Negative Approach

Off-topic: I survived a day without email or blogs!

While I was at the Dow Jones Venture One conference yesterday I was in total black hole of technology. I couldn't get on the wifi network and my Crackberry was caught in some kind of death spiral.

Miraculously, I survived the whole day with no email, minimal news and no blogging. And I have to say that I really enjoyed it. I long for the day when I can just carry a normal cellphone and don't have to be a robot.

This leads me to a bigger point, which is that I, like many others really have to … Read more

Desperately trying to be interested in Adobe

I was reading Cote's write-up on the Adobe Engage conference and I just can't get excited about Adobe. Maybe it's because for me, the company still equates to Photoshop?

All of this AIR stuff looks like things people were doing with Macromedia Director back in the late 90's. And while I completely understand that this is easier to use, blah, blah, blah, I just can't get excited.

Anyway, at least Adobe is moving toward open source.

On the other hand, a fantastic technological breakthrough is Specialtys' CookieAlert where you can login and see who has … Read more

Novell buys 2nd semi-irrelevant company this quarter (SiteScape and now PlateSpin)

Novell announced today that they were looking to acquire PlateSpin, a Canadian company that makes software to manage virtualized servers.

I guess Novell is taking the land-grab path to get something in the virtual space but I can't see how the acquisition of SiteScape makes any sense. For that matter, PlateSpin may work in theory but regardless of what Ron Hovsepian thinks, this doesn't present a clear strategy.

At this point, what is Novell? It's clearly not an open source company.

Neither of the recent Novell acquisitions: -Have a large volume of customers -Are open source -Have … Read more

Love open source events? How about OSBC and MuleCon Promotions?

The fine folks at InfoWorld Events and MuleSource are offering Negative Approach readers discounts for their upcoming events.

OSBC-March 25-26, 2008, San Francisco Reg code for $200 discount: mulesource Registration https://webreg.events.infoworld.com/osbc

MuleCon-April 1-2, 2008, San Francisco http://www.mulecon.com Mention this blog and get $50 off the MuleCon registration - just email mulecon2008@mulesource.com or call 1-415-229-2065 to register.

Disclosure: I am an employee of MuleSource and speaker at OSBC.

Stick to what you know or land-grab the future? (Microsoft and Yahoo)

This weekend's NY Times article "Maybe Microsoft Should Stalk Different Prey" raises the point that perhaps Microsoft should reconsider the Yahoo acquisition to focus on what it knows, which is enterprise software.

New CNET Editor-in-Chief Dan Farber raises a different point in a post today--that there is still time for an internet land-grab and Microsoft should take this opportunity to nab Yahoo before it's too late.

Overall, I don't see the Yahoo acquisition paying immediate dividends. In fact, it's hard to see when it would pay off. Microsoft doesn't have the machine … Read more

Visual Studio Guy vs. SQL Server Gal

Microsoft has created a series of cartoon superheros for your enjoyment. Must be nice to have all that marketing money.

I can only assume these characters battle "Blue Screen of Death" and "The Googlebot"

The most disturbing thing is that I like the same band as Visual Studio Guy. Sigh.

Building on growing platforms

When you are contemplating starting a new software company you want to look at where money gets spent now and where it's going to be spent in the future. That's why startups these days are building their applications on utilities like Amazon S3 (which despite last week's outage, I still believe in) and attempting to monetize Facebook (I am not a big believer in this one though I get the idea.) And while neither of these things may be right, they are better bets than building your infrastructure on dying platforms or betting on outdated technologies.

One product that I use daily is SpanningSync, a simple sync utility that connects iCal and Google calendar. One of the guys there (Charlie is his name, but I couldn't find his title or role) has a very logical and eye-opening take on why they went the way they did.… Read more

Mobile phone price wars--it's about time!

If you want to see people get lit up about a service that they hate, but can't live without, ask them about their mobile phones.

Never mind the dropped calls or the death-grip lock-in, just the outrageous cost is enough to send people into a rage. So, today when Verizon and T-mobile both introduced new flat rate price plans (which are very appealing to heavy users) I would have thought that this would be viewed as a good thing--helping to retain the more valuable customers. Instead, analysts whined that this would undercut pricing. To an extent it will effect … Read more

Bungee Connect--the next-gen SaaS platform?

About two years ago I met up with the team from Bungee Labs and heard about this crazy platform they were building to enable on-demand applications to be built and deployed through a browser.

BungeeConnect launched today and it's an audacious product to say the least. It's definitely worth your time if you are interested in this kind of stuff.

More over on InfoWorld