Unsurprisingly netbooks are hurting Microsoft.

Allegedly Windows 7 will run pretty well on netbooks. I'm totally ignorant of the details here, but this surprises me. I always assumed that at least some of the reason that Vista appeared so clunky was that more of Windows had moved to Managed Code in a sandboxed virtual machine. Does the performance improvement mean that Windows 7 moves some things out of that? Or have they found a way to make it more efficient?

Whatever the facts of that, it's clear that M$ are cutting the price to compete with free Linux on netbooks. And that's a loss that isn't going to be recovered if (as I predict) the O/S for netbooks remains a commodity. (As in, they won't be able to make Windows an essential as opposed to more-familiar-and-therefore-preferred option.)

So ... what's 2009 bringing us so far?

Wardley's dream of an open sourced cloud standard comes closer.



While Zuora creates a billing SaaS :

I don’t intend to denigrate the undoubted capabilities of other SaaS billing vendors ... But all of them take a traditional, project-based approach to implementation that means the usual to-ing and fro-ing before you can get anything up and running. Whereas Zuora lets developers work directly with its APIs, charging nothing until the service is ready to go into production. That’s a major advance and one that means developers at last have a low-threshold option for including proper subscription management and collection in their pay-as-you-go applications.

Two trends to watch.

Incredibly, enterprise RSS is dead!

My first, flippant thought : Enterprises just take forever to adopt stuff ... give it another 10 years or so.

But that's not really true. I'd suspect that the real issue is this. Enterprises are a life-form with a certain kind of structure, held together by specific forces. Like a single-cell organism, puncture the membrane and it dies as its resources just drain away.

And RSS is rather like a nano-needle.

We *imagined* that social-software would burst the enterprise. Instead, the enterprise resolutely rejects it. No senior manager (who has a certain amount of "between-ness centrality") wants to legitimize the automated software streams that would route around him (or her), bypass the company's official PR outputs, bypass the company's official sales department's inputs.

RSS is an example, but the same is true of blogs, wikis and other social software that threatens the corporate structure. Hell! If you're in a Windows shop you don't even get a web-server on the corporate intranet as standard. If there had been demand from corporate clients, Outlook could have been a web and RSS and a wiki server (out-of-the-box) to allow colleagues to co-operate more effectively. It isn't. Because M$ didn't want to piss off IT departments by taking away their control of the corporate servers.

You may think that new, RSS powered upstarts will come along and defeat the dinosaurs who reject social software.

But maybe the fluidity, interpenatrability of such social companies will prevent them ever growing large. Maybe there'll remain a sea of small companies whose boundaries are too malleable to congeal into the next generation of dinosaurs. The sea will get bigger, and the dinosaurs will dissolve. But RSS will never be "the next big thing"

Could 2009 be the year that someone tries to hook a micropayment system to a YASN?

I missed until now, but enjoyed, Stowe Boyd's 2009 predictions.

Great Danny Sullivan series on the search giants : Microsoft, Yahoo, Google

How Facebook Could Kill Twitter Overnight

It's not true, for a dozen reasons (Twitter's locked-in community, less openness etc.) But worth thinking about.