Strategy

Hollywood's losing digital downloads battle

Digital downloads, despite seeing healthy growth through 2008, leveled off in 2009, coming in at $291 million instead of the $360 million projected by Screen Digest. While Hollywood searches for scapegoats, it need look no further than itself and the burdensome controls it puts on digital.

As Arash Amel, research director with Screen Digest, puts it:

Digital downloading is characterized by its restrictions--it's all about what viewers can't do, rather than what they can do.

When will Hollywood learn?

The movie studios are overlooking their real value, just as the record labels did before them. Hollywood is desperate … Read more

Is monogamy good for technology?

As a longtime Mac user, I can tell you that nothing works as well as an iPhone-Mac-iLife-iTunes connection. If you play completely within Apple's playground, it's nonstop fun with no bumps and bruises. Microsoft, which has long billed itself as a soup-to-nuts solution, doesn't even come close, despite diligent efforts.

The problem, of course, is that most of us can't afford to live exclusively within Apple's (or Microsoft's) ecosystem. Work often gets in the way of personal preferences, whatever they may be. We're also more and more inclined to experiment with new devices, … Read more

Will open source ever be completely free?

In various markets, open source has relentlessly driven prices down while boosting performance and customer value, as detailed by The 451 Group. Even as traditional vendors have struggled with a tight economy, open-source vendors have thrived.

In the process, has open source conditioned customers to expect more for less? Perhaps as little as $0.00?

The Linux market offers some clues.

IDC reported in 2009 that nonpaid Linux adoption had claimed a significant share of the Linux market, now as much as 50 percent, and counts as Red Hat's biggest competitor, be it unauthorized (i.e., unpaid for) use … Read more

Isilon back from near death

Last week, Isilon, which designs and sells clustered storage systems and software for digital content, announced the integration of STEC's solid-state disk modules to its S- and X-Series or scale-out network-attached storage (NAS) platforms built on SAS and SATA disk arrays. The announcement was doubly significant.

First, its marks the appearance of SSD implemented as storage for metadata within an NAS platform as opposed to application data. In other words, the Isilon announcement is not an example of tiered storage for scalable NAS. Rather, SSD is used to store file system metadata--data that describes the application data and as … Read more

'Why Firefox?' and 'Why Windows?'--same answer?

Is Mozilla becoming too much like Microsoft?

In a strange bit of irony, Mozilla, the foundation behind the popular open-source Firefox browser, increasingly relies on Microsoft's playbook to promote Firefox adoption. No, Mozilla executives aren't secretly plotting an open-source monopoly to replace Microsoft's, and, indeed, are focusing precisely on doing the opposite.

But the answer to the "Why Firefox?" question increasingly sounds the same as the answer to "Why Windows?"

Namely, community/application support, to the exclusion of significant improvements in its performance.

I've been using Google's Chrome browser on Linux, … Read more

Is Apple the new Microsoft?

Is Apple becoming more concerned with strategy than technology?

That's the question (and accusation, really) leveled at Apple by the Wall Street Journal's Holman Jenkins Jr., who decries Apple's strategy as little more than "zero-sum maneuvering versus hated rivals."

He has a point. But is it valid?

Jenkins argues that Apple's decision to ship the iPad without Flash support amounts to an attempt to lock consumers into iTunes-only content:

Apple may be succumbing to the seductive temptations of "network effects," in which the all-consuming goal becomes getting its mobile devices into more … Read more

The application is the new the operating system

If you're a Google Nexus One user, you experienced a bit of magic last week.

In one click of an over-the-air update, your Nexus One became an iPhone--offering the ability to pinch and expand the screen to zoom in or out.

Just one click, with little to no user intervention. That's what operating systems look like in the 21st century, a future more clearly playing out in mobile than in the more traditional realms of personal computers and servers.

Apple is leading the way on this, but application developers have been quick to pick up on the trend.… Read more

Apple, Google, and the importance of Bing

For some, the definition of software freedom begins and ends with source code. Such people have apparently never heard of market competition.

It's arguably even more important, and doesn't necessarily derive from a software license (though it's no doubt better when protected by an open-source license).

Over the last few weeks, we've seen signs that key open-source vendors are waking up to this fact, with both Canonical (Ubuntu) and Mozilla (Firefox) sniffing around Yahoo/Microsoft to replace Google with Yahoo/Bing as their default search engine.

Choice, you see, is good, even when it's not … Read more

Thank heaven for Apple's (upward) pricing pressure

As the economy has stalled, prices have fallen to match the increasingly frugal moods of consumers and businesses. Only Apple seems largely impervious to gravity, consistently scoring solid earnings and rising market share, all while keeping prices high.

You don't have to be an Apple fanboy to be grateful for Apple luxury. We all benefit from it, even if we've never bought a single Apple product.

In economics, "anchoring" refers to a pricing strategy whereby a vendor sets a product's price high to create perceived value ("What a deal!") for other, lower-priced products, … Read more