As I type this, Firefox 3.5 is blazing past 5.6 million downloads, having been released just a day and a half ago. While such uptake for Mozilla's upgraded browser is impressive, the bigger story is how Firefox 3.5 is upgrading the Web with its extensive support for HTML 5. Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) 8 has brought the company's browser back into the 21st century, but its sluggish (and perhaps perverse) response to emerging Web standards threatens to leave it in Web 1.0 Blunderland.
ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley wonders if the departure of Bill Gates has taken some of the bite out of Microsoft, and she may be on to something. Regardless, Microsoft needs to quickly execute to outflank Firefox or it threatens to let Mozilla, not Microsoft, define the Web, as Slate implies:
The best thing about the new Firefox is that it gives us a peek at the Internet of tomorrow...Firefox 3.5 offers the best implementation of the (HTML 5) standard--and because it's the second-most-popular Web browser in the world, the new release is sure to prompt Web designers to create pages tailored to the Web's new language. In other words, Firefox isn't just an upgrade for your computer; it could well prompt a re-engineering of the Web itself.
But it's not just HTML 5. Firefox is innovating in a number of other areas, including "location-aware browsing" on the "desktop," while Mozilla's Weave is experimenting with new ways to enrich identity in the browser. In tandem, Mozilla's team is also actively working on improving the online video experience.
And that's just this week.
It took Microsoft two-and-a-half years to move from IE7 to IE8, while five years passed before the company updated IE6 with IE7. The company seems to be moving faster on browser development now, but is it fast enough to keep up with Mozilla, not to mention Apple (Safari) and Google (Chrome)?
It won't be enough for Microsoft to borrow features from Mozilla's Firefox. Microsoft needs to innovate again, and not simply in its marketing department.
Also, it would be nice if IE were available for more than Windows. Mozilla is available on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, and it doesn't seem to slow its development pace down. Perhaps Microsoft should stop trying to protect Windows at the expense of losing the Web?
Of course, Mozilla, too, faces a host of competitive issues, as CNET describes. But Mozilla has never been shy about innovating. It exists to improve the Web, and understands that a competitive browser market does that...even if Firefox sometimes has to play catch up.
For today, however, the field is Mozilla's to lose.
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The GNU General Public License (GPL) used to dominate open-source licensing, but its hold appears to be slipping according to new research from Black Duck Software. While GPLv3 has seen a 400-percent increase in adoption, and though the GPL and its variants still claim over 65 percent of all open-source projects, Black Duck reports a 5 percent decline in GPL adoption.
This drop makes sense, given the GPL's decreasing relevance to the modern world of network-delivered software and the increasing value of data over software.
ZDNet's Dana Blankenhorn points out that there are no clear replacements arising for the GPL, and he's right. But I'm not sure that's the point.
Peter Vescuso, executive vice president of marketing and business development at Black Duck Software, argues that we're starting to see greater diversity in licensing approaches, as "many developers are selecting licenses that are less restrictive, a move that underscores the broader adoption and value of open source in today's multisource development environments."
Perhaps. Or perhaps developers simply don't care that much about open-source licensing qua licensing very much any more. The real value in open-source software is no longer the software, but rather the resultant services that are delivered over the Web, a theme that Tim O'Reilly has been hitting consistently over the past six years.
The GPL was highly relevant in the Software 1.0 world because it was a great way to protect software assets. In effect, the GPL became the preferred way to replicate the copyright regime, except under the banner of free software.
Today, the GPL (and open-source licensing, generally) is irrelevant.
It's irrelevant because the GPL protects nothing in a world where software is delivered over the Web, because the GPL's "distribution clause" isn't triggered. The GPL becomes BSD/Apache, in short.
Because of this, Web developers long ago stopped worrying about open-source license requirements and instead are focused on data-driven lock-in. Open-source software becomes a way to build free services that encourage adoption, which adoption yields valuable data. That data is the crown jewels in a networked world, as O'Reilly suggests.
Because Web developers don't necessarily need to protect their software, we're seeing more adopt licenses like BSD, Apache, and other permissive licenses in order to foster community, rather than protection, around their software. Those who persist in seeing the world through the Software 1.0 lens continue to try to protect the software, which is why we're seeing a four-fold increase in AGPLv3 adoption. (AGPLv3 extends the definition of "distribution" to include network-based delivery of software.)
The GPL isn't dead, and perhaps it's not even dying. But that isn't the point. The point is that the real question is Web-based delivery of software, and current licensing has almost nothing to say on that topic.
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Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers calls video "the killer app," but apparently, he hasn't been paying attention to trends on the Web, or even to his company's own emerging-collaboration story.
Video, while great, takes too long. We e-mail, instant-message, and tweet for a reason: it's short and to the point. Who has time to watch a video each them they want to communicate?
Perhaps even more critically, as Hampus Jakobsson pointed out to me (over Twitter, no less), video "requires full attention--the scarcest of all resources."
Cisco gets this. At least, groups within Cisco get this. That's why Cisco Senior Vice President Doug Dennerline's WebEx team has been adding presence and instant messaging through Jabber, e-mail through PostPath, and more to its Web-conferencing suite.
It's also why Cisco will almost certainly add some form of office productivity suite to WebEx, despite protestations to the contrary from Alex Hadden-Boyd, director of marketing for the collaboration software group at Cisco. (Apparently, Hadden-Boyd didn't see the memo from his boss, Dennerline.)
Zoho, anyone?
Zoho is a leading competitor to Google Apps and, in many areas, actually surpasses Google Apps. While some of Zoho's applications directly overlap with Cisco's current products, the sheer breadth (and, in some cases, depth) of its office productivity and collaboration story must be intriguing to acquisition-hungry Cisco.
Some suggest that Google will struggle to make it in the enterprise due to security concerns with Google Apps. Cisco doesn't have that problem. Its brand oozes "enterprise." As such, it may well be Cisco that changes the face of enterprise computing...by initially changing the way we communicate and collaborate within the enterprise.
Just don't hold your breath for video to part the waters. Video has its place, but it's a highly verbose form of communication, and the Web's most popular technologies increasingly teach us to speak sparingly.
Indeed, I think that we'll see Cisco acquire Control Yourself, the company behind open-source Twitter lookalike Identi.ca, before it changes the world through video.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
If any class of financial-services firm should have become extinct in 2008, it's the hedge fund. Hedge funds bled $154 billion in 2008, according to Lipper Hedgeworld, with 1,500 hedge funds closing shop, as reported by The New York Times.
Amazingly, however, 659 new hedge funds launched amid this financial bloodbath, and these new hedge funds are looking to build high-performance trading platforms on the cheap, a trend that bodes well for Marketcetera.
Hedge funds need to save money. Who knew?
It's important to remember that today's aren't yesterday's spendthrift hedge funds. I spent the morning with a friend who left a large financial-services firm to join a small, $250 million hedge fund in June. He represents a new demographic in the hedge fund world, one that cares about fund performance and cutting fund costs.
A lot of hedge funds still in business saw their top traders leave when the economy imploded, only to set up new funds. These new independents couldn't make money at the old firms because their performance was so underwater, it would take years to get back enough in positive gains to start cashing in on performance fees. Meanwhile, fund sizes under management began shrinking, with redemptions and fees getting slashed in the process.
This means a new breed of leaner hedge fund is rising, hedge funds that arguably could spend lavish sums on trading platforms but learned enough from the market implosion to save money wherever possible.
Marketcetera fills this need, particularly now, with its hosted offering. I've covered the company before but continue to be impressed by its speed of innovation.
The company launched Marketcetera 1.0 in January 2009, then hit version 1.5 in April 2009 (adding support for multiple traders and some key data feeds and real-time analytics), and now, in June 2009, the company's open-source trading platform is sitting on the NYSE's high-performance cloud.
Pretty impressive.
Equally impressive is where the company expects to take open source next, as can be seen in this YouTube video. The proprietary-software industry serving hedge funds and other financial services companies just got a wake-up call.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay. Perhaps if enough people follow me, I'll be able to afford to lose an investment in a hedge fund.
Oracle doesn't want to own Linux. Oracle just wants Linux to be cheap.
That's the insight an analyst shared with me the other day as we discussed why Oracle hasn't made a move to acquire Red Hat (recently, anyway). According to this source, who is familiar with Oracle's Linux plans, Oracle wins eight of 10 deals where the operating system is Linux, and only wins five of 10 where the OS is Windows, a win rate that continues to drop as Microsoft's SQL Server gets better.
Oracle's Enterprise Linux strategy is therefore not so much about neutralizing a threat from Red Hat as it is establishing its own threat against Microsoft, a thought that others have highlighted.
Indeed, Oracle's Wim Coekaerts has declared that if Red Hat Enterprise Linux were free, Oracle would exit the market for Linux entirely.
Red Hat isn't likely to drop its pricing for RHEL anytime soon, at least, not for Oracle, but the reality is that Oracle already has a way to offer a popular, enterprise-quality Linux distribution for free, or close thereto. It's called Ubuntu.
The only thing Ubuntu lacks, as I've written, is the blessing of a major enterprise software vendor. Oracle could grant that blessing. All it would need to do is start offering Ubuntu as part of its certified stacks.
Oracle wouldn't need to pay billions for Red Hat, only to undermine the value of that deal by cutting the price of RHEL. Oracle could pay exactly $0.00 to establish a partnership with Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, and Ubuntu's already significant traction--both in personal computers and in servers--would do the rest.
If Oracle wants to beat Windows, it needs to get Windows-like distribution. Its applications help drive its databases, but if it wants a bottom-up distribution strategy to complement its sales force, it couldn't do better than Ubuntu, the leader in community Linux.
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For all the hype around cloud computing, two big issues continue to keep CIOs from feeling safe participating: security and interoperability. Red Hat, by announcing its Premier Cloud Provider Certification and Partner Program and Amazon's entry in that program, hopes to allay these concerns and claim for itself a significant percentage of the money set to pour into the cloud-computing gold rush.
For the past five years, CIOs have given Red Hat top ranking for value. A significant part of this value, as Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst revealed on Red Hat's first-quarter earnings call, is the company's ability to corral a complex array of third-party software vendor certifications and package them into the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform, giving the CIO peace of mind that whatever the application, it will "just work" on RHEL.
Now Red Hat wants to bring that peace of mind to the cloud, effectively giving CIOs a way to follow the Red Hat brand well beyond the four walls of their data center into public cloud offerings like Amazon Web Services, and then back to their own private clouds, if they so choose.
With over 3,500 applications certified to work with RHEL, and likely thousands of others that haven't sought formal certification, Red Hat is offering CIOs a safe way to extend their computing to the cloud. Intriguingly, it's likely that only Microsoft can make similarly potent claims, given its own application ecosystem and core infrastructure that can be used to power cloud computing.
Red Hat and Microsoft, duking it out to be the center of the cloud.
The two companies bring a very different mindset to cloud computing, not the least reason being that Microsoft's cloud offering, Azure, also competes with the very cloud providers it hopes to enable. Red Hat is not competing with its partners.
Red Hat's strategy is founded in choice, as I discovered in a call with Mike Evans, Red Hat's vice president of Corporate Development, who has been heading up Red Hat's cloud-computing efforts.
Mike Evans, VP of corporate development, Red Hat
Q. Red Hat isn't one to try to hang out with "the cool kids," just because they're cool. Why is Red Hat getting into cloud computing now? What do you hope to accomplish?
Evans: Some may not remember, but Red Hat has actually been involved with cloud computing since at least 2007, when we announced we were offering RHEL in Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) service. During that time we were fine-tuning our cloud offering, not only technologically but also from a support and business model perspective. Cloud computing is a fundamental shift in how software gets delivered, and it took roughly 18 months of largely beta testing to get to a point where we felt we had an offering that could live up to Red Hat's reputation for quality and service.
During that beta period, we spent a lot of time talking with CIOs, trying to understand their concerns with cloud computing and how Red Hat could overcome them. CIOs have two primary concerns with cloud computing--security and interoperability--but also worry around SLAs [service-level agreements], compliance, and more. The area where Red Hat felt like it could have the biggest immediate impact is on interoperability.
There are three levels of interoperability: data formats, management and measurement, and applications.
Data-format interoperability is the lowest level, and basically means, "Once I'm running my application with Cloud Provider X, can I get my data out and move my application to Cloud Provider Y?" This turns out to be non-trivial to overcome if different cloud providers run on different "substrates," or infrastructure components like operating system, application servers, etc.
Then there is the management and measurement piece. Once IT starts working with a given set of tools like Hyperic for managing its cloud assets on, for example, its Rightscale cloud, will it be able to continue using these same tools if it moves to a private cloud or Amazon cloud? A CIO needs to know that its tools investment will follow it from cloud to cloud. Again, this is difficult when switching between disparate cloud "substrates."
Finally, interoperability is a question of application portability. How can a CIO be sure that an application written for a Google cloud will work with Salesforce, Amazon, or another cloud?
At the macro level, Red Hat and open source can break down these interoperability barriers. We can't hide behind proprietary APIs. It's in our DNA to be interoperable.
It's also in cloud computing's DNA. Today, virtually every cloud-computing service, with the exception of Microsoft's, is built using open-source software. This works to Red Hat's advantage, because the world is already building cloud computing on Linux, for example.
For its part, Microsoft, too, will need to eventually capitulate to open source because it simply won't be able to keep up. Imagine having to rewrite all of the great open-source cloud software like Hadoop. How can Microsoft do that and remain competitive?
Why Red Hat? What role does your certification program play in all this?
Evans: Red Hat is firmly positioned to take on CIOs' core concerns with security and interoperability. With JBoss, RHEL, and our virtualization offerings, Red Hat already provides the trusted low-level infrastructure, or "substrate" as I've called it, upon which many CIOs depend. Given that we believe most cloud-computing involvement, at least initially, will be in private clouds, it's important that CIOs feel they can trust their cloud infrastructure. Red Hat delivers that trust.
We want, however, for CIOs to feel that they can move to public clouds like Amazon Web Services with confidence, so this certification program offers cloud-computing vendors a way to tell reluctant CIOs, "This cloud is safe for you." Our business model is founded in choice, as CIOs know. We're looking to make clouds safe, not a new way to lock them in. This new certification program is a significant step toward making cloud computing a reality for many CIOs that would otherwise be too nervous.
We're also offering a great way to bring confidence to ISVs that don't want to have to rewrite their applications for all the different cloud-computing providers. One aim of this certification program is to provide a certified, common substrate to which ISVs can write their applications. Many ISVs will find that the work they've already done to certify to RHEL will work just fine with RHEL in the cloud. JBoss, for example, worked "out of the box" when we ran it in the cloud for the first time.
Finally, CIOs are concerned about getting support and security updates for their applications and workloads, whether running on private clouds or public clouds. CIOs aren't dumping their private computing infrastructure in a mad rush to public clouds. They want good ways to leverage both. This Red Hat program certifies select cloud providers that have a strong support, technical, and business partnership with Red Hat, giving CIOs confidence to move into the public cloud.
In these ways, Red Hat is taking the complexity and risk out of cloud computing for end customers, ISVs, and cloud providers. We spent 18 months making the cloud work for Red Hat, and now want to make those efforts available to others through this certification program.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Just when I get consumed by the "destruction" in Schumpeter's "creative destruction," I stumble across something like this note from a new indie band on Dave Kusek's "Future of Music" blog:
TOTAL MADE THIS MONTH USING TWITTER = $19,000 TOTAL MADE FROM 30,000 RECORD SALES = ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
In part, this is a testament to the power of Twitter, but it's primarily an example of how new technology can upgrade old business models, as Kusek points out.
These new tools, such as Twitter, will help the entire music business scale much, much better. Very popular musicians such as Radiohead will still make a lot of money. But relatively unknown artists, by promoting their work and selling stuff directly to the fans, using free or inexpensive online tools, will be able to make a better living than they do right now. The future might not be very bright for the big record companies, but it is indeed bright for the artists.
It's not about a wholesale replacement of the old world with the new. It's about making the old world more efficient through the Web.
Yes, some businesses will absolutely get bulldozed by the power of the Web. But not most. At least, not yet.
For example, Jason Hiner is likely right to suggest that Microsoft's enterprise dominance is unlikely to wilt in the face of Google in the near term, though I continue to believe Google has the upper hand in the long run.
This is particularly true when you track the executive departures from Microsoft to more agile competitors like eBay (Yes, even eBay is more agile than Microsoft), Google, Facebook, etc. Steve Ballmer was quick to call the death of offline media, but has been slow to move Microsoft to an online existence.
Regardless, there's still plenty of time for software companies and record labels to adapt to the power and potential of the Web. But the transition must start now.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Mozilla just released Weave Sync 0.4.0, but the reality is that it will take a long time before we need a 1.0 of Weave. Weave Sync coordinates your Firefox bookmarks, browser history, saved passwords, and tabs across your various Firefox installations: desktop, laptop, Netbook, and mobile.
The problem with this vision is that today it's largely unnecessary. For a variety of reasons (some very good, some not so good), Mozilla's mobile Firefox--codenamed "Fennec"--runs on Windows Mobile (version 6 and up) devices...and that's it.
While some new moves from Google may see Fennec port its way to the Android platform, this is a drop in the global browsing bucket, and doesn't even address the fact that there are other mobile browsers with much more momentum, as ReadWriteWeb notes.
Compounding this problem, it's unclear that most people want to sync between different computing devices. More and more people have gravitated to laptops or other mobile computing devices, using these as their primary computing device, rather than as an adjunct, under-powered alternative when away from the desktop.
Personally, I can even remember the last time that I thought about using a desktop computer.
Yes, I have four Macs sitting around the house, but each one is tied to a different family member. I don't really want my son's Webkinz bookmark on my Firefox browser any more than my wife wants to look past my NewsNow Arsenal news feed.
In short, Weave seems to be solving a difficult, but not important, problem. At least, not as currently envisaged.
I'd find Weave far more compelling if it acted as a Web service that let me take my full Firefox experience with me to devices that I don't own. For example, I occasionally find myself using the desktop computers in a hotel lobby, and would love a secure way to log in, claim that browsing experience as my own, and have all traces of myself obliterated for the next patron.
That would be a useful way to "Weave" together my different Firefox sessions: between computers I own and don't own, rather than just between computers I own.
How about it, Mozilla?
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay,.
The Wall Street Journal recently opined that "the inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of CO2," causing a greater number of scientists to question the science behind global warming. Whatever your opinion in the matter, it's certainly true that the world would be better off if we wasted less energy, which is what makes open-source Ecobot so useful.
Ecobot tracks your carbon footprint
(Credit: Taxi)While programs like Amee help businesses measure their carbon footprints, Ecobot offers a personal "carbon trainer" for Mac users.
Designed by Taxi, a Canadian corporation, Ecobot is derived from Taxi's participation in the "Green for Green" competition. The program "calculates your carbon footprint by measuring the fuel, power, and paper you use," and, importantly, does a lot of this data aggregation automatically. ("Automatically" is good - heck, if we weren't so lazy, we probably wouldn't need all these vehicles to power us from Point A to Point B.)
Not only does Ecobot keep track of how many pages you print from your laptop, but it also tracks the wireless networks to which you connect and works with you to figure out how you got from one to the other, and calculates the carbon emissions required to make the journey.
Pretty slick.
Even if you're not a tree-hugging, carbon-footprint-obsessed member of the Greenimati, Ecobot is an easy-to-use, unobtrusive way to monitor how much carbon your lifestyle requires. Of course, it only works if you're a Mac user.
Even so, despite Dell's insistence that Apple's Macs aren't as green as Apple claims, Ecobot lets you be as green as you want to be...and brag about it to anyone patient enough to listen to you.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay. But please consider the environment before printing out my 3,000-plus tweets.
It's not exactly the Sundance Film Festival, but Red Hat's new Red Hat Stories film series is setting the standard for technology marketing through film.
These aren't product pitches. Instead, they pitch "the Red Hat way" of doing things, attempting to broaden the appeal well beyond bits and bytes of operating systems and application servers.
While you'll find the films on YouTube, Red Hat doesn't want you to label them as "videos." As Red Hat's Chris Grams explains:
I use the word "film" rather than video on purpose because it better captures the spirit of what we are trying to do with digital media at Red Hat. Films are what you make when you are capturing stories. Videos are what you make when you are selling your stuff. So we aspire to film, certainly with our most strategic work, but sometimes settle for video when the project demands it.
Red Hat is careful to pitch product strategy when positioning its products: you're buying freedom and its attendant value, not simply Linux. These short films do much the same: they're surprisingly interesting to watch, and they push the audience to think beyond the simple questions "will it run?" and "how much does it cost?"
See for yourself:
Grams suggests that "the combination of a talented group of internal storytellers and a passionate group of smart employees with something to say can create some pretty effective communication." He's right. Red Hat continues to set the standard for how an open-source company--or any company--can reach and potentially inspire its audience.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
