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Google makes Chrome OS open source
Google made the early code available to the open source community and claims external developers will have the same access to the code as internal Google developers.... Continued »
Category: Hardware
November 17th, 2009
Five ways Android could get into trouble
On the surface these are happy days in Android-land.
Going into the key Christmas selling season, Android is eating Windows for lunch. New (non-Google) development centers are continuing to open, new manufacturers are coming on stream.
What could possibly go wrong?
Knowing that rising markets need a wall of worry to keep going up, here are some possibilities:
- Momentum must be maintained. Once you start gobbling market share you have to keep doing it. Even a slowing of momentum can be read as failure.
- Developers must be kept happy. Some are complaining they’re working full-time getting apps written for the Android operating system running on multiple phones.
- The Android app store has some catching-up to do, especially in the user experience area.
- When will Android get a “killer app” that the iPhone can’t match, or one it hasn’t already matched?
- Can Google ride herd on its complex ecosystem? Everyone knows who the boss is with the iPhone. Not so with Android. (UPDATE: Rich Sands writes to say this article from his site is more to the point.)
We shouldn’t get too excited about Android’s early success. A 3.5% market share is still a gnat on Apple’s elephant. Early buzz does not make for victory — as President Howard Dean will tell you. (Or President Huckabee, if you prefer.)
Google has set itself a more complex task than that which faced Apple when it introduced the iPhone a few years ago. Google is using an open source approach, which means there are more hands on the steering wheel. And Google is trying to overcome an established leader, leading to charges of me-tooism.
A good start is not the race.
November 16th, 2009
Montavista embedded Linux eaten by Cavium
Embedded Linux is proprietary by its nature.
Expressing software inside a chip, then selling the chip, gives embedded Linux a business model, but that business model is tied closely to the success of the chip being sold.
So as chip makers have turned to Linux to power their new designs they have bought the software houses that pushed embedded Linux. Intel bought Wind River and now Cavium has bought Montavista.
LinuxPundit Bill Weinberg is troubled by this, but not for the reason you think. Very few of these companies are left now, and those are very small. But Weinberg is concerned more that Montavista failed to bag the really big bucks it was seeking at its founding 10 years ago.
What embedded Linux means for users and software developers is that there are open source on-chip tools you can write to and use for building bigger applications. Who controls the embedded Linux company is less important than that it succeed.
Cavium is considered a “start-up” networking chip company, but it’s doing some cool and interesting stuff.
This month Cavium showed a networked high-definition WiFi design, dubbed netHD, that can move 1080 HD feeds around your home on an 802.11n set-up. It’s working with Hitachi on “security processors” and drives the latest Netgear firewall. Despite continuing losses stock buyers have bid the company up to $850 million.
One can argue that, while Montavista hoped to sell for more, its investors are now getting a taste of a fast-growing proposition. And their success, Cavium’s success, will be open source’s success as well.
NOTE: My apologies to those who like to engage in flame wars here, for delivering a story that contains nothing but good news. How about this….Microsoft! (Stallman?)
November 12th, 2009
Broadcom goes open source and hell freezes over
When the rock group Eagles broke up in 1980 they said they would get back together “when hell froze over.” They did get back together, in 1994. The album was called Hell Freezes Over.
Point is you can promise you will never do something — never, ever, ever — but business is business.
It’s with this in mind we find Broadcom making its BroadVoice voice codecs open source and royalty free under GPL V. 2.
GigaOM is wondering whether Broadcom isn’t just pushing for higher priced, higher quality voice from service providers using the codecs. I have another theory.
Broadcom saw its greatest success in pioneering relationships with Taiwanese OEMs. When other chip companies were offering these firms software and ecosystems, Broadcom offered them solutions, complete designs from brand names they could bang out for a quick profit.
What I saw at CompuTex this year was an enormous interest from these OEMs, whose ties to Chinese manufacturing are incredibly strong, to go “up the stack” of value, to own their own designs and create their own brand names.
They see this as an impossible dream on the desktop, but very possible in the handset business, a Broadcom niche. Systems like Android, LiMo and Symbian are open source, so the components going into them should also be open source. It’s the most effective way to compete with Apple.
In taking this route, the OEMs are explicitly rejecting Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, and this is a very big deal. This has nothing to do with the sales world they desire. They gave Microsoft all of the Netbook market and stuck Linux in a corner.
This Broadcom announcement is the best proof yet that the future of the handheld market is Linux.
November 4th, 2009
LiMo has a second phone
The LiMo Foundation has delivered its second mobile phone to the market under the second release of its software.
The Vodafone 360 Samsung M1 looks uncomfortably like an iPhone, only with three buttons below the screen. The name is a hybrid — Vodafone 360 refers to the carrier’s service platform, Samsung M1 the phone manufacturer.
And it’s the Vodafone 360 that is at the heart of it all. The company calls this its “web services strategy.” Vodafone owns 45% of Verizon Wireless of the U.S.
Version 2.0 of the LiMo platform was announced in September alongside another Samsung phone, the H1. While Android stories revolve around developers and phone makers, LiMo seems proudest of its agreements with carriers.
The M1 itself seems to be a dumbed-down version of the H1, with less memory, a smaller screen, and presumably a lower price. It seems the idea is to hit the low-end of the market with something that looks like an iPhone, but isn’t, and a network that seems like the Internet, but isn’t.
LiMo press announcements also tend to carry a breathless quality that hasn’t been seen in America since the 1980s, except among recent college graduates. Here’s a taste:
This latest handset developed by Samsung offers mobile consumers a unique mobile experience presented through Vodafone’s stunning feature-rich, highly customizable Vodafone 360 user interface (UI) – providing a new set of Internet services for the mobile and PC that gathers all of a customer’s friends, communities, entertainment and personal favorites in one place.
You would think these people invented the handset.
Snark aside we are starting to see the dimensions of contrasting strategies among the various Linux handset groups. Android is about the makers, LiMo the carriers, and Moblin the developers.
Which will win the customers?
October 29th, 2009
Qualcomm joins open source movement at head of parade
Qualcomm, which has long had a major position in mobile chip sets and standards, has joined the open source movement with an eye to leading it. (Picture from Whenpigsfly.info.)
The company formed a new unit called Qualcomm Innovation Center (QuIC), under a senior vice president, and it joined the board of directors of the Symbian Foundation.
The idea behind the QuIC is to push open source, including systems like Chrome, Webkit and Android as well as Symbian, the company said.
Qualcomm is doing this to support its Snapdragon chip set, a CPU and graphics chip package designed for low power and handheld devices, most based on Linux. These include what Qualcomm calls “smartbooks,” netbook-phone hybrids on which Chinese manufacturers like Acer, Asus and HTC are already working.
The move should also be seen in light of recent moves by Intel to support mobile open source. Matt Asay writes that “pigs are beginning to fly” and he’s right.
But where are they heading?
The efforts of Qualcomm surrounding Snapdragon seem to prove that the “waiting for Godot” story of “desktop Linux” may finally get an appearance by its title character appearing on the stage in the form of a telephone-laptop hybrid.
But open source advocates should also take a jaundiced view of this, not just because it has been delayed for years. As Matt notes, combining open source and proprietary technology in the way Qualcomm wants to do, while legitimate, does threaten to maintain the vendor lock-in that open source is meant to fight.
Just because you draw a picture does not mean the pig is really flying.
October 26th, 2009
Why Android is beating Windows Mobile
Most analysts have it wrong. It’s not about a balance of power and it’s not about Google becoming what Sun promised to be and it’s certainly not about that dread word free.
It’s about the game that the two companies are playing. Google is playing, and Microsoft is not. (Here, one of the 16 “masterpieces” in the dogs playing poker series, from Wikipedia.)
With Google Android you see where all your competitors start from. You can innovate from there. You can differentiate your phone from other Android phones.
With Microsoft there is less wiggle room. The only people who see the code are Microsoft and (maybe) the manufacturer. You are betting that Microsoft can out-innovate Apple. (Stop laughing.)
No one in the mobile business throught Apple could out-innovate Apple back in the day. Remember when Apple was playing footsie with Motorola? No one in the mobile business thought Apple had what it took to be a “lead dog” — they all wanted it in harness with an unchanging view.
So Apple did its own phone, its own way, and Apple won.
Microsoft lacks the courage to do this. It won’t compete with its own ecosystem. It doesn’t understand that hardware is software. So it plays the game the way Symbian did five years ago, even though Symbian has abandoned that game, so there is no reason to fear Microsoft, and no “there” there.
The days of control are over, unless you’re willing to bet big. Apple did, and wound up playing Monopoly on its own design. What’s Microsoft playing, Blind Man’s Bluff?
By contrast, think of Google as dealing hands of poker.
All the players at the Android table can see one anothers’ cards. Not all the cards, but enough to get a feel for what’s happening. They can keep their aces in the hole, they can innovate or compete in some other way.
The dealer is patient, you can play all day, and guess who ends up with most of the chips at the end of play?
The dealer.
Google is betting that carriers and manufacturers will play enough hands with it that it can gain some market share. Right now that looks like a pretty good bet.
Microsoft is like a gambler with a fistful of dollars that can’t find the game.
October 19th, 2009
Motorola goes all-in for Google Android
What makes the World Series of Poker compelling is that it ends.
TV poker has specified stakes and players going “all-in.”
Business lacks such climaxes. You seldom see such a grand gesture. There’s always another quarter. It’s a grind.
That’s what makes Motorola’s gamble on the Google Android, and the grand gesture of its “Droid” launch, worth a second look. The company is going “all-in.” There is no backup plan. If the sales parachute does not open the company falls like a rock.
Failure might be embarrassing for Google, but it has other partners and many other opportunities. For Motorola this is do or die.
Even if the company itself doesn’t go under with a Droid failure, this is its last shot at cellphone glory. Its phone sales have been cut in half the last few years, its market share is a shadow of its former glory, and the vultures are circling.
Having followed Motorola off-and-on for over 30 years I find this a fascinating spectacle. The company has been around for over 80 years, producing its first cellphone back in 1973. Motorola’s corporate history claims it invented Six Sigma, and among its acquisitions over the years were General Instrument and Symbol Technologies.
Now Motorola is betting on Google to help make it a player in radios again, its original niche. The first pictures of the platform are out, and were enough to send the stock soaring. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
How do you think it will taste?
October 15th, 2009
Should Google spin Android into a foundation?
How does it maintain control of Android and at the same time build a community of interests in which developers can seek profit?
The easy answer is to turn the Open Handset Alliance into the Android Foundation. (Fans of the late Isaac Asimov will recognize this fellow even in French.)
Critics love to claim that Eclipse is just an IBM front, but that’s a cheap shot, based on the fact that IBM gains huge benefits from Eclipse without having to pay all the bills there.
Foundations can be a great way to organize vendors who have a common purpose but divergent business plans. The Linux Foundation is a good example of this.
But there are risks in an Android Foundation, as Symbian’s David Wood said when they were going open source a year ago.
Forks are one.
Foundations lead naturally to forks. Every vendor who sells an “enhanced” version of Eclipse tools is pushing a proprietary fork. There are dozens of Linux distros, each of which forks the code in some way to provide added value.
How much Android forking can Google stand before the value starts dribbling through its fingers? Like to see some stuck-up Microsoft search engine sitting on an Android phone? (Make your blood boil? Well I should say.)
There is, of course, another risk in going the Foundation route. It doesn’t always work. Witness LiMo, which Motorola recently abandoned for Android. Witness Moblin, which Intel gave to the Linux Foundation. Witness Symbian itself for that matter.
The difference between the OHA and a conventional software foundation is that for Android to move forward it must first be expressed in phones, in hardware. The chicken-and-egg question here yields an easy answer. It’s the chicken. An egg, the software, is pretty meaningless if it’s just sitting on a server.
This fact reduces the threat of a fork. The value of any Android handset lies in its compatibility. Without that it might as well be a Windows Mobile set.
So long as Google is the biggest investor in Android, then, it’s probably doing the right thing by avoiding the foundation model. But at some point the rest of the ecosystem needs to grow up for Google to get its investment back.
So if Google does set up an Android Foundation some time down the road, know that it’s a sign of success, and that it no longer has to push this rock up the hill all by itself.
October 13th, 2009
Wikipedia productized
Perhaps no business has been so transformed by open source as encyclopedias.
The appearance of Wikipedia, and its many cousins, rivals and inlaws, has wrecked the business. Even giant Microsoft’s Encarta has succumbed, as of the end of this month.
We all know the jokes about Wikipedia’s accuracy, but since it beat the Encyclopedia Brittanica in a blind taste test nearly four years ago attention has focused more on making it better, or creating rivals to it, than knocking the idea of open source, crowdsourced content.
And now it’s in a box. Meet the Wikireader.
It’s about the size of a portable alarm clock, with a one-color screen, a MicroSD card, and a touchscreen with three buttons, running on two AAA batteries. Update the card on the company’s Web site or they’ll send you four updates a year for $30. The retail price is $99.
The designer is Sean Moss-Pultz, last seen helming the failed OpenMoko mobile phone project. It’s cute, and it has enough marketing muscle behind it to have a chance.
Will we see it under your Christmas tree this year? Maybe you know a kid who can use it, or a know-it-all relative.
It’s also part of a general trend, specialized, mass market devices designed to access just one piece of the Web. Certainly a trend worth watching.
I don’t know if you’ve ever thought of owning a really fine set of encyclopedias (my office has one from 1883) and I don’t know if you’d call Wikipedia fine. But at $99 it’s cheap as chips.
October 12th, 2009
Why the big Android bandwagon?
We have had open source mobile platforms for years. Why has Android become a bandwagon, one big enough that people are wondering if it’s not growing too big for its britches.
One word: marketing.
Thanks to its low-cost structure, Google can subsidize the marketing of its products to a degree even experienced rivals can’t match. As I have said before there is a price lower than free, and Google is uniquely positioned to pay that price.
Why? Look at the ad above, for the HTC myTouch, from Vimeo. All those celebrities aren’t just selling T-Mobile, or HTC. They are also selling Google. Android gave Google an excuse to do TV ads, with others’ help. Even if it doesn’t sell phones it sells the Google brand, and Google benefits from that.
It’s all about the sharing. By spreading the development effort through open source, Google also spreads the marketing cost as various players vie for position. But Google’s size and budget are what make this a good deal for everyone else.
Symbian and RIM can’t pay this price to the degree Google can. Symbian was spun-out to become self-sustaining, and its developer outreach efforts may be all it can do. RIM has a proprietary background, and proprietary profits, so for it to grab open source may easily be seen as desperation.
Google has both the money and the reputation to push product through the channel that has its roots in open source. Its multiplicity of developers means all of them have an incentive to drive down the open source incline and the open source development incline.
Google may eventually seek to monetize all this with online services, but it is developing the market before showing its hand in that area. Meanwhile, the ad revenue from having Web pages appear on more mobile kit is all it really needs. (Yes, this means the iPhone is subsidizing Android.)
Google’s cost structure gives it the power to be patient, something no other market player has. The Android bandwagon is built on this patience.
To succeed, however, it will have to deliver products as good or better than the iPhone, at the same or less cost, with just as many apps. That risk to its reputation is all Google is laying on the line here, but since failure will also hurt open source that risk is also shared.
October 12th, 2009
Netgear slammed for doing the right thing
Over the weekend a controversy erupted over Netgear’s shipping some proprietary software with its GPL router, the Rangemax Wireless-N.
This is one of those stupid kerfluffles that give open source a bad name.
Harald Welte, one of the good guys, got things started with a blog post titled Netgear trying to fool their users with “Open Source Router,” (Picture from Wikimedia Commons.) The text doesn’t match the intensity of the headline.
Welte’s complaint is that Netgear did not “study the Open Source market that they’re trying to address.” The company ships proprietary software with the router, then lets users download open source replacements if they wish.
This doesn’t please open source advocates, but they’re not the whole market for this product. Addressing multiple markets with one router is called marketing.
Netgear’s Pat Choudhury explained the company’s position at its Myopenrouter web site.
What makes the router open source is that Netgear lets you flash open source onto it. In fact they give you tools for this, and software. They’re happy if you do, and happy if you then build applications on the open source software you flash.
But if you don’t care, if you just want a super-fast router you can use out of the box, then Netgear wants to have its own software there, software it supports, software it understands. Yes, that’s proprietary software. So what? If you don’t care where’s the harm?
Santa Claus, who does his online business under the name megacoder, immediately chimed in under Choudhury’s post with an attaboy, but I wonder how many times open source advocates need to cry “wolf” when there is no wolf before people stop listening when there is a wolf?
Harald Welte has more power than I do, power he has earned over many years with good works. It doesn’t matter much when I shoot from the lip. It matters when he does.
October 8th, 2009
Google plays a hand of Ogre with Apple
Those of a certain age will remember an early Steve Jackson game called Ogre. It was a two-player game where one player had a single piece, a powerful piece called the Ogre. The other player had everything else.
This pretty much sums up Google’s Android strategy against the Apple iPhone. Apple in this case plays the Ogre. (Picture from Steve Jackson Games.)
The combination of Apple’s proprietary iPhone design and its exclusive deal with AT&T has proven financially powerful. Apple created a market no one thought existed for a data-driven mobile Internet client and everyone else is playing catch-up.
With Dell now agreeing to supply AT&T with its version of the Android, Google now has game pieces on all four major U.S. carriers, including the one Apple plays on. T-Mobile was the first carrier to carry Android kit, Verizon is being promised a bunch of it. Sprint and Samsung will be in on the game in a Moment.
Everybody gets to play the way they want. Carriers can get exclusives on designs, and negotiate any deal on the resulting data flow they wish. Both new and old manufacturers get to play in the phone game and try to innovate on the margins.
All this work feeds back into the Android ecosystem, and all content sales feed into the Android marketplace. Google just wants a place to advertise alongside the content.
It’s a fun game, whose knock-on effects are a direct challenge to Microsoft, Symbian, and the Blackberry folks. Google seems destined to be the market’s #2 player by early next year, #2 with a bullet.
But please note this. All Google’s pieces taken together don’t yet add up to the power of Apple’s iPhone. The Ogre still has the power. But Google has the dice.
October 6th, 2009
Netgear offers an open source router that is an applications platform
Netgear launched a new open source router called the RangeMax Wireless-N, a Linux-based unit with both Gigabit Ethernet ports and ReadyShare USB storage access.
The company is supporting the downloading of firmware and community development around the router at a site called MyOpenRouter.com.
This is precisely what I wanted to see when I started writing my blog posts about “Always On” at Corante in 2003.
The idea is that with storage and processing at the router, applications can live in the air independent of the PC. Clients on such a network might include security systems, RFID chips so you could find your stuff, and medical applications living on your body.
I was allowed to speak about this vision at the 2004 Accelerating Change conference at Stanford, and it is gratifying to see it finally being supported.
Unfortunately, router vendors resisted this concept for a long time. Early Linux routers seemed to emerge by accident, after programmers found they were using open source code without releasing it, and they were not supported by marketing.
Now things are changing. It will be fun to see where it goes from here:
- Security systems that can let police watch your break-in in progress, even from their police cars.
- Home automation systems that know when to water the plants and turn the lights on-and-off while you’re gone.
- Music systems that find you and deliver your tunes to the nearest speakers.
- A way to find your keys, your wallet, and your hat if you’re senile or just have ADHD.
- Systems that monitor the aged so they can age at home, not a nursing home.
- Medical systems that monitor your heart and blood sugar while you sleep, so ER techs are there as you have your heart attack instead of your getting the victory hug from the fellow in the brite nitegown.
All this, and more, can be developed on a platform where routers act as servers, wireless does the work of wires, and clients can be as small as a single RFID chip.
Now get to work and make yourself some money.
September 24th, 2009
HP supporting Oregon State Linux portal
Hewlett-Packard is quietly lending its support to a new Oregon State support portal for Linux, Communitylinux.org.
The site is hosted by Oregon State’s Open Source Lab and, while its content is HP-centric, it is pointedly not part of the HP domain.
(This happy little penguin is supporting the Linux Foundation’s annual membership drive. Are you?)
The idea is that non-commercial Linux distributions running on HP hardware can find support, even though it’s not officially coming from HP. We’re talking about server versions of Asianux, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu.
All these programs can now be run on HP servers without violating their hardware warrantees.
Bdale Garbee, HP’s Linux head, indicated at LinuxCon that HP’s support over time will include loading tests and certifications it has done with Linux onto the site so the community can use the data.
It’s a small announcement, but LinuxCon is a small show.
September 11th, 2009
Will new Motorola Google phone Cliq?
The code name for what is now the Motorola Cliq was Morrison, and I’m sure during its development some Chicago wags were asking “Tommy or Marion?” (This is Tommy. Use the link to find Marion.)
Its release, as a T-Mobile device, revealed the Android strategy. The phones may run open source, but they are being sold as Google proprietary.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Brands sell. Brands are a shorthand for all sorts of features and benefits, and when you’re marketing millions of units priced at just a few hundred dollars in a mature marketplace you need a brand to push through the clutter.
Motorola was once such a brand. It’s not any more. The hope is that Google is. So on Google Maps, on Google Voice Search, on Google Picasa and GTalk.
That last is also a hint as to where this goes. You release by Labor Day and you’re selling heavily for Christmas. The units sold at the Mobilize show yesterday were black, but expect them soon in red and green.
For carriers, the key question remains the data load this phone delivers, and the money they might make from that data. It’s called ARPU — average revenue per user. But these days it should called ABPU — average bandwidth per user.
By that measure, of course, the iPhone is John Wayne. What will Morrison be?
September 10th, 2009
Could One Laptop Per Child be a bad thing?
You know the old saw about helping people rise from poverty? Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime — or until the fish run out.
The idea of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is to teach a child to fish. But is it really more like giving a child a fishing pole?
It’s true the man who offered this criticism, Tom Pastorius of Projects Abroad, is selling something. Volunteering. He is the exclusive agent of the UK-based volunteering group for the U.S. and Canada.
He says volunteers should be there to help kids who get laptops, ideally at a community computer cluster rather than leaving each child to their own devices. This reduces the child’s frustration, without hindering the learning process.
Fair enough. One volunteer per child sounds better than one laptop. But it’s not going to happen. So that means we go back to the idea of computer labs, with the hardware locked away at night to keep it safe?
Pastorius’ concept also flies in the face of recent trends in Australia, where as we noted earlier students in New South Wales all got laptops to start the year. Windows laptops.
How long do you think those will last, with their hard drives and optical drives and what are the odds the kid’s going to update their antiviral each day? How about one computer repairman per child?
Which leads to my own modest proposal. Client hardware is not the problem. OLPC has proven that hardware can be super-cheap. Taiwanese Netbook makers have taken that idea and run with it.
The real problem is connectivity. Would our aid money, and the work of volunteers, be better spent upgrading the bandwidth available to villages in the developing world? One WiFi per child.
Or perhaps one pigeon?
September 4th, 2009
How an open source camera will change photography
What Stanford calls the Frankencamera does not look like much.
It’s big and clumsy and you don’t get much better performance as a result of that.
(This is a close-up from our Crave blog. The hands are those of graduate student Andrew Adams. No word on whether he’s related to Ansel.)
But because the new camera is based on a Nokia N95 smartphone, whose software is licensed by the open source Symbian Foundation, it can become a lot more.
Professor Marc Levoy plans to release a complete implementation for the camera in a year, a platform on which apps can be built.
Already he has created software for the camera that does things no commercial camera can do, like extend its “dynamic range” so all distances are optimally lit, and enhance the resolution of videos with still images.
The applications are endless, going well beyond hobbies.
Cameras that take pictures of speeders could have programs that enhance and re-take those images on cars that try to gray-out their license tags to avoid detection. Any attempt to evade photo detection might be automatically countered with the right combination of hardware and software.
It seems amazing that no camera company has yet sought to build an ecosystem based on software, but this is an area where open source really can innovate, since every application will be a new one.
Open source smart phone groups like Android, LiMo and Moblin should all be anxious to replicate what Levoy is doing in their phones.
One point Levoy did not make is that the Frankencamera software could be integrated with existing open source imaging software, like The Gimp, so developers of those programs can jump-start the ecosystem.
Levoy’s idea is also so obvious it’s impossible to believe a proprietary company can’t adapt it quickly enough.
How soon before we see camera apps at the Apple app store?
August 26th, 2009
Open source revolution at Sony
Sony is quietly pushing forward with a minor revolution, based on open source, across its product divisions.
Since becoming a conglomerate in the 1990s Sony has been managed as a collection of fiefdoms, not a coherent whole. Yet many of those fiefdoms now seem headed in the same direction.
- Sony chose an open source format, EPUB, for its e-book reader.
- Sony-Ericsson is apparently taking command of the open source Symbian movement as Nokia retreats from it.
- Sony Pictures Imageworks is launching an open source program.
Under Akio Morita, who resigned as chairman in 1994 and died in 1999, Sony was a lot like Steve Job’s Apple — iconoclastic, entrepreneurial, proprietary, secretive. These moves indicate the company is now headed in the opposite direction.
It’s easy to say that Howard Stringer, the former CBS head who has been chairman of Sony since 2005, is behind a grand turn toward open source. Interesting if true. But the who is not nearly as important here as the what.
The what seems to be an attempt by Sony to regain market share by embracing open source across the board. Anyone ready to root for the Japanese?
August 24th, 2009
Nokia brands a netbook
One thing I learned at CompuTex is that any brand can have a Netbook.
All you need is marketing and a supplier. Suppliers are thick on the ground. You can do your business from Taipei and have gear with your name on it coming out of Shanghai within a month.
Nokia is just the latest to follow this strategy. (Picture from CNet’s Crave blog.) There is nothing terribly special about the unit being offered — an aluminum case, an Intel Atom processor, weight under 3 pounds.
So why do it? For the same reason AT&T has former newsman Bill Kurtis sitting in a motorcycle with an HP Mini — to sell services.
In Nokia’s case, it’s to sell its Ovi data services, Maps, photo exchanges, data syncing — sure sounds like PC data. So why not put it into a PC while you work on a handheld people will buy?
It’s the connection between hardware and services that makes this story of interest to open source users. Services are the key open source business model. You can’t make someone buy a support subscription, but if they are buying the services provided by your software their checkbook is open to you.
This is what Moblin is about, what Android is about, and what Nokia’s own open source Symbian is about. Service revenue driving open source adoption.
But it’s going to be a multi-corner race among open source, Apple, Microsoft, and RIM. The Netbook gets Nokia into that game. Can open source win it?
August 14th, 2009
Will mobile Linux distros hang separately?
HTC has had its Android phone out for months now, and there’s great excitement over the coming kit from Motorola.
Panasonic and NEC are out with new LiMo gear. Intel and Novell are both pushing the Moblin platform. Nokia is pushing Linux in the new Maemo phones.
But what are the chances you will be able to move software among these various phones? (Tux is holding a Treo in this picture from Palminfocenter.com.)
I am not a programmer. The job may be trivial. But until we know what is involved in doing the job the job cannot be done. And right now we don’t know what will be necessary.
The question for this weekend is, are these mobile Linux vendors making a big mistake by not collaborating more? Apple is still killing them, developer attention is not unlimited, Microsoft hearts developers, and Palm is still in the game.
Even taken together, the market share of all these Linux phones by the end of next year may be trivial next to what is being piled up by the competition. But these Linux phones can’t be taken together. They are all tied to different distributions. They all stand alone.
This is just what happened with Unix back in the day. The software was great, but each vendor had their own way of doing things, so the market never really developed. Unix did not hang together and so each vendor hung separately.
Is this about to happen with mobile Linux?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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