Globalisation.eu: Brilliant idea, Un-bundle Engines from BMWs!

From their article The traditionally protectionist group responsible for providing input into the EU’s globalization arm and butcher knife (read collude and conspire to squash American, Japanese, and Asian competition) comes the brilliant idea that will ruin many a grandmothers’ Christmas present.

Right out of the "Gee Boss, I’m not sure what to come up with so I will just come up with someone else’s idea" department the EU group recently published an article which says they believe the best way to increase competition and help consumers is to damage the companies that the market reward. Why don’t they just come out and say it. The solution? A PC and it’s OS should be sold separately. The fact that most major companies already sell PC’s with many different variants of Linux isn’t good enough, if grandma buys a PC, she should be forced to also buy an OS, if she doesn’t know what one is, she will be trying to email her family from BIOS. 

Instead of letting the market decide what technologies they want at home and in the workplace, the EU seems to want it to be regulated. A monopoly should be forced to compete on equal of slightly less secure footing, but this is the most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard. The group is trying to bring down a slew of American companies including Intel, Apple, Rambus, and many people are speculating their next target for rape is Google.

Candace Lombardi says:

The signal the institute refers to is the September 17, 2007, ruling in which the EU’s Court of First Instance upheld commission rulings requiring Microsoft to share certain technical specifications with rivals and to offer customers an unbundled option in cases where Microsoft has tied together two separate products. The court ruling also upheld a $613 million antitrust fine against Microsoft that had been imposed by the European Commissioner for Competition, Neelie Kroes.

I’m not sure why I even am blogging about this, this group seems pretty confused, let’s point out some foolish statements from their article:

• Moreover, there are other costs: some argue that support costs are higher for Windows than other operating systems, particularly when one considers security vulnerabilities:
• We do not believe this would add complexity for consumers ??? What???
• By increasing competition, 10 operating systems would all be competing, and all programs would somehow run on all of them.
• We consider the Mac to be a premium, niche product
• Microsoft has had an OS monopoly for 20 years.

This paper is so off the mark that I think the act of publishing it has forever stained and tarnished the word think tank. They must have been living in a tank for the last 20 years perhaps. This will actually hurt consumers who would not be able to buy Microsoft OEM version and end up costing Europeans more money.

del.icio.us tags: Protectionism, EU Protectionism, Microsoft, Anti Trust, Bad Ideas

Technorati tags: Protectionism, EU Protectionism, Microsoft, Anti Trust, Bad Ideas

The Ultimate Extra–Microsoft trust–a little sold with each copy

Paying Microsoft for services "to be delivered" is probably never a good idea, it’s probably what made Vista a product that took so long to deliver, and is probably why Ultimate Extras are taking so long if they even ever materialize. I think that all people should receive Vista at a much cheaper discount, and for every major issue that gets fixed in the OS, more money is transferred into their bank account. This would create a bug free Microsoft based on what I’ve seen in the past with software assurance, and now Ultimate Extras.

Not only have we received basically nothing that was a surprise as an added bonus, which could be implied by the price we paid for extra, or two copies of Ultimate in my case, but we haven’t even received nearly any of the features promised on time. Long Zheng says it best:

Ironically a whole lot of nothing is exactly what you’re getting.

When it comes to technology, especially gadgets, and software, many technologists simply must have the best. Microsoft marketing team knows this, and so they used some actuaries to show that the profit margin normally found in Windows and even Office would be dramatically increased by simply creating a small team of engineers that would create a few doodads, that could be really hyped up, but deliver absolutely next to zero value, and they could put in as much value into these copies of windows as they wanted, and deliver it whenever they wanted.

Have you ever felt that it was wrong for a contractor to ask for 100 percent down, for work to be delivered at a later date? I know I have, and I have refused. In the world of technology things are the same and different.

Anyone who must be truly informed about Vista all had to get Ultimate because they would be clueless about the experience and they would have to experience secondhand through the voice and thoughts of others. By getting Ultimate, you get all of Windows, as each other copy is just a subset of Ultimate. I know I wouldn’t be able to blog with as much confidence about Vista unless I had Ultimate. I trusted Microsoft so much that I purchased two copies of Ultimate.

What Microsoft marketing may not know is with each copy of Ultimate they sold a little bit of their trust to us. Not all of their trust, but maybe enough trust that the true hard working innocent engineers at Microsoft whom are burning the midnight oil and had nothing to do with this get tired of their masterpieces being treated as ho-hum, and leave the company to deliver similar products to rave reviews.

At big companies at Microsoft, it’s very hard to understand what happened. Perhaps the Ultimate engineering team was planning on receiving more head count, and perhaps marketing thought so too, but why is it in Microsoft’s interest to pour resources into software that has already been sold and will not increase the next quarters numbers. This is a lesson we all believed Microsoft had already learned with Software Assurance.

I like to think that Microsoft sold a little bit of trust in each copy of Vista Ultimate as well as each software assurance copy. What’s the Ultimate extra we’ve learned with Microsoft? Never pay up front, for services to be delivered later on, because there is a conflict of interest when company management is being offered a paycheck that reflects the next quarters outcome. It’s a shame that a higher-up like Bill Gates or Ray doesn’t step in and make it right, it’s their brand name though, and it leaves you feeling that if this is the Ultimate thing Microsoft can do, perhaps none of their other products are even worth trying.

…and I really mean it.

Technorati tags: Trust, Microsoft Trust, Integrty, Brand Value, Good Will, Ethics, Quarterly Earnings vs. Long term outlook example, Windows Ultimate Extras, Vista Ultimate, Ultimate, Bill Gates, Ray Ozzie, Microsoft

del.icio.us tags: Trust, Microsoft Trust, Integrty, Brand Value, Good Will, Ethics, Quarterly Earnings vs. Long term outlook example, Windows Ultimate Extras, Vista Ultimate, Ultimate, Bill Gates, Ray Ozzie, Microsoft

How about Massively Multi-nodal Online Extensible Social Networks or MMOESN?

Dave Winer points out that he doesn’t like the new word, Social Graph and Nickolas Carr agrees so much he thanks him. Due to the way he words it, I believe he really means your AN idiot if you use it. They say that it’s impossible to passionate unless you are intelligent.

Dave explains "Why not use the equivalent–social network? He supports the argument with an unarguable degree of understanding of the two words, and then he says that using the buzzword creates confusion.

Others are saying that in order to rightfully declare the fact that we are now seeing a new burst of money chasing innovation, we need a new buzzword–Social Graph–to explicitly show that it’s an innovative improvement over things like good old Friendster and My Space.

I tend to agree with Dave and Mr. Carr, people already know what a social network is and after all, we still call an operating system an operating system, and it’s definitely been evolving, all of them. I guess maybe some at VMWare might like to call it an operating layer.

Obviously there are many different opinions, and I thought I would just come up with a Microsoft Marketing Buzzword, which would adequately describe the improvements using a definition Microsoft has already "drilled down" even the most laymen techies’ mind. 

2.0 really refers to an era, and I can hardly say we’ve even been through the first era of real social networks, perhaps at the end of an era, but not into the next era. Whatever happens, let’s not use Massively Multi-nodal Online Extensible Social Networks.

I think this would be a great time to create an online poll, at the end of the poll, we look at the results, and then we all have to agree to the new, or not so new word. When all is said and done, I think we will all agree that we’ve done a better job than our counterparts in the online gaming industries. 🙂

Technorati tags: social network, social network 2.0, MMOESN, massively multi-nodal Online Extensible Social Network, buzzwords, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Social Graph

del.icio.us tags: social network, social network 2.0, MMOESN, massively multi-nodal Online Extensible Social Network, buzzwords, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Social Graph

Google Reader: the most improved product of 2007

When I first used this crawling, sluggish, OPML choking excuse for a Google sub-domain I was not very impressed. Silly Google, rich clients belong on my hard drive, not in the cloud! Slowly but surely, the product went through a number of revisions which quietly added functionality and tuning. Today, with each account having it’s own built in index, I’d say the product is the best of breed reader. Really the best thing to say is great job to the folks at Google Reader, and it’s quickly becoming better than Google.com as a way to research something you are very familiar with.

You’ve done quite a fantastic job on your product, and you make it important to have a large OPML, where as with other clients, having a very extensive one causes problems. Categorizing your large amount of content becomes important. As of last week, you have graduated from Google Labs, and rightly so, you deserve it, however, I don’t think it’s time to stop improving and I never like to give a pat on the back without some suggestions for improvement.

Improvement Suggestions, Let’s see if you listen!!

Integrate:

• Just as you are planning on integrating many other of your products and API’s into Orkut, I think it would make more sense than anything to add unique functionality that pulls elements of reader into blogger, and blogger into reader. Sure, this isn’t the best way to do serious blogging which is best left to best of breed blogging tools like the Live Writer which I use when I’m using Windows, but by integrating the two you can enable micro-blogging and other quick "Get it off your chest" type blogs, and some blogging can be done from here.
• Google Gears it! What good is Google Reader if you Can’t Read it?
• Add Gtalk into the reader. Sometimes I don’t about the blog about what I’m reading, but I know someone who does, or I want to twit about it. Adding Gtalk would enable me to email another user as well so this could be the one stop shop functionality making the product Viral. Perhaps I want to verify a news source, or verify a fact without leaving an application.
• Add Zimbra Zimlet type features. Perhaps there is a word or subject that I’m reading about that I’d like to get a quick back round on before reading the rest of the story, just so I’m analyzing in an efficient context. Don’t be like the NYT’s and if you click on a word it pops up, make sure the user is holding a shortcut key and or make it launch up in a DHTML window after a right click left click to confirm. Other items which are good just about anywhere are auto parse to Google Maps.

All in all, the offline mode with Google Gears is going to be the most important feature that will get me off of my other hardcore readers. I have faith in the giant Metroid brain in the sky that is Google.

Technorati tags: Google Reader, Google, Google Gears, RSS, OPML, Research, Online Research Techniques, Online Scanning, RSS Search, Microsoft, Live Writer

del.icio.us tags: Google Reader, Google, Google Gears, RSS, OPML, Research, Online Research Techniques, Online Scanning, RSS Search, Microsoft, Live Writer

Presently, is at the Forefront of “Destroy Microsoft 2.0”

Presently is not yet a good way to create a stunning decks, although it’s a fantastic way to share and collaborate all of the contents of a one. Google still hasn’t created a compelling way to create presentations, nor have they with documents, but that matters very little. What they are doing a better is taking the strengths of delivering software on the cloud. Google isn’t worried about being the best Power Point or Keynote producing software, what they are interested in is taking these platforms, embracing them, and then extending them.

Also important to note, there are so many companies that want a piece of Microsoft’s Office’s money making dominance that Microsoft should be glad that Office 2007 is a solid product. (With a fast processor on XP) IBM is getting ready to release plans to Kill Office with Symphony  IBM has released Symphony, and so I guess you can say that Google’s Defiance to Microsoft’s dominance has emboldened all of Microsoft’s competition to come at it from all angles atat once. 

Other companies such as Electric Rain are busy getting ready to deliver the next generation of presentation software, namely Standout, which when released will be by far the best way to create a compelling, stunning deck with a lot shine.

A quick look at Google Presently:

From the "File" menu, you pre presently presented with the options to:

• Open a New Presentation
• Upload a file (PPT, etc.)
• Save
• Save as a new presentation
• Rename
• Delete Presentation
• Printable View
• Save as Zip
• Start Presentation (CTL + F5)
• Discard Changes
• Save & Close

Also, you can expect to find most or all of outline and markup abilities found in Google Docs including:

• Undo
• Redo
• Bold
• Italics
• Underline
• Change font (The five majors)
• Change Text Size
• Change Text Color
• Change or Create Text Highlight
• Create a link
• Ordered List, Numbered and bulleted
• Indent left and right
• Align left, center and right
• Remote formatting

There are also revision buttons in which you can "Summon" previous versions of the document so that you can perhaps recall a change that wasn’t supposed to be made.

Analysis

So there it is, Google Presently, currently a good way to create basic presentations online, but a better way to store, publish and collaborate on documents that were first created in offline, rich document authoring programs like Power point, Apple’s Keynote 08. Also, Google will not have the first presentation software with built in conferencing. Currently Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional allows professionals to use the widely deployed Adobe Acrobat , Flash and Video production platforms to create, edit, review, share, publish, screen sharing and even create conferences online. You can check out a demo here.

Google is taking the simple approach to a presentation platform, but their strategy is not a bad one. Let traditional software companies be the offline rich editor, but let them save to our online collaborative, platform where we can then embrace and extend your platform. Google and Microsoft are fiercely competing to be your Cloud Computer. The cloud computer is your free advertising supported computer in the sky that acts as a hard drive and processor. The network is the computer was Sun Microsystems’ slogan from over a decade ago. Too bad most people were still not using at 56k modem yet.

Technorati tags: Google, Google Presently, Google Presentation, Google Powerpoint Killer, Online Conferencing, Online Collaboration, Office 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Acrobat Connect, Microsoft, Microsoft Powerpoint, Apple, Apple Keynote, Apple Keynote 08, Silverlight, Erain, Standout, IBM Symphony, IBM, Symphony, Symphony Office

del.icio.us tags: Google, Google Presently, Google Presentation, Google Powerpoint Killer, Online Conferencing, Online Collaboration, Office 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Acrobat Connect, Microsoft, Microsoft Powerpoint, Apple, Apple Keynote, Apple Keynote 08, Silverlight, Erain, Standout, IBM Symphony, IBM, Symphony, Symphony Office

Zimbra: The Darling of OSS sold to Yahoo! for over 1/3 a Billion!

Get your tarballs downloaded now, according to Michael Arrington, he has heard it through the no bad grapes vine that Yahoo! Has closed in on Zimbra for 350 million dollars. Zimbra has over 6 million paid mailboxes which Yahoo! would like to be their paid mailboxes.

Zimbra has the absolutely best email system on earth in my humble opinion, and if Yahoo! close sources this project somehow it will be a disaster for the open source community.

Google has recently been ramping up it’s office killer wannabe and smoozing up with corporate America in order to eliminate Microsoft’s dominance in the workplace. Most of corporate America doesn’t like online mailboxes that are not directly tied to their own infrastructure but as these companies build up more and more of a compelling and cheaper offering, they will be forced to at least examine the options every year or so. There is a major pull inside large companies to reduce costs from software licensing however possible. 

Something else to note: Zimbra is more closely integrated with Google services, such as Google search and Google maps. There are Y!Maps in Zimbra. Bringing Yahoo on board will hopefully only give Zimbra users more options, and not tie in Zimbra features with Yahoo entirely.

The only other thing I am hoping doesn’t happen is the renaming of Zimbra. I hope that the service keeps it’s Zimbra name, and I hope that Yahoo! keeps offering a great open source server for running in the home without charging for personal use.

Update: The Yodel.yahoo.com blog has the following to say:

Zimbra is a global leader in email and collaboration software and its services are aimed at universities, businesses, and ISPs worldwide, which is a major driver of what made the company so attractive to us. We’re constantly being approached by these entities for our expertise in email and communications. Combining the best of Zimbra with what’s made Yahoo! Mail the top dog in web mail will not only allow us to cater to these markets better than anyone, it will allow us to expand our presence to partners and consumers at school, work, and home

That’s freaking Scary. Sure I’m probably jumping the gun, but are they going to just purge all of the cool Zimlets and other features out of Zimbra and then pop them into Yahoo and then let Zimbra die on the vine? I hope Yahoo! sets a clear strategy and roadmap for both of these products, and allows both to flourish separately the same way that freedesktop.org takes components from KDE and Gnome and pushes for cross pollination and innovation instead of competition.

I hope the dice will fall like this if not a whole lot of people will be upset.

1. Zimbra continues on as a standalone server and client with added Yahoo! features and…
2. Yahoo mail continues on as a mail service, with the added benefit of Zimlets, which should be considered as a major yahoo API I hope.
3. Zimbra Open Source Addition continues to receive valuable mainline patches from the open source community and Yahoo! in order to remain a great product for us techies who love having a multipurpose, multi OS server rack in our home. (Okay maybe a bunch of crappy PCs on a shelf but I call it a rack =D )

One Last Point: This new acquisition makes Comcast a major partner of Yahoo! AT&T while traditionally a Microsoft partner, is now heavily an Apple partner. Do you think that AT&T saw how much value there was in becoming a big time partner with Comcast simply because the first major Internet portal to offer a new phone with effective GPS enabled advertising will be pulling in the big bucks and will have something that can take large chunks out of Microsoft’s enterprise pie, simply by not only drastically eliminating their software licensing costs, but by doing the same for their communications?

Technorati tags: Zimbra, Zimbra Open Source Edition, Yahoo!, TechCrunch, Michael Arrington, OSS, Email, Office 2.0, Zimlets

The Long Road to Owning a Mac

The New York Times has a very important analysis on why the 3 percent of market share that Apple currently enjoys, isn’t growing. I recently purchased a Macbook Pro and the out-of-the-box experience began with two hours on the road.

Many people are saying that this might be slowing down the adoption of Macs but the truth is it definitely is slowing down the adoption.

Dell lost a lot of market share to other companies when the laptop became the primary type of computer purchased. It was said that people like to play with laptops and they really don’t care so much about desktops, they can see pictures, and then just order online. Perhaps this is true even more with Macbooks, especially those who are afraid they will have trouble making the jump to the Mac.

What no one is talking about is why the Mac isn’t sold in every Best Buy. There is an immense amount of training that needs to take place. Your average employee at a Best Buy doesn’t usually spend two thousand dollars or more on a laptop.

Even still, the training is occurring, and the number of stores that sell Macs are Ramping up. Next January, the Bestbuy close to my house is supposed to start selling them.

Technorati tags: Apple, Best Buy, MBP, Mac Book Pro, Macbook Pro, Mac, Macs, NYT, OSX

Apple makes money off of OSS, but doesn’t give back

Actually, I honestly don’t know if Apple ever has done a single thing for the OSS community. They most likely voted against OOXML but other than that (someone correct me if I’m wrong) Apple doesn’t care about the OSS community, and has recently made moves which thwart its advancement and acceptance with it’s iPod, to let them know exactly how much they do care. Will says:

This affects Linux users – there’s no iTunes for Linux, so popular Linux iPod management tools like gtkpod and Rhythmbox will not work with the new range of iPods.

Granted, this might be a side effect of bigger things going on that we don’t see, I’d like for once to see Apple give back for all of the great things that it takes from the open source community, primarily all of the great things which it conveniently puts on it’s Xserve stack.

The open source, UNIX foundation of Apple’s operating system makes it easy for developers to port their existing enterprise database and UNIX server applications for deployment on Xserve. In fact, tens of thousands of UNIX developers are already turning to Mac OS X to combine the performance and reliability of a UNIX-based platform with Apple’s innovation and ease of use.

Let’s count the number of OSS applications which earn Apple money:

1. Apache Web Server
2. Webmail
3. WebDAV
4. JBOSS
5. Tomcat
6. MYSQL

There are probably many more like OpenLDAP and others. Apple, if you want to keep being the cool kid on the block, you are going to have to do more than deliver top notch products, you are going to have to deliver top notch products that play nice. If you mess with the OSS community, your popularity will suffer. People should voice their concerns and email Apple and let them know you are unhappy. Let them know they should extend support to the Linux platform, or at least let the good people who reverse engineer the iPods for the Linux community a break.

Technorati tags: iPod, iPod Classic, iPod Nano, Linux, ipodminusitunes, Linux and iPod, iPod and Linux, bad iPod, Evil iPod, Apple

Robert increases insight into likely Google strategy

Robert who has extensive experience with telcos and relevant technologies is starting to realize or at least blog (I guess he is a blogger, yes) about what I’ve been saying all along. Gphone and 700mhz and Google backbone equals free wifi and he explains in more detail how the tech could look. I’ve already explained how this will get Google into corporate America, which is yet another reason why the shareholders don’t mind Google spending loads of cash. THe isp and wireless companies all need more competition, and I hope Verizon’s lawsuit goes nowhere, make no mistake people, Google winning it all is good for the consumer.

Roberts take here:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070914_002928.html

(posted from web browser, on the go…) 

I am about to dump Live spaces

I continue to have someone go in and flip and flop pictures around on my space. I had a post of a screen shot to a hacked looking shot to Microsoft live mail and it got replaced by another picture. This is not the first time this has happened, I am documenting everything and I’m going to have to find out what’s going on. It’s not fair to me or my readers. More later.