- Oracle makes $6.7B bid for BEA
- IBM's Outsourcing Patent Application Withdrawn
- Track Comments Across the Web?
- Back to blogging and more off-topic than ever
- Responsibility
- Solutions
- Open Source Companies make the AlwaysOn 100
- Red Hat Announces Solid 1Q08 Results - Stock down?!
- Off-topic: Someone needs to invite me to the Cisco Networkers Event
- Off-topic: CIA Family Jewels (The Mafia was hired to kill Castro?)
October 12, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Oracle makes $6.7B bid for BEA
Via Roy Russo's heads up:
Oracle, in letter to BEA Systems' board, offers cash at a 25% premium; says it seeks friendly acquisition.
"We believe our all cash offer provides the best value for BEA's shareholders and the best home for BEA's employees and customers," said a statement from Oracle President Charles Phillips. "This proposal is the culmination of repeated conversations with BEA's management over the last several years. We look forward to completing a friendly transaction as soon as possible."
Posted by Savio Rodrigues on October 12, 2007 06:19 AM
October 11, 2007 | Comments: (0)
IBM's Outsourcing Patent Application Withdrawn
Net/Net: The patent application for "outsourcing of services" was filed 8 months before a new IBM policy to reduce business method patents. This one slipped through the cracks of the "new policy". Our bad.
Via Bob Sutor's blog (oldish news):
"IBM has put into the public domain and withdrawn its application for patent number US2007/0162321 - Outsourcing of Services. This patent application covers analyzing work flows, skills, economic costs, etc. Here’s why we are withdrawing it — IBM adopted a new policy a year ago to sharply reduce business method patent filings and instead stress significant technical content in its patents. Even though the patent application in question was filed eight months before the policy took effect in September, 2006, had the policy been in place at the time, IBM would not have filed the application. We’re glad the community pointed this application out so IBM could take swift action."
Two IBM posts in a row...sorry. I thought you'd want to know that we (as is the case with most vendors) generally listen to the community. We (as in all vendors) may not always act, but we listen.
PS: I should state: "The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions."
Posted by Savio Rodrigues on October 11, 2007 08:56 AM
October 03, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Track Comments Across the Web?
Wouldn't it be cool if there was a way to track comments across blogs and discussion sites such as slashdot or TSS? Maybe this capability exists, and if so, PLEASE enlighten me. If not, I am happy to take credit for the idea that someone will implement and become a hundred thousandaire.
Here's the problem:
We all have 100s or feeds that we follow in our trusty RSS reader of choice. If you're like me, and read about 10% of the feeds that are tracked, you quickly realize that there are a handful of people on the Interweb whose opinions you respect and want to follow daily. Following their blogs via RSS does the trick 75% of the time. I'm beginning to think that the other 25% is just as important. For example, I follow what Roy Russo says on his Loopfuse blog. But I almost missed when he posted the following comment on Marc Fleury's blog:
In response to a user who posted a comment in Chinese (which, for the most part, few of us in North America would be able to understand).
Roy Russo said... I agree with the chinese guy. September 28, 2007 7:12:00 AM PDT
ROTFL....I fear that I'm missing witty comments like this all the time.
Actually, a better example is Bill Burke's comments during a TSS discussion on the bind that Interface21 & SpikeSource are in. Bill made some great points and I almost missed them because he made them on TSS (which I seldom read on a daily basis) versus his blog.
I used to tag all my comments with a del.icio.us "comment-SavioRodrigues" tag, but that became cumbersome very quickly. I want the ability to automagically attribute all my comments on the Interweb, regardless of website or username, to some comprehensive pile in the sky. If you have a wordpress.com username, this is possible, but only on wordpress.com blogs. I'm looking for this capability to be extended across domains and online properties. I know I'd use this feature to keep better tabs on what folks like Bill, Matt, Roberto, Alex or the Redmonk guys are saying.
I can't be alone here...
Maybe someone in OSS land can help? (I can write the hello world portion of the code in BASIC to get us started!)
Posted by Savio Rodrigues on October 3, 2007 03:47 PM
September 06, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Back to blogging and more off-topic than ever
I have been struggling trying to decide whether or not I should continue to blog. I am really busy lately and I mostly have felt like my commentary was as useless as the next knucklehead. James and Cote pretty much convinced me I should keep it going even if I am not talking about open source all the time. As I drove to the office this morning I was invigorated to write some stuff no matter how meaningless. To that end I offer an account of an incident I witnessed driving through the Tenderloin.
For those of you familiar with SF. I usually drive up Geary and cut down Gough to Golden Gate to 8th St to get to Folsom (far less complicated then it sounds) which takes you through the Tenderloin.
I'm driving along eating a muffin and drinking a much needed cup of Peets and get stuck at the Golden Gate/Larkin stoplight. I take the opportunity to jam the rest of the muffin in my face and look to my right and notice a beatup Oldsmo-buick.
There seemed to be some kind of ruckus in the front seat so I turned down the music (the new Queens of the Stone Age) and was able to catch this snippet of city living: "Bitch, give me my money. You owe me $40." I wasn't really sure what I should do—was it a pimp thing? Perhaps someone he needed to pay for Windows Vista? Maybe $40 was what it would take to get a new iPod? Ultimately I choose to believe that he wanted $40 so that he could buy lots of muffins.
After a bit of further yelling things calmed down. The driver noticed me looking over (muffin still crammed in my craw) and said "have a nice day" as he made a left and I went straight.
In light of this incident I must demand that all readers immediately send me $40 or a basket of muffins. In return I will provide you with muffins and/or other baked goods the next time you are in San Francisco.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on September 6, 2007 11:48 AM
July 28, 2007 | Comments: (0)
I was playing golf the other day with some other folks in the software business and the topic of email came up. I was talking about an article I read that claimed that the younger generation prefers instant messaging over email and quoted someone as saying that they only used email to talk to their parents. My daughter echoes many of these sentiments. Email, however, still drives much of what we do in business and will probably be around for a long time.
My particular complaint about email, though, is spam and the seeming inability to end it. I get more spam in my email than actual messages and it's quite frustrating. As we waited on the 11th hole to make our tee shots we went back and forth about email usage and spam. The following conversation ensued:
- My friend: "Would you download a piece of software to your machine that would guarantee to eliminate spam?"
- Me: "No. I wan't to be able to use web-interfaces from any machine to deal with email and I don't want to have a client program tied to any particular machine that cleans up my spam. Besides, this is the responsibility of my ISP and the other ISP's out there processing email. Why should I have to buy a program to install on my machine to solve this problem?"
- My firend: "What if the software was free?"
- Me: "Nothing's free, would it have advertising?"
- My friend: "Not at first."
- Me: "So, let me get this straight. In exchange for eliminating unwanted advertisements in my email I have to use an email program that gives me unwanted advertisements?"
This exchange, of course, led us off on a number of discussions that related to responsibility. I pay for my email service. When I use the ISP's web-based interface I get advertisements through-out the web-page. I get spam leaking into my inbox. No one's close to claiming a solution to this systemic problem yet I'm expected to individually solve it for myself.
This is no better than the virus-protection issues. A company creates an operating system susceptible to viral attack. I'm expected to purchase third-party products to protect me from the underlying design and coding issues that allow the attacks in the first place. Where is the responsibility of the creator of the operating system? What's fascinating about this particular problem is there's a huge debate about whether or not the O/S vendor should be allowed, because of anti-trust issues, to create their own solution to the problem. What's irksome about the debate is the O/S vendor wants to charge me for a product designed to fix the problems they created in the first place.
Where is the responsibility?
Posted by Dave Dargo on July 28, 2007 08:18 AM
July 28, 2007 | Comments: (0)
I'm sick and tired of products. Actually, I'm sick and tired of product features and the announcements related to them. I remember back in the late 80's and early 90's when database products were introducing new features like row-level locking and relational integrity. These were new features introduced into markets that were just starting to buy relational databases as a product.
Here we are, almost twenty years later, and we still talk about product features. I received an email from Microsoft that highlights the features of SQL*Server 2008 with cool new things like "transparent data encryption."
Good grief, where are the solutions? Why am I still expected to build the solutions myself? Why haven't we moved beyond self-integration of independent technology stacks?
In the open-source world we still mimic much of the marketing and product management methods of these old-school software business models. One of the greatest promises to me of open-source is the ability to integrate products and build completely new solutions. One can not take Oracle, or a sub-set of Oracle, and combine it with technology from Microsoft Windows to build something that didn't previously exist. Licensing and intellectual property protection prevents that type of innovation.
With open-source, however, one can take source code and products from different projects and combine it into unique, new solutions designed to solve actual problems faced by large IT organizations. It's one thing to save an IT department money at the acquisition point, it's quite another to solve the real-world problems they face every day.
I'll give you an example. IT organizations face a nightmare today when creating new development environments for their developers. They have to provision physical servers. They have to create stacks of software that have to be manually managed and serviced. They get stuck with proprietary interfaces and file formats that have to be maintained. This is a problem screaming for a solution. The larger IT organizations are independently creating internal solutions to the problem yet there is precious little being done by the industry to solve the problem. The technology is there today that would allow the dynamic instantiation of server environments for developers. Imagine a developer who needs a new sandbox using a web interface to identify the components they need in their development environment and having it automatically instantiated in a virtual server environment. An instantiation that only occupies CPU and memory real-estate when being used is much more efficient than today's world of dedicated servers. This type of solution would drive standards. I'd love to see the day when the developer doesn't care what database lies behind their interface, the developer would simply expect a standard API and standard set of behaviours. The developer could concentrate on development and not on the nuanced differences between different database implementations or the proprietary features of any particular database. I've seen systems like this implemented by individual companies. If there was a solution in the market, though, it would sell and would help us all reach another level of efficiency.
When are we going to move beyond the tired product and feature announcements and start to see, as a matter of course, new solutions being delivered via the combination of heretofore unrelated products?
Posted by Dave Dargo on July 28, 2007 07:53 AM
July 17, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Open Source Companies make the AlwaysOn 100
I'm not sure if we all got much hipper or AlwaysOn has expanded their reach but I am happy to see that several open source companies have made it to this year's AO 100 List.
Azureus
MuleSource
Untangle
Funambol
I have to think that at least 50 more of the chosen companies are big open source consumers.
Link: AO 100
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on July 17, 2007 08:00 AM
June 27, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Red Hat Announces Solid 1Q08 Results - Stock down?!
Red Hat announced results for its Fiscal 1Q08 quarter ended May 31, 2007. Pretty solid results.
Revenue rose 41% to $118.9 million from $84.0 million. The analyst consensus was $117.12 million.
GAAP net income rose 17% to $16.2 million, or 8 cents a share, from $13.8 million, or 7 cents a share, a year earlier. The analyst consensus was 6 cents a share.
But the stock is down in after hours trading, so here's the (funny) explanation:
The company reported $52.25 million in non-GAAP cash-flow from operations. Jefferies & Co. analyst Katherine Egbert said that fell short of her forecast of about $55.5 million.In addition to the shortfall, investor may have been spooked by the fact that the results were otherwise just about in line with expectations, she said.
Red Hat shares have climbed 13 percent since the beginning of May amid hopes it would post strong quarterly earnings.
"The business is healthy. But you just get the sense that there is nothing exciting here," Egbert said. "There is no explosive metric you can point to. It is boring."
To add some balance to this post, don't forget that Oracle grew revenue by 20% in their fourth quarter. We're talking about growing from a multi-billion base ($4.85B). Not to take anything away from Red Hat's 41% growth, but as Oracle's results indicate, Traditional software is doing alright, thank you very much.
PS: My friends in the DB2 side of the business would strongly dispute Ellison's comments about "taking share from DB2", especially since the IBM Information Management software division grew 20% in the most recent quarter (1Q07), but hey, who's counting?
Posted by Savio Rodrigues on June 27, 2007 07:31 PM
June 27, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Off-topic: Someone needs to invite me to the Cisco Networkers Event
Seems that KISS is playing at the Cisco Networkers event. Someone hook me up. I will bore you with tales of open source and trade you a Mule T-shirt for an invite/ticket/whatever.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on June 27, 2007 11:12 AM
June 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Off-topic: CIA Family Jewels (The Mafia was hired to kill Castro?)
This CIA "family jewels" data dump is completely nuts.
Top Ten Most Interesting "Family Jewels"
Released by the CIA to the National Security Archive, June 26, 2007
1) Journalist surveillance - operation CELOTEX I-II (pp. 26-30)
2) Covert mail opening, codenamed SRPOINTER / HTLINGUAL at JFK airport (pp. 28, 644-45)
3) Watergate burglar and former CIA operative E. Howard Hunt requests a lock picker (p. 107)
4) CIA Science and Technology Directorate Chief Carl Duckett "thinks the Director would be ill-advised to say he is acquainted with this program" (Sidney Gottlieb's drug experiments) (p. 213)
5) MHCHAOS documents (investigating foreign support for domestic U.S. dissent) reflecting Agency employee resentment against participation (p. 326)
6) Plan to poison Congo leader Patrice Lumumba (p. 464)
7) Report of detention of Soviet defector Yuriy Nosenko (p. 522)
8) Document describing John Lennon funding anti-war activists (p. 552)
9) MHCHAOS documents (investigating foreign support for domestic U.S. dissent) (pp. 591-93)
10) CIA counter-intelligence official James J. Angleton and issue of training foreign police in bomb-making, sabotage, etc. (pp. 599-603)
Noah Shachtman at Wired is blogging the good stuff. I love that the Mafia was brought in to eliminate Castro. You really can't make this stuff up.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on June 26, 2007 07:59 PM
June 19, 2007 | Comments: (0)
By now you've heard that I'll be joining the Open Sources team. It's a shame that Matt Asay is moving on to bigger and better things (you can follow him at CNet). I'm sure we'll continue to disagree about an item or two related to open source :-)
I'm pretty excited about joining the team. A key reason for this, (aside from being in the company of a few open source stars) is because I don’t work for an OSS vendor. I told Steve Fox, Editor in Chief at InfoWorld, that bringing in a voice from the Traditional software world to the Open Sources team was a forward-looking move on InfoWorld’s behalf*. The views from 1.8% of the software market have historically been, and will no doubt continue to be, amply represented at Open Sources. I'll do my best to bring in a complimentary viewpoint from the other 98.2% of the software market (with a lot of help from friends & colleagues!).
OSS commentary and analysis from an OSS & Traditional vendor lens is another example of the idea that Redmonk’s Cote coined "pragmatic open source" (definitely more on this soon). In keeping with the pragmatic storyline, as JBoss’ Sacha Labourey likes to close his correspondence with:
"Onward"
--
*I believe credit mainly goes to Matt & Dave R. for making this happen behind the scenes. Wow - did I just call Matt & Dave visionaries?!? ;-)
**Disclaimers:
- The postings on this site are my own views
- I am an IBM employee
- IBM does not necessarily agree with the views expressed here
Posted by Savio Rodrigues on June 19, 2007 07:12 PM
June 19, 2007 | Comments: (0)
I'm enjoying my new blog over on CNET, but I admit I'm missing Dave. Especially now that he has turned into Jane Austen, penning blog entries by the thousands. I was clearly holding him back. :-)
I just noticed for the first time today that Michael Tiemann (founder of Cygnus and VP of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat) and his wife, Amy, have joined me. They have a blog about parenting in the high tech world. How cool is that? I would love to write this blog:
Today's parents may live and work on the cutting edge, but we didn't grow up in a digital era. (parent.thesis) brings you the latest news and musings about life raising kids in today's 24-7, hyperconnected world. MojoMom.com creator Amy Tiemann and open-source software pioneer Michael Tiemann are a 21st-century couple. They take a leap of faith as parents and build their parachute on the way down, living by the motto, "We aren't raising our children for the world we live in, we're raising them for the world they'll live in.This is actually the sort of blog that I like to read: one that captures the humanity of the writer but still provides mostly topical content. InfoWorld should have a blog or two like this. Blogs like this remind us that we're not alone in the universe; that there are other parental failures just like us. :-)
Anyway, check out Michael's new blog. I want to see it followed up by the Dave, Karen, and Kiki Rosenberg blog on mixing CEO-hood with a month-old terror.
Posted by Matt Asay on June 19, 2007 06:29 AM
June 17, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Why Do People Write Free Documentation? (ONLamp Survey)
Andy Oram posted his survey write-up on why people contribute documentation. Pretty interesting, but still a bit hard to quantify (says Andy himself.)
I tend to think that people who write documentation for their own work tend to do it as habit, maybe even more so when working on public/communal projects.
A unique survey ran on O'Reilly's web site during the first three months of 2007, aimed at people who contribute free documentation to online mailing lists, web sites, and other forums. The survey garnered 354 responses, which in itself indicates the thriving state of free documentation and the dedication of the people who write it.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on June 17, 2007 04:23 PM
June 15, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Conspicuous consumption (or Babies make you poor)
Two weeks into this baby adventure I can't believe how much money we have spent and will continue to spend on our precious little monkey. Admittedly, I have used the baby as an excuse to buy a new LCD Tv (like a child of mine wouldn't have a Tv in her room), the new HD Tivo and a new cell phone (really a business expense I switched to the BB8830 on Verizon and it's been fantastic, unlike that useless Cingular drop-fest) on top of the fact that we had to buy a 2nd car.
Within my spending spree I have been paying close attention to who has been providing good service. Being that our core Mule business is supporting our customers, I am a little bit obsessed with it and constantly evaluating who is good and who is bad. More to the point I am always trying to figure out who will sustain me as a customer.
The good list (so far):
Room and Board-we bought a chair that they delivered before the due date, the order process was flawless, the delivery guys were pros and they sent me a nice email afterward. I would order from them again in a heartbeat.
Target-hard to beat Target, though I have noticed that other places have been selections of baby stuff. While waiting in line I did the math to figure out that diapers are $.25 each even in bulk. All of the sudden I started to realize again why I had to make this company successful.
Comcast-Surprisingly, Comcast was really easy to deal with to make the change to the new Tivo and I changed from DSL to cable modem.
Amazon-Everything I've ordered has been early. Shockingly good service, even on returns.
Mediocre:
Babys-r-us-We had to return something and brought what appeared to be only half of the receipt and they couldn't look up the transaction in their system so we had to go with store credit.
Costco-Went there for the first time last week and it's pretty nuts. The clientele makes the Linuxworld crowd seem like high-society. Good prices on electronics can't be beat.
Bad:
Cingular-Trying to cancel my service was like a 9th circle of hell. It took 3 people and I had to tell everyone of them how bad the service sucked. Also somehow they had one of our guys roaming full-time resulting in $800 bills when he was only using 1/3 of his minutes.
Obnoxious recruiters and commercial real estate people-We're all afraid to answer our phones in the office.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on June 15, 2007 04:29 PM
June 15, 2007 | Comments: (0)
New bloggers joining Open Sources: Zack, Savio and Dave D
We're happy to announce that we have some new members of the Open Sources team of masked banditos.
Zack Urlocker of MySQL
Savio Rodrigues from IBM
Dave Dargo, man of mystery and intrigue
Zack started the ball rolling with a post on his recent trip to China.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on June 15, 2007 10:39 AM
June 14, 2007 | Comments: (0)
You may notice today that there is now
another blog bearing my name and my opinions out on the web. As of today, I will be moving my blog activities to CNET. I've loved blogging here for the past two years - Dave and InfoWorld have been fantastic to me.
In addition to the blog, I've also had the chance to collaborate with InfoWorld on this last OSBC, which was our best ever. I will continue to support and read Infoworld.
In fact, I have been working with Dave and InfoWorld to ensure Open Sources remains one of the top open source blogs on this planet. I'll be helping out through the end of the month, which will include some blogging and the welcoming in of a few prominent open source bloggers that you already know and love.
In short, keep this page bookmarked. My "Open Road" blog on CNET will be a great companion with all the incorrigible bias you've come to expect.
What luck
Posted by Matt Asay on June 14, 2007 02:53 AM
June 13, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Advertisement: MuleSource is hiring!
Now that we raised the B round we are on a hiring spree. So far things are going great with the exception of the non-stop barrage of annoying/obnoxious recruiters who call several of us every day and spam us all with crappy candidates. Do us all a favor and stop. Seriously, please don't call me. Your obnoxiousness makes hiring managers hate your candidates, regardless of qualifications. For all you job seekers--make sure you hook up with the right firm. I have had good experiences with several and *really* bad experiences with several others.
For our hiring spree we have brought on a dedicated recruiting team from the Kain Management Group. They're vetting all candidates--even ones that come from other recruiters.
We have 18 open head count right now, though the website only lists 13. If you think you want to hang out with our crew of misfits and get paid in "Mule Bucks" instead of real dollars, drop us a line.
Director of Marketing
Director, Engineering or Manager, Engineering
Director, Product Management or Manager, Product Management
Principal Software Engineer / Architect – Core Team
Principal/Senior Test Automation Engineer – Test Team
Product Marketing Manager
QA Director / QA Manager
Senior Manager/Director Technical Services
Senior Software Engineer – Core Team
Senior Web Developer - MuleForge
Software Engineer – Core Team
Solutions Architect/Technical Director
Support Manager
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on June 13, 2007 09:29 PM
June 13, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Back to the front...Dave returns to the blog world
After a 6 week absence from the blogebrity ranks (not a big loss since Matt is the real star here) I am back in blog form. A lot of people think that big life changes (in my case a kid) makes you all introspective and self-aware. I can confidently say that I am the same knucklehead that I was before, and I don't foresee much change in the future.
I can say that the month of May was a bit surreal. I turned 35, raised $12.5 million and my wife had a baby that we named Kiki Moon. I can only hope that the name makes her an artist/musician/writer and not an exotic dancer. As far as I know the father's only real responsibility is to keep female children off the stripper pole.
During this time I had absolutely no interest in blogging or writing. I did however read lots of books:
Books I read:
After Dark-Haruki Murakami
Murakami has been one of my all time favorite authors since Karen bought me The Elephant Vanishes back in 1995. His writing has an ethereal quality that I can read over and over. Admittedly this was not my favorite book but the writing is just so good I have already read it twice.
Inspector Imanishi Investigates-Seicho Matsumoto
I'm a sucker for short sentences plus I like detective novels in foreign countries…they provide the escapist fantasies I so desire. My fave in this category is probably All she was worth by Miyuki Miyabe...a detective with a bad limp? You get me every time.
At Risk-Stella Rimington
Don't bother
Hooking Up-Tom Wolfe
Don't bother
Ask the Dust and Wait Until Spring, Bandini-John Fante
Fante is somewhat unknown. I first came across his stuff in a Charles Bukowski interview and it's clear that the influence is heavy (Arturo Bandini is Fante's Henry Chinaski.) Just like Buk, I can read the Fante stuff over and over. The writing is so simple and strong and so hard to achieve.
The Catastrophist-Lawrence Douglas
This book started out great, reminded of A Conspiracy of Tall Men, which I later realized I found to be a disappointment, just like this book, which I have to say in the end was a total dud. It started out strong with a good story line but ended with a pathetic whimper and a failed attempt at a clever ending. Totally lame.
Sayonara Bar-Susan Barker
I haven't finished this yet so I will reserve judgment but it’s a cross between several Murakami books and Bangkok 8.
Music:
From iTunes: Tony Williams Lifetime Collection
On CD: Unsane-Visqueen, Queens of the Stone Age-Era Vulgaris
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on June 13, 2007 09:25 PM
June 09, 2007 | Comments: (0)
An excellent op-ed from the WSJ today about how the world (as a whole) has improved economically (and dramatically so) over the past few centuries.
Modern humans first emerged about 100,000 years ago. For the next 99,800 years or so, nothing happened. Well, not quite nothing. There were wars, political intrigue, the invention of agriculture -- but none of that stuff had much effect on the quality of people's lives. Almost everyone lived on the modern equivalent of $400 to $600 a year, just above the subsistence level. True, there were always tiny aristocracies who lived far better, but numerically they were quite insignificant.What caused this uplift to society? Technology.Then -- just a couple of hundred years ago, maybe 10 generations -- people started getting richer. And richer and richer still. Per capita income, at least in the West, began to grow at the unprecedented rate of about three quarters of a percent per year. A couple of decades later, the same thing was happening around the world.
The source of this wealth -- the engine of prosperity -- is technological progress. And the engine of technological progress is ideas -- not just the ideas from engineering laboratories, but also ideas like new methods of crop rotation, or just-in-time inventory management. You can fly from New York to Tokyo partly because someone figured out how to build an airplane and partly because someone figured out how to insure it. I'm writing this on a personal computer instead of an electric typewriter partly because someone said, "Hey! I wonder if we can make computer chips out of silicon!" and partly because someone said "Hey! I wonder if we can finance startups with junk bonds!"Not just technology, mind you, but the business models that enable it. It's one thing to come up with a great invention, but quite another to figure out how to make money from it.
Which is why being as open as possible may well be the source of even greater prosperity for the planet in the next few centuries to come.
Posted by Matt Asay on June 9, 2007 04:32 PM
June 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)
How Google can avoid becoming evil (Jeff Nolan)
Not that Google would ever contemplate doing anything evil, of course. But Jeff suggests that it's collection of data and secrecy about how it will use (and what it is gathering) it is a problem for you, me, and everyone else:
But here’s the thing, the data they are collecting is about ME and as a consequence of that Google is able to piece together things about my life, my online life as a proxy for my real world life, that they are profiting from without my informed consent. They would say "well don’t use Google services and no data will be collected" but that argument rings hollow when Google doesn’t publish what they are collecting, or hold themselves to public review on what they wish to collect.Good points, all. Jeff goes on to suggest an "opt-out" option when using Google, which I think is a great idea. I'd actually be willing to give Google much more of my personal information if I knew how it was being used (and if it ever resulted in me getting a better deal on skis, books, or whatever - the best my personal information seems to nab me is the exact same ad that everyone else on the planet sees, with no better deal).More to the point, Google is now the tip of the spear for the entire industry so what they do will soon be replicated by every other search provider. The internet is a public utility at this point, like electricity, and the simple fact is that individuals cannot not use it without suffering economic disadvantage.
In short, Google, we will help you to be evil if you'll just promise to be evil within the bounds we set for you. Just give us the chance....
Posted by Matt Asay on June 5, 2007 01:00 AM
June 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Which of your congresspersons is owned by the RIAA?
Well, mine, for one. Orrin Hatch (Republican senator from Utah) took $6,000 from the RIAA, that group that goes around suing children because its backers want the freedom to treat digital goods like physical goods.
Except that they're not. And so I see no reason to subsidize their Luddite ways.
I'm not suggesting that theft and piracy are right. I buy all my music and movies through iTunes (or at the store). But I am suggesting that the RIAA does far more harm than good, and no US legislative leader worth her salt should be taking money from this group.
You can find out if your congressperson is an RIAA lackey here.
Posted by Matt Asay on June 5, 2007 01:00 AM
June 04, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Would you have allowed Bill Gates to be born?
This from MSNBC. Very funny.
Btw, my response? Of course. He's done a huge amount of good for computing. I still think we in open source have much to learn from Gates. Not his sense of style, of course, because he has none. Just look at his software. But the ability to make complex things eas(ier)...that's innovative.
Posted by Matt Asay on June 4, 2007 05:28 AM
June 01, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Jobs envies Gates; Gates envies Jobs
In a mostly staid interview Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher did with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, one question elicited two very different, and very striking responses:
Question from the audience: You approached the same opportunity so very differently. What did you learn about running your own business that you wished you had thought of sooner or thought of first by watching the other guy?Gates has no sense of taste. Jobs has no sense of collaboration. And their companies have suffered (and succeeded) based on these failings for three decades.Mr. Gates: I'd give a lot to have Steve's taste -- in terms of intuitive taste, both for people and products. We sat in Mac product reviews where there were questions about software choices, how things would be done, that I viewed as an engineering question -- that's just how my mind works. And I'd see Steve make the decision based on a sense of people and product that is even hard for me to explain. The way he does things is just different, and I think it's magical.
Mr. Jobs: Because Woz and I started the company based on doing the whole banana, we weren't so good at partnering with people. And, you know, actually, the funny thing is, Microsoft's one of the few companies we were able to partner with that actually worked for both companies. And we weren't so good at that, where Bill and Microsoft were really good at it because they didn't make the whole thing in the early days, and they learned how to partner with people really well.
And I think if Apple could have had a little more of that in its DNA, it would have served it extremely well. And I don't think Apple learned that until a few decades later.
Fascinating, what a CEO's personality can do to and for a company.
Posted by Matt Asay on June 1, 2007 11:16 AM
June 01, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Maybe proprietary companies can offer good support, too (Oracle)
Kudos to Oracle for nabbing the SSPA's awards for "Best Knowledge Management Practices" and "Best Value-Added Support." I don't know much about the Services and Support Professionals Association, but assuming it's not Larry's car service, I think this is great news for Oracle. Here's the subtext:
Oracle continues to extend the breadth and depth of its knowledge management systems and value-added services. In order to provide customers the most complete and up-to-date information on Oracle products, the Company also maintains a knowledge base of over 340,000 articles supporting more than 650 products.This actually sounds a bit like what several open source companies built, and possibly reflects the shift in Oracle's revenues from licenses to maintenance. At any rate, this sounds like good news for Oracle's customers.Oracle Configuration Support Manager is an engineered service innovation that has significantly improved the way customers manage, track, and support their Oracle environments. A proactive automated service; Configuration Support Manager helps customers significantly lower the resource requirements involved in maintaining and enhancing their Oracle solutions. Integrated with automated HealthChecks and security alerts, Configuration Support Manager prevents critical issues and increases systems performance and availability to provide customers a superior ownership experience.
Posted by Matt Asay on June 1, 2007 07:18 AM
May 31, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Building an online business...online
People are always surprised to find out just how distributed Alfresco is as an organization. Aside from a small hive in London, it's hard to find more than two Alfrescans in the same city. The same is largely true of MySQL and a number of new open source companies (MuleSource comes to mind).
At Alfresco in the US, we have people in Austin, Boston, San Francisco, Denver, Salt Lake City, Atlanta, and New York City. Even where we have people in the same cities (there are now four of us in Salt Lake City), we don't have offices and only see each other at conferences or other gathering points. Given this, how do we keep in touch? Sometimes I feel like we're missing out on the "watercooler discussions," but more often than not I think we gain by dropping the waste that can come with an office.
Here are the basic principles of how we work:
- If you're not online, you don't exist. This means that we talk all day, every day over IM. We talk over the phone, too, but our watercooler discussions happen over IM. Therefore, people need to always online.
One of our members - who shall remain nameless - came to us from a big technology company. When on the phone, he'd set his IM to "Unavailable." But if we're on a conference call, that's precisely when we need to have him online. A huge amount of chatter goes back and forth during these calls.
- If you can't close a deal online/over the phone, you belong at another company. In an online world, you have to follow SugarCRM's sales model: "Go big, lose early." There is no time to fritter away months with on-site visits - that's the proprietary model where buyers pay for the privilege to stare at a salesperson in their lobby. In an open source world, the software has to (mostly) sell itself. We hire people who are good over email and good over the phone.
- Email should not remain unread/unanswered for more than a day. We have to rely on everyone else in the org to respond to email quickly and comprehensively. We don't have the luxury of walking over to someone's cubicle to pose a question. Every email must be answered, every day.
- Emails must be directed to the people from whom a response is needed. Because so much of our business happens over email, it's easy to skim through email and miss deliverables and what-not that have been assigned to you. Therefore, we try to call out (often in the subject line) who needs to pay particular attention to an email.
- Software should be supportable online. This means that documentation needs to be solid (self-support), and processes need to be in place to use web conferencing/etc. to "remote" into an organization's server to fix problems. I also think something like Meebo Rooms or some way to online chat with customers is important (though we're not yet doing this).
And despite what I said above, keep in mind that there are absolutely instances (many, in fact) where customers require a person sitting in their office, looking over their IT environment, etc. Could such things be done online? Yes, but old habits die hard....
I'd be interested to hear how your business functions online, too.
Posted by Matt Asay on May 31, 2007 07:07 AM
May 30, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Private equity should buy out Novell
Ah, Novell. I IM'd this morning with one of your faithful - someone I respect a great deal - and he reminded me of all that Novell does well (fight SCO, put out a great Linux product, both server and desktop, etc.). But what Novell has been lacking is the business side of this "goodness," as Forbes reports:
Don't hate Novell because of its partnership with Microsoft. Hate Novell because its business stinks....What Novell needs is to be taken off the public market so that it can regroup and make difficult decisions that Wall Street doesn't have the patience to permit. The company has over $1.8B on its balance sheet with a market cap of $2.5B. So, for $700M or so you can pick up a company with some valuable assets: technology, great engineers, and some exceptional processes around support, certification, etc. Sell off or open source all the stuff that keeps Novell mired in its past (ZEN, GroupWise, etc.) and start afresh. Or fresher. And dump the Microsoft pact while you're at it. There are good ways to work with Microsoft and bad ways. You chose the latter.Unfortunately for Novell, business isn't good. Analysts expect the company's second-quarter earnings will come in around $4.7 million on Wednesday--that's a drop of of 50%. Worse yet, sales are set to slide to $235.1 million from $278.3 million. As a result, over the past year Novell's shares have plodded along, dropping from $7.82 to $7.55.
The problem? For the past 10 years, booming sales of cheap software from Microsoft and open-source software vendors have sapped sales of Novell's venerable NetWare offering. Novell tried to adapt, first by repositioning itself as a vendor of open-source software with a string of acquisitions in 2003. Then it ticked off many of its newfound friends by announcing a deal with open-source foe Microsoft last November. One of Novell's open-source developers even resigned over the arrangement.
But there's redemption in sight. I think, however, that it will be too hard to effectuate the necessary changes without getting off the quarterly Wall Street treadmill.
Posted by Matt Asay on May 30, 2007 09:47 AM
May 30, 2007 | Comments: (0)
So, the big news today (well, not the really big news, which is, of course, that the Spanish media is reporting that Arsenal may trade Henry for Eto'o plus 17 million pounds - I'll take it!) is Jason Maynard's provocative research note that suggests that there aren't enough quality On Demand/SaaS offerings out there. We actually have the same problem here in open source land: great potential, but still in the early days of our growth.
He writes:
It's fascinating to me how closely this language mimics what we say about open source. I've noted before that SaaS and open source are true bosom buddies. I would expect to see more partnerships between the two worlds before long. (Interestingly, though perhaps not directly correlated, JasperSoft is one of the top applications on Salesforce.com's AppExchange....)
- We stand by our call that On Demand computing is actually an under-hyped transformation of the software industry. Business software customers have been shackled by the complexity, cost, and inflexibility of traditional on premise software. We believe that On Demand computing will grow to over $21 billion in revenue by 2011.
- The rise of software as a service is fundamentally changing the rules of software and ushering in a new era of asymmetric warfare that is poised to break the traditional rules of the game. We firmly believe that in the coming year some On Demand vendors will introduce advertising-based or at least partially subsidized software offerings.
- The premise to our valuation argument is that incumbent vendors like Microsoft will have a difficult time organically shifting their business model to On Demand computing. Since the On Demand model is so disruptive from a licensing, deployment, and DNA perspective it could attract outside entrants into the business software space. Cisco has already made a move for WebEx. Why couldn't an IBM or even an ADP extend their respective models?
At any rate, welcome to the wild west of disruption. No, Mike, I'm not suggesting that the end is nigh for proprietary software companies. Remember: I came from Novell, which has persisted at $1B despite seeing its glory years fade over a decade ago.
But I am suggesting that disruption is afoot, and only those who embrace it will dominate the next two decades of technology discussion.
Posted by Matt Asay on May 30, 2007 07:39 AM
May 29, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Would you give a baby to this man?
Our very own Dave Rosenberg is shortly to become a father. You can see how he feels about it:
Dave is closing in on the end of life as he knows it, and beginning a much better life. Good luck, and don't worry about the blogging.
Posted by Matt Asay on May 29, 2007 09:29 AM
May 28, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Memo to readers: we need a minute to recover
It's that time of year where things start to get crazy and we need a minute to regroup. Give it a few days and you'll see some new stuff.
For Matt, OSBC was a killer event both in terms of it's success and the overwhelming amount of work it took. For me, raising the B round and waiting for my wife to pop out the kid definitely requires some time off.
More soon...
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on May 28, 2007 12:13 PM
May 25, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Facebook opens up, becomes "OurSpace"
In yet another sign of the seemingly unstoppable tide of openness, Facebook has opened up its API to outside developers, as The Register reports. What does this mean?
he news should allow the network's 23 million claimed monthly visitors to integrate their profile with other online services, which until now had competed with Facebook. It represents a challenge to the tight control that rival MySpace exerts over its network....In other words, it means Facebook just became "OurSpace." It's what the iPhone should be doing (opening up to outside developers). It's actually what Microsoft has long done well in its Windows platform strategy.The announcement casts Facebook as a kind of social networking operating system, open to third parties. The policy is in contrast to Murdoch-owned MySpace, which has blocked outside embeddable features from popular photo-sharing dump PhotoBucket, among others, angering users. Zuckerberg said: "Until now, social networks have been closed platforms. Today, we're going to end that."
If you think you're the be all, end all of development on your platform, you will be. And that 20th Century mentality just won't cut it in the 21st Century of user-generated applications.
Posted by Matt Asay on May 25, 2007 05:46 AM
May 19, 2007 | Comments: (0)
My son and I were talking this morning, and I asked what he wants to be when he grows up. His reply (I'm not making this up):
Oh, I don't know. Either a Microsoft guy in England or a stunt man.I didn't have the heart to tell him they might well be the same job. (-:
Posted by Matt Asay on May 19, 2007 08:55 AM
May 17, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Betting on Java (O'Reilly book data)
I've been grateful for O'Reilly Media's quarterly State of the Computer Book Market. It provides interesting insight into which programming languages/tech topics are hot, and which are on the wane. In this latest installment, two things stick out to me:
- Java continues to be the biggest enterprise target yet
- Java (and every other "major programming language") is on the wane.
Ruby and other "web languages" are on the upswing, while stodgy old "major programming languages" are on the decline. Still, if you're selling into the enterprise, the installed base is more comfortable with .Net and Java than the sexy new languages. (I mention this because at a recent gathering of a few open source startups, we were trying to decipher the reasons behind our differing average deal sizes. Those built on Java were significantly higher, which I can only assume has to do with enterprises (incorrectly, in my view) feeling like "Java = enterprise class" and "enterprise class = big payment."
Take it for what it's worth (I'm not sure how much that is), but it seems like a strategy that uses Java as the baseline and yet allows developers to extend the base with PHP/Perl/Ruby/whatever should be a winner.
Posted by Matt Asay on May 17, 2007 05:45 AM
May 15, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft, the blogosphere, and free stuff
Alfresco's PR firm just emailed me to say that I had been quoted in a BusinessWeek article, which surprised me, since I didn't talk to anyone at BusinessWeek about Microsoft's patent BUD (Bogus Uncertainty and Doubt).
Neither did Larry Augustin. Or Mary Jo Foley. Or Robert Scoble. Yet we're all quoted.
It's an interesting statement on the relevance of bloggers to the traditional media world. Aaron Ricadela, who wrote the BusinessWeek article, could have called each of us to ask our opinions. But Aaron didn't. Instead, he just scoured the blogosphere for commentary. Efficient.
All of which makes me wonder when I'm going to start making money on this blogging thing. The Wall Street Journal has an interesting story today [Subscription required] on how studios and TV networks are offering freebies to bloggers in order to get bloggers to post positive things about their products.
Who says you can't buy love? Trying to tap into the burgeoning power of blogs as promotional tools and fed up with the jaded attitudes of professional critics and TV feature writers, studios and networks are flooding bloggers with free stuff in hopes the flattered recipients will reward them with positive coverage. Flowing into the trough is everything from fancy gym bags and toasters to video iPods and free trips. Some networks -- in the spotlight this week as they unveil their fall schedules to advertisers -- have even borrowed a term from the technology industry to describe the strategy: blogola.The problem with covering open source software is that I get free stuff all the time...but it just so happens to be software. MySQL gives me its database software for free. Novell gives me SUSE for free. Loopfuse, too. Of course, they give it to everyone for free. So, everyone gets 'blogola' in open source land.
Which makes my blogola not very special at all. :-)
Posted by Matt Asay on May 15, 2007 11:24 AM
May 13, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Or maybe I'm just mad the football season is over
Maybe Microsoft's suggestion that open source developers and companies care less about respecting IP than it does (which is completely false) is not the reason for my ire. Maybe I'm just annoyed that I have to wait another three months to watch soccer (football) again.
From the looks of it, the NBA feels the same way. They can't believe they have to watch baskeball, either.
Posted by Matt Asay on May 13, 2007 09:19 PM
May 10, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Midnight is creeping up on me, and I'm just finishing edits to my 10-year old daughter's school paper. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. It is 10 pages long. Double-spaced, yes, but 10 pages?!? Scout (my daughter - yes, it's from To Kill a Mockingbird) has apparently adopted my verbosity. Here's a sample from the paper:
The minstrels begin “Great Calm Plains,” Sallvendale’s most popular song. I pick Ella Jense, Nimbara’s princess, for the dance. She is naturally tan with shiny, black, thick, clean hair. She smells like mint leaves. She is a wonderful dancer and singer. Her smile comes easily like her father’s, who is King Nickolas. She is his main pride ever since Queen Lucy died of food poisoning.Ah, there's some Morrissey in her, at least. I long for the day that I'll see her write lyrics like this:
Tell all of my friendsMorrissey is genius.
(I don't have too many
Just some rain-coated lovers' puny brothers).
And I'm verbose. So is Scout. I'm going to have her be my ghost writer. Just need to whip her up into a frenzy of GPL fanaticism and you'll never know I've left. :-)
Thanks for enduring my Brevity Void.
Posted by Matt Asay on May 10, 2007 10:20 PM
May 10, 2007 | Comments: (0)
The problem with disruption: you kind of have to do it to yourself (SAP)
Ah, disruption. It's so much fun to do to others, but uncomfortable when others are doing it to you.
Or, in SAP's case, to oneself.
As Steve Hamm writes, SAP's SaaS efforts seem destined to fail. Not because the company doesn't have 3,000 people and $400M sunk into SaaS. It does, as I've written before
No, SAP's problem is that it has billions of (dollars of) reasons to stay the same. Successful. Until it's not.
Steve Hamm sums up the problem nicely:
What's going on here is that SAP has to market its new product without cannabalizing its old cash-cow products. That's going to be very difficult. It's clear from the stellar performance of Salesforce.com that on-demand services have struck a chord with corporations of all sizes. And now Dave Duffield, founder of PeopleSoft, has a new company called Workday that's about to release a whole range of run-the-business applications in the on-demand mode. So SAP has to be in the game. Yet most all of its revenues and profits now come from old fashioned software.It's difficult to break with tradition, especially when those traditions have served you well. It's even difficult to break with tradition when it's blindingly obvious that you must, as was the case for Novell back in 2002. Open source was the answer to many of the company's problems, but getting the culture and business around open source was/is non-trivial.Bruce Cleveland, a venture capitalist who used to run the on-demand division for Siebel Systems, now part of Oracle, did a good job of summing up SAP's challenges in a response to an e-mail from me today: "As long as they're a public company, I don't believe they can make this transformation. It's absolutely the right strategy, but the internal DNA of the company will defy their ability to support both business models." Cleveland should know. That's partly what led to Siebel's collapse, which forced it to sell out to Oracle.
Sometimes the ghosts of our past constitute our biggest barriers for the future.
Posted by Matt Asay on May 10, 2007 01:14 PM
May 08, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Being that Matt is the most prolific person I know most of our readers don't care that I am not posting much. Much of reluctance has been because of a hand/wrist pain that makes it hard to type. My 2 months of excruciating pain turns out to be carpal tunnel.
I usually mock people that say they have fake ailments like carpal tunnel, but man, it really sucks and is totally painful. So, light posting and no epics for a few more weeks.
I *really* feel old.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on May 8, 2007 08:08 PM
May 08, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Interchangeable Web 2.0 - Too much web in common
I was going to post on this article in today's WSJ, but Paul beat me to it. The WSJ doesn't call out the underlying problem, but points to a surface problem in today's web companies...at least, for the VCs that invest in them.
Namely, what happens when you invest in Company X to do Service/Product A, and it shifts to do Service/Product B? And that change conflicts with one of your other portfolio companies?:
hen venture capitalist Peter Rip put money into two young Internet companies, he thought he was buying into two entirely different businesses. Riya Inc. was a digital-photo-sharing site while Vast.com Inc. was an online classified-ad site that made money by generating leads for online advertisers.What the article doesn't call out, but which is the subtext in the article, is that VCs are in this dilemma precisely because web companies are often somewhat generic. It's like the dot-com bust all over again. Companies are launching to take advantage of the web (filling the Web 2.0 Conference in droves), but about the only thing they understand is the web, not the actual product/service they're delivering.The next year, in 2006, Riya changed course, and now Mr. Rip wonders if he has a conflict of interest on his hands. Late last year, Riya launched a comparison-shopping Web site that makes money by producing sales leads for online retailers.
"I thought I had invested in two totally different start-ups," says Mr. Rip, a general partner at Crosslink Capital in San Francisco. "But all of a sudden, I'm sitting on the boards of two companies that are both doing lead generation."
And so when they fail at their service (for which they often have no domain knowledge), they morph to Yet Another Web Service. Which will also likely fail. Because of a lack of domain knowledge.
VCs: Here's some free advice. Invest in companies that actually do some THING. Not open source, generically. (We've seen enough over-hyped open source companies fade away and die because they thought open source was a core competency - it's not. Open source is a strong complement to a product, but it's not a replacement for a winning product that solves a real customer need.) Not the web, generically. But a specific product or service with a team that has experience doing that product or service in a different context or the same context.
Otherwise, you get what you pay for.
Posted by Matt Asay on May 8, 2007 11:05 AM
May 08, 2007 | Comments: (0)
I just went through the attendee list for the Open Source Business Conference and loved what I saw. For the first time, OSBC is truly drawing a deep bench of IT buyers. It's something that we have strived for since the first show (well, the second, since the first show was intended to be a vendor strategy event), and which has finally happened.
We have CIOs/VPs/Directors from the following companies (and I won't even bother to go into all the CXOs/VPs we have from Red Hat, MySQL, Alfresco, Microsoft, MuleSource, JasperSoft, SugarCRM, OpenBravo, Loopfuse, Zmanda, XenSource, etc. etc. - this is the place to find out what's now and what's coming in open source):
B. M. Trading InternationalAnd a range of others. I got tired of typing. What a great group of enterprise IT buyers! This will definitely be the best OSBC we've ever done. (Btw, if you're with an IT group and are having trouble swinging the attendance fee, let me know. I may be able to intervene with InfoWorld.)
Boise Cascade
Lehman Brothers
Genealogical Society of Utah
Denali Oil & Gas
Bank of America
Sony Playstation Group
Barclays Global
Activision
Electronic Arts
H&R Block
SRI International
Ricoh
Vancouver Community College
Christian Science Monitor
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Golden Gate University
E*Trade
Leapfrog Enterprises
eBay
France Telecom
MIT
Nokia
Pacific Gas & Electric
Seagate Technology
Orange (Telecom)
Fisher Investments
Washington Post
Yahoo!
SurfControl
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Federal Express
Nikon
Posted by Matt Asay on May 8, 2007 08:20 AM
May 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)
One more reason to dislike bozos who own copyrights
Now I'm angry. The English Premier League (home of the divine Arsenal) are threatening to sue YouTube over alleged infringement of its copyrights.
t claims YouTube had consciously encouraged people to view content on its site in order to raise its profile, violating the material's commercial value....The lawsuit said a scheme by which website visitors could access, view, and otherwise exploit copyrighted materials without having to pay their owners made the site valuable enough for Google to pay
Posted by Matt Asay on May 5, 2007 08:12 AM
May 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)
IBM is laying off half of its massive Global Services group, according to Cringley. The RIF starts with 1,300, and is expected to hit as many as 150,000 employees. (!!!)
The IBM project I am writing about is called LEAN and the first manifestation of LEAN was this week's 1,300 layoffs at Global Services, which generated almost no press. Thirteen hundred layoffs from a company with more than 350,000 workers is nothing, so the yawning press reaction is not unexpected. But this week's "job action," as they refer to it inside IBM management, was as much as anything a rehearsal for what I understand are another 100,000+ layoffs to follow, each dribbled out until some reporter (that would be me) notices the growing trend, then dumped en masse when the jig is up, but no later than the end of this year.If true, this is shocking and hugely unpleasant news. No matter what you think about this or that company (and I think highly of IBM), real people are losing their jobs in the LEAN layoffs.Cringley says that the layoffs are a result of underbid, unprofitable services. If so, this is a reflection of the increasingly competitive price wars going on in enterprise software (and associated services). Survival of the leanest (seriously, no pun intended on that).
At the same time, I've heard from several friends at Novell that a quiet restructuring is happening there. Developer Services and the NetWare groups have reportedly been hit hardest, but I also know much of the Linux Impact Team has volunteered to take severance and look for greener pastures. Many of these left Novell on April 30. (I've been talking with a range of them - if you want to hire a LIT person, let me know. Many of these people are fantastic.)
Posted by Matt Asay on May 5, 2007 07:57 AM
May 01, 2007 | Comments: (0)
After law school I lost much of my faith in the law. Perhaps because law text books focus on "edge cases," it's easy to get a jaded view of the law, and especially of the US Supreme Court.
Today, I feel some of that old faith coming back.
In two landmark decisions, Microsoft Corp. v. AT&T [PDF] and KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc. [PDF], the US Supreme Court has made it much harder to get patents on software, and has limited US patents reach beyond the US.
Ah, common sense comes to the Supreme Court. And near unanimously in both cases.
The New York Times reports on KSR:
The Supreme Court, in its most important patent ruling in years, on Monday raised the bar for obtaining patents on new products that combine elements of pre-existing inventions.And in Microsoft, the Supreme Court overturned the lower court to side with Microsoft, and rightfully so:If the combination results from nothing more than “ordinary innovation” and “does no more than yield predictable results,” the court said in a unanimous opinion, it is not entitled to the exclusive rights that patent protection conveys. “Were it otherwise,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in the opinion, “patents might stifle, rather than promote, the progress of useful arts.”
Because most inventions combine previously known elements, the court’s approach to deciding what sort of combination is so “obvious” as to be ineligible for patent protection will have widespread application. The result will be to make patents harder to obtain and defend.
“Granting patent protection to advances that would occur in the ordinary course without real innovation retards progress,” Justice Kennedy said. He added that such patents were also undesirable because they might deprive earlier innovations of “their value or utility.”
Foreign law alone, not United States law, currently governs the manufacture and sale of components of patented inventions in foreign countries," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in the majority opinion. "If AT&T desires to prevent copying abroad, its remedy lies in obtaining and enforcing foreign patents.Imagine that - common sense! It's nice that the Supreme Court's law clerks (since they do much of the work) are a bit more computer savvy than previous generations of clerks. Maybe eventually we'll get a few open source savvy clerks in, and all hell will break loose. ;-)More coverage from Chris Marino here.
Posted by Matt Asay on May 1, 2007 08:27 AM
April 30, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Off-topic: Fat Guy Stuck in the Internet Videos
Cartoon Network has a new show--basically a souped up version of "Gemberling," which is a series of short films about fat computer programmer who gets stuck in the internet...something we are all familiar with.
Well worth the hour you will waste watching the five clips.
Link: TubeWad
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on April 30, 2007 10:31 AM
April 27, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Who really owns a free API (Nat Torkington)
Nat has a fantastic post on the value of free APIs...to those who consume but don't create them. I don't want to give them away, but here's a teaser and one of my favorites:
Amazon and Google have recently shattered a common misconception: that free APIs are a commons of goodies to be built on top of for fun and profit, like open source software. If you think that, then here are six things you need to know about free APIs:...Great insight, Nat.4. The provider of your API will find it easier to implement services on top of their API than you will. Therefore you have to add something of your own that's difficult to replicate, something beyond a simple UI tweak or a feature like "search", so that the business that provides the API doesn't simply compete with you when you look like you're succeeding.
Posted by Matt Asay on April 27, 2007 01:02 PM
April 25, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Since Dave and I spend so much time harping on the foibles of others, I thought I'd give a little digital ink in praise of a company that consumes far too many nights away from home. Marriott.
I stay at Marriotts (Courtyards and Residence Inns most often because they're cheaper) all the time. If there's a Marriott hotel in a city, I'll be staying there, no matter how inconvenient it is for me. Why? Well, because I'm a points addict (it has paid for many great vacations for my family) and because I've found that I get treated better when I show a little loyalty.
Case in point: Tonight I arrived in San Francisco to check into my (Marriott) hotel. I had changed my reservation earlier this afternoon so as to stay in San Francisco instead of Oakland, where I was originally scheduled to sleep (cheaper), because the prices on San Francisco had come down. Unfortunately, I must have made a mistake in the reservation process because the hotel didn't have my reservation. I was tired, cranky, and trying to keep from boiling over.
I started calling alternative Marriotts in the city (as did the hotel). No dice. Every single hotel within 15 miles was sold out. I then started to dig out numbers for other, non-Marriott hotels, but before I could undergo that fruitless exercise the hotel manager came up with a solution: He gave me the parlor room (of a suite) and improvised a rollaway bed. For a price that was heavily discounted off the price I thought I was going to be paying with my imaginary reservation.
So, let's get this straight: I made a mistake. I'm out of luck. They figure out a creative solution to the problem (undoubtedly putting out another arriving guest, but I'm Platinum with Marriott, so I guess they figured it was worth it to keep me loyal), and they charge me a pittance for my incompetence.
That's service.
Thank you, Marriott, for finding a way to keep me in your hotel. My bill tonight will be small, but the revenue I provide over my lifetime will be worth it. Thanks for thinking of me as a long-term investment.
Posted by Matt Asay on April 25, 2007 11:13 PM
April 25, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Well, some of it, anyway. At least, so says Josh Greenbaum about Oracle's John Wookey (head of Oracle's applications efforts) attempts to brush Oracle with a kinder, gentler image.
My rumor is the following: John Wookey...is personally chagrined at the lawsuit and the negative press (and analyst coverage) his group has been getting of late....Wookey wants to be recognized for his team’s achievements, and would rather not be tarred with the same brush that has been used to pillory his bosses’ strategies and methods. His personal efforts at being a nice guy are genuine, despite his company’s rapacious reputation.I'll buy that. At least, the people I know at Oracle are also nice and intelligent people. I still wonder why the company does things like try to get SAP customers to diss the company and its software (on camera at the SAP SAPPHIRE show). And I don't like its approach to Linux.But maybe Oracle, like Microsoft, has an old guard versus new guard problem. I feel certain (perhaps naively) that Microsoft would have a more nuanced, positive approach to open source if Ray Ozzie were at the helm (or even if Bill Gates were). Microsoft will always struggle to accept open source while Ballmer runs the show.
Ballmer is to Microsoft as Ellison is to Oracle. Its heart and soul, yes, but perhaps one that the company would do well to shed as both companies look to the future? It's hard to say, given how successful both men have been in leading their companies to outsized returns on the enterprise software market. But perhaps this very success will hobble the companies as they approach the future? Time will tell.
Posted by Matt Asay on April 25, 2007 10:35 PM
April 25, 2007 | Comments: (0)
No, Apple is not an open source company (though it has made use of some interesting open source technology to build an exceptional operating system, browser, etc.). But I love to see news like this that it has, yet again, blown the doors of Wall Street expectations. Companies that build beautiful things should prosper.
But the bigger news, for me, is how quickly Mac sales are growing:
Apple shipped 1,517,000 Macintosh® computers and 10,549,000 iPods during the quarter, representing 36 percent growth in Macs and 24 percent growth in iPods over the year-ago quarter.It was the most profitable (March) quarter in Apple's history, and bodes well for the company that is making computers cool again."The Mac is clearly gaining market share, with sales growing 36 percent -- more than three times the industry growth rate," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO.
Now if only Novell and Ubuntu could make hardware as sexy as Apple's for their respective Linux desktops....(Btw, if you bump into Mark Shuttleworth, as him about his ideas for innovating the desktop. If he can pull them off, I think he has a chance to make the Linux desktop sing. I agree with Marc Fleury that replicating the Linux desktop is a bit of a tired theme, but only so far as it's meant as a retread of Windows (or the Mac).
Mark and the Ubuntu crew are actually thinking of what a desktop could be, not what it has been. (And I'm sure Novell and team are doing the same - Novell has been a star on the desktop.)
Posted by Matt Asay on April 25, 2007 10:34 PM
April 25, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Quote of the day (Sun's Sandeep Agrawal)
With spokespeople like this how could Sun not be on a rebound...
"There's really no reason that middle-class Americans, when they watch three or four hours of TV a day, shouldn't be able to watch whatever they want when they want to watch it," said Sandeep Agrawal, group marketing manager for the Sun Systems Group.
What about slack-jawed yokels, and the upper crust? Should they not get 3-4 hours of Tv a day when they want it?Sun: 160,000 channels, should be somethin' on
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on April 25, 2007 05:12 PM
April 24, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Sun's renaissance continues (reports Q3 results)
As announced today, Sun's resurgence continues apace. It's not much of a pace so far, with sales still slow. But a $67M profit compared to last year's Q3 loss of $217M, is a very big deal.
I'm rooting for Sun. I like its aggressive approach to open source, and want to see that approach pay dividends.
Posted by Matt Asay on April 24, 2007 02:19 PM
April 24, 2007 | Comments: (0)
