November 25th, 2009

Death of the black box EULA

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:03 am

Categories: FOSS, General, Internet, Legal, Satire, business models, mass market, values

Tags: Software, Box, EULA, End User License Agreement, Tools & Techniques, Management, Dana Blankenhorn

Computing’s greatest accomplishment of this decade will likely go unremarked in the popular press.

I call it the “death of the black box EULA.” (Picture from the blog Fortunes Pawn Luncheonette, December 2007.)

Free software wounded it in the early 1990s. The Internet stabbed it again. But it was open source, in this decade, that struck the fatal blow.

Users under 25 may be unaware of what I am talking about. Let me explain how the scam worked.

1. I have this black box. It does tricks. I sell you the tricks it does with fancy TV ads or in glossy magazine spreads. You want my black box. You want it bad.
2. I will let you use a copy of the black box, but I will not sell it to you. I will take your money but you are not buying anything.
3. All this is covered by an End User License Agreement (EULA), written in a form of elvish. You signed it when you ripped open the black box.
4. The EULA states that the box may not work. The EULA states the box may do nothing. Regardless, I keep your money.
5. The EULA says you can’t look in the black box and try to fix it. You can’t even see what’s inside. You might steal it. Maybe I will talk to you on the phone about it from India.
6. Here is another black box. It fixes the first one, makes it better. It’s more stable. You need an upgrade, maybe a new computer, but you really, really want this black box. Seen the ad?
7. Wash, rinse, repeat.

The black box EULA is descended from licenses IBM wrote in the 1950s, when computers filled great rooms and the value of calculating, say, the pay-outs for a horse race were worth a fortune.

Software was unstable then, even more so than now, and without the EULA companies like IBM might have been sued out of business by angry customers. The computer revolution may never have happened without the black box EULA.

Companies like Microsoft brought the black box EULA into the 1990s intact. Even though PCs were very reliable, even though software storage had become stable, and even though the creation of software was no longer a black art, the black box EULA remained.

The black box EULA made Bill Gates a billionaire 50 times over. It made many other people wealthy too, rich beyond their wildest schemes.

But the black box EULA was always hopelessly one-sided. It was unfair to customers. And lawyers could provide no help — they had written the black box EULA and were sworn to uphold it.

So folks like Richard Stallman struck a blow against wealth and said software should be free. Not only free but visible so you could see it, smell it, kiss it, touch it. Fix it, improve it. And they wrote their own license, which they dubbed copyleft.

The war against the black box EULA was on.

The free software folks won applause, but the people who needed complex black boxes were skeptical. They knew you couldn’t just give stuff away, that software writers need to eat, too. Even if Linus Torvalds was happy with hamburger while the customers ate steak, a way was needed to get him a hamburger. And a beer.

This is what I have now spent a half-decade covering. Open source is a transformation enabled by the Internet, born of righteous indignation, and driven home by hard-headed businessmen and women on both sides of major transactions.

So now you have an alternative to the black box. The makers of black boxes know they can’t hold customers to their EULAs forever. They have to compete with free. The eye of Gates has fallen. The age of men has begun.

The black box is now encased in plastic and steel. You can return an iPhone to the store. The EULAs are still there, and they retain their legal weight, but they no longer control the market.

It’s a good time, at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, to look back from these heights and see what has been accomplished.

The black box EULA no longer has the power to cloud mens’ minds. It is dead as a controlling force in the software world. You can open the box, see what’s inside. You are free to tinker with it, to freely connect with it, and you no longer think of it as a black box that holds all light, but as a physical product, with a warranty.

There are obligations on both sides. It’s a fairer and more just software world. It’s worth celebrating this Thanksgiving.

Happy Turkey Day.

November 23rd, 2009

Tim O'Reilly and the Cassandra act

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:38 am

Categories: Apple, General, Google, Internet, Microsoft, business models, content, mass market, telecom

Tags: ESPN, Web, Tim O'Reilly, Threat, News Corp., Mobile Telephony, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Internet, Channel Management, Marketing

Tim O’Reilly delivered a dire warning at his Web 2.0 Expo over the weekend.

The Web is under threat from closed applications, from Google and Apple to Microsoft and Amazon, and from content vendors like News Corp. building moats and raising high the drawbridges.

I felt great sympathy for Tim, reading his words. I issued similar warnings over the dot-boom, starting from when I launched A-Clue.Com as a weekly newsletter in 1997, having been laid off from CMP’s NetGuide.

Watch out, be wary, I wrote. This Internet commerce thing is just a bubble. It’s going to pop and all will be carnage.

Turns out there is little value in being Cassandra (right, from Wikipedia). When the dot-boom burst, which I date from AOL’s purchase by Time-Warner, it did me no good at all.

I went from having 17 writing gigs to zero. I had joked during the boom that I would gladly write for nothing — in 2002 and 2003 I did. Ha-ha.

The point is that, while I was right, I was powerless to do anything about it.

Tim O’Reilly is not powerless.

And the first thing he needs to do is get straight about the issues.

1. The “threat” from Google and Apple is a feature, not a bug. Mobile telephony has been wholly proprietary from its birth 25 years ago. There is not and never has been a mobile Internet, just whatever data carriers wished to let pass on their networks.
2. It has always been possible to erect paywalls and registration walls. The New England Journal of Medicine and many science journals hide much of their content behind registration. Publishers like England’s The Spectator are constantly trying to get paid.
3. Clouds like those of Amazon and Google may only support software their owners choose to support. Trying to make clouds vanilla discriminates against rocky road and tutti-frutti.

There have been proprietary threats to the Internet practically since the moment the Web was spun. That’s what the browser wars were about. Microsoft was going to add proprietary hooks to Internet Explorer and we’d all be gutted like fish on a line.

Since the Web was spun, there have also been elite audiences, narrow niches for whom payment and registration is a business advantage. Not everyone wants the hoi polloi coming in at all hours so they can spend the next day digging quarters out of the couches. Velvet ropes hold a business model.

So long as I’m not forced to buy News Corp. content, in other words, there is no threat from News Corp. hiding its face from me.

On the other hand, there are real threats O’Reilly didn’t mention. ESPN, for instance.

When ISPs are charged for content, and those ISPs have monopolistic control of their subscribers, that’s a real problem. ESPN has quietly engineered this. Don’t like sports but need a cable modem? You are buying ESPN360 whether you want to or not. Every month some of your ISP bill goes to Disney (ESPN’s owners).

I’m sure News Corp. and every other big content provider would like a taste of that gravy. And it would do little good for subscribers to try and disconnect Comcast en masse — where you gonna go?

It’s the proprietary control of the last mile, and the use of that control to force users into buying things they may not want, that is the big threat to the Internet. That’s a feature of the wireless world, but we can change it. It’s a product of the Bell-cable duopoly, but we can change that, too.

Focus on the real dangers, Tim. You have the power to make change if you focus on what’s real and use your influence.

Otherwise you’re like Holly Hunter in Broadcast News, or hundreds of other working journalists. It must be wonderful to always be right, she’s told.

No, she replies. It’s horrible.

And if you can’t do anything about it, it is.

November 19th, 2009

ChromeOS says tear down this network regulation wall

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:05 am

Categories: Cloud Computing, General, Google, Government, Internet, LANs and WANs, Legal, business models, mass market, politics

Tags: Software, Network, Chip, Wall, ChromeOS, Unleash Moore, Network Technology, Semiconductors, Networking, Hardware

An Australian friend wrote yesterday with a question:

I really can’t see the point of a cloud-based OS for the general user. The added cost in using it doesn’t seem worthwhile.

It would take me over 6 months to upload my data at my connection speed not to mention that ISPs here in Australia have now included uploads as part of your total usage which for me would be exceeded for those 6 months.

So can I ask - why choose ChromeOS ?

These are good questions. They have been vexing me ever since IBM and Ubuntu launched their Africa-only Linux, based heavily on network use, a few months ago.

It got me to thinking about the 1980s, the dawn of the Windows era.

Each new release of software pushed hardware beyond its limits. To get the latest new features, to review new software, I had to buy a new top-of-the-line PC every few years. Software sold hardware.

This helped make more than Bill Gates rich. It delivered fortunes to the entire semiconductor ecosystem — from box makers like Michael Dell to chip makers like Andy Grove of Intel to chip equipment makers like Jim Morgan of Applied Materials — everyone sold everything they could make at a fat profit.

All of today’s current trends — you can add clouds and the iPhone to this — are pushing demand for networking much as chip demand was pushed then.

What will meet that demand is just what met it then — Moore’s Law. Not Moore’s Law as Moore wrote it, but as it has been applied in networking technologies like optical fiber and radios.

Thanks to Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing, a single optical fiber today can carry many times the data it carried a decade ago. Thanks to Digital Signal Processors we can do the same thing with wireless data.

What is holding back network capacity is politics. We still think of it in terms of telephony, a regulated industry managed for scarcity. It’s not that way, and hasn’t been that way for a long time.

Throw out the old rule book and write a new one, based not on scarcity but abundance. Let the competition to serve more-and-more bits drive entrepreneurs to new fortunes around the world. Open more spectrum to unlicensed use, like WiFi is regulated, demand wholesaling of the last mile, and the bits you unleash will make us all rich again.

That’s what today’s software is telling us. That’s the message of ChromeOS. Unleash Moore’s Law in networks, unshackle competition to provide faster-and-faster data services, and watch the economy of the world take off again.

With ChromeOS Google is making the same call on networks Microsoft made on chips two decades ago. It’s a call that demands a response, not just from the market but from governments.

Deregulate. Free the bits. Here and around the world.

Or, as Ronald Reagan might say, Mr. Genachowski, tear down this wall.

November 16th, 2009

Should search engines pay tribute to content?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 2:43 pm

Categories: Google, Internet, business models, content, mass market

Tags: Google Inc., Search Engine, Rupert Murdoch, Journal, Internet, Search, Construction, Dana Blankenhorn

Tom Foremski, one of the good guys here at ZDNet, is out with a piece suggesting that Google fork over whatever Rupert Murdoch wants in order to keep indexing Fox News.

His argument is that losing access to regularly-updated content would be a big hole in Google’s business model, which is based on making everything out there available.

I have two problems with that:

1. If one publisher can force Google to pay for a link, so can every other publisher. Blackmail never ends.
2. Publishers have tried this before and failed. Including Murdoch.

I think the first point is more important. Foremski argues that newspapers get little traffic from Google. This is true, mainly because, as he notes, most still haven’t got a Clue when it comes to the Internet.

Google has already taken their wire service traffic away, signing side deals with major wire services like AP, posting those stories on Google pages, paying back the ad revenue. The only newspaper content left is local or beat-specific. Most traffic to those stories comes from the local area.

So if the traffic flow is modest, why should Google be paying? Just to protect its reputation?

There is no need to argue the point. We can run an experiment.

Let Bing or Yahoo pay Murdoch, and let Murdoch put robots.txt files on all his properties, keeping them away from Google’s crawlers. See what happens. If there’s real market share to be gained here, Google’s competitors will be happy to buy it.

On to the second point. Both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have tried the paid model. The Journal maintains it, but offers links to the full-text of its stories, through Google. The Times gave up its Times Select program as a money-loser.

Yes, The Journal began its program before Google bought it. But I also remember a time, about a decade ago, when Fox site managers were transferring every link deep into their site to the home page. It was maddening. They stopped.

There’s some basic math at work here. The smaller your circulation base, the more specialized it is, the better off you’ll do with either a paid model or a registration model.

Lots and lots of journals allow only access to abstracts if you’re not a registered user. The New England Journal of Medicine is an example. And there are many publications only available to paying customers, who are notified of updates via e-mail.

The problem is that if you want a mass audience on the Internet, you have to make yourself available to a mass audience. Newspapers are mass circulation publications. Throwing up registration windows or pay walls hasn’t worked for them.

But, again, Murdoch (and every other publisher) is perfectly free to try. Just write a simple robots.txt file forbidding indexing. Poof, you’re invisible to the search engines’ spiders.

There’s no real controversy here, IMHO. Publishers are free to conduct what experiments they want with Google, either seeking to tweak it to get more audience, or block it to access a smaller, elite audience.

History says Murdoch is barking at the Moon. But he likes to write his own history. Let him try.

November 4th, 2009

LiMo has a second phone

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:58 am

Categories: General, Hardware, Linux Handheld, mass market, mobile, wireless

Tags: Vodafone Group Plc., Phone, LiMo Foundation, Mobile, Handset, Advertising & Promotion, Cellular Phones, Telecom & Utilities, Marketing, Consumer Electronics

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?

November 2nd, 2009

Mozilla goes back to the beta with Firefox 3.6

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:43 am

Categories: Development, Distributions, General, Internet, mass market

Tags: Mozilla Firefox, Beta, Mozilla Corp., Web Browsers, Internet, Dana Blankenhorn

Barely four months after launching Firefox 3.5, Firefox has shipped its first beta version of Firefox 3.6.

Mozilla takes release numbers seriously. As our own Stephen Shankland notes, this is not Firefox 4, nor is it Firefox 3.5.x. It’s being pushed as a minor tweak, one with no visible user interface changes.

There are two ways to look at this.

1. Oh goody. Mozilla is increasing the pace at which it delivers updates and upgrades.
2. Oh bother. Does this mean Firefox 3.5 is buggy and insecure?

Among the features in the new release:

• Personas, a set of “skins” for the browser surround of menus.
• Alerts on delivery of new plug-ins.
• Support for full-screen native video.
• Support for WOFF fonts.
• New support for CSS, DOM and HTML5.

If you have ever thought to yourself, “gee, I’m not a programmer, and I can barely afford my daily bread, how can I help an open source project,” here is your answer. Download this buggy code and report on what’s wrong so it can be made right.

No excuses if you’re Basque or Czech or Georgian. This beta has you covered. Yes, even if you’re Telugan, the new Firefox beta understands you. Download it now.

Oh, and feel free to complain below.

October 29th, 2009

Qualcomm joins open source movement at head of parade

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:38 am

Categories: Development, General, Hardware, Linux Handheld, Linux Laptop, mass market, mobile, telecom, wireless

Tags: Open Source Movement, Qualcomm Inc., Matt Asay, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

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

News Corp. prepares to destroy more online value

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:17 am

Categories: General, Google, Internet, business models, content, mass market, video

Tags: News Corp., OpenOffice, Social Networking, Open Source, Office Suites, Software, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Dana Blankenhorn

One thing I like about News Corp. is their utter online cluelessness.

One word. Myspace. When News Corp. paid $580 million for MySpace’s parent in 2005 it was the undisputed leader in social networking.  Now it’s an also ran.

News Corp.’s Photobucket once ruled online photo sharing. Now Flickr is catching up. Its Scout.com and Foxsports are being pushed hard by Rivals.Com and ESPN.

The main reason? News Corp. is impatient, it tries to monetize everything quickly, and thinks its unique content is worth paying for. No one’s unique content is worth paying for when there are ample alternatives.

So now News Corp. is pushing to ruin another potential online gold mine, Hulu. News Corp. owns 45% of Hulu, and is now screaming that it will make users pay for access, just as it will make them pay for access to everything else it owns.

The problem is this idea of make them. You can’t make people wear underpants online. When you charge people for something — anything — you cut your potential traffic by 90% or more. You become invisible to search engines, except for your main page, so you have to flog your own stuff.

Most of News Corp. is very bad at the whole competition thing anyway. Its whole schtick is to push a specific sensibility, to have a monopoly on that sensibility, but its online efforts don’t have that sensibility. They could monetize that sensibility if they wanted to play the niche, but instead they try to monetize what everyone else gives away.

If people really love Glenn Beck, in other words, you can make them pay for Glenn Beck. But you can’t make them pay for something they can get free down the street. Like news. Or sports. Or TV clips.

You can’t force the market. If you’re selling something others are giving away they won’t buy from you. The price you charge must be related to what everyone else charges. And if you try to make everyone else charge it’s called collusion.

What News Corp. is trying to do is like buying OpenOffice and sticking a $495 price tag on the box. Won’t work.

Why is News Corp. obsessed with charging people? Probably because their cost structure is out of line. YouTube, thanks to Google, has its costs under control. Until News Corp. can deliver costs close to that Hulu can’t compete.

So they blame you instead. Yes, you, greedy online consumer who expects something for nothing and chicks for free. It’s all your fault they can’t make money. But they’ll take it from you, force it out of you, make you pay.

Like I said, clueless.

October 26th, 2009

Why Android is beating Windows Mobile

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:48 am

Categories: Apple, General, Google, Hardware, Linux Handheld, Microsoft, business models, mass market, mobile

Tags: Google Inc., Microsoft Windows Mobile, Mobile, Apple Inc., Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Corp., Games, Mobile Operating Systems, Advertising & Promotion, Smart Phones

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 25th, 2009

Drupal challenged as White House goes blog

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:59 am

Categories: Database Management, Development, General, Government, Internet, content, mass market, politics

Tags: Drupal, White House, Blog, Whitehouse.gov, Blogging, Government, Internet, Dana Blankenhorn

Whitehouse.gov has been relaunched as a Drupal site.

The switch was designed to be transparent, but even a casual observer will note the site now features five separate blogs, and that officials’ names are now listed on announcements that read more like stories, often with personal details.

So it’s one small step for Washington, one giant leap for open source. Sites like Whitehouse.gov are the ultimate honeypots for hackers and script kiddies around the world. This is true regardless of the party in power.

What that means is that government programmers, the Drupal team, and the folks at its commercial arm, Acquia, are going to be very busy with real and imagined bug reports. It’s going to test their systems as well as the software.

Officials indicated that if the Whitehouse site works well Drupal could be in line for other government work.

October 13th, 2009

Wikipedia productized

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 9:20 am

Categories: Applications, General, Hardware, business models, content, marketing, mass market, publishing

Tags: Encyclopedia, Wikipedia, Wiki, Online Communications, Dana Blankenhorn

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?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 8:19 am

Categories: General, Google, Hardware, Linux Handheld, Strategy, business models, marketing, mass market, mobile, wireless

Tags: Google Inc., Android Bandwagon, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

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 8th, 2009

Google plays a hand of Ogre with Apple

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:58 am

Categories: Apple, General, Google, Hardware, Linux Handheld, Strategy, mass market, mobile, wireless

Tags: Google Inc., Google Android, Apple Inc., Ogre, Mobile Operating Systems, Games, Smart Phones, Personal Technology, Consumer Electronics, Dana Blankenhorn

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

How Verizon might ruin Android

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 12:06 pm

Categories: General, Google, Linux Handheld, mass market, mobile, wireless

Tags: Verizon Communications Inc., Wi-Fi, Wireless And Mobility, Dana Blankenhorn

Verizon makes Apple look open.

But they are one-half the U.S. mobile phone duopoly (T-Mobile and Sprint are minor players) so the kids at the Googleplex are doubtless celebrating news that Verizon will be working on bringing Android phones to market.

Verizon has a ton of incentive to make this work. Apple’s iPhone is the 800-pound gorilla in the wireless room, and since it’s exclusive to AT&T Verizon has been hemorrhaging market share (especially on the high end) for many months now.

Both sides were saying the right things today, but Verizon Wireless has based its corporate identity on maintaining control of its wireless environment.

Old habits will be hard to break.

Top management at Verizon seems to have decided that in its pursuit of market share it will throw everything it can at the wall and hope something sticks.

But what if Verizon succeeds? What if it starts selling a lot of Android kit, and those users start making heavy use of apps for which Verizon isn’t getting its usual cut?

What happens when those in Verizon middle management, raised on the iron belief that Verizon must get a cut of every bit on its wireless network, see Google spreading its open source gospel on its network?

I think I know. And I don’t like it.

It will take more than a few words at a press conference to remove my suspicions. How about you?

September 25th, 2009

Which is more reliable, the client or the cloud

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:32 am

Categories: Applications, Cloud Computing, General, Infrastructure, Internet, mass market

Tags: Client, Outage, Manufacturing, Cable, Software As A Service (SaaS), Network Technology, Telecommunications, Personal Technology, Emerging Technologies, Networking

I understand GMail was out again yesterday.

Our Stephen Shankland notes this was the fourth outage of the year.

Education blogger Chris Dawson calls this a game of “unrealistic expectations.” The tweets were all a-Twitter about it, but the big fail whale has been on their screen so much this year that cable news viewers now know what it is.

Online services have brief outages all the time, and it can be funny when it happens. In a store, or at the library, workers stand around helplessly. They have forgotten how to take cash or make change.

But we’re facing a choice, as users, and as a market. We have increasingly bloated clients, and (apparently) unreliable SaaS and cloud networks to serve them.

Which side is going to win?

Having watched technology evolve for nearly 3 decades, I have seen this pattern repeat-and-repeat. We build something, it’s great, so we grow it and it gets bloated. So we go somewhere else and start building that.

It happened with PCs, with LANs, with the Internet, with mobile, and even with open source. Even Linux is now bloated.

So what’s the answer? This does not happen with hardware. Hardware is highly reliable, increasingly so, as it becomes more complex. Anything relying on software, however, is increasingly prone to breakage as it grows.

Knowing this, will you rely on the client or on the cloud?

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September 21st, 2009

Will the open Internet become a partisan divide

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 8:58 am

Categories: Applications, General, Government, Infrastructure, Internet, LANs and WANs, Legal, Network Administration, Network Standards/Protocols, mass market, politics, telecom

Tags: Net Neutrality, Internet, Dana Blankenhorn

The idea of an open and neutral Internet is about to become a political flash point.

The launch of a new site dedicated to the issue, OpenInternet.gov (above) was accompanied by FCC chair Julius Genachowski publishing his speech text at The Washington Post and a brief commentary based on it at The Huffington Post, a liberal site.

The regulatory regime he proposed is along the lines of a net neutrality bill offered by Democrats that got a hearing in the House last week. The agency and the House agree on their aims, the main differences being how and where the details will be fleshed out.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal, which hosted policy pronouncements from top regulators throughout the Bush Administration, ran a piece about Genachowski’s moves that was highly skeptical of both their rationale and their legality.

It said Republicans will oppose Genachowski on “free enterprise” grounds, and pointed to a suit by Comcast against previous attempts to impose a set of net neutrality rules.

At the same time the two Republican members of the FCC said they opposed any net neutrality for wireless, and support exclusive deals between equipment makers and networks like the AT&T-iPhone deal.

Add a little industry Astroturf and a plan depressingly like that in health care starts to become visible. Turn some insiders with industry money, work from the outside on ideological grounds, and the 2008 election need never have happened. Plus you can blame the Democrats if they fail to crush you — call them partisan and ideological.

My view remains that net neutrality would not be necessary in an environment where there is ample competition. If someone wants an ISP or cell operator that will block everything to the left of Fox News they should have it, so long as the market offers ample alternatives.

Unfortunately antitrust does not appear to be the ground the Obama Administration seems ready to stand on. Which could make the open Internet a partisan divide for years to come.

September 15th, 2009

Can Fast Flip build a business model

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:10 am

Categories: Applications, General, Google, Internet, business models, mass market

Tags: Google Inc., Google News, Publisher, FastFlip, Blogging, Benefits, Strategy, Internet, Human Resources, Management

Google News is much, much better, in many ways, than Google’s new FastFlip.

So why bother? Because, by giving publishers control over what content a user browses with the software, they can deliver Google a business model.

Google News has long been controversial with publishers for several reasons. The most important is that it uses a Google bot as its editor. All competing outlets are in the same vat of news, so you may end up seeing a second-hand iteration of the story, or a comment on it, before the actual reporting.

Google News has been around for several years, yet to this day there are no ads on its main page. It delivers revenue and links to publishers but no revenue to its maker. And the publishers still claim the site is “stealing” from them by adding lead paragraphs and thumbnail pictures.

In the past Google has sought to respond by doing deals with major news services like AFP and AP, hosting their stories on ad-soaked pages, passing along the bulk of the revenue. But this has cut the market for AP stories on partner Web sites. The solution just creates a new problem. Publishers scream louder.

FastFlip tries to solve this by limiting the number of outlets available. A page on politics culls just a dozen sources, each a scaled “professional” publishing organization willing to sign a business agreement.

Google hosts publisher pages on FastFlip, including ads, so there’s a defined business model and a benefit to publishers in faster page loads. Users can click through to “inside pages” so there’s a second publisher benefit, increased traffic.

The main benefit of FastFlip is that it keeps out the riffraff. Scaled, complete, “real” news sources, magazines, and publisher-owned sites only, please. If you’re not big enough to negotiate a contract with Google for your content, you’re not big enough to get on FastFlip.

By building a high barrier to entry against blogs and new entrants, and by having signed business agreements defining benefits and limiting Google’s interference with their product, FastFlip is a godsend to publishers.

And if you look at Google News itself, you’ll see a second bow to power. Click on a story claiming, say, 587 links and you’ll get an intermediate page highlighting the stories of “reputable” news services and publisher-owned blog sites.

By raising barriers to entry against individual blogs and open source news sites, Google hopes to get publishers off its back. But I doubt that will happen, because once the other side knows it can move you, it will keep moving you until you’re off the board.

September 14th, 2009

Would you march for Internet privacy?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:31 am

Categories: General, Government, Internet, Legal, Security, identity, mass market, politics, values

Tags: Law, Internet, Government, Vertical Industries, Dana Blankenhorn

It’s marching season again, time for the political opposition to take it to the streets, and show its strength in numbers. (Picture from CBS News.)

But this article is no tea party. It’s about another march that happened over the weekend, in Germany. Over 10,000 people marched in Berlin marched for data protection.

They were protesting a new law meant to guarantee police the right to track back Internet traffic, with tamper-proof IDs and special police.

Germany has long been a world champion at seeking to monitor its citizens online, its avowed goal to make  online law conform to what is allowed offline.

So if the German law says the government has a monopoly on gambling, so should it be online. If German law says thou shalt not speak of Nazis, so should it be online. If sharing files is truly a copyright violation, the law must halt it, regardless.

The American reaction to such government actions is generally to engineer around them, or to laugh them off. My spam folder says they have apoint. Yet even here there are magic words that cause most voters to surrender any zone of privacy once offered by someone in authority. Watch.

Child pornography. (Open your laptop.) Terrorism. (Take off your shoes.)

The Internet, being based on computing, is a binary sort of place. To be effective, laws must become absolute. Which means, at some point, we’re trusting the government with the medium’s future.

In Europe, it should be noted, data privacy marches are the property of leftists, Greens, even pirate parties. In American, right now, it’s the right that’s out of power, fearful of an intrusive government.

Anyone expecting a tea party for the Internet?

September 10th, 2009

Could One Laptop Per Child be a bad thing?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:08 am

Categories: General, Hardware, Internet, education, mass market, support, telecom

Tags: Child, Laptop Computer, One Laptop Per Child Project, Pastorius, Client Hardware, Productivity, Notebooks, Hardware, Notebooks & Tablets, Dana Blankenhorn

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 3rd, 2009

Young man yells at cloud

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:55 am

Categories: Cloud Computing, General, Infrastructure, Internet, Network Administration, management, mass market, support

Tags: PC, Cloud, Blogger-novelist-activist Cory Doctorow, Man, Client Hardware, Desktops, Netbooks, Nettops & MIDs, Hardware, Dana Blankenhorn

Blogger-novelist-activist Cory Doctorow is out today with a screed condemning the whole idea of cloud computing.

(Here he is in Wikipedia. Doesn’t that live somewhere in the cloud?)

Here is a summary.

The Man is trying to put us down. It’s all a conspiracy to make us pay for what we could do ourselves for free. The corporate shills want to control our machines and through them, our brains.

I agree with Doctorow on many things. On other things I’m sympathetic.

On this he’s dead wrong.

Running a PC is a hassle. There are software updates, there are anti-virals and anti-spyware and registry cleaners to worry about. It can take five minutes for even a Netbook to boot up, and another five minutes to shut it down.

Hardware is not the issue. Client hardware is an incredible bargain. The issue here is software.

All the problems now endemic to Windows machines are slowly infiltrating the worlds of the Mac and Linux, too. This has to do with the size and complexity of modern operating systems, and the large number of very nasty people working overtime to break them.

Maybe, if you have just one laptop, you can deal with this expense and hassle. But even small companies may now have 10-20 or more PCs running at once. The expenses of managing clients are driving companies to the wall.

The idea of the cloud is to abstract this complexity, take it out of the hands of users and put it in the hands of experts. One set of experts can handle the hassles of thousands of users, and hundreds of companies, for less than those users and companies are paying now.

Or as Mark Twain once said, “Put all your eggs in one basket and watch that basket.”

As to the broader market, Mr. Doctorow has one kid, a toddler. Congratulations. I have three PCs, my dear wife runs three, my daughter has two and my son has a desktop for gaming with a terabyte of storage.

We use both wired and wireless networking to keep it all together. Several times a year I lose a day of work scrabbling around on my knees, under a desk, trying to check wiring. I have a repair guy on speed dial. I’m not that unusual, and becoming less so all the time.

The complexity and vulnerability of PCs means you can’t just run one. I always have my Netbook on standby for emergencies. If malware infects me, or the cable goes out, I can be at a local coffee shop within minutes.

I no longer even trust my PC for really important stuff. That goes on a USB stick. You can get a 32 Gigabyte stick these days for about $70. Next week it will be less. Wear it around your neck, plug it into the cloud anywhere and, if everything works right, there you are.

Now Doctorow has valid concerns. Networks are not yet built to handle massive use of clouds. The legal environment for cloud users is, well, cloudy.

Fact is these are early days. In PC time it’s 1978. In Internet time it’s still 1994.

What 30 years of experience tells me is that condemning the future when you don’t know what it looks like is never a wise move.