06.13.08
Posted in General Rant at 9:28 am by Administrator
Since Yahoo and Microsoft have now officially (at least in public) said their goodbyes, it seems that the bed isn’t even cold when Yahoo gets girlfriend 2.0 - Google.
It turns out that just hours after Yahoo announced that negotiations were “over” - they also announced that they had struck a four year non-exclusive deal with Google to display advertising on their site. Apparently, Yahoo has high hopes for the cash that the deal will generate - citing a figure of $250 million to $450 million in operating cash flow during the first 12 months.
Yahoo also gets to control the search terms queries and the pages on which the ads will appear. The deal also allows for Yahoo to continue to sell their own advertising from its own Panama ad platform as well. That’s assuming, of course, that Yahoo doesn’t get lazy and just relegate the ad serving to third parties as time goes on. We’ll have to wait-and-see for the results of that one.
Also of interesting note is the fact that the deal only applies to the U.S. and Canada - leaving the door open for Yahoo to negotiate the same kind of deal with other players in other countries.
Although both Google and Yahoo say that they don’t need a Federal regulatory blessing on this unholy union, they’ve wisely delayed the rollout for three and a half months while the U.S. Department of Justice reviews the arrangement. (Can you say “CYA”?)
Of course this doesn’t mean that Yahoo is out of the woods - not by a long shot.
It’s stocked tanked about 10% yesterday - but the move may just stop pissed-off-rich-old-guy Carl Icahn from totally replacing the board during their shareholder meeting on August 1st. It was actually a good move by Jerry - making Yahoo even more of an odious takeover target for Microsoft, since Icahn’s plan was to appeal to shareholders that he could resurrect the Microsoft takeover deal.
It seems that with their hopes for a yummy payout dashes - some key executives are also jumping ship. Among the latest jumpers are Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of Yahoo’s network division;
Usama Fayyad, chief data officer and EVP of research and strategic data solutions; and veteran developer Jeremy Zawodny who has been with Yahoo since 1999 and helped to spearhead important projects like the Yahoo Developer Network.
This is on top of the earlier resignations/firings of Bradley Horowitz, head of Yahoo’s advanced technology division; Salim Ismail, head of Yahoo Brickhouse; and Jeff Bonforte, VP of social search.
So class, let’s sum this up: Yahoo is outsourcing their ads to Google (and probably others); key folks are leaving in droves; Carl Icahn (multi-billionaire - and your largest individual stock holder) is pissed off; you’re having your board meeting where your directors could get replaced in 6 weeks; your stocked tanked 10% in a single day; AND you’ve finally decided that portals don’t matter - it’s all about search - but two guys in a garage have cleaned your clock… whaddaya’ do?
Jerry - it’s Miller time! You’re gonna’ need it…
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06.12.08
Posted in General Rant at 9:51 am by Administrator
It’s the day-after the day-after the “big” announcement - and the iPhone fanboy sites are buzzing (again!) with speculation. Although the speculation is somewhat toned-down - I’ve seen a bunch of commentary written on how this or that is great or sucks - what the problems are (or will be) - for a product and operating system that has not even shipped yet!
Geez, people - get a life! Just wait another month, stand in line, and actually buy the damn thing before you go off and start predicting doom and gloom - or joy and balloons.
The reality will be somewhere in-between. From a technical point-of-view, the phone is pretty good - but not as impressive (or feature-rich) as those that are already on the market - or ones that will come to market soon.
But that doesn’t matter. What matters is - people’s perception of the iPhone as “the next big thing.” That spells both opportunity for developers building native iPhone applications - and it also means that business folks will have to get ready to adoptiTunes officially into their stable of “blessed” applications.
For small businesses, this is no problem. It’s no big deal to have personal media assets on company equipment, and they can just use a single install ofiTunes for everything from browsing the iTunes store, to downloading games, to uploading pictures as well as the more “business-like” functionality of contacts and calendaring.
So, let me throw my speculative hat into the ring - and talk about corporate application distribution. There will be certain applications that businesses will develop for in-house use that also happen to run on the iPhone. As announced, there will be only two “official” mechanisms for distributing them:
- Make them publicly available on the Apple App Store; OR
- “Register” the iPhones in your organization and roll out apps just for those devices
Both of them have something in common: iTunes.
Now, iTunes is a terrific consumer application, and from the announcements that Steve made the other day, Apple is really trying to “get” the enterprise. It’s put in thesynch to Exchange, the ability to remotely wipe a device, etc.
What they didn’t announce (and what I’m speculating on) - is a “corporate” version of iTunes. Can’t you just imagine all the enterprise IT folks going crazy at people installing iTunes on their corporate boxes?
As of the currently shipping version of iTunes, there’s no way to centrally control the application. No support for Active Directory Group Policy, no way for the IT wonks to disable theiTunes store, no way to set the default media download location, no way to limit the updating of QuickTime and iTunes versions to a centrally “blessed” version, etc.
Even in SMB companies of 30-500 people, such controls would (will?) make life much easier for an already-overworked IT staff. Hopefully Apple will “get” the needs of business - and include it into their future strategy androadmap for a business-friendly iTunes.
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06.11.08
Posted in General Rant at 8:31 am by Administrator
Ruby (with or without Rails) - looks like it’s getting a Microsoft-sponsored update in Silverlight that will allow it to have AJAX-like interaction - sans the JavaScript.
Right now, if you want to have AJAX type of functionality - you can still do it within Ruby - although most developers use RJS (Ruby JavaScript) utility to write Ruby and then have RJS generate the JavaScript code for execution in the browser.
Ummmm…. right. If you’re going to have a client-code dependency like Flash - it seems to me that it’s probably not a good idea to be beholden to Microsoft. I mean, the whole reason people use Ruby is because it’s open source and cross platform - right?
So… if people lean on Silverlight to be the client-side goo to execute these AJAX calls - what happens if Microsoft decides to only update the Windows version, and allows the Mac and Linux versions to fall behind (feature-wise)? Not that it’s happened before with… ahem… Office for Mac or anything…
While I think it’s a good idea to help developers of all languages bring it to the browser, I’m not sure this strategy is all that it’s cracked up to be. Plus, I really don’t see this group of heavily Unix (including loads of Mac developers) group relying on technology from the Evil Empire to solve their coding woes.
It would be good, though - if the major browser makers (or some astute, cross platform, named vendor - e.g. Adobe) would built-in support for such a scheme.
If they did - then we could have a whole new crop of acronyms: APhAX (PhP), ACFAX (ColdFusion), ALAX (Lasso), ANAX (.NET)…
Let’s just stop the insanity here. There will always be languages that are not ECMA scripting. In fact, ALL languages except JavaScript are different. Let’s face facts: JavaScript is here to stay - and even becoming 2.0 (soon according to Brendan Eich the guy that made it up back in the Netscape Navigator days).
It’s really all up to the browser folks - and hopefully they’ll all just agree to support the same stuff, the same way. The last thing in the world we need is a new generation of browsers that are even MORE incompatible.
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06.09.08
Posted in General Rant at 11:56 am by Administrator
10:35am PST: So I’ve been following the Engadget - and it looks like they’re trotting out all the same developers they did when they announced the SDK 3 months ago.
Still no news on the good stuff. Oh sure, they’re showing all the background crap - we did Exchange, education loves us, the Army loves the SDK, etc., etc.
You’d think that with record attendance of 5,200 developers (they sold out or would have had more) - they would just START with the cool stuff and fill in with the crap at the end.
But that would ruin Steve’s “show.”
10:50am PST: Parading an endless string of applications - games, photo blogging, text editor, piano (to MAKE music on your iPhone?!?), etc.
11:00am PST: Back to Steve. The general consensus from the Engadget folks is - someone kill us. Give us the goods already. And, quite frankly, I couldn’t agree more. But, again, it would blow the “show” to just come out and actually TELL people what it is you’re officially announcing.
I guess since Steve’s name is FIRST on the patent application - he wants his (another) 15 minutes of fame…
11:05am PST: Still no Steve, but they did manage to make another feature that would guarantee that Apple would be in the proprietary loop forever: they just announced a “push” notification feature that will allow developers to send a webservice request to see if a particular phone is on. The senario is for IM chat - and rather than having a background process (like Windows Mobile does) - developers can just “ping” the Apple server and push badges, sounds, and custom textual alerts down to the phone.
(It’s cool when you ridicule a competitors product during your own product demo!)
11:10am PST: Only Steve could get applause for announcing the 2.0 version of the iPhone OS would SLIP by a month (available in July). He’s also the only one that can get away with charing non-iPhone users (iTouch users) $9.95 for the OS!
Oh, and BTW, they will “allow” developers to keep 70% (!) of their revenue when they sell stuff on the iTunes App Store. Ahem… that means Apple is making a 30% iTunes App Store tax… unless the developer app is free - in which case, there is no charge to anyone (wow, that’s really big of him!).
11:15am PST: The store is available in 62 countries, and for < = 10MB applications, you can download over the air (cellular or WiFi) and >= 10MB download either via WiFi or iTunes.
They also will allow Enterprise folks to have an intranet version that will allow them to turn out apps, as well as an ad hoc service that will allow people to register some phones - and send out apps that way as well (as in a teacher teaching how to write iPhone apps!).
Uh oh. “Something new”… MobileMe. It’s sort of like Windows Mesh, but supposedly, better. Will synch all the email, calendar, contacts, etc. to all other devices. Works with Mac (duh) and Outlook on the PC. Simple url (me.com).
Now this, is interesting. They’ve built a bunch of AJAX-apps that look like (their) desktop apps that allow you to manage email, contacts, calendars, etc. - and then - whammo - everything is synchronized.
I bet the folks over at Google Docs are puckering right now…
And… the revenue opportunity (for Apple): $99 per year for 20GB of storage.
11:30am PST: Here is comes… 3G iPhone (thud). They’ve only sold it in 6 countries - but it’s in use all over the world (heee heee - unlocked is not such a bad thing after all).
According to Steve “..everyone wants an iPhone, but we need to make it more affordable.”
Uh oh.
“Today w’ere introducing the iPhone 3G. Solid metal buttons, the same gorgeous 3.5-inch display, camera. Flush headphone jack. Improved audio, it’s really, really great… and it feels even better in your hand, if you can believe it.”
“We took two other 3G phones — the iPhone 3G is 36% faster than the nokia N95 and Treo 750 — and look at the result you get, by the way! Full page on the iPhone, and quite a bit less on the other phones.”
Again - I LOVE when you completely ridicule and belittle your competitors - and quantify it by… ummm.. oh yeah, Steve said it - it MUST be true!
11:35am PST: It’s official: GPS is in there. Along with a really scary, Big Brother-esque feature that allows them to “…even do tracking.”
Tracking? Ummm… ok…. Stalkers unite!
11:45am PST: Here’s the price: “iPhone started off at $599 for an 8GB device, which now sells for $399 — we want to make it even more affordable. I’m happy to tell you the 8GB will sell for $199. We think the iPhone 3G will be affordable to almost everyone. 16GB model for $299 — for that model we have a white one.”
$199? Uh oh. He really might sell the 10M units.
Availability: July 11 - worldwide.
And… I’m spent.
Unless the other handset manufacturers have a really, really good pipeline and story - it will be the case of people standing in line (again) to get the new 3G version (at a CHEAPER price than the current iPhone).
Well, nothing like a good Steve demo to get the old blood pumping…
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Posted in General Rant at 7:05 am by Administrator
I’m here on the west coast - a mere 4.5 hours away from San Francisco and a mere 3.5 hours away from “history in the making”. The most-anticipated, most-speculated about, most-hyped event in the known universe!!! It’s.. it’s… it’s…
The introduction of a mobile phone.
It’s just a phone. Really. You can make calls on it, listen to music on it, and now - you can (probably) even use it in Europe. Now your iPhone can (probably) use GPS and (probably) Exchange Server. Cool? Yes. Worth hyperventilating about? No.
There has been so much speculation and nuh-uh rebuttals this past week - that I think I’m ready to puke.
On one side, you have the twinkie-and-jolt “MS Windows is just as good if not better than that iPhone crap” side waiting with bated breath for the Blackberry Thunder, and on the other side… well, you-know-who. The folks that think (and vote with their dollars) that the iPhone is the end-all, be-all of the mobile communication universe.
Hey, some of my friends have the iPhone, and it’s a cool piece of hardware - that much, I’m not denying. I don’t personally own one, so I everything I know about it comes from them - or from fondling one at the Apple store across the street from my office.
I don’t have a Blackberry either. I don’t have a Windows Mobile phone. In fact, I don’t have a “smart” phone at all.
My phone is old, dumb, and nearly indestructible. It’s a Motorola v547 - and I didn’t even buy it myself - I got it as a gift. I haven’t bought a new phone in over 5 years. I don’t own an iPod (my daughter and wife do, though). I’m using XP, not that fancy Vista. I have an iMac, upgraded with Leopard on it (that has had the motherboard replaced and crashes like a mother).
Needless to say, I’m in the market for a phone, and maybe an MP3 player. I’ve wanted to replace my phone for about 6 months. Then the Android announcement came out. Then the iPhone 2.0 announcement came out. Then the Blackberry Thunder announcement came out.
So, I’m keeping an open mind - and I’ll be watching at 10:00am PST when the equally beloved and beguiled, sweater-and-jeans clad, Ron Popeil of the tech age makes the hallowed announcement…
Oh, and I’m heading to the Apple Store at lunch time…
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06.06.08
Posted in General Rant at 9:17 am by Administrator
I think Google should step up and create a tight integration with OpenOffice. I mean, they’ve done this (mainly marketing spin) integration with Salesforce.com - and the press ate it up like it was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
I mean, really people! Webservices these days are not that huge of a western deal - and given that Salesforce is a web application, it’s not exactly rocket science to integrate the two.
Where things get a little more sticky is with traditional applications. Applications people use every day to generate real world work stuff - like word processors, spreadsheet and presentations. Google gives you a free way with Docs.OpenOffice gives you (an arguably) full-featured suite that frees users from the MS Office choke hold.
Discuss.
What’s in it for Google? Selling support. Bashing MS in the good eye. Driving people to adopt OpenOffice so they can finally just switch to Ubuntu and leave that crappy Vista in the dust. Adding actual, paying users of Docs at an enterprise level. Selling more storage. Selling email hosting. Driving mobile users to a slimmed down, mobile-Internet-data-package-burning way to use Docs on the road, and OpenOffice when they land - seamlessly.
Where’s the proof that any of that would even happen? IBM is giving it a shot by announcing a couple of days ago that it was selling support for its free Symphony Office-like suite. Plus, I think they have a couple of guys there that can probably do it over morning coffee - after all, Google gives them all 20% of their time to “try stuff out” on their own.
There’s even a free OpenOffice plug-in that will give them a roadmap and a headstart. Written by Polish engineer Przemysław Rumik, the OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs plug-in (yeah, it’s not the most elegant name ever) will export and import your documents to and from Google Docs and Zoho. Did I mention it’s free?
Google - meet Przemyslaw… Prezemyslaw - Google. And Prezemyslaw, just in case they don’t call you - here’s some openings at Google Poland… Szczęście!
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06.05.08
Posted in General Rant at 9:36 am by Administrator
Adobe launched Acrobat.com earlier in the week - signaling they are throwing their hat into the online Office-like, pseudo-Office-killer arena. I just had to take a look for myself.
The thing is all based in Flash, as you might expect - and it makes a very good first impression. The screen is dark grey (almost black) - and the icons are pretty (one would hope that a company like Adobe could make stuff look nice).
You can basically do 5 things - use Buzzword - their online word processor, use ConnectNow, create a PDF, share files, and view your own files. Hmmmm… the ConnectNow thing sounds cool - and it’s free (for now) - but the word processor, creating a PDF and sharing files - I can do now (and DO now) on Google Docs.
So, I started with the stuff I’m used to using on Google Docs - the word processor. The first thing you notice is “loading”… and “loading”… then some more “loading”. Once the thing is loaded - it looks very pretty. It has all the swooshing and wooshing you would expect in a Flash-based app. The controls are minimal, but you can set the fonts (font, size, color, bold, etc), paragraph stuff (alignment, etc), list functions (number, ordered and bullet), image control (adds an image), table control, comment control and a way for you to see your existing files.
OK - that’s the good news. The bad news is - it’s 15,000 clicks to do anything. You see, rather than just have a “normal” toolbar at the top where you can do a single click - these area icons swoosh to the left to activate, and they collapse whatever else it was that you were working with.
For example, if you are looking at the font stuff, and want to add a table, you click the little table icon and the whole toolbar swooshes to the left, collapsing the font stuff, and only showing the table stuff. OK. So, then you click the add table and it adds a 2 row, 2 column table. Good.
Now, you want to type something - and format the text. So, typing, typing - want to change the font color. Oops. Going to toolbar (that I would have to do anyway) - click font - SWOOSH - away go the table controls and the font stuff appears.
WTF?
One thing that I absolutely LOVE about it - is the table control. FINALLY someone was smart enough to put little “+” icons on all the rows that allow you to add or remove the row visually. Plus, when you select a row or column there is an icon that turns into a menu that will allow you to insert/delete etc. right inline. KUDOS to Adobe for this innovation. I just hope EVERYONE copies it.
The other interesting thing is that there is the ability to comment on every line - and you can see comments from others - but it’s not as flexible as being able to leave a “floating” comment. They’ve got a couple of cool features in there - the color picker is by “family” of color (basics, greys, beach, brights, earthtones, forest, hot, jewels, tones) - but you can’t get your own custom color; and they have a nifty little dialog for inserting high ASCII characters that pretty cool.
It saves fairly quickly, and exports to PDF , Word, RTF, HTML (in ZIP format), and plain text. It would only import .doc or .txt files (no support for OpenOffice) and it spawned a new window to do the import. And guess what - you “get to” watch: Loading… loading… loading… again. HUH?
After playing and importing I “let it rest” and came back to it this morning - thinking that the annoyances of the slow loading and slow-ish performance would “settle” overnight.
Nope.
I’m still just as annoyed as I was yesterday/last night. I’m so wary of the word processor that I’m not going to try out the online screen sharing right now (although I’m sure it’s pretty as well!).
I’m writing this back in good ol’ (more ugly but MUCH more functional) Google Docs. I here’s the lessons that I’ve learned:
- All show and no go really IS all show and no go
- Sexy-looking apps that don’t function well - won’t be used. Ever.
- Simplicity and elegance is much more than skin deep
- Swooshing is cool only the first time
- Try to make controls easier to use (like the table control) by asking the question “How would my mom do it?”
- When push comes to shove - easy is better sexy
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06.04.08
Posted in General Rant at 8:45 am by Administrator
The emerging news in mobile devices and even mainstream PC makers is the advent of Solid State Drive (SSD). On the surface, what’s not to love? They’re small, many times more energy efficient and provide equivalent input/output rates of traditional drives.
The bad news is that they have limited capacity (for now) and they’re hugely expensive - in many cases they cost as much (or more!) than the laptop or device they’re in.
However, they are the future.
If you’ve ever tried to do multiple things at once - like steam music while writing your blog, or render video while doing email while streaming media while working in Photoshop - for example - you’ve no doubt noticed the solid green light of your hard drive spinning with all of its might to keep up.
In theory, SSD drives would be much more efficient. Not to mention the fact that they have no moving parts - and therefore should be much more durable and have a longer life than platter-based drives - especially in mobile devices like laptops, iPhones and the new class of sub-compact notebooks known as net-tops.
Now, this will date me a bit - but I can remember buying a “whopping” 20 MEGAbyte hard drive back in the early 80’s for just under $1,000 and thinking to myself - “Good, now I have all the storage I will EVER need.”
We’re at about that stage now with SSD. The technology is cutting edge, and it hasn’t hit the economies of mass market adoption yet - so they will still be a bit pricey for the next year or two.
BUT - as the capacity increases and the price drops (both inevitable) you’ll see them more and more. It won’t be long until your “normal” platter-based hard drives are as modern as your pile of 8-tracks and cassettes.
RESOURCES: Free IDC report on SSD (registration required), SSD backgrounder on SSDs by Crucial.com
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