Number crunching

Entertainment: Is it a rent-to-(never)-own market?

Even as the decline in DVD sales--both in the U.S. and abroad--has accelerated since 2006, DVD rentals through services such as Netflix (adding 25 percent more customers since 2008) and Redbox (adding 500 machines per month) have been booming.

The reason, as The Economist surmises, may be a shifting view on how consumers prefer to consume entertainment:

The real worry (for the movie industry), then, is not that people are abandoning DVDs but that they are abandoning the notion of owning them.

This is perhaps exacerbated by an industry that can't seem to make up its mind … Read more

Venture financings are up. Is this a good thing?

Venture capital has not died, despite a big dip in Q1 2009 financings. But honestly, everyone might benefit if a significant percentage of the industry's members went on life support.

So while ReadWriteWeb waxes hopeful about the venture industry's 61 percent jump in financing in Q2, I'm not so sanguine.

As The Economist notes, we still have an oversupply of poorly managed venture capital firms:

(The) root cause of the (VC) industry's problems...is that most venture capitalists have failed to find enough decent companies to deliver the return they promised investors....Although many venture capitalists … Read more

Open source rising as the economy continues to fall

The market is clearly racing toward a bottom when we start looking to Monty Python for business advice and the most lucid (if profane) analysis of Google's announced open-source operating system, Chrome OS, comes from Fake Steve Jobs.

However fast we may be "racing," however, we're not there yet.

At least, not according to a survey of 200 IT executives by Computer Economics, which finds:

About 49 percent of the IT executives surveyed plan to make further budget cuts in 2009. Almost 50 percent will spend less than what is allocated in their IT operational budget. … Read more

IE market share plummeting! (Or is it?)

Microsoft's Internet Explorer's market share is absolutely falling. The question is, by how much?

I've reported before that Internet Explorer (IE) drops 5 percent market share points each year, while Mozilla Firefox gains 5 percentage points per year. But what is becoming increasingly clear is that IE's market share may be dropping more precipitously than previously reported, falling to 60 percent share in June 2009 instead of the 68 percent share expected.

Or is it?

The answer may depend on the source of the information, and the reliability of its data. Mozilla's Asa Dotzler uses StatCounter data … Read more

Legalized drugs, now open source. Those crazy Dutch!

While some organizations continue to hide their open-source adoption, NOiV (Nederland Open in Verbinding), has published a map of over 200 open-source products currently in use by the Dutch central government as of mid-2009. (Translation here.)

Spoiler alert: there's a whole lot of open source being used by the Dutch government.

NOiV concludes in its study (PDF) that that Dutch central government is on the right track with open source for the operating system (platform) and middleware, but is in a very early phase of looking at business applications.

The main obstacle for moving from closed to open source … Read more

Safari numbers still dwarfed by Firefox downloads

Apple has been desperately trying to turn Safari into a mainstream browser player. Unfortunately, its numbers simply don't compare to Firefox.

Safari 4.0 notched 11 million downloads in just three days. While significant, this number is almost a rounding error compared with Firefox 3.0.11, which pulled down 150 million downloads in just 24 hours, as Mozilla's Asa Dotzler reports.

With more than 300 million active users of Firefox, Mozilla is miles ahead of Safari in terms of users. Firefox also dwarfs Safari (and Internet Explorer) in community; indeed, it is Firefox's rich ecosystem of add-ons and extensions that arguably render irrelevant any performance advantages Safari claims.… Read more

As chip sales plummet, which software vendors will survive?

The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) is now projecting that global chip sales will drop 21 percent in 2009, reflecting a souring view since its last projection in November 2008, according to The Wall Street Journal. Fewer chips means fewer new servers and fewer personal computers sold, which is consistent with IDC's report of a 25-percent decline in server sales in the first quarter of 2009.

Against the backdrop of these hardware declines, which software vendors are best-positioned to withstand CIOs' spending frigidity?

Recent earnings reports from Novell and from Red Hat suggest that Linux and open-source vendors may clean … Read more

Can Microsoft stop IE's market share slide?

The Web browser market has been undergoing tectonic shifts for the past six years, with Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) dropping 10 percentage points in market share every two years while Mozilla's Firefox gains 10 percentage points every two years. These trends are called out by Mozilla's Asa Dotzler, and they suggest that as early as January 2013 we could see Firefox surpass IE in market share if the trend continues:

A larger version of the chart can be found here.

Firefox's growth raises all sorts of questions about how proprietary software vendors can and should compete … Read more

Open source gains while proprietary software declines

It used to be so easy to be a proprietary-software vendor.

That is, until the open-source neighbors moved in. As noted in a Gartner analysis from late last year, proprietary software is on the wane within enterprises while open source is gaining:

That's not the sort of chart that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer likes to wake up to, but it's a message to which CIOs are increasingly warming.

The reason? Well, cost is the primary driver for open-source consideration, as a recent Forrester report suggests, but what is most significant is the overwhelmingly positive experience CIOs are having … Read more

Study: Open source worth $387 billion (in savings)

There's a lot of money in free software.

That's good news, because as the recession takes its toll on IT budgets, a new study suggests that companies can save $387 billion in development costs by using open-source software.

Talk about a stimulus.

Black Duck Software arrives at the $387 billion number by applying industry cost estimation standards to the available 4.9 billion lines of open-source code. Additionally, the company:

Estimates that 10 percent of IT application development spending is redundant with existing open-source projects, (which means that) U.S. companies could realize savings of more than $22 … Read more