to this post is whether they will really move on or just dress up Vista and try to sell it as something different. This study suggests it's the latter.

The only people I know who like Vista have at least 4GB of memory. Beyond performance issues, Microsoft went so overboard on wanting to protect us from possible security violations that it literally made the OS unusable. Every time I have to use Vista I walk away frustrated. I hope Windows 7 will be an improvement and not just more of Vista because if it is, Microsoft will surely have lost for me for good, and I don't think I will be alone.

What did I expect? I expected that Microsoft recognizes that Vista is a dog and they should want to run as far away as possible and produce something that the market wants. If they giving us warmed over Vista, they will continue to lose market share and industry respect. The market has shown nobody wants Vista. Why would they want warmed over Vista.

Way down deep it's the same old you
Way down deep you ain't hiding the truth
Just for a minute you had me confused
Baby way down deep it's the same old you
~Tom Petty, Same Old You.

My colleague Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols in his aptly titled Cyber Cynic column on Computer World is always good for a reality check for all things technology, especially Microsoft. This week Vaughan-Nichols takes a look under the hood of the highly-vaunted Windows 7, and he finds nothing more than warmed over Vista stew, the same OS we didn't like much the first time Microsoft served it.

Seems Randall Kennedy over at InfoWorld put the new version of Windows through its paces and found, surprise, surprise, that it's no different than the old Windows. I've never hidden my disdain for Vista (as I wrote in How Much Does Vista Suck, Let Me Count the Ways) and ever since people have been gushing about Windows 7 at the recent Professional Development Conference, I have warned that controlled presentations do not mean diddly. As usual, Vaughan-Nichols has found me proof.

Microsoft's Marketing Machine Goes To Work

For all its problems, and Microsoft is facing many on a number of fronts these days, it still remains a formidable company with huge cash reserves. This means they can dazzle us with presentations and fancy conferences. They can trot out the company's stars to mix …

I was watching a video of a panel from the Web 2.0 Summit on ReadWriteWeb. I've had a growing fascination with Cloud Computing in recent months, and this particular panel included key players from Google, Salesforce.com, Adobe and VMware (with Tim O'Reilly acting as panel moderator).

As each man made his opening statement, one statement in particular jumped out at me from Dave Girouard, who is president of Google's enterprise division. Girouard stated that his company's long-term goal is to open up the Google development stack to outside developers. If this is true, then it could have some serious long-term implications for developers who could use Google services in new and interesting ways.

Say What?!

Before we jump the gun too far, fast forward to the 10 minute mark of the video and listen to what Girouard has to say. For those of you who don't want to click the link and play the video, let me quote:

"We want to open up the Google stack, the Google platform in many, many ways, and in the end if we do it right, you will have the same access to Google that our own developers do, and we are a long way from that..."

Why Wait?

So what's stopping Google from doing this today? If this is truly the long-term goal of the company, and we have no reason not to believe that it isn't, then why not …

Microsoft announced a new program the other day called Microsoft BizSpark, where they give away a boat load of software and services to young startups and presumably lock them into Microsoft long-term. For a small start-up with little capital, this has to be a very attractive offer.

Microsoft not only provides free software, it provides you with mentors and marketing help and other invaluable services. If your company is planning on building around Microsoft, say you are .net developer, this is great, but for many others it just means selling your soul for short-term gain without thinking about the future of your company. It's like that old ad from years ago: "You can pay me now or you can pay me later."

The Good

On the plus side if you are a privately held company, under 3 years old with less than a million dollars in revenue, Microsoft will give you:

* Microsoft Windows Server® (all versions up to and including Enterprise)
* Microsoft SQL Server® (all versions)
* Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server
* Microsoft System Center
* Microsoft BizTalk® Server
* Microsoft Dynamics® CRM (coming soon)

But wait, don't answer yet. There's still more including access to the Microsoft Azure Services platform, a free subscription to MSDN and various other goodies. Sign-up is free, although strangely, you have to pay $100 to leave the program.

The Bad

Microsoft isn't stupid. They …

Salesforce.com, best known for its cloud-based CRM package, announced on Monday that it would be providing web hosting services for web sites, intranets and web-based applications. The announcement comes on the heels of Microsoft's coming out party for its cloud computing services platform called Azure last week at the Professional Developer's Conference. But Salesforce, much like Amazon is building this business as a logical extension of its existing business. It's already running a server farm infrastructure for Salesforce, so it only takes some minor tweaks to move into the hosting business.

Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon: Oh My!

Suddenly three very formidable players have gotten into the hosting business. What does this mean? First of all, it means that mainstream enterprise computing is going to be getting increasingly comfortable with conducting business in the cloud. Although there has been a lot of FUD spread lately by the likes of Larry Ellison and Richard Stallman (as I wrote about in Does Using Gmail Mean You're Stupid), the fact is that these announcements mean that we will see a further shift of enterprise applications to the cloud, these complaints not withstanding.

Last week at The Web 2.0 Conference in Berlin in a video called Web 2.0 is Not Dead, Tim O'Reilly defined the concept in the simplest terms: "Web 2.0," he said "is the shift to the network as the platform and that is not changing."

As more computing moves to the …

All last week, Microsoft was trying desperately to shift the spotlight from Vista, the OS that has become a major liability for the software giant. To that end, Microsoft made a flurry of announcements including Azure, the newly announced cloud platform, the Windows 7 Alpha and a preliminary view of the web-based version of Microsoft Office.

It's clear that Microsoft has thrown in the towel on the woeful Vista. Maybe that's why Microsoft's love fest, aka the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) last week in Los Angeles, provided a 24/7 forum to discuss a future without Vista, but like a political convention (which it resembled), it's time to sweep up the confetti and take a clear-eyed look at what we witnessed.

No, You Shut Up

Regular readers may recall that a couple of weeks ago I wrote a post called Ballmer Needs to Learn the Art of Shutting Up. What prompted the post was a surprising presentation by the Microsoft CEO in front of the Gartner's Symposium ITxpo in which Ballmer basically threw Vista under a bus, stating that if people wanted to wait for Windows 7, they probably should. At the time, the statement seemed an outrageous gaffe, but perhaps Ballmer himself had already decided it was time to move on and knew that the PDC would showcase his company's new initiatives.

Could Windows 7 and Azure Represent a Fundamental Shift?

Microsoft still has some tricks left up its sleeve, that's …

This week at the Professional Developer's Conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft made a big splash by announcing a new cloud computing initiative it's calling Azure. It's significant on several levels.

First of all Microsoft wants to compete with services like Amazon S3 and offer online storage and online computational services. Secondly it begins to blur the line between the cloud and the traditional desktop operating environment where Microsoft has made its living, and finally and perhaps most significantly it will expose some key pieces of Microsoft business software including Sharepoint and Exchange to external developers who will be able to tap in the cloud versions of these packages and perhaps come up with some interesting results.

By all accounts it's an all-out attempt by Microsoft to take the cloud by storm (so to speak), but not everyone is convinced that Microsoft can succeed at all aspects of the venture.

Whoa Nelly! Not so Fast

One person who is throwing up a big caution flag is Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu, a chief executive who know a thing or two about the cloud. Vembu says any time a company like Microsoft gets involved you have to respect it, but he says, Microsoft has to start from scratch and it's a completely different way of doing business. As such, he's not completely convinced Microsoft is equipped to handle the cloud business for a couple of reasons.

Can Microsoft Compete with …

But the real question here, Davey, is do you like it? :-)

Sounds really cool and just another reason, I should take the plunge and finally get myself an iPhone.

Ron

The same correction goes for the BB Storm. That should be 1GB of memory (not 1 MB as I wrote). That would be very bad, not that 1 gig is very good.

It was just pointed out to me that I mistakenly wrote that the G1 has only 2 MB of memory. What I should have said is that it has 2GB of memory. Still not all that good compared to the 8 GB and 16 GB offered on the iPhone, but better than what I wrote. :-)

Thanks, David for pointing out the error of my ways.

Ron

Yes, an iPhone available across carriers would in fact be a significant change, but there were other changes with the second generation besides the 3G upgrade (which was mostly AT&T, not Apple's doing), most important being the App Store, which was not available in 1.0.

Thanks for commenting and for noticing that I try to respond to most comments. It's something I try to do build community and keep the conversation going.

Regards,
Ron

Hi TracyAnne:
Thanks for the comment. For those of you out there who might not be familiar with the Freerunner phone, you can read more here:

http://www.openmoko.com/

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/technology/personaltech/10phone.html?fta=y

I definitely like the fact that it's completely unlocked and open. I certainly wouldn't mind getting my hands on one to see how it worked. :-)

Thanks again for the comment.
Ron

Actually, the iPhone is in its second iteration and much improved over the first I might add. That's actually a point I forgot to make as the other two *are* first generation phones. I'm not sure that people won't jump carriers for a hot phone, but I can't say for sure as I have no way of knowing that. I agree they are all great phones or at least potentially great phones, but they are not created equal as I pointed out in this article. There's no saying that the Storm is the right phone for you just because it's a touch screen phone offered by your carrier, which is the point I was trying to make. You shouldn't get a phone just because it has a high cool factor. You should get it because it's a phone that works for you.

Thanks for the comment. I always like hearing from you.

Ron

The Bold looks more like a traditional BB with the full keyboard, so it doesn't really apply to this round-up, but you make a good point about the pricing. From everything I've seen the Storm will be substantially less than the price you list here for the Bold. As an AT&T customer (which I am) given the choice of smart phones between the BB & the iPhone, I would take the iPhone in a heart beat, but many people who work inside large organizations might opt of the BB, especially if the employer is paying.

I think you make a good point that the closed system can save the users some hassles, but I would argue that Google is making a business decision by making it open source. Google has to worry about stock prices too don't forget. I think once you see the types of applications that will come out of an open source environment, you will see that it has a huge upside.

Thanks for the comment.

Ron

“Informed decision-making comes from a long tradition of guessing and then blaming others for inadequate results.”
~Scott Adams.

There is a battle going on out there in cell phone land involving the 3 hottest-of-hot cell phones. I write of course about the iPhone from AT&T, the G1 from T-Mobile and the upcoming Blackberry Storm from Verizon.

All include the obligatory-cool touch screen interface--the G1 also sports a keyboard under the hood for you touch-typing phobes--but each has its strengths and weaknesses. It would be foolish to buy a phone that doesn't meet your needs just because it's popular, so let's take a closer look and compare these three hotties. Perhaps it can help you make a decision about which one is right for you.

The Apple iPhone

It was the first popular touch-screen phone and it sports a very intuitive, clean interface. You can access the internet using the AT&T 3G network when available or use WiFi. It comes loaded with applications that have been tuned to the iPhone and the App Store gives you access to hundreds of add-on application that enhance the iPhone experience. With a choice of 8 MB or 16 MB of onboard storage, the other two phones can't compete on this spec.

On the down-side it is a distinctly closed system--Apple maintains tight control over developers in the App Store. It has a pathetic 2 MP camera and doesn't have a video …

Well if I misunderstood you, I apologize, but at the same time, I'm not sure I agree with you. I think it's the right of the individual or company to decide how they want to approach politics.

As I say, I do agree that it can be a slippery slope and companies, like Apple have to be careful when doing this, but all companies engage in politics on some level, it's just that Apple's donation happened to be trumpeted. Where do you think the Political Action Committees get the millions of dollars they raise for candidates? Corporations in fact are fully engaged in the political process. Apple was just up front about it.

Ron