Despite its 22.51 percent global market share, Mozilla's Firefox browser has yet to crack the enterprise IT barrier. While Firefox is undoubtedly used widely in the enterprise, Internet Explorer is still the default choice for enterprise IT, in part because Mozilla has never made any particular market, including enterprise IT, a focus.
No more. Perhaps responding to criticism that Firefox lacked the tools to help enterprise IT departments manage its deployment, Mozilla is now rolling out a Build Your Own Browser program. The program aims to provide "a good fit for enterprises that want to create a customized browser that can be easily installed across multiple corporate desktops," according to Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox at Mozilla Corp.
This is good news. While some breathlessly wait for Google Chrome to leverage Google's cachet into the enterprise, ultimately functionality and stability win with skittish IT professionals. Mozilla's Build Your Own Browser program is designed to deliver against these IT requirements.
The program works as follows: IT professionals can tailor their preferred browser configuration (perhaps with default bookmarks to corporate Web sites, for example) using a Mozilla Web application, including corporate branding using Mozilla's Personas technology. The application will then send the user a custom installation program for deploying the browser across the company.
It's an interesting new foray into enterprise computing by Mozilla, but it's doubtful that the program will foster an exodus from Internet Explorer. That is happening already, with or without such enterprise tools. Mozilla is already seeing its Firefox market share gain 5 percent each year even as IE falls by 5 percent per year. This is leading more application developers to write their software for both IE and Firefox.
This, it is assumed, will continue apace.
In fact, with things like Mozilla's new Add-on Collector service for Firefox, which makes it easier to subscribe to and maintain third-party add-ons (e.g., Fasterfox, Faviconize, etc.), Mozilla is setting new benchmarks for browser performance and ease-of-use. Internet Explorer is playing catch-up.
Enterprise IT is a lagging indicator of where the market is going. It's normal that Firefox's rising popularity should be felt everywhere else first. At some point, however, even the stodgiest of enterprise IT departments is going to need to recognize that with roughly a fourth of their constituents using Firefox, sticking exclusively to IE is a losing battle.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Leave it to Zend to kick Java-loving Sun Microsystems when it's down.
PHP has become one of the hottest programming languages in technology, and the engine behind the little scripting language that could is Zend Technologies. Back in 2000 Zend released its Zend Framework to facilitate PHP development, and it's now taking this Java-bashing crusade a step further with the release of its new Zend Server, as The Register reports.
As Dave Rosenberg notes over on CNET's Software Interrupted blog, Zend Technologies is making available its Zend Server on Tuesday as both a commercial product and one free to the community for download. Why? Because such a move should further facilitate PHP adoption and give Zend a prime location to profit from that adoption.
Smart strategy. The new Zend Server can be easily integrated into any bundle, runs native to the operating system, and offers significant performance and management features. With the community version, the company says developers and admins can set up a complete PHP environment in minutes.
This is especially interesting for two reasons:
- With the general availability of Zend Server, the company is obviously signaling that it's serious about run-time and extending its products beyond tools. In other words, it wants to make money. Lots of it. It's smart enough to know that there is a huge market opportunity to support PHP application development with a full production environment--from tools to run-time. And with both the company and a community of users supporting it, Zend can help PHP dominate in Web development.
- The company is going to use the freeware model to accelerate adoption and then convert some of those users to paying customers and provide a foundation of access and support for which the open-source software model has blazed the trail. This model has worked for Red Hat, Zimbra, and others, and I suspect it will work for Zend, too.
This wraps up a really amazing decade for Zend Technologies and its recently appointed CEO, Andi Gutmans. And with big companies like Adobe Systems, Google, IBM and Microsoft using PHP or rumored to nearing full support for it, the next decade should be equally as productive.
In other words, life just became a wee bit harder for Sun. Just what it needed.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
TechCrunch calls Facebook's new Application Verification Program a "protection racket."
Verified apps will get a green checkmark.
(Credit: Facebook)That's a bit harsh, but the marketing behind the move does smack of The Godfather: "Yes, my son, you could use that unverified application, but you don't want to get hurt, do you?" TechCrunch's take:
Basically, application developers (there are 48,000 applications on Facebook today) can apply to become a verified app. If they pass, they get a badge and special placement in the application directory, plus increased communication limits with users, increased visibility in the news feed, and some free advertising credits. If they don't pass, they get stuck into the unwashed masses of apps that aren't verified because they aren't "meaningful," "trustworthy," or "well designed"...You don't want to be in the loser group.
Facebook application developers must pay a fee ($375) to be part of the program. Given the nominal cost, it's likely that many will sign up. But it's not the cost that should be worrisome: it's the idea.
Ironically, this is much the same tactic that open-source businesses are often pushed to by their communities or, rather, by the community. (The paying customer community generally could not care less.)
Because open-source vendors like MySQL have been harangued by the community into providing little to no product-level differentiation between their "community" and "enterprise" products, they have been left to forage for dollars, sometimes by implying that the community product is not up to snuff.
This is the wrong way to go about product differentiation, and it's as true for Facebook as it is for open source. Some projects like ZipTie are apparently going off the open-source grid in order to make money that the pure-play open-source model hasn't afforded them. We don't want to see this happen.
No more litmus tests. I've been as guilty as anyone of establishing these in the past for what constitutes an "open-source company." I was wrong. It's a bigger playground than that.
Esther Schindler over at CIO.com does a great job picking apart some recent data on Ruby adoption. The (Koders.com) data, which is gleaned from language-specific searches on its code repository site, suggests that Ruby interest is up by a factor of 20 since 2004.
However, as Schindler points out, the Koders.com data may simply reveal the obvious (i.e., the Ruby community is vocal) or the not-so-pleasant (i.e., perhaps Ruby users have lots of need to look for information because of problems with Ruby).
Ruby use really isn't all that much. According to Evans Data, which asks developers twice a year about their favored programming languages, only eleven percent of North American developers use Ruby today, for any part of their work...About two thirds use JavaScript in any guise, just for comparison, but somehow that doesn't generate the same kind of passion...
[I]t also might mean that Ruby developers need more help than others do..., whether because the existing software is hard to understand or because their shops don't have a lot of existing in-house expertise. It might mean that there's so much easily-found JavaScript open-source code that they don't need to head to a dedicated search engine for it. Maybe, in their enthusiasm for all things Ruby, they just like to look at code examples.
So maybe Ruby is on a roll, or maybe it's not. The Koders.com data is inconclusive on this point. All we really know is that the Ruby community is vibrant and vocal.
But Ruby isn't about to take over the enterprise, where most of the money in software still resides. Java and .Net still rule the enterprise roost. Along with the imperfect Koders.com data, O'Reilly Media's book data points to an upsurge in Ruby development, but we're a long ways off from massive enterprise adoption of Ruby, at least in any way that threatens Java developers.
Java has its detractors, but according to a recent reading of the Tiobe Programming Community Index, it's still the dominant programming language, with little change in its overall popularity since August 2007. Runners up? C, (Visual) Basic, C++, and PHP.
That's the short-term view of the past year. Looking at the longer-term view, however, Java, C, and other "traditional" languages appear to be on the decline while PHP and its ilk are on the rise:
Tiobe Programming Community Index, August 2008
(Credit: Tiobe)Data from O'Reilly book sales suggests a similar decline for Java and other traditional programming languages over time. Cause for alarm? Not really. It's just a matter of the web assuming a more vital importance to programming, a trend that will continue to grow. It will, however, take a very long time to make your Java or C skills irrelevant.
Microsoft has a clever Home Use Program that "provides a simple way for staff to work at home with the same Microsoft products they use at work." It's also a great way for Microsoft to spread its software and prevent would-be Mac or open-source users from straying from the Microsoft fold.
Speaking of which, Apple has a similar program, of which my company takes part. I can get Apple hardware and software at a discount, even when not buying it for work. To Apple (and Microsoft), it's a way to expand adoption at a lower cost of sale.
To these efforts, however, we should add a third "Home Use Program." It's called Sourceforge.net. At Sourceforge.net you can download popular open-source projects at work...for free. You can then head home to buy these exact same programs...for free!
It's the ultimate Home Use Program. Completely free. What a bargain!
Using book sales as surrogate tea leaves, Mike Hendrickson of the O'Reilly Radar finds life bleak for pretty much every major programming language except C#, Javascript, and Ruby. Java? It has plunged by 50 percent since 2003.
Sun Microsystems is hedging its bets on web scripting languages, recently adding Python experts to its fold. So perhaps Sun will weather the storm. Regardless, even despite its five-year slide, Java still holds the biggest share of the book-buying market, as this chart shows:
... Read MoreWeb scripting languages like PHP are hot, but it's Java and .Net that pay the bills, according to a new survey by Robert Half Technology's 2008 Salary Guide:
Next year, application developers and senior web developers skilled in Java, Java Enterprise Edition and Microsoft's C# and VisualBasic.NET look likely to have more leverage in salary negotiations and pull in more cash than those armed with Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl/PHP/Python (LAMP) or AJAX, according to a new salary survey.
IT employment specialist Robert Half Technology's 2008 Salary Guide found application and senior web developers versed in Java and Microsoft's languages can add another 10 to 12 per cent on top of the salary range for developers. Those skilled in LAMP and AJAX can add around five per cent.
Time to dump open-source scripting languages for the old world of Java and .Net? Nah. It just demonstrates that much of the enterprise world is still driven by these two programming languages, and likely will be for some time.
Tim O'Reilly had a fireside chat (minus the fireside) with Marten Mickos during today's Executive Radar at OSCON. Marten, ever insightful and pithy, didn't disappoint.
Here are a few of the things that caught my attention most in Marten's comments:
... Read MoreI came across this surprising piece of news in ars technica (I always feel a little dirty saying that :-). Surprising, because it's such a good idea. Most surprising?
It happened at Novell.
What idea? Why, to set the Linux engineering team loose for a week to do work on whatever they wanted. Full freedom to hack at will on the open source projects of their choice. Appropriately, they called it "Novell Hack Week."
I like this quote from one of the participants:
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