At lunch with Michael Coté from RedMonk on Wednesday, we talked a lot about how open source has really split into "free" and "open source," with the former typically associated with basement developers and Apache licenses, and the latter generally associated with the General Public License and some set of enhanced features.
As I was following Coté's Twitter feedearlier, I started to wonder whether everything really will go to the cloud and all of our open-source musing will go away, as software becomes consumed versus installed.
Realistically, there is a vast array of software that really can't move outside the enterprise in the foreseeable future. Consider, for example, banking and stock-trading systems, or telecommunications infrastructure. On the other hand, consider pretty much everything else. Even when you take into account the complexities of back-office systems, odds are that in a green-field situation, you could find a software-as-a-service application to solve your problems.
So here's the paradox that I think about: Let's consider a company like Google, which writes, buys, and installs a lot of software. Some is unique to its business and isn't available as an online service. Other products are packaged applications. Yet it wants the rest of the world to stop buying software, instead just consuming it from Google.
I'm not seeing a way that on-premise software disappears forever...
The Series B round was led by Accel Partners. Benchmark Capital, the lead investor in SpringSource's first round of financing, also participated. Word on the street is that the valuation was very pleasing to the team there.
I didn't think much about the Covalent acquisition when it happened but now that Iona is going away, SpringSource is the one-stop shop for Spring, Tomcat and ActiveMQ along with their new Spring Application Platform.
Good for the Spring guys for figuring out how to monetize Apache-licensed projects while building in secret sauce to sell their products. The subtle shift from free software to open source shouldn't be underestimated. Just selling support is not a sustainable business model.
It's amazing what a little bit of smack talking will do for your traffic. You commenters take yourselves way too seriously. My last post was designed to address some of the FUD in market and be flame-bait. I do like the fact that everyone thinks Ross is a gentleman. He is. It's that British thing he's got going on.
My ploy to upset some people worked and now I am over it. Moving on...
The Iona acquisition rumors have been flying for months, and now we know the winner (loser?) of the prized pig: Progress Software. This is a not a bad purchase for Progress, which does a lot of business in legacy application integration. Iona's CORBA products are good and fit into the Progress customer base. What they'll do with 3 of the same products (Artix, Sonic, and Servicemix) I have no idea.
Having dealt with Iona personally over the last two years as they have "participated" in the open-source community I can say that I am very pleased that the company is being taken out. For all their open-source positing, Iona has been divisive in the community and clouded the market with FUD. I don't see how or why Progress would continue with the open-source efforts, which haven't been particularly lucrative.
From the competitive standpoint I can't point to a single account where Mule has lost to Iona or Progress (though I am sure they exist) in our multithousand user base. Now the odds are even lower.
I tend to be fairly low-key on this blog (and in public) about my company's complete and total domination, whereas these third-tier players like Iona blather on and flail. These guys and others like them are just noise.
My targets remain Tibco, BEA, Oracle, IBM, and so on. If you are an open-source company and your goal is to beat other open-source companies then you are destined to fail. The economics of re-attacking a market that is shrunk by open-source pricing simply don't work.
As a great man said in the movie There Will Be Blood, I drink your milkshake.
If you, like me, have opted against the iPhone (AT&T doesn't work at my house), then this new Blackberry Bold is probably right up your alley. The Bold has wi-fi and several other features that have taken way too long to hit from RIM.
"Emerging" economies like China and Russia are going through this strong badware period. Research by StopBadware.org theorizes that lack of economic incentives for Chinese hosting providers and site owners to inform their users of infected sites and/or to take action to clean or remove these sites.
Full report (PDF)
Badware sites per million Internet users:
China 689
Russia 307
United States 212
Germany 135
France 128
Republic of Korea 115
Great Britain 60
Via The Register
Over on ZDNet Joe McKendrick asks Is Microsoft slow to the punch on SOA, or just waiting for the right moment? The answer is neither. Microsoft is clueless about SOA (service oriented architecture) and seems intent to remain so.
Microsoft can't seem to figure out what it wants to be anymore. In this day and age the company simply can't be all things to all people. It's clear that after the Yahoo fiasco, the focus is on the business "user" and the consumer. There has been very little in the last year or two that suggest Microsoft is taking the enterprise seriously anymore. Even all the noise about Linux has stopped.
Fundamentally I think the Microsoft SOA challenge is due to the fact that most SOA environments are multi-vendor. Even when Oracle is giving away components and trying to shove a whole stack down your throat they realize that interoperability is key to success. Microsoft has *never* embraced interop at full-scale. If they had, the market would be very different right now and arguably Microsoft would have an even bigger footprint.
Joe makes a point below that Microsoft will likely attempt to go bottom-up with SOA as it's still too large of an undertaking.
Microsoft typically hasn't gone head-to-head against large enterprise vendors, especially with SOA. And my guess is that Microsoft doesn't even want to attempt to try to take away or eat into IBM or BEA/Oracle's huge SOA engagements. It's not worth it -- at least not yet. Instead, Microsoft intends to move into underserved and long-ignored markets with commodity-priced tools and work their way up from there.
I agree to the extent that the opportunities will still be there for Microsoft once these initial deployments are done. One of the main reasons I still work like a dog is because consumption equals deployment in 99.9% of our use cases with Mule. The odds of another vendor pushing out existing infrastructure is very low and Microsoft is missing the boat.
SAP's Henning Kagermann thinks that big companies are too conservative (afraid?) to adopt SaaS.
But while it is the sales people, numbers crunchers and purchasing pros who enter information into these systems, traditional business software isn't designed with these workers in mind. It's designed for these workers' bosses, who need a single place to track what their departments and employees are up to.
With every other company trying to increase productivity and bring the consumer/collaborative angle into their software it's interesting that SAP chooses to remain archaic and conservative. Only time will tell if that's the right choice.
Writers and producers at ABC News demanded payment for after work usage and reached a settlement with management. ABC agreed last week that workers can get paid for some work on their BlackBerrys -- if it goes "beyond routine."
I go through phases of Blackberry obsession. Lately I have been forcefully placing my electronic leash face down on my desk at home so I can't see the red light blinking.
Self-control is a powerful thing. The Blackberry is a great device that serves an important purpose, but most people should be able to recognize when they've crossed the line.
I posted last week on Oracle's clever but annoying move of raising prices so they could discount and still maintain margins. Today I saw that United is raising prices AND requiring an overnight stay--the bane of the business traveler. This royal pain will start in October and remind us all how much we hate to fly.
Taking an economic view of the situation, I think we all understand that fuel prices have gone through the roof and that affects United dramatically. But I would think that it makes a great deal more sense to pack the planes full (for example on same-day trips) than it does to force travelers to stay overnight.
How long passengers have to stay under United's new minimum-stay policy will depend on the destinations involved, the price of the ticket and the length of the flight.
For example, travelers booking the cheapest seats between Chicago and Minneapolis or Boston and San Diego will now be forced to stay three nights or the entire weekend, Urbanski said.
Is it just me, or does this seem completely insane?
