Dave Winer continues to be clever and inventive.

Scoble very interesting on Facebook :

First, you’ve gotta realize that in Facebook’s life it will go through at least seven phases. We are moving from phase four to phase five right now. In each phase change people have gotten pissed off

[snip]

Phase 4. All those above+All People (in the social graph).

Phase 5. All those above+People and businesses in the social graph.

Phase 6. All those above+People, businesses, and well-known objects in the social graph.

Phase 7. All people, businesses, objects in the social graph.

Mike Arrington:

Facebook is now well over twice the size of MySpace, according to recent worldwide Comscore data. And what's worse, MySpace is losing audience while Facebook absolutely hockey sticks: MySpace lost 2% of users in just one month, while Facebook grew by nearly 40 million members in February alone. MySpace currently has 124 million monthly unique visitors, compared to Facebook's 276 million.

Here's something interesting : look at how Chumby is not all about their hardware, but is making reselling their personalized feed handling to other companies and devices (including TV).

Dare on Feeds as the new Email.

What is it like to be a bot?

Fascinating.

Just discovered a Bespin which I believe to be *really* significant for the software industry.

Essentially, all the important parts of the software industry have now migrated into the cloud. Including the software development environment itself.

Wow! Asus considering Android-based EEE-PC

Things are moving *very* fast, aren't they?

Mary-Jo Foley tracking Microsoft's Red Dog : Microsft's non-Windows(!!!) web-operating system for Azure

Will live (Twitter) search kill Google?

Unlikely. But an interesting read (and trend to watch)

Especially when you compare what Clay Shirky says about filters in the last part of this interview..

ZDNet Bloggers :

Netbooks killing Microsoft faster than expected

Biggest threat to Microsoft revenue.

Dare Obasanjo on Google's cancellation of side-projects.

Good points. Though I thought that Jaiku and Dodgeball were buy-ins rather than 20% time projects.

Larry Dignan, Sam Diaz, Tom Steinert-Threlkeld :

The most likely scenario is that Amazon didn’t want to talk about its Kindle-iPhone connection, which may have people wondering why they need a Kindle in the first place. However, whispersync lays the groundwork for a few interesting possibilities.

He he!

Phil Wainewright wrings his hands :

Have we brought up an entire generation to believe that cash isn’t important?

To which the right answer is "Yes". Because it *isn't* so important. And NOT because of the same ultra-cash-focussed casino games of the financial sector although Wainewright tries to tar "free" with the same brush.

Mary-Jo Foley highlights the confusion of Microsoft's Windows upgrade roadmap.

I've no idea what corporate Windows users are likely to do, faced with this mess. But M$ could be making it a lot better. Here's one suggestion : Give Windows 7 away, free-as-in-beer, to all existing Windows Vista licensees. XP users still have to pay to upgrade, but M$ should get everyone off Vista and on to Windows 7 as quickly as possible.

This is, of course, assuming that Windows 7 is as good as everyone says it is. But what about earlier incompatibility issues? Once again I ask, isn't Windows 7 based on the same core as Vista? Are they making it better than Vista by undoing some of the things that were new in Vista? Can 7 be both more compatible with XP and more compatible with all the new .NET stuff that came out on Vista?

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.

Paul Graham : Could VC be a Casualty of the Recession?

Some useful conservatism on the cloud threat to M$.

I think the cited report both overplays the real problems of switching from M$ Office, and is slightly disingenuous - I mean even if you think the cloud is going to be huge, you still think there's going to be a mix of cloud and locally hosted services for the foreseeable future. But that dodges the question of the combined effects of SaaS AND free-software AND Apple AND Adobe AND local caching for web-apps. Yes, hosted office apps are not going to replace the requirement for local apps. But if Google Apps. play well with Open Office and can be run locally on Gears on occasions when your connection drops, you can have an excellent company-wide standard which provides everything you need.

Nevertheless, the report might be right about the real human reluctance to shift.

Quick notes on 2008 :

1) Apple proved they were brilliant ... in an old fashioned way. But nevertheless brilliant ... and dominant in the mobile device-swarm and PCs for the aspirational elite of pretty much all smart professions. Their 2009 story is (sadly) about Steve Jobs' health.

2) Google revealed that they now run the world. That their 20%-time distributed R&D gives them an accelerated entry into everything new that's going on. But it also revealed that they are mortal and capable of mediocre me-too-ism. The story of 2009 will be some of Google's services losing to better rivals and failing. Does Google know how to handle that?

3) Amazon showed they were visionary (in clouds and Kindles) and focused enough to execute. Their 2009 story is about making the cloud work. And whether the Kindle ecosystem can take off.

4) Nintendo were vindicated, demonstrating again that genuine creativity and innovation sees off the mere imitators in gaming.

5) Microsoft showed that they are walking dead. Void of ideas or courage to drive innovation forward. Their 2009 story is going to be whether they face up to the threat which is, to them, existential : the end of "software as a stand-alone product"

6) Sun were revealed as clueless.

7) Sony clunked. They have technical ability but lack inspiration.

8) Asus turned out to be more innovative than any other PC maker ... and now Netbooks are going to conquer the world.

9) Facebook revealed they were evil after all. But they're still a force to be reckoned with.

10) Unlike Yahoo, who aren't. I'd still be intrigued if Apple bought Yahoo and tried to remake it in their image. But I can't see it.

11) Adobe have a great thing with Flex and AIR. But everyone can see that. Microsoft will throw a *lot* of resources behind Silverlight to try to take Adobe's place. And Titanium looks a very interesting free-software alternative to AIR.

I was proved wrong in thinking that the browser was no longer interesting when Google came out with Chrome. The full impact of this is yet to be seen.

12) In fact, Platform Wars was generally busted ... the two big trends I've been watching for : the YASNS-as-platform and the device swarm didn't really materialize as clearly and distinctly as I expected. Apple's App. Store was perhaps the nearest we saw to both these trends coming to fruition with Apple providing a popular device and distribution infrastructure to specialist developers. Google have got all the pieces (GAE, Android, FriendConnect, Gadgets, Orkut etc.) but haven't put them together in quite the right way. Maybe next year, fumbling around in competition with Apple and Facebook the pieces will start coming together.

Of actual devices, only the iPhone really excited attention. LiveScribe came and didn't change the world. Nor did Chumby or Nabaztag. Possibly they're too expensive for something so specialized ...

13) Trends to watch in 2009 ...

a) Cloud providers trying to make their clouds profitable while signing up real clients.

b) Microsoft wrestling with its soul.

c) The rise of the online spreadsheet.

d) Energy efficiency.

e) Google having to handle (localized) failures.

f) Who gets the good bits of Yahoo?

g) Applications built for the browser (or AIR/Titanium/XULRunner etc. desktop virtual machines built with the same Javascript / HTML / CSS / jQuery technology) will continue to expand. Development of ordinary desktop software will crash.

Few people or companies will find it worth developing desktop applications.

What's in store for the future of netbooks?

Twitter does deals with Google and Facebook but not MySpace.

How advertising people see widgets.

Read this.

Estimates vary, but the global software industry probably generates annual revenues of about $500 billion. Industry analysts are saying that up to 25% of new software sales will be delivered as SaaS within the next few years. That implies a shortfall of some $100 billion of license revenue that won’t be collected upfront any more, along with whatever it takes to buy and set up the infrastructure to operate it — maybe another $100 billion?

These are scary numbers, and others can do a better job than I of validating them, but let’s say they’re even half accurate. Will the industry have enough nerve collectively to fund that revenue gap, not just for a year, but over a period of several years as the big switch to cloud and SaaS accelerates? Especially if such a huge financial shortfall coincides with the tail end of what is starting to look like it will be a deep, traumatizing recession?

Dave Winer : Soon it will be time for the next cycle

Update : Actually the "data-portability" initiatives from Google and Facebook (mentioned in the Dave piece) are the natural unfolding of "user-is-the-platform" thinking.

And now, with the soaraway online advertising market threatening to stall, comes news that Google's software engineers are going to get less time to spend on pet projects and are being told instead to hunker down and work on money-making tweaks to the core business.

Depending on how serious this is I can't see this is a good idea. 20% time is Google's brilliant distributed research and innovation project. Killing it off a) makes Google stupider, and b) pisses off all the people who are currently emotionally invested in their projects.

Far better for Google to cut other perks (free food, toys) or even salaries than cutting 20% time.

Over on SmartDisorganized I've been tracking and playing with spreadsheets, particularly the online variety. I'm becoming increasingly impressed by the potential of online spreadsheets as containers for mashups and widgets. In particular EditGrid which comes with embeddable queries to Amazon and Ebay "out of the box" seems to be pointing in a very interesting direction.

Whereas the online equivalents of Word or PowerPoint are more or less dead-ends, as I've said before spreadsheets (in particular Excel) are grossly underexploited powertools, not to mention the repositories of most of the world's semi-structured data.

I've also said that Excel is so good that this is all Microsoft's market to lose if they screw up the transition to a new kind of spreadsheet : the spreadsheet as front-end / dashboard to all the enterprise's information streams. A flexible mashup builder which can be configured by a reasonably smart / well trained user or the IT department or an integrator.

We are a hairsbreadth away from the socialized spreadsheet fulfilling this destiny. But I'm waiting to see who's going to give it to us. Will Microsoft succeed in reinventing Excel? Will Google pump up the capabilities of their spreadsheet to compete? Will an outsider with a technically superior web-native sheet (like EditGrid) manage to sneak in-front of both?

Winer is thinking hard at the moment. Couple of goodies :

Twitter business model

What's news? What's its business model?

What will kill Microsoft.

Craig Mundie:

If you want to focus narrowly on saying, as perhaps we should, "We're just a software company and we intend to make a business out of software" -- then I think his statements are true. It's obviously a little bit more complicated than that. But, at a conceptual level, the idea that software is not an intellectual property asset is something that we do not agree with. We spend billions of dollars a year to make [software]. Most of the established countries in the world accord it intellectual property status and we work hard to develop patents and uniqueness.

Apart from that, he makes some good points.

Dare Obasanjo on walled gardens and the social network os

It's the usual stuff ... (same as I was discussing with Umair some time ago)

Of course, Facebook and its ecosystem failed to find the value that I presumed that private networks could provide. And now looks to be in trouble. Does this mean I was wrong?

I don't know ... no one is doing what I thought they'd do ... but I still can't shake off the feeling that it's possible.

We'll see ...

Wisdom of Clouds has a great overview of the "big 4" cloud offerings.

Facebook's coming payment system

Dare Obasanjo on whether the Yasn-as-platform is dead. (channeling Alex Iskold)

Eeek!!! Has one of the major planks of my understanding and prediction of the software industry just turned turtle and sunk?

Well, I still believe in the widgets and YASN-as-Platform model. But some things clearly went wrong in Facebook's case. Is this in relation to their being evil?

Or is it an issue when giving away access to your platform : applications must pay somehow. What does this bode for GAE or Amazon or Faceforce or Microsoft's Azure? Presumably paying apps. earn their keep.

Meanwhile, it turns out that Java never made money for Sun. Which shouldn't surprise anyone. But does raise the question, what was their strategic objective? It's one thing to have had a sound strategy and just been beaten (eg. by Microsoft's C# or the free-software movements swarm of "scripting" languages) but it's very hard to see what on earth they were expecting from Java.

My first thoughts on Microsoft's Azure ended up at Folknology.

Basically, it seems to me that M$ aren't clear what they're aiming for. An Amazon-like generic hosting option. Or a GAE-like integrated experience. I'd be more impressed if they'd produced a great hosting story for ASP. At least then you'd feel that they had the something that they believe in. Dropping hints about PHP or Rails on the one hand, while pushing tighter integration with Visual Studio on the other, just sounds dissembling at best, and downright deliberately misleading at worst.

Cringely reads the tea-leaves of a recent Samsung announcement : that they are getting out of high-end SmartPhones from which he infers "nah, all phones are gonna be smart, but Samsung want to get out of smartphones with expensive (read Microsoft Windows Mobile) software".

And on the future of mobile platforms :

If I had to bet right this moment on the mobile 85-10-5 of 2011 I'd say iPhone, Android, then RIM, Symbian, or something completely new from behind Door Number Three.

To recap ... Microsoft are in real, real trouble. M$ are a company built around a particular vision that Bill Gates had in the 1970s : that with the right intellectual property protection, a company could be a pure software company, independent of any hardware vendor or service provider. And that vision was spectacularly successful for two decades.

But that business model is evaporating. As Cringley points out : on mobiles, two of the big platforms (Android and Symbian) are now free. The third, and (to-be) biggest (iPhone) is an appendage of a hardware manufacturer.

On the exploding netbook category the contenders are Linux and Windows XP, the product Microsoft is desperate to kill. (Here's a hint to Microsoft. Fix a couple of problems in XP, rebrand it as "XP3" and keep it alive for netbooks.) If M$ are stupid enough to kill XP, and Apple get into the game too, there's no guarantee Microsoft will have much presence here either.

And that's where all the growth is going to be in personal computing over the next few years.

Update : Bonus link to developer view.

Well known troll Andrew Keen argues the case for money in the great "money vs. something else" platform war.

My response :

Surely if something gets scarcer, it's value goes up, but, by definition, consumption goes down.

If there are fewer pancakes, we may obsess over pancakes, we may dedicate our lives to the great pancake chase. But most of the time, we'll eat bread.

In a recession, the thing that's got scarce is money. And whether we like it or not, we'll have to make do with less money, and more of something else. (Whether that's scrip, LETS, doing each other favours, growing our own food or donating our time to free software.)

Your argument is effectively based on the idea that demand for money is "inelastic" ... that however expensive it gets, people just gotta have it and so anything else will be sacrificed for it. I don't agree.

If there's less money, companies aren't going to start splashing out on *more* software licenses. People aren't going to start buying more CDs or DVDs. *Consumers* will either adapt to go without, or to pirate, or to consume free versions.

And whichever of those three they choose, the effect is the same : less money will change hands while people manage their software and content requirements. And there'll be less money going to programmers and "content creators".

This is true for any other product too. We don't imagine that a recession means more paid work for people in the steel industry. Why imagine that it will mean more paid work for journalists?

The only difference is that we know that when there's no money to pay for steel production, the quantity produced and consumed goes down. Because information isn't scarce in the same way, we don't know whether total production and consumption in the information industry will go down or whether amateurs doing it for free will pick up the slack.

How to add third party widgets to SocialText

This is an interesting place : Apple's AppStore now gets rivals from Android Market and RIM's Blackberry Storefront

Presumably the manufacturers will want exclusive control over selling to "their" phone platform. But for their device-swarm-market they'd like to be able to sell apps. for other phones. Who'll break this open?

Update : Who's gonna do this for ordinary PC ie. netbook software?

I continue to be a fan of M$ advertising.

This time the jokes on Wired for not getting it. (Even though some of their commentators do.) Ricky Gervaise is God!

Google App. Engine goes Javascript and Java

Android's "kill" let's Google delete applications from your Android phone?

Google opening up user's profiles to search.

Hat-tip Scribe : The state of scripting language platforms.

Tim OReilly on Dell's move away from customization and flexible supply-chain.

There are two possibilities: first, that Dell is wrong, and their new supply chain approach will not save them, just make them more like everyone else. It could be that their "live suppy chain" approach just got too crufty, too complex - the article linked above suggests more than 5000 possible configurations. Maybe what they needed to do was to make the system smarter again by streamlining and simplifying.

But it's possible too that the competitive advantage to be wrung from a live enterprise only takes you so far, and that in certain circumstances other advantages are more important. It may well be that the PC market has reduced itself to such commodity status that standardization trumps customization. It may well be that the costs of physical goods mean that the laws of virtual networks are only partly true in that realm.

Worth thinking about, especially as I thought Dell should go in the opposite direction.

Update : Interesting that Dell's suggestion box Ideastorm is full of people demanding better Linux support and pricing. Guess this is a self-selecting audience, of course, but what does Dell do? Create a way of listening to customers and then not follow it for fear of M$, or follow it, and risk the wrath of M$?

PC manufacturers creating sites like this are bad news for M$ either way.

Update 2 : Why are Dell abandoning make-to-order? At one point I wondered if they're actually worrying about long distance just-in-time supply chains as the world energy prices keep going up. But it doesn't look as if that's what's going on. Or is it just a bet on cheap and standard over expensive and flexible (particularly as we go into a recession.)?

Windows Server on Amazon EC2

Good move for both of them.

Marc Andreesen joins EBay.

Hmmm. Is it just coincidence that Donahoe is talking about powerful communities when Andreessen’s current baby–Ning–is a social networking platform. Can you say exit strategy?

Admittedly, that eBay buying Ning idea is a leap, but crazier things–like eBay’s acquisition of Skype–have happened.

I must admit that I've warmed to the new Ning. It turns out to be pretty useful for putting a quick YASNS together. Buying it (and Andreesen) would definitely be a good move for EBay (if they can avoid wasting the opportunities the way they have Skype and Paypal)

Here's an interesting interview with Jeff Hawkins about the netbook category. Implies that early rejection was due to Grognard Capture.

Here it comes. Gears on Android.

And here's some appreciation of it.

Interesting question : could the StackOverflow method / software (clean, reduced advertising, voting driven) be applied to medical diagnostic sites and patient discussion forums?

New Android demo video

Mary Jo Foley on Midori, a family of stripped down, "managed code" infrastructure projects within Microsoft. Possibly the aim is to move towards the whole M$ operating system product running inside a light, portable virtual machine.

LinkedIn starts an advertising network

StackOverflow is genius. Two respected and popular software development bloggers putting their audiences to work to make a better mutual-aid site for programmers.

Incredibly this seems something that no-one else has done. Most places for programmers to help each other are based on pretty lousy generic discussion forum software and plastered with adverts.

Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood have rethought the whole thing and made a far far better service.

It reminds me of a post I wrote about Behance, Design Outpost, Tribe and other more specialized YASNS and markets. There's a huge largely untapped opportunity ... to take YASNS away from generic people-collecting sites and make them useful vehicles for communities to work together. In my fantasy I talked about putting diverse but complementary communities together. But StackOverflow reminds us that there's also plenty of room just to take a rather tired and ineffective genre of community site and make it a hell of a lot better.

Meanwhile, back in the cloud :

The long and the short of it is that we have entered into a new era, in which data centers will no longer simply be collections of servers, but will actually be computing units in and of themselves--often made up of similar computing units (e.g. containers) in a sort of fractal arrangement. Virtualization is key to make this happen (though server virtualization itself is not technically absolutely necessary). So are powerful management tools, policy and workflow automation, data and compute load portability, and utility-type monitoring and metering systems.

Run and read Dare (and indirectly Nick Carr)

Nick :

Google’s protean appearance is not a reflection of its core business. Rather, it stems from the vast number of complements to its core business

Dare :

So why is [Chrome] significant? It isn't because "Google Chrome is going to replace Windows" or some other such silliness. As it stands now, Google Chrome is a Windows based application whose most interesting features exist in other browsers. A Web browser cannot replace an operating system any more than an automobile can replace an Interstate highway. The significant end user innovation in Google Chrome is that it is bundled with Google Gears. This means that Google Chrome has a mechanism for delivering richer experiences to end users out of the box. Google can now use this as a carrot and a stick approach to convincing browser vendors to do what it wants. Google can make its sites work better together with Chrome + Gears (e.g. YouTube Uploader using Gears) which could lead to lost browser market share for competing browser vendors if this becomes a widespread practice among Google's offerings. Even if Google never does this, the implied threat is now out there.

Chrome will likely force Google's competitors to up their game with regards to adopting newer Web standards and features just to stay competitive. This is similar to what Google did with online mapping and Web mail, and what the Opera browser has been doing by pioneering features like "pr0n mode" and tabbed browsing. So even if Google loses because Chrome doesn't get massively popular, Google still wins because the user experience for browsing the Web has been improved. And at the end of the day, if more people are using the Web because the user experience is better across the board that's just fine for Google. The same way the fact that all online mapping experiences and Web mail experiences have improved across the board is also good for Google.

I wouldn't be as sanguine about the "replace Windows" bit as Dare is. Particularly not if I was Microsoft. Looking at Asus netbooks over the weekend I'm seeing lots of positive reviews and happiness with the Linux + browser + very cheap hardware package.

It looks to me as though we could easily be approaching, not exactly a "tipping point" (with all the notions of positive feedback that this implies), but at least a period of rapid transition, beyond which the standard or most common computing tool in our lives isn't a Windows PC running MS Office but a $200 - $300 netbook running free software. See all the PC makers playing catch up.

The standard price for this tool is way too low to charge an extra $50 - $100 for OS and Office Suite. And the browser-based email and office apps. will be fine for most users. The entire market for the traditional Microsoft software product, the generic "PC", is evaporating as we watch.

ZDNet is calling this Browser Wars 2.0 ...

I've been saying that browsers are not (and shouldn't be thought of) as a site for strategic competition. But it looks as though I may be wrong on this one.

The reason I thought that there was no room for competition there, is that I saw (and still see) standards (HTML, Javascript, CSS) rather than differentiation as dominating. There's no mileage in a slightly different HTML or scripting language.

All web-applications want to be runable on all browsers ... anything else is just suicide. And all browsers want to be able to run all applications ... and so ...

But I underestimated the part about a better experience for the users which isn't related to the browser content. Browser features such as speed, privacy, off-line caching, new UIs such as Enso-like "ubiquity". All the browser makers have demonstrated that they can create some excitement in these areas.

Also, what's becoming clearer is that "privacy modes" can disrupt the kind of cookie tracking which allows, say Google, to serve relevant adverts, which makes browser innovation in this area a direct attack on Google's revenue. (And so also makes us realize how much of an interest Google have here.)

So, I think I was still right about standards in web content (at least for the moment). But as the browser really starts to replace the desktop operating system it takes over a whole lot of other responsibilities as well. And there's clearly some room for differentiation there.

David Berlind points out the should-be-obvious (but-not-very-remarked) : Google's Chrome + Gears also wraps mobile (device swarm) operating systems.

Point 1 : the browser is the only reliable application container which runs reliably across different operating systems on phones

Point 2 : the downside of the browser is that it depends on network connection which is unreliable on mobile phones

Point 3 : Gears (which is sneaked into Chrome) solves that.

It works ... Doesn't the Apple "cool vs. nerd" already start to look rather tired and cliched after you watch the M$ ads?

Wow! New Gates and Seinfeld episode.

This is all about scrambling any perception or stereotype you might have had about M$.

Update : It is, also, of course a kind of satire on / deconstruction of the Apple ads. With Seinfeld in the place of the "cool" (Mac) guy, and Gates as the boring, nerdy (PC) guy. Except in this case, the distinction is being shown as breaking down, both are equally weird, uncool, "bad" (flawed, selfish, stupid in the way all Seinfeld characters are).

The Apple / PC dichotomy that the Mac ads push? There is no such structure in the world. There's just the nihilistic despair of the human condition. A primal chaos from which a new M$ brand can emerge.

BBC Radio becoming a YASN?

Obasanjo's three reasons developers adopt new platforms : 1) to help them differentiate themselves, 2) to make things significantly simpler, or 3) to reach new markets. Plus he seems to add a fourth : better distribution.

For example, the platforms I've been excited about in the last couple of years : the Facebook / YASN-as-platform and Google Application Engine. The first is basically 3 (or maybe 4) while the attraction of GAE is mainly 2.

I'm still pondering whether Google's 20% time constitutes a new kind of effective R&D for them. Here's a story that Microsoft are also thinking about how to revamp (and accelerate / diversify / distribute?) their R&D.

Well, I have to come out here and say I like the Microsoft / Seinfeld ad. I think it's funny ... and non-obvious. I'm not sure where they're going, but at least in this sphere they don't seem to be trying to catch up with Apple.

Weird though that now they try to make Bill Gates a brand-mascot, now he's left.

Update : Second thought ... the total lack of any kind of real "message" (apart from "Gates wants to be seen as a fun guy and hang out with Seinfeld", obviously) may be making a virtue of necessity in that M$ don't actually have a message at the moment.

That's perhaps not a bad position to be in ... maybe the first task has to be to destroy our previous perception of M$. And that means reinventing Gates as no longer the mega-rich, evil, world-dominating manipulator behind the scenes but a lovable, fun, nerd who still buys discount shoes and jokes around in an archly subtle way. (From his performance here, Gates could actually be made into a pretty funny comic actor. Couldn't you see him cameoing in a Woody Allen movie?)

M$, if anything, are the practical, pragmatic choice of conservative IT departments. What if you could pull off the antithesis, upping the nihilism in the Microsoft ads, to make Apple (in its race to the enterprise) look the stodgy "sensible" choice, while M$ discover an entirely clean space to reinvent themselves as whatever they want to be seen as next?

John Hagel :

The next generation of the WWW may be driven by environments and tools that enhance serendipity. Companies that find ways to amplify serendipity may reap the greatest economic rewards as we all struggle to improve our return on attention.

Cringley thinks Chrome is all about the danger of Microsoft making Ad-blocking in IE sufficiently good to hurt Google.

Haque meanwhile is wearing his rose-coloured Google glasses.

So Google want to own the browser too.

It's interesting to speculate why. Of course, one possibility is that someone in the hydra-headed Googleplex just started this as their 20% project and it got released.

Or maybe it's just a defensive move to protect web-standards (a Google "complement") against the possible encroachment by proprietory RIA front-ends like Flash and Silverlight? But why not just invest in Firefox or Webkit? Is this just Google's way of doing that? Are they trying to disuade too much fragmentation between these other open-source contenders?

I still believe Internet Explorer is a total waste of time, money, energy and focus for Microsoft. Why wouldn't an "own brand" browser be similarly one for Google?

Not sure ... let's see if they do anything clever with it.

Update : Dare Obasanjo nails an important point :

Will ship with Google Gears built-in

This pushes the Gears offline caching standard (against Mozilla's own rival) and is therefore an indirect attack on the desktop as offline application platform.

Dare's bonus question :

Am I the only one that thinks that Google is beginning to fight too many wars on too many fronts.

I half agree. To me, the most interesting question about Google today is whether, through their 20% time, and their ready engagement of open internet culture, and having pots of money to spare, they've created a genuinely new, decentralized type of company structure, one which is capable of innovating more products and fighting on more fronts at the same time, than a traditional, more top-down, organization.

I'm not wholly convinced they have. But then I'm not wholly convinced they haven't, either. I'm keeping an open mind. But if we see a few more of these bets become successful and profitable, that may signal a Google which is almost unbeatable by more conventional software companies.

Remember this discussion here?

Trouble with third-party widgets at Ning.

Missed this interesting nugget about the shift in Facebook-land.

Umair :

Today, I think there's perhaps a simpler and more powerful way to think strategically about platforms.

Let me advance a simplifying proposition: platforms are markets. The most useful way to think about platforms today is simply as markets.

Of course, I don't entirely agree with him, but a good position to start from.

John Robb on "Containerization", the creation of a new shipping platform.

The Bearhug

Update : now a camp.

Competing for an open (generative) web :

Think about it another way. The main metric that I would use to describe the health of a truly open web is this: That as the ecosystem expands, the raw number of people, companies or groups who hold power inside the ecosystem, and can affect its direction, grows as the ecosystem grows. Put another way, the power center is decentralized over time. Change inside of that ecosystem require more voices to agree that change is good. That’s healthy. And that’s an open web.

Open-source financial trading platform

GigaOm interviews Adobe.

An online carbon platform.

Meanwhile ... Microsoft's cloud-hosted platform : Zurich.

Compare and contrast : the end of broadcast with the triumph of Linux on the "remote" desktop.

Lack of Android exitement, apparently.

Microsoft shake-up : Windows + WindowsLive vs. Online Services

Dare Obasanjo's analysis of the Facebook redesign is well worth a read.

Bill de hÓra on Apple's AppStore.

The appstore is easily the most interesting part of the iPhone, much more than 3G. The appstore imvho means three things. First the carrier deck constraint is shifted away from the operator or default homepages to getting placed on the appstore's core views (like hot, top 25 and new). Second, and this what is drives the first, "embed date stress" is relaxed somewhat. In the mobile handset biz, phone embed dates are king - missing the date is bad because nobody, statistically speaking, downloads applications - whereas the appstore is easy to use. The appstore allows you to have a hit well after the handset launch. Third, "OTA" (over the air) updates will become the normal way of doing things instead of a feature - bad bug? - requirements 180? - protocol upgrade? Push out a new revision the way we do today with desktop applications and browser plugins. As much as Tim Bray doesn't like sharecropping and objective-c, this is a good for SMEs and innovators. I can imagine handset and opcos cloning the appstore model, right down as far as supporting technology, eg Android supporting an OSGi-a-like, and enhanced developer programs to drive applications. (None of this is good for IMS btw).

I think my respect for Michael Arrington just increased somewhat. He's decided to declare war on Microsoft.

It's the zeitgeist, of course.

Gaping Void is talking to Dell about revamping their brand.

My comments :

Seems to me that it's the usual branding vs. commoditization problem. As long as Dell make commodities (PCs) they have no social object to hang a story around. We know what a PC is and what we want from it. Either Dell can give it to us as cheaply as possible or they can't.

If Dell want a social object / brand makeover they have to make products that are differentiated in a way worth talking about. With English Cut and Stormhoek you had a novel story : "a tailor / wine that blogs". With Dell, "a computer company that blogs" isn't going to fly.

Who's making a differentiated PC today? (Apart from Apple who are at a whole other level.) Basically Asus. They have great stories : a whole new form-factor, a whole new price, new technologies (solid state disks), Linux really making things cheaper, etc.

Dell used to have two good stories : "cheaper because we sell direct without dealers" and "you can customize on our web-site and our super-lean process will build to your design in a day". The first story is probably no-longer available. Doesn't *everybody* sell direct? The second seems to have gone AWOL.

"Customizability" could be an idea that Dell still owns. The right web-site, a cute user-interface, could turn computer shopping into an intensely personal Build-a-Bear kind of emotional experience. Dell could offer wider variety of peripherals, accessories etc. They could invest in and promote their supply-chain, gain green credentials through offering you the chance to build "low carbon footprint" PCs from local or lower-polluting sources. They could create an Etsy-like market for casemodders etc.

But they need to have *something* to tell a story about.

Update : what inspiration should Dell take from Nabaztag or Chumby or LiveScribe? The PC is becoming the Device Swarm. How does a traditional, "staid", clone-manufacturer engage with that? Buy the innovative start-ups? Try to make me-too copies? Partner with the originators to sell them with the site? Help foster an eco-system that includes them?

Now Facebook really does open-source it's "Cassandra" Big-Table equivalent.

Yahoo's Open strategy

About time! (If not too late.)

Now, let's see what it gets them. (I have no predictions at this stage.)

Update : Sweet. The mashup-framework is in python (since GAE, becoming the new duct-tape of the web.)

Update 2 : Of course it's not "open-source". I wonder why people thought it was?

What the W3C can do.

Twitter as PayPal killer?

Update : tipit.to

Microsoft utterly defensive on Vista.

More on identi.ca as the open Twitter.

Twitter to buy Summize

Interesting comment on Microsft's Equipt.

Bundling Office suite + tethered security-as-a-service == new business model? And if so, is it one which allows Free Software substitutes to take advantage of? (With proprietary anti-virus vendors as the reseller channel.)

Russell Beattie on Nokia'a Simbian acquisition.

In my mind, there are different types of OS platforms, created for one of several reasons, broadly separated into monetization, control or shared workload. Monetization - as shown by Microsoft - is that if you control a platform that becomes popular, you can charge money for it indefinitely as it's the basis for many other people's work. Control is what Apple and Blackberry do, where they don't license the platform, but use it to ensure they control everything about what happens on their platform and devices. Shared workload is what the Linux folk are about, where even though they lose control and get no fees, they still derive benefits from not having to do everything themselves, and the platform improves and is used more broadly as well with less investment on their part.

Symbian it seems has attempted to do all of this ...

Dave was clearly somewhat wrong about a couple of things here. :-)

I wonder what IBM / Rational's Jazz "collaborative development platform" is, really.

Gnip, a new Ping-Server