PlexNex

OPEN SOCIAL: In Your Facebook

Better than de-listing your Facebook account, squash Facebook like a bug...

Marc Andreesen | "Open Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web"

Dare Obasanjo | "Google proposes..."

Dunk This!

Ballmer flatters himself that his company is in the same league as Google.

Embedded in the "dunk" bluster is the not so subtle message that Microsoft admits that Google is nine-odd years ahead of Microsoft in search and other things...

I would say 'Hey, you're just 3 years old and we've got you in there playing basketball with the 12-year-olds.'

Google's acquisition of Jaiku -- for one thing -- indicates how far ahead Google is...and pulling away.

Steve. How you gonna dunk when Google just moved the hoop, the boards & the paint into another county?

Assembler Programmers Don't Have Groupies

Another fine piece of expression by Joel (Spolsky) -- on software. IBM's, Goolge's & everybody's this time...

As a programmer, thanks to plummeting memory prices, and CPU speeds doubling every year, you had a choice. You could spend six months rewriting your inner loops in Assembler, or take six months off to play drums in a rock and roll band, and in either case, your program would run faster. Assembler programmers don’t have groupies.

It's called "Strategy Letter IV" and in it Joel draw's a haunting comparison between some early difficulties of word-processing in the mainframe era and today's world of AJAX.

But Ajax apps can be inconsistent, and have a lot of trouble working together — you can’t really cut and paste objects from one Ajax app to another, for example, so I’m not sure how you get a picture from Gmail to Flickr. Come on guys, Cut and Paste was invented 25 years ago.

And this about Google...

...while you’re not paying attention, everybody starts writing NewSDK apps, and they’re really good, and suddenly businesses ONLY want NewSDK apps, and all those old-school Plain Ajax apps look pathetic and won’t cut and paste and mash and sync and play drums nicely with one another. And Gmail becomes a legacy. The WordPerfect of Email.

But it's not just about Google.

One assumption Joel makes here -- and which bolsters many business plans (and one I knew intimately) -- is that bandwidth keeps growing. It may. But yesterday my Skype performance was so lousy that I had to doubt this received wisdom...for a moment.

Shuttleworth & Co. on OpenSeason

Ashlee Vance hosts a fun & informative chat with Mark Shuttleworth on OpenSeason. Also attending: Matt Asay & Dave Rosenberg.

Audio (MP3) over an hour. Run in the background while you waste time on Facebook.

Bub-Bye Exchange, Office

Google announced their enterprise packages -- Google Apps -- to replace Microsoft Office, Exchange, Outlook and other dominant and unhealthy software from the desktop.

Consequently we're going to see more of messages like this one from well-known CEOs...

“We are in the process of phasing out Microsoft Office and Exchange from our company,” said Marc Benioff, the chief executive of SalesForce.com

This is a part of the tide of systems morphing off of the desktop and into the black background...

[Rebecca] Wettemann [of Nucleus Research] noted that a business may spend about $80,000 on a systems administrator to manage e-mail and desktop office software. For the same amount of money, Google Apps allows a business to support 1,600 users, she noted. Simply in terms of staffing, “this may be a better proposition even if Microsoft were free,” Ms. Wettemann said.

GoogleOS...NOT!

Ian -- as in debIAN -- puts an end to speculation about Google being in the operating systems business.

Releasing yet another Linux distribution isn’t disruptive—redefining what an operating system is is disruptive, and Google’s already doing that.

Don't Bet Against the 'Net

Google's Schmidt...

Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, has said he believes that the rise of advertising-supported Web services will increasingly undercut Microsoft's model, which is to use a proprietary software development system and sell shrink-wrapped applications.

"Almost no pure PC software companies are left (all is on the Internet), most proprietary standards (I'm thinking of Exchange e-mail and file systems protocols from Microsoft) are under attack from open protocols gaining share rapidly on the Internet," he wrote recently in an internal company memo titled "Don't Bet Against the Internet."

John Markoff | NYTimes & Int'l Herald Tribune (8 Oct 2006)

Microsoft: a Question of Air Supply

...their own.

The excellent John Markoff in The New York Times wrote yesterday about Google's Eric Schmidt going on the Apple Computer Board of Directors and made no subtlety of the Silicon Valley vs. Redmond theme.

Given the recent enterprise product announcements from Google and the move to Intel chips by Mac which support Windows as well as OS X, the squeeze is being applied overtly on the Monopolist from the two most significant & influential desktop computing companies. (This is really what Steve Ballmer was throwing chairs about back when Google was hiring the talented Microsoft doers: it was likely the dull Ballmer's first recognition that competitors were deliberately acting to both promote their own plans while interfering with his ability to operate.)

I add the world's attack via ODF on Microsoft's document file formats as a significant third factor which is presently increasing the blood pressure in Redmond and will be taking the state, municipal and key federal accounts in all countries away.

Next, we may be able to rely upon an attack on MrSofty stock from the more clueful sectors of Private Equity. The FT was laughably floating the Microsoft LBO meme last week, which to me indicates not only that greed is at an apex in Greenwich, Connecticut, but that hedge funds are running out of roadkill. The smart money will see that a) Microsoft is in a different competitive environment now, one pitted directly against them -- enlivened by the personal animus of people who's careers were adversely affected by Bill Gates' psychopathic anti-competitive business lust (or those from Bell Labs or Stanford who feel a personal responsibility to take computing back from a dishonest company); and b) customers are quite fed up with the status quo, and they have alternatives emerging.

In addition, Microsoft can't seem to help itself: Vista requires now more hardware, when the rest of the world is calling for less. And their new file format -- MSECMAXML -- is predicated on more and deeper ties (as in illegal monoplistic Tying) to Microsoft-only applications and platforms than ever before rather than less. One would be accurate to say that Microsoft is swimming against the current.

Google into the S&P 500

Google shares jumped today over 8% upon the news that the company's stock will be included in the Standard & Poors 500 Index.

Technologists, developers & students with little Wall Street backround might be inclined to snore such news off. However, stocks that get added to a major index tend to face inter-temporal supply / demand imbalances -- which is to say the stock price rises as portfolio & mutual fund managers buy it into their market-indexed portfolios.

Being added to a broad market index like the S&P 500 is an indication of agreement that the company represents the economy. It is a bit like being blooded for the Big Leagues.

While there are only a few days' trading volume of shares represented in the amount needed to satisfy quotas from indexed porfolios, there is a new symbolic factor which makes Google shares now more attractive to a broader spectrum of individual investors -- a growing segment of the market for many years. It would not be shocking to have Goolge shares beat their high from here within a few months.

[The author does not own Google stock.]

Online / Offline Office

Phil Sim (his blog, Squash, from downunder) has the most perceptive note to-date on the Google + Writely theme.

Phil says that the future of the office suite will not be purely on-line because, frankly, it wouldn't work due to bandwidth & storage limitations. This notion is supported by Google's announcement of GDrive -- our local drives will behave as a cache for the online version hosted by Google.

Q.E.D., Google's office suite will have significant Fat- or Rich-Client componentry; this is what we suppose OpenOffice is doing in their skunk works. For engineers, the trick will be making the experience safe & seamless.

Google + Writely

The earth moved today upon the news of Google's acquisition of Writely.

This quote from Gary Edwards explains why...

My wife is a Realtor who uses Writely to "collaborate" with clients, other agents, and property professionals also playing a part in the typical real estate transaction; (mortgage officers, loan processors, title reps, inspectors, appraisers, lawyers, insurance carriers, brokers, etc.) The "Purchase and Sales Agreement" is of course one of the more important documents in the real estate transaction process, and it demands collaboration. 

Typically my wife would write such a document in ODF, using the XForms binding model to wire in database and spreadsheet fields such as listing price, offer amount, address, etc. Then she uploads the ODF to Writely, invites others to join her, and they proceed to hammer out the details in record time. And do so with everyone, including her clients, satisfied with their level of participation. Saves time. Saves money. Saves the hassles of scheduling a convenient meeting time. And everyone lands in this collaborative process with their information processing systems (their computers and information resources) cooking full speed.

See Gary's whole piece ________, when it gets published.

More need not be said, except that this is where all desktop productivity is going with OpenDocument as the baseline platform for data.

Gary Edwards is Founder & President of The OpenDocument Foundation, Inc., a US not-for-profit 501(c)3, and a founding member of the OASIS OpenDocument Technical Committee.

The Way We Work

Richard Waters -- West Coast editor US -- did a useful summary & analysis today of the new Web-enabled forms of the office suite in the Technology section of the Financial Times (subscription only): "Time for a virtual war over Office work?"

He mentions:

Calendaring
    30 Boxes
    iCalShare
Word-processors
    Writely
    Zoho (offers nearly all categories here, actually)
    gOffice
Spreadsheets
    Numsum
    Jotspot Tracker
Project Management
    37 Signals
    JotSpot
Email
    Zimbra
    Gmail (needs no introduction)

Jason Fried, founder of 37 Signals:

"Software is too complex. People don't need all this stuff."

"That [says Waters] addresses a weakness in the Office suite of software applications that even Microsoft has acknowledged: "feature inflation" has created an over-complex product and most users benefit from only a small part of the capability. Drawing on the lessons of successful online applications from iTunes to eBay, the creators of the new productivity services have designed their sights to be as easy to use as possible."

Microsoft's response in this environment is to launch Office Live and to tier their Office product list into versions from lightest to heaviest. This at a glance looks the right strategy for them, but the question is begged: will young people or organizations choose the known pariah, Microsoft, when online productivity services are on a level playing field, can be turned on or off more or less by the click of the little 'x' in the top right-hand corner of the browser?

[This, incidentally, suggests how documents will behave under the OpenDocument regime: more like a web page that you can click on and edit, with any common tool (like a browser) that's laying around.]

Echoing around in my ears is Peter Quinn's assessment of his then workforce in The Commonwealth:

"...most users are content-consumers. They just never use most of the stuff we've bought."

It is especially critical for Microsoft to separate the common tools from the high-end. If they stayed doggedly tied to the one-size-fits-all approach, the markets would fade away from them to the low-end. This is supported by innovation theory, particularly by Clayton Christiansen's work on disruptive innovation, on which I've commented before. If you look on the chart on that post, Microsoft's high-end, deeply infrastructure-tied products are moving today well above the upper bound of common utility, while alternatives are presently entering the range at the lower end.

Microsoft must compete at the low end; trouble is this means obvious profit cannibalization, as their high-end stack suggests a less-than-10-percent solution that's suitable only for large organizations (opinion). I would be more certain of that company's coming existential crisis, however, if they were ignoring the low-end right now in the PR pump leading up to Vista: with the early focus on consumer benefits, their messaging for Vista is practically faultless so far (although there is confusion right now about Vista's relevance in the enterprise...we'll see).

Waters:

"These new web-based applications have one other important common characteristic: the ability to share."

Scott Dietzen, CTO of Zimbra:

"The web itself is emerging as a collaboration platform."

Sam Schillace, co-founder of Upstartle, incubator of Writely:

"It is not such a leap for the mass market as it was a couple of years ago. For most of us our machines aren't that useful when they aren't connected to the internet."

To this I'll merely add a vision I had last week on the Acela coming back to New York from Boston. I was thinking of the Little Green Laptop and how hollowed out common PC's & notebooks are becoming, prices falling indefinitely (think about how heavy a 1994-era 486 was compared to a modern Dell Optiplex). Soon enough they will be commodities: plentiful, ubiquitous like sugar, coffee, natural gas, porkbellies; no need for a hard drive, even, with Compact Flash drives on a Micro ITX platform. Certainly that's the goal of the very bright distributution strategy Negroponte has devised of selling in one-million-unit quantities to national governments only -- where in poor areas the laptops will be so plentiful as to have no street value for trade or theft.

Now, if this is the direction of hardware it strains not the imagination that on a stroll down the isle of Acela's Business Class, one could, without much bother, kindly request the use of a fellow traveler's laptop to quickly check email, field and edit a key document, post a mission-critical message, make a life-saving medical recommendation, execute a profitable portfolio re-allocation or lay down a losing punt on Barcelona v. Chelsea. This on someone else's machine...without even the trouble it takes to borrow someone else's cell phone for an urgent call.

The flex-office takes new meaning when PCs and notebooks are fungible, like bicycles on campus in the Bohemian early 1980's: you would just take the nearest one and yours would show up later somewhere across campus, ostensibly none the worse for wear. This vision also accommodates the possibility of an individual moving across OS platforms seemlessly of their day -- like I already do between Mac OS X, Linux or Windows. Horses for courses.

Thank you Richard!

Fortune Cookie #601

Microsoft was about software: Google is about information.

Google Braille

David Berlind speculates on Google's accessibility plans or actions today, on the birthday of Louis Braille.

Microsoft's File Format Lock Slackens

If you've looked at Gmail's "What's New" section lately, there's an interesting new wrinkle: View as HTML. This neat new item let's us view email-attached files in a browser (without downloading the files). Included in the service are the following file types...

• .doc (MS Word)
• .xls (MS Excel)
• .ppt (MS PowerPoint)
• .rtf (MS Rich Text Format)
• .wml (MS Word ML)
• .sxw (OpenOffice.org 1.0/StarOffice 7 Writer)
• .sxc (OpenOffice.org 1.0/StarOffice  7 Calc)
• .sxi (OpenOffice.org 1.0 /StarOffice 7 Impress)
• .sdw (StarOffice 5.0 Writer)
• .sdc (StarOffice 5.0 Calc)
• .sdd (StarOffice 5.0 Impress)
• .pdf (Adobe Acrobat)

Now, I ran a partial experiment using a text file with a little formatting, including a simple table. While the MS Word (.doc) file converts reasonably okay to formatted HTML (table intact), the OpenOffice Writer (.sxw) file comes out in HTML like a raw text dump.

I've kindly asked the Google query system why my OpenOffice file looks like my cat's puke and shall report their reply as soon as I hear. To say I'm enthusiastic to hear when the OpenDocument formats will be added to the service would be an understatement.

In any event, despite this offending occurance (which I take as a pragmatic slight due to the mythical 90% market share held by the Microsoft formats, again), now that there is an HTML reader for Microsoft's basic formats built right into Gmail, I hear another few ticks on the file format lock-in meter sounding in the people's key. Look for AOL and Yahoo! Mail to add the same feature and MSN to say some bullshit like,

'Our customers didn't ask for View as HTML for our .doc, .xls & .ppt files because they already enjoy the fruits of our amazing innovation on their desktops via the wonderful & innovative Microsoft Office suite.'

"Your potential. Our passion." And more Herman Millers will fly in Redmond.