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 19th, 2009

MindTouch launches its open source cloud

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:29 am

Categories: Cloud Computing, General, Infrastructure, Software as a Service, business models

Tags: MindTouch, Open Source, Software As A Service (SaaS), Emerging Technologies, Dana Blankenhorn

You can argue that clouds are fast becoming synonymous with SaaS, but MindTouch has launched its own cloud to serve up its open source collaboration solution.

MindTouch bills itself as the open source alternative to Sharepoint and recently named our own Matt Asay as the second most-influential executive in open source. (You’re number one in my book, Matt.)

Pricing starts at $7/month, but you can try it free. It allows non-programmers to overlay data from a variety of internal and external resources in a single collaborative environment.

You might consider it an enterprise mashup service akin to Salesforce.com’s Chatter. But while Chatter is focused on social media MindTouch is focused on enterprise data — Chatter is about social and MindTouch about media.

Of course that last may be a comparison of sales pitches, not feature sets. MindTouch is launching its cloud just a week after announcing its Enterprise Dashboard, so these features may just be at the top of its mind right now.

Clouds will bear careful watching in 2010. They not only abstract complexity and virtualize everything, but they also blur the lines of open source and proprietary with a unitary business model based on SaaS. Which means everyone in software competes with everyone, and on the same playing field.

Which would leave me with nothing to write about. Maybe I can finally start that novel.

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 11th, 2009

Linux to your grandma this Christmas

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:38 am

Categories: Distributions, General, Linux, Linux Desktop OS, business models, marketing

Tags: Grandma, British Broadcasting Corp., Valerie Singleton, Linux, UNIX, Operating Systems, Productivity, Open Source, Software, Dana Blankenhorn

It’s really just another demonstration of what Linux can do.

It started with a BBC story and quickly became an Internet detective piece.

(If you recognize this picture you’re either a middle-aged Brit or a trivia expert. The lady at the center is the entry point for what follows. She is shown in her mid-1960s heyday hosting the BBC children’s show Blue Peter.)

According to the BBC former children’s presenter  Valerie Singleton (center at right), now running a Web site of discounts for seniors, got together with a small computer store chain recently to offer a PC for older folks who’ve never touched one before.

On start-up users could first see a video from Ms. Singleton, demonstrating the basics, then face six big buttons for applications that are all built-in.

A BBC reviewer called it both patronizing and expensive, but the 80 year-old computing newbie he brought with him appreciated the gentle learning curve. We all know so much, even kids know so much, about computing, that going back to a time when it was all new is hard to conceive. But for some that’s reality.

Then came the detective work. I wanted to verify what the BBC was saying, after all.

• Singleton’s Discount Age makes no mention of the offer on its home page — you have to go inside.
• The man credited by the BBC as the designer makes no mention of the offer on his own blog — he’s drinking in sorrow over turning 42.
• The computer store is a billboard site.
• The help site referenced in the story makes no mention of the offer.
• There is a Linux called Simplicity, which released a new version last month, but it’s apparently no relation to what Singleton is trying to do.  (Simplicity Linux focuses on making old hardware useful.)

Turns out all this is a sales channel. Valerie Singleton, her site, the computer store, the designer, they’re all acting as a channel for Eldy, an Italian outfit which offers a Linux interface based upon Linux Mint, focused on the needs of old newbies.

Which means our detective story has become A Christmas Carol.

Let’s say you have a grandma, or grandpa, here in the U.S., who has never used a computer, claims not to care, but whom you know is just blustering because they don’t know the first thing of what to do.

Check out Eldy. They have a nice slide show on their home page demonstrating the features and benefits of the software.

Then, if you like, download Eldy to whatever hardware you have, load it on an old laptop, and spring it on them for your Christmas visit, sitting by their side as they learn it.

They won’t have Ms. Singleton, but your American grandma likely doesn’t know Valerie Singleton from Adam’s Off Ox.

Once grandma gets the hang of things, they can turn off the Eldy interface and have a solid, basic Linux to work with. They’ll be programming rings around you by Easter.

Who says Santa Claus has to have a long, white beard, or that he only cares about the needs of children? We’re all children — you, me, Valerie Singleton, and your grandma — inside.

Help one this Christmas.

November 10th, 2009

Open source be not proud

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:53 am

Categories: Database Management, Development, General, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, business models, java, management, mergers & acquisitions, support

Tags: Larry Ellison, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

Open source is, in part, a release of ego.

When a program is proprietary, it’s yours. You own it. You can feed it or you can kill it.

Not so with open source. When software is made open source it is with the knowledge that its fate is shared among all stakeholders. The contributions that make it valuable may well come from outside, the direction of the software is no longer completely in the hands of its owner or sponsor.

Larry Ellison doesn’t understand this, and I suspect neither does Wall Street. Otherwise, why would the Street be cheering on Ellison’s suggestion that he’ll kill Sun to keep Euro-hands off mySQL?

More than the future of mySQL is now on the line. So are the futures of Java and OpenOffice, and all the other projects Sun Microsystems sponsors. Ellison thinks this fact should make the EC Competition Commissioner, Nellie Kroess, back off. He seems to think the U.S. government can make Kroess relent.

The key to why Ellison is wrong can be found in the paragraph above. It’s one word. I’ll wait…

The word is sponsors.

Open source companies don’t own the code bases that are in their charge. They seek to monetize the code, so the code can be expanded, so it will draw more committers. Acquia doesn’t own Drupal, and Automattic doesn’t own Wordpress. The code bases are, in fact, owned by the community, simply by virtue of being open source.

Ellison seems to think that if he snaps his fingers and brings down the wrath of heaven, then mySQL and Java and OpenOffice will cease to exist. This would be true if they were closed source. In that case they would be orphaned, and if no buyer were found support would disappear.

Open source does not work that way.

Sure it would be tough for these big projects to find new sponsors. But there are plenty of prospects around.

Google would have an interest in Java, as might Microsoft. IBM already has a stake in Open Office. I’m certain we can find another home for mySQL, too. Even Glassfish might well find a new home within the federal government.

Ellison’s threat to kill Sun’s open source projects if he does not get his way is an empty one. Someone would pick up what remaining pieces have value.

Open source, divorced from its sponsor, turns to software water, and would quickly flow through Ellison’s hands.

Go to an open source conference. Listen carefully to the commercial open source businesspeople you see there. They may talk about their kids and their companies, their hobbies and their passions, including a passion for the projects they control.

But they know those projects are more like their kids than their sailboats. They are responsible for the software they control. They do not own it. It’s not “my” software. It’s “our” software.

This is the attitude you must take if you’re to make a success of an open source business. This is why many in the proprietary world, like Larry Ellison, confuse it with communism, or socialism, or some other foreign -ism.

Open source be not proud. Open source code responds to whomever gives it the love of time. The parents aren’t those who gave it the DNA of capital, but those who gave it the love of hard work.

November 4th, 2009

Sam Ramji has his head in the clouds

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:34 am

Categories: Cloud Computing, Development, General, Software as a Service, Strategy, business models, management

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Sam Ramji, Sonoa, Stacks, Cloud Computing, Blogging, Virtualization, Strategy, Internet, Hardware

Sam Ramji, formerly the face of open source at Microsoft (cue the Star Wars music) is settling into a new life as vice president for strategy at Sonoa Systems, a cloud start-up.

He told me it suits him.

“Instead of pushing boulders up the hill I’m going down the hill. Sonoa has 65 employees. I talk to customers directly, daily, instead of monthly. There’s less operational overhead. So I’m getting out more, talking at events more, talking to journalists and analysts more.

“At Microsoft there is no such thing as a staff job. You have to always be driving strategy, be a subject matter expert, and get into detail as much as necessary. I had a 120 person team in a 90,000 person organization.

“As Vice President for Strategy at Sonoa Systems I’m a one man show.” He also gets more family time — he describes himself on his personal blog as an “avid husband and father of two.”

That blog (now part of the blogroll here) is also now a great place to get Ramji’s honest views on cloud computing, CodePlex, and open source in general, as in this piece “free is not the opposite of commercial.”

Ramji describes Sonoa as being among the many start-ups working to define what will become the LAMP stack of cloud computing. (That’s a close-up of its home page, describing its offerings, to the left.)

This means competitors are often collaborators. “We’re all trying to figure out how our technologies connect” with the primary competition coming from clients’ in-house development.

He described one Sonoa solution, for MTV, involving RightScale, Amazon, Sonoa and Xen, all working together. “It seems like we do the same thing, but when we get deployed you realize that managing the virtual infrastructure is different from managing cloud service traffic. Stacks are just starting to emerge and each component is important.”

So Ramji has gone from a world where everything is defined and the fight is continuous to one where nothing is defined and contention is nebulous. It’s more wide-open and, he says, more fun.

So there is life after Microsoft, in the clouds.

November 4th, 2009

Ramji delivers a CodePlex process

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:23 am

Categories: Development, General, Microsoft, business models, support

Tags: Commons, Microsoft Corp., Ramji, CodePlex, Open Source, Tools & Techniques, Management, Dana Blankenhorn

Successfully pulling code out of a big company can be like pulling the teeth off a lion, without anesthesia.

Sam Ramji (right), the former Microsoft executive who remains President of CodePlex, president of the CodePlex Foundation, which surrounds the Microsoft open source repository, said the key to success is a process.

CodePlex has published a draft of its process, a Project Acceptance Guideline, and is seeking comments from the community on it. The draft describes the advantages of contribution and provides a step-by-step guide for delivering new projects to CodePlex.

Ramji told ZDNet he’s anxious to get community input into the Guideline and will take that input seriously. He wants CodePlex to become a bridge between the open source community and corporate interests.

“How do we solve the problem of corporate contribution to community projects?” he asked. “The barrier is comfort. That comes from a clearly understood process and a well understood mechanism so people see contributing as low risk.”

Ramji said the Codeplex process says “here is how you should contribute in a way that’s sustainable for you and safe for the developer. There should be derivative works with no concerns about patents.”

CodePlex contributions come from software companies and non-industry sources, Ramji said. Software companies learn, through the CodePlex process, which elements of their IP are valuable and which are more valuable in the commons.

Then there are the non-industry contributions.

“Wall Street banks have talked to me over the last few months about contributions they couldn’t get legal clearance on. CodePlex offers a template for how it can get done. We have an organization that can own the copyright, that can accept cash as well as code, and can do the community management.”

In both these cases CodePlex is delivering code to the commons that might not be contributed otherwise, valuable code that can be used to build new applications.

“CodePlex is a lot of my future now,” he said, even though he has left Microsoft to become vice president of strategy at Sonoa Systems, a cloud start-up.

And the work is gratifying. “The Foundation is growing pretty quickly in terms of input from community members and corporate interests.”

November 2nd, 2009

Blackboard embraces and extends into open source movement

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:09 am

Categories: Applications, General, Google, Implementations, Infrastructure, Strategy, business models, content, education, marketing

Tags: Open Source Movement, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

Anyone seeking a case study of how a proprietary software company can “embrace and extend” itself into the open source world should stop thinking Microsoft and start thinking Blackboard.

(Picture from the University of Alaska. Bonus points if you find a link to Russia from the site.)

Blackboard has a long-running feud with open source, ably chronicled by our own Christopher Dawson. Open source Learning Management Systems (LMSs) like Moodle, Sakai and OLAT have been seeking its market share for five years now.

Part of the solution was to open source tools for use with its proprietary suite. Blackboard may have been overly-aggressive in pushing this as a true open source solution but it wasn’t finished yet.

Phase Two involves signing alliances with educators and lining up scaled resources from within the open source ecosystem.

Today’s news brings an example.

It’s a deal with Northwestern University (Go Wildcats) to integrate its Blackboard Learn platform within Google Apps as a single sign-on. The Building Block itself is open source, Google Apps is based on open source, but here’s the imprimatur of a major University (and big customer) linking a proprietary LMS into it.

Earlier this year Blackboard signed a deal with Flat World Knowledge, the open source textbook publisher we’ve written of here, to integrate Flat World textbooks with Blackboard Learn.

Given Blackboard’s position as a market leader, and its open source Building Blocks for handling the integration, the move by Flat World is logical and justifiable.

The result, however, is that despite open source a proprietary LMS is more entrenched than ever within its marketplace.

November 2nd, 2009

Wordpress picks up college newspapers with CoPress

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:35 am

Categories: General, Internet, business models, content, education, publishing

Tags: College, Wordpress, Content Management System, CoPress, Content Management, Enterprise Software, Software, Dana Blankenhorn

Drupal may be grabbing headlines by becoming the CMS of the White House, but WordPress is bound to be the CMS of a future President thanks to a deal it signed with CoPress.

CoPress, the brainchild of former University of Oregon editor Daniel Bachhuber, aims to build a vertical of college papers within the CMS market, with managed hosting and training.

(The original Oregon Duck mascot image was trademarked by The Walt Disney Co. Can you kids guess who it is?)

Bachhuber told Poynter Online that 21 colleges have already signed up, including the papers of Central Michigan, Michigan State, and Cal State Fullerton.

Papers now have a choice between rolling their own solution, joining CoPress, or working with the College Media Network, whose College Publisher is given away free in exchange for banner ad space.

This means free is battling open source directly within the college paper market. In addition to comparing features, CoPress is also arguing against CMN’s latest upgrade, and pointing out that it is building a community around contemporaries rather than delivering a top-down solution.

My own career in college journalism seems a world away from all this. During my freshman year at Rice the paper was actually set with hot type from a Linotype. They later switched to a photo-typesetting solution in which formatted type was printed and then glued to a piece of cardboard with pink plastic cut-outs showing where photos would go.

Before that, I broke away from my high school newspaper to create an opinion-based start-up, which leads to the real challenge facing college journalists in today’s online world, namely competing in their markets with every entrepreneur on campus.

If your start-up costs are nearly nothing what is the benefit of being the “official” college paper Web site?

October 27th, 2009

Black Duck finds its business makes sense

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:24 am

Categories: Development, General, Security, business models, support

Tags: Encryption, Security, Dana Blankenhorn

I am of two minds concerning the Black Duck release on encryption in open source.

On the one hand it’s interesting to know that 4,000 out of 220,000 tested (less than 2% if you’re scoring at home) contain strong encryption, the kind the U.S. still thinks of as “munitions grade.”

On the other hand there is no reason to panic, as Dr. Dobbs did. And a close look reveals this release is basically a product launch for Black Duck Export, a new feature in its “watch out, look out, over there” suite of offerings that includes warnings on copyrights and other important issues.

The image that often comes to mind when I think of Black Duck is of Daffy and his friends flying across the sky when Elmer Fudd & Co. start blasting from down below. On the other hand lawyers and spies can also use Black Duck software, so security through obscurity may be a bad move.

For the government this is an opportunity to choose its attitude regarding encryption, which has been an issue for software developers going on 20 years now. Pretending that the U.S. is the only home of this stuff is just plain silly and rules should be uniform. The encryption wars should have ended a decade ago.

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

The chief value of open source

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:20 am

Categories: Development, Enterprise Policy, General, Infrastructure, business models, values

Tags: Code, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

One thing I agree with Matt Asay about. The key to open source is not that it’s free.

Open source doesn’t even cut costs, because code licenses represent only a tiny portion of a major product’s cost.

The chief value of open source is visibility. (These highly visible sneakers cost $120 from Xander. Picture from Hypebeast.)

You can see the code, you can test the code, you can improve the code, but mostly you can see the code.

When you see the code vendors, of necessity, change their business models. Their costs move to the back-end. They look for subscription revenue, for services revenue. They look for ways to help a project work.

When you can see the code you have a different relationship with it. You’re no longer asking what it can do. You’re asking how you can adapt it to your needs.

With code visibility, you and your vendors become partners in trying to make something work. The vendor can’t over-promise, but you can’t over-assume either. This may be one of main hidden reasons for IT failure, the two sides of the transaction not being on the same page.

You can also get around a vendor with open source. If the vendor doesn’t have time to fix your issue, you pay someone else to fix it. Maybe you hire someone, maybe you just go to the community or its commercial arm. There are no more excuses, well no more you have to tolerate, with open source.

When code is visible, and you’re a member of the code community, you’re going to be up-to-date on improvements, enhancements, and bug fixes. It’s not just that the code becomes visible, but you become visible as a user of the code.

It’s true that in the enterprise space there is no such thing as free code. There is only visible code and invisible code. When you have open source you have the visible kind, and this makes all the difference.

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 16th, 2009

Analysts build open source straw men

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:30 am

Categories: General, Strategy, business models, management

Tags: Open-source Company, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

It is natural that market analysts might not like open source.

Open source lowers costs and passes the savings on to you.

While it is possible to build a $1 billion business on open source the path to that success does not require that you do the Forrester walk or buy Gartner studies on sales channels.

It costs nothing to try open source, so instead of selling you’re converting users into buyers of service.

Open source is also a big enemy of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD), which often defined success in the 1980s. It’s hard to talk about what you might offer when everyone can see what you do offer and add to it if they want.

These same problems, I must add, apply to the media as well. Open source companies do not advertise as widely as those with closed source. They do not hold food frenzies for reporters with big shrimp and an open bar. They know who their customers are — they are the people who have downloaded the code.

This may be why straw men have recently become the subjects of choice among analysts like Gartner’s Brian Prentice.

(If you really want to make your own straw man, the Wiccan section at About.Com has complete directions, from which this illustration was taken.)

Here comes one now:

That story involves bands of fiercely independent geek-heroes. Armed only with an Eclipse IDE, a weekend’s supply of Jolt Cola for energy and a poster of Jean-Luc Picard for inspiration, they set out to usurp the big software companies in their attempt to control the software universe.

Just because Richard Stallman has a beard like Jerry Garcia doesn’t mean he can play the guitar.

In 2009 most of the long hair and bearded guys I know carry The Fountainhead in their pockets and listen to Glenn Beck. There were more unshaved womens’ legs at the recent Tea Party rallies than in the entire Obama Administration.

I have been covering open source for five years and have yet to meet a single CEO who dreams of wearing Spandex to work. They’re all businessmen (and women), hard-charging dollars-and-cents people. They take advantage of the Internet to drive out costs and are looking to monetize what they have in any way they can.

Now this much is true. In many open source companies, especially early stage open source companies, programmers have enormous power. Getting a project committer onto your team is a real coup for an open source company trying to monetize that project with support contracts.

Some of the best open source companies out there are led by project leaders. And some programmers do drink Jolt Cola.

But just because salesmen wear alligator shoes and some programmers wear Crocs does not mean that open source is being run by hippies. Mario Batali likes Crocs and he’s as serious a businessman as you’ll find.

My guess is this is part of a long mourning process that the research industry has been going through. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.

Please get to Stage Five quickly, folks. It’s the only way you can go forward.

October 15th, 2009

Why prefer open source

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:44 am

Categories: Development, GPL, General, Government, business models, management

Tags: Asset, Open Source Code Base, Management Attitude, Mandates, Asset Management, Open Source, Government, Operational Planning, Business Operations, Dana Blankenhorn

A preference for open source is based on a simple, easy to understand premise.

An open source code base is your asset. A proprietary code base is someone else’s asset.

Just so long as you understand what “your” and “someone else’s” mean.

(You will recall this picture from Arian Young. I used it in February discussing mandates.)

Now it’s true that an open source asset is shared. But that’s why GPL code may be the best open source asset to have, if you’re not a software company.

Everyone who has GPL code has an obligation to share their improvements. Other people are busy, right now, increasing the value of your GPL assets.

This calculation is true for businesses as well as governments. You don’t need a mandate, assuming you can sell the idea behind a preference to your staff. (Thanks to Matt Asay for his excellent essay on this subject.)

This is something managers in all kinds of enterprises — public, private, and philanthropic — often fail to do. There is a tendency everywhere to mandate. Business managers pass orders down the line without giving much thought to its impact on the people below them. It’s easier than selling.

Vendors take advantage of this to sell a preference for closed source to their customers. Employees are defending their jobs, and futures, by defending the vendor’s interests. Change vendors, even to open source, and your skills with Microsoft or Oracle code can seem worthless, your job may be at risk.

So there is a lot business can learn from the problems governments have in trying to mandate open source. If a Fortunate 500 company dumps Windows for Linux it can face the same resistance.

This can be a hard lesson for top management to learn. You advertise for technical help. You state the specific programs you want people to know. These skills are their assets, and if you make vendor changes — you will always make vendor changes — employees see their assets destroyed.

My dear wife of some decades talks about this all the time, in relation to her work. Her employers get new software and now only want experts in that stuff. The old people are vulnerable.

But people can learn, and people will learn if you give them the chance. The same minds that learned assembler can learn Java. The same minds that learned Oracle can learn mySQL.

Management attitudes are what need to change. Stop thinking of programmers as mere skill sets. They’re trained minds and willing hearts. Most are anxious to take on new skills. Give them a chance. Sell them, don’t just issue them orders.

That’s why preferences are better than mandates. Preferences begin a sales process, they give people a chance to learn new skills. Mandates are always a threat, or at least they are perceived as threatening.

Business and government aren’t really so different. Managing is managing, coding is coding. Treat people as they deserve to be treated and most will come good. Treat them as cogs in your machine and the friction will grind that machine down.

October 13th, 2009

The original open source niche remains just that

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 10:29 am

Categories: General, Infrastructure, Network Administration, business models, venture capital

Tags: GroundWork Open Source, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

When I first began covering this beat five years ago there was great excitement about one niche, enterprise software.

Large companies would buy support, the thinking went, and open source would save them money. Big money.

Five years later, it’s still a niche.

Consider the good people at Groundwork Open Source. (That’s co-founder and COO Dave Lilly smiling over there, maybe because Peter Jackson replaced him in the CEO hot seat. His corporate picture is much better than the one CNET has.)

Groundwork offers reporters a steady supply of story ideas and leads. They specialize in system management software. They have been around since 2003. They offer many fine resources like MonitoringForge, a community for open source system management problems of all kinds.

Groundwork Open Source is an example of a well-run enterprise open source company. It has good relations with Red Hat, evidenced by its recent switch to JBOSS. It’s also part of the Microsoft System Center Alliance program. At Oracle OpenWorld this week they’re supplying some of the games.

The big news, however, is the closing of a new $5 million round of financing led by Canaan Partners.

Cool. Congratulations. Uh, $5 million?

Please don’t misunderstand. It’s great that Groundwork has this money. A lot of open source companies founded in 2003 are sprouting tombstones, not running tombstone ads.

But $5 million? In venture capital? Six years after launch? When you’re doing everything right? Really? Really.

My point is that there are some zeroes missing in this enterprise open source niche. Previous booms sprouted many more, much faster. This business has already seen a $1 billion deal (mySQL) and a $350 million one (JBOSS). But how many more are out there?

There are other values in open source other than money. I am the first person to say so. But among those for whom money is the chief value, is this an ore vein that’s playing out?

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 7th, 2009

Will open source biology get anywhere?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:11 am

Categories: General, Strategy, business models

Tags: Biology, Open Source Biology, Sage, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

While open source moves forward smartly in software, the movement has barely begun in biology, where the need is much greater.

The first such “open source biology” company, Sage Bionetworks, was founded just this year and is only now beginning to solicit its first donations beyond seed money.

Its growth may be slowed in that both co-founders, Stephen Friend and Eric Schadt (who has since left), came from Merck, and the perception may be that this is a Merck stalking horse.

The big news is that this may be broadening. Sage is now trumpeting a “major donation” (amount unspecified) from Quintiles, a contract researcher with 21,000 employees.  Friend is now going around the world in search of more.

I will have more to say about Sage’s efforts in biology, and what may be hampering them, over at SmartPlanet Rethinking Healthcare, but for now I want to solicit the wisdom of open source readers.

How would you go about gaining traction for open source biology? What should Stephen Friend be doing?

October 6th, 2009

Netgear offers an open source router that is an applications platform

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:09 am

Categories: Applications, Development, Distributions, GPL, General, Hardware, Internet, business models, wireless

Tags: 111Connection refused

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.