July 28th, 2004

Digital convergence, RSS and rights management

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 9:16 pm

Categories: General

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Comcast’s second-quarter results offer a fascinating snapshot of where user preferences are trending in the broadband market. With DSL maxing out at much slower download and similar upload speeds, customers are switching to cable for high-speed access. I just took advantage of a six-month offer at $20 a month. But at the same time, I’m sticking with satellite video service from Dish Network, primarily because Comcast does not yet offer DVR services. Ironically, the phone company here (SBC) is offering Dish service for new customers, while Comcast moves into VoIP. When six months roll by, it may be time to switch again, as Comcast may likely have both DVR and HDTV channels for local access, something Dish is now trailing in.

Meanwhile TiVo unveiled DVD burning facilities, leveraging the robust data storage requirements for HDTV as well as TiVo’s expansion beyond broadcast and cable offerings to so-called “pure” broadband programming.

When RSS converges with this trending toward more Web-based programming, it will be time once again to reevaluate broadband suppliers.  RSS will be the filtering and program guide technology for an entire spectrum offerings.

As Dan Farber reports from OSCon: O’Reilly said that the open source community needs to "Napsterize" the calendar, address book and other social software to prevent ownership of personal data by a single entity.

We will need an open, peer-to-peer standard so that no single entity controls user data or access to content via onerous digital rights management schemes.

July 28th, 2004

Open source about vendor choice?

Posted by @ 5:33 pm

Categories: General, Open Source

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Speaking at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, Peter Schay, executive vice president of The Advisory Council, made the case for Linux versus Windows in simplified terms: avoidance of vendor lock-in at all costs, even if on paper or whiteboard TCO a Microsoft deployment is less costly than Linux.

"The economic value of ‘open’ is in the ability for users to walk away from onerous vendor pricing and licensing,"  Schay said.

That’s a common sense statement. You want to have the advantage in negotiation and low switching barriers help that situation. Today switching from one Linux distribution to another is easier than a Windows to Linux migration, but it’s not a seamless process. On the other hand, Schay is right that more choice and openness should lead to more advantageous pricing and service. If so, then why does Red Hat have such a dominant share. Is it there enough choice and interoperability in the open source world? Can the open source community take care of its own, in terms of ensuring a more competitive marketplace of highly compatible, interchangeable components?

July 28th, 2004

O'Reilly: Time to think differently about open source

Posted by @ 4:39 pm

Categories: General, Open Source

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During his keynote address [listen to an audio clip of his address or the full presentation] to the O’Reilly Open Source Convention 2004, Tim O’Reilly discussed some of the top issues shaping open-source development and said the community needs to shift its approach and thoughts about what open source truly is.

He talked about the challenges of moving open source forward in an environment in which the applications and services built on top of open source code is the focus of attention.

"You can give someone all the source code for Google, but still have to run to deliver the Google experience. It’s a different problem set than ‘give me a piece of source code and a compiler’ ….In the new context, openness is about data portability and building services."

"Free and open source software doesn’t guarantee freedom. The fact is applications and the success of application and platforms depends on network effects. There are various opportunities for data lock-in that are much bigger than the effect of APIs on lock-in….Regardless of whether you are doing proprietary or open source software, it’s really important to realize that data is increasingly becoming what makes the added value of an application. It’s important for open source developers to build a participatory layer around the data used in an application, not just around the source code, and to set standards for who owns the data." 

O’Reilly gave the example of Amazon as an application that has figured out ways to build an advantage, with its data warehouse and participatory elements such as user reviews. Gmail is a poster child for the move toward centralized services in which data portability becomes critical.  In addition to the issue of who is going to control the data and key name spaces, O’Reilly said that the open source community needs to "Napsterize" the calendar, address book and other social software to prevent ownership of personal data by a single entity. 

O’Reilly also noted that companies like Red Hat  need to deal with the whole stack, and asked who is going to be the "Dell" of open source, a company that could excel in delivering customized open source solutions with the efficiency and acumen associated with Dell’s hardware business. Red Hat seems more focused on becoming the next Microsoft, using its own integrated stack rather than mixing and matching components for customers. Perhaps Novell wants to take on that challenge…or someone in a college dorm will come up with a way to do it and build a company that grows into an industry force. 

In any case, O’Reilly has good insights into where open source is headed. It’s no longer about getting people to comprehend the concept or obsessing over licensing models and the definition of free; now it’s about evolving software in a way that data and Web services are wrapped with an openness ensuring that individual users have control over what data is public and what remains private.  

July 28th, 2004

Aussie CIOs delivering on IT value, alignment

Posted by Chris Jablonski @ 3:22 pm

Categories: General

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Outback Jack may know a thing or two about winning over women, but what do Australian CIOs know about business alignment and delivering the value of IT? Apparently a lot according to new research from META Group.  Australian CIOs are successful at obtaining healthy alignment with their executive peers because their practices center on their top priority, value management. Consequently, more CIOs (55%) report directly to the CEO down under compared to any other part of the world. Half of them hire relationship managers that keep a tight bond between lines of business and IT. And average CIO tenure has increased to 32 months from just 20 last year. Here are META’s recommendations for performing top-notch IT value management:

• Basic: Apply baseline assessments to a value management plan
• Basic: Create service-level agreements to properly set expectations
• Intermediate: Perform basic portfolio management to communicate the value of IT projects
• Intermediate: Develop and refine investment-return processes and criteria to manage risks, benefits, and variability
• Intermediate: Create communication plans and strategies for nearly identical communiqués
• Intermediate: Apply balanced scorecards for holistic metrics
• Advanced: Apply real options analysis or scenario-valuation techniques
• Advanced: Create taxonomies to link strategic, managerial, supervisory, and operational IT activities to ensure consistent IT value and metrics at each reporting level
• Advanced: Overcommunicate why and how-to via “train-the-trainer” methods

July 28th, 2004

Microsoft's mixed report card

Posted by Chris Jablonski @ 2:53 pm

Categories: General

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Microsoft’s latest earnings results show some business segments clearly doing better than others. Here’s the breakdown from a Gartner analysis published yesterday:

July 28th, 2004

French MS exec slips with Redmond's anti-virus plans

Posted by David Berlind @ 1:40 pm

Categories: General

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Although Microsoft officials have routinely denied the company’s ambitions to produce an anti-virus product, the technical head for Microsoft’s security project in France, Nicolas Mirail, has revealed some of the details of the company’s forthcoming anti-virus initiative.  According to Mirail, the standalone anti-virus product will be built from the tools that the company inherited through its 2003 acquisitions of GeCad and Pelican Software.  Microsoft’s M&A department is also rumored to still have its checkbook open for the right anti-virus company.  Microsoft’s foray into the anti-virus world could spell trouble for existing solution providers such as Symantec and McAfee.  On the other hand, given the the upper-hand that hackers seem to have on Microsoft, the may have little choice but to secure it’s software with world class anti-virus tools and personal firewalls.

July 28th, 2004

Next up: The -1 Day Attack?

Posted by David Berlind @ 1:17 pm

Categories: General

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The shrinking time-to-exploit (the amount of time that elapses between when a vulnerabilty is announced and when an exploit that takes advantage of it surfaces on the Net) is one of the hot topics as this week’s Black Hat security conference Las Vegas, NV.  It’s gone from as long as six months for the Slammer worm to two days for the Witty Worm to a matter of hours for a type of exploit known as a zero-day attack.  Part of the problem, according to a report from CNET News.com’s Rob Lemos, are the ever-improving tools used by hackers to reverse engineer patches.   Meanwhile, as the vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer revealed several weeks ago, we may have reached a tipping point where the exploits are showing up in advance of the patches.

July 28th, 2004

Peoplesoft's ingestion of J.D. Edwards now giving customers indigestion

Posted by David Berlind @ 12:41 pm

Categories: General, IT Management, Software Infrastructure

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Customers of the once stand-alone J.D. Edwards used to look forwared to the care and coddling that the enterprise solutions developer was known for providing .  But one year after the company was swallowed whole by PeopleSoft, CNET News.com’s Alorie Gilbert reports that customers of J.D. Edwards — including the City of Orlando’s CIO — are starting to miss the TLC they had grown accustomed to.  Is it just typical growing pains that go with the turf of big time M&A or is the problem more systemic?  And, should Oracle be allowed to proceed with it’s acquisition of PeopleSoft, will there be any chance of the system improving, or could it get worse?

July 28th, 2004

IBM's storage tank running into problems

Posted by ZDNet Editor @ 12:41 pm

Categories: General, Hardware Infrastructure, Software Infrastructure

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IBM’s Storage Tank project, built to handle data from Europe’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project is not meeting targets and may never be used at all, Infoworld reports. IBM has said the Storage Tank will provide a key storage technology for the grid, but according to the project managers has only managed to scale so far to 28TB of data, representing just 0.2 percent of the project’s total needs for the first year.

As this is the first attempt at building a grid storage system of this size and capacity, it’s not surprising that IBM has run into trouble. IBM’s apparent failure, however, demonstrates that widely deployed utility computing is several years away.