BusinessWeek's Steve Hamm quotes David Kralik, director of Internet strategy for American Solutions, who believes that Republicans are gun-shy of open-source software:
Open source is a powerful force, but a lot of people on the right think it's liberal, and they don't want to be involved with it. They think if Apple likes it, they don't. That's a mistake. Open source is politically neutral. We should be using it.
Well, as an Apple-loving, open-source conservative, I have to say I agree. In fact, if anything, I believe open source is an inherently conservative ideal, making software a local affair, rather than a "big government" or "big vendor" affair.
But really, it's just technology, not ideology. Democrats can use open source. Republicans can. No party has a lock on .Net, MySQL, PHP, or (name your technology preference). They're just tools for getting our jobs done, and guess what? Open source happens to be a highly efficient way of getting an widening array of jobs done.
In this economy, that's something both conservatives and liberals need, and should agree upon.
I just received an e-mail from Sun Microsystems' marketing department, and I really like the message:
Very clear, and something Sun is particularly well-suited to deliver. The question for me is, what comes next? Right now its message mostly centers around MySQL, and that's great. But there's more to building out a Web presence than the database.
Sure, Sun is building out its cloud strategy, adding Q-layer to its arsenal Wednesday, but the "Open Web" idea is both bigger and smaller than cloud computing.
Would a Zend acquisition make sense, to bring in strong PHP expertise to complement Sun's Java solutions? Or would it make sense to buy a company like SpringSource to bridge the gap between Java-based applications for the enterprise and the Web?
I'm not sure, but I think that Sun's message should resonate well. How it rounds out the message over time is perhaps less important than making sure it gets it right in the beginning. For me, "Open Web" is a great start.
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Market research firm Gartner recently surveyed enterprises throughout the world and found that 85 percent are using open-source software.
Using open source for isolated applications, however, is not nearly ambitious enough, according to the Vietnamese government, which is now setting a target of 100 percent open-source adoption within the government by December 31, 2010, according to a policy paper (Word document) issued by the Vietnamese government and reported by VietNamNet Bridge.
To get to that 100 percent goal, Vietnam's Ministry of Information and Communications has mandated that open-source software products such as the OpenOffice.org productivity suite, as well as Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail software and Firefox Web browser, be installed on all government machines, starting with IT departments, by June 30.
Open source is not new to Vietnam, which has been promoting open-source adoption since at least 2004, as Network World reports, within its universities in an effort to develop its local software economy.
This thinking is consistent with advice I've given before in Russia: the best way to develop a local software economy is to keep the software local, rather than shipping rubles (or dong, in Vietnamese currency) back to the United States.
Regardless, this is a very ambitious project by the Vietnamese government. It will be interesting to track its progress and to place bets on how long it will take to get a Microsoft operative on a plane to try to change Vietnam's mind on the matter. I think it's likely that someone from Redmond is already sitting in a bureaucrat's office in Vietnam, making a plea for Windows.
I admit that I can't figure out the new Cisco Systems. It's making a big push into consumer electronics, as reported by CNET, adding things like home audio systems to its portfolio of products.
In tandem, it's building out a corporate collaboration story, complemented by things like telepresence solutions.
Does Cisco still provide networking equipment?
The answer, of course, is yes, but I wonder if the company risks diluting its brand as it makes forays into markets beyond networking. Perhaps that's the point.
Cisco has been exploring new markets in order to find new areas for growth, a normal pursuit by megacompanies, both in terms of new products and new geographies. This is what companies that measure their revenues in billions of dollars must do in order to grow by billions of dollars.
But I'm losing track of just what Cisco stands for, and I assume that I'm not alone in this. Even as the company grows, it needs to maintain a common theme to that growth. It says it "enables people to make powerful connections--whether in business, education, philanthropy, or creativity." That's a great mission, but how does home audio fit into that statement? Making powerful connections with one's music in one's home? I don't get it.
Sure, Cisco isn't alone in overstepping the boundaries of its mission. Microsoft's entry into the gaming market with the Xbox doesn't exactly fit into its implicit corporate mission to reduce the cost, and improve the ease of use, of software. Perhaps once a company reaches a certain heft, it doesn't need to have every division singing to the same sheet music.
Even so, I can't shake the feeling that Cisco still has a lot of room to grow within its general "networking everything" mission without getting into things like home audio. If you disagree, please let me know why.
A recent post on Techdirt offers provocative food for thought on how to monetize media in the digital world, but the implications run well beyond journalists scrapping for a living.
Using Mark Cuban's suggestion that sports leagues fund journalists (instead of newspapers funding them), Techdirt makes the following observation:
In truth, this is often what has happened anyway, with local companies buying ads in the paper and expecting coverage of the local sports teams, even when there wasn't a direct need for it.
Making it more explicit, while also making the editorial controls clear, doesn't seem so unreasonable. In fact, it seems like it might make a lot more sense than the old way of doing things in that it gets everything out in the open.
The underlying implication? That perhaps we've been looking to the wrong paymasters on the Web.
Dave Rosenberg joins a long line of people searching for a way for Twitter to make money, but perhaps the money isn't in Twitter at all. The money is likely in people getting paid to post to Twitter, or in search providers like Google getting paid to skim intelligence from the Twitter data cloud, but Twitter as the technology provider? I'm beginning to think the money just isn't there, and that it's absolutely the wrong place to be looking.
Or consider phone calls, the economics of which have dramatically changed in the past 10 years. The Guardian takes on the concept of "free" phone calls through Skype and finds--get ready!--that there's no such thing as a free call. The money you pay simply shifts to your Internet service provider (paying a premium for better bandwidth), your headset provider, or other add-on services. You save money in one place; you spend it in another.
For Twitter, I believe it needs to stop thinking about individual consumers and start thinking of the companies that could derive value from it. Indeed, I'm beginning to think that much of the content in Web 2.0 is going to be funded by corporations trying to be heard on the cacophonous Web, not consumers clicking on advertisements.
The Web not only changes the economics of distribution, but also to whom we should be thinking about distributing and, hence, charging.
In a late-night Twitter rant, CNET's Stephen Shankland uncovers a significant error in judgment by software vendors like Adobe Systems: vendors continue to default to Internet Explorer, even as consumers increasingly do not:
Why the hell do Adobe CS4 help and Lightroom geotag links launch Internet Explorer? It's not even my secondary browser, much less default.
In other words, Adobe is trying to second-guess the consumer, presumably to favor either some preconceived notion of what its customers want or some revenue or partnership arrangement with Microsoft.
In either case, vendors like Adobe need to be thinking forward, not looking backward, and the writing is on the wall that Mozilla Firefox is becoming a new standard for Web browsing.
Sure, IE still commands a 68 percent global market share, according to Net Applications, but that share has been on a steady decline for years. Firefox? It has surpassed 21 percent global market share, and it claims more than 30 percent of the market in Europe, growing in popularity nearly every month.
Adobe and other vendors needn't prejudice their applications to Firefox in the way Google has--at least not yet--but they certainly shouldn't be force-feeding IE down customers' throats. An increasing number of people don't want it and, guess what? The customer is always right.
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Kaltura is an open-source video application server that competes with the likes of Brightcove. In a nutshell, it helps companies put video on their Web sites.
Kaltura recently released an integration of its product for Drupal, which was a great way to quickly enable its technology for broad distribution. Of more interest to me, however, is that Kaltura was recently selected to power the video on Footbo, a dedicated social network for soccer (football).
With more than 1 billion soccer fans on the planet, Kaltura couldn't do much better than to tap into this passion, starting with Footbo. From the press release:
Footbo has integrated Kaltura's video management platform, allowing Footbo admins to manage and moderate video content, create playlists based on tags, ratings and other criteria, track video statistics and usage, and more. Kaltura's platform also enables users to upload videos and photos and import them from leading social networks and content sites. Kaltura's platform enables Footbo to easily add over time more advanced interactive functionalities such as content discovery, subtitles, remixing and editing tools.
It sounds awesome. It also sounds like a copyright train wreck waiting to happen. I should know. I was booted off YouTube for posting some video I took at an Arsenal match.
But that's not Kaltura's problem to solve, and I was excited to give the Footbo service a try, starting with that most divine of teams, Arsenal. Watching the video of Arsenal's last good season (2003-2004), I nearly broke into tears, all enabled by Kaltura.
My Arsenal fetish satisfied, at least for the moment, I'm back, and I'm impressed by the Kaltura technology. As an end user, it makes for seamless video integration into an existing site. As a publisher, it promises to be much the same. This is an open-source project worth watching.
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- video,
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Wow. Satyam Computer Services, the world's fourth-largest systems integrator, just declared that $1 billion, or roughly 95 percent, of its Q2 cash...isn't.
Despite using PricewaterhouseCoopers as its accounting firm, Satyam's chairman, Ramalinga Raju, today declared that he has "systematically falsified accounts," as reported in The New York Times.
Wow. 53,000 employees serving one-third of the Fortune 500, and yet so much of its heft is a lie. Virtually all of the cash and bank loans Satyam reported in its second quarter do not exist. More than $1 billion in paper lies.
How it started or, rather, why it persisted, is a lesson in the importance of honesty, early and often:
In the four-and-a-half page letter distributed by the Bombay stock exchange, Mr. Raju described a small discrepancy that grew beyond his control. "What started as a marginal gap between actual operating profit and the one reflected in the books of accounts continued to grow over the years. It has attained unmanageable proportions as the size of company operations grew," he wrote. "It was like riding a tiger, not knowing how to get off without being eaten."
The first step down the wrong road led to many more, and ultimately to a situation in which it was easier to keep lying than to come clean. In Satyam's fraud is a lesson for us all.
Apple may be the poster child for showing the industry how to compete effectively with Microsoft, but the company isn't free of Redmond's long arm just yet.
Despite spending years, and millions of dollars in research and development, on its own suite of productivity software, 77 percent of Mac users stick with Microsoft Office, according to a TechFlash report.
I love my Mac, but I couldn't use it without Office. In this, I'm sure I'm not alone, which must give Apple pause whenever it celebrates its rising Mac market share.
Perhaps this is why Apple is releasing a SharePoint-esque knockoff designed around its Pages and Numbers programs, taking Microsoft head-on in document collaboration.
The strategy won't work. Until Apple actually starts winning market share with its iWork suite, it won't matter if the five or six customers who actually use it can collaborate with each other.
No, to end Microsoft's latent stranglehold on its Mac market share, Apple needs to do one of two things vis-a-vis office productivity: go disruptive with a Web-based offering in the manner that Google has, or invest deeply in OpenOffice.org to make it a viable, rock-solid enterprise competitor to Microsoft Office. The first path leads to Mountain View (Google). The second? To Menlo Park (Sun).
Regardless of which path Apple takes, at some point, it must address Microsoft Office. Yes, people could just run Office in a virtual machine or through Boot Camp, but that really only deepens its dependence on Microsoft.
What do you think Apple should do? Or does it matter?
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Apparently, someone forgot to tell Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz that the market for tech mergers and acquisitions is dead.
On Wednesday, Sun announced that it has acquired Q-layer, a cloud-computing management and automation company (see CNET's coverage here):
Imagine scaling up instantly to massive capacities to meet changing needs. Then imagine doing it on the Web, without having to invest in new infrastructure, train new personnel, or license new software. That's cloud computing, and Sun is making it a reality.
That's Sun's pitch, and it sounds promising. Cloud computing is a great fit with Sun's past and with its current technology portfolio, including open-source MySQL, the database leader on the Web. But is the market big enough yet to fill the holes in Sun's declining revenue?
That's the big question on Sun. I'm optimistic on its strategy, going forward, as I think its use of open source to drive add-on sales is smart and increasingly well-defined, and I also think, as I noted previously, that cloud computing is a good fit for Sun. But neither are likely to pay big dividends in the short term, which begs the question, can Wall Street be patient with Sun during this transition period?
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- Q-layer,
- cloud computing,
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