Outside the Lines

Eariler this month, I spoke with Brendan Eich, CTO of Mozilla and creator of JavaScript. We discussed the development process for the open-source Firefox browser, the status of Firefox mobile, and new competition.

Eich maintained that increasing competition from Google and Apple, as well as Microsoft, is good for developers and users. It also helps that the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation garnered $75 million in revenue, mostly from its search partnership with Google, which ironically just launched Chrome, a competitor to Firefox. With $33 million in expenses last year, it appears the Mozilla team is well funded to continue development at a rapid pace and attract top talent.

Regarding competition with Google's Chrome and other browsers, Eich said:

It's really a neck and neck race. There is a contest going on not only between Google and Mozilla but also Apple to have the fastest JavaScript engine, to have the best performance on various benchmarks. This is great. Competition is good for users and for Web developers. Another focus for us, especially for me is the Web developers...We are right in there, we are slugging it out. On the Google benchmarks their JavaScript engine is faster, on Apple's benchmarks we're faster than Google currently. It is going to vary, you are going to see it go back and forth, so it is only going to go up, which is the best thing for developers and that is what we are focused on.

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Guest post: Jean-Louis Gassée explains how Microsoft's future business model will borrow from both Apple and Google to compete with the free world of software. The essay was originally posted on Monday Note.

How do you compete with free? That's the question Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO, is trying to answer every morning when he goes to work. On the server software side, Windows Server is doing well, especially with the Exchange e-mail server and the unheralded but very good collaboration server, SharePoint. These products have matured, they're relatively easy to set up and manage by IT organizations. The Exchange component is a spectacular success: it manages e-mail, contacts, calendars for hundreds of thousands of organizations all over the world. Even Apple finally embraced Exchange: the iPhone now syncs well with Microsoft's server and the next version of OS X promises "native" Exchange support. In plainer English: Apple's Mail, Address Book and iCal programs, for example, will sync with Exchange "out-of-the-box" just like the iPhone does. (This will be a relief to suffering Entourage users. Entourage is Microsoft's own Outlook sibling on the Mac, but it is a poor relative and lacks Windows' Outlook depth and polish.) Seeing that Windows Server generated more than $20 billion last year, one is tempted to think everything is going swimmingly.

Unix is the problem or, rather, the free Open Source implementations of its function set called Linux and FreeBSD, to name the best-known variants. While Windows Server and Exchange still reign for many Enterprise applications, tens of millions of Web sites run on Linux of FreeBSD software. Further, the Open Source nature of such software encourages sophisticated users to modify the operating system to fit their specific hardware configurations or applications requirements. For example, Google designs and manufactures (!) its own servers and customizes the Open Source OS they run. There's even a rumor they "roll their own" 10-gigabit Ethernet switches but I don't know vouch for that one. In any event, imagine how much the Google account would be worth to Microsoft if the Mountain View company used Windows Server? Knowledgeable readers will immediately object: Google running Windows Server isn't realistic. Not for price reasons but because Microsoft's server software isn't technically suitable for large "server farms" such as Google's. True. It'll be interesting to look at what Microsoft uses for its own Live cloud. In the past, Microsoft has had to resort to "other" server software for applications such as Hotmail. But, "scalability issues" (the ability to grow to serve very large server farms) aside, Microsoft is losing against free server software for the millions of simpler Web servers sprouting all over the world. And, as Linux and its cousins mature, they will inevitably make inroads in Enterprise applications where Microsoft still leads. Open Source competitors to Exchange do exist, they're not yet a strong threat but, if they keep improving, they will erode Microsoft very juicy server business.

On the desktop, Linux is trouble again, but much less so than in server farms. For consumers, as opposed to technically versed sysadmins, ease of use is still a strong plus for Windows. I bought two identical Asus EeePC netbooks, one running Windows, the other a Linux distribution. Windows is still much easier to use and update, Linux is still a little rough on normal humans. One example out of many glitches: the version I used didn't remember Wi-Fi access points and passwords. I had to re-enter everything each time I turned the machine on. This type of problem has prevented Linux from gaining much ground on the desktop.

But this could change: the success of netbooks, their large unit volumes could encourage a manufacturer such as Asus, Acer or Lenovo to invest in the needed polish to make a Linux-based netbook as easy to use as a PC or Mac -- or close enough at a much lower price. And the name, netbook, reminds us it might not need today's (or is it yesterday's?) full suite of robust desktop applications to succeed--it will run applications on/from the Cloud. Imagine a Google netbook.

Lastly, smartphones. Ballmer tries to change the subject by suggesting Apple ought to license its iPhone OS as opposed to keeping it all to itself. Let's skip over Microsoft's proprietary Xbox and Zune software and, perhaps, the upcoming Danger smartphone. Danger, the maker of the Sidekick PDA, is the company Microsoft bought earlier this year,. Microsoft has been selling Windows Mobile licenses for close to eight years now. In the licensing business, the iPhone isn't the real competition, Android is. How do you compete with a free smartphone OS, and a good one at that, which is supported by Google Cloud applications?

My guess is Steve Ballmer is working on a combined answer, one that is sketched before our very eyes already. Microsoft's Live services are but a rehearsal for a much bigger act, Microsoft's Cloud OS, sometimes called Strata. And, based on Microsoft's own Cloud services, we'll see a Danger-based smartphone, as proprietary as the Xbox and the iPod competitor Zune. Put another way, Microsoft's future business model will borrow from Apple and Google, it will have two components: proprietary devices and "universal" Cloud services. And like its models, it will attempt to extract extra profits by nicely tying both components together. For example: iPods are tied to the iTunes service, Android phones might (we don't know yet) better enjoy Google applications.

Interesting times ahead.

Jean-Louis Gassée is a general partner at Allegis Capital. Prior to his venture capital career he founded Be, Inc., which was sold to Palm in 2001. Gassée also held several positions at Apple Computer. He started Apple France in 1981, and in 1985 became president of the Apple Products Division. Earlier in his career Gassée as worked at Data General, Exxon Office Systems and Hewlett-Packard.

Guest post: Jean-Louis Gassée looks into Apple's MobileMe launch misfire and whether Apple can run a worldwide wireless data synchronization service for tens of millions of users. The essay was originally posted on Monday Note.

Simple is hard. Easy is harder. Invisible is hardest. So goes one of the many proverbs of our computer lore. As Apple found out last month with the MobileMe launch misfires, the lofty promise of "Exchange for the rest of us" translated into a user experience that was neither simple nor easy--in a highly visible way. Four weeks later, the service appears stable but doubts linger: is Apple able to run a worldwide wireless data synchronization service for tens of millions of users?

What happened and what does it mean for MobileMe's future?

Let's start by decoding the "Launchpad Chicken" phrase. The game of chicken is one by which two young males test their virility in the following way: from opposite directions, two cars speed towards each other on the same lane of a country road. The one who steers away first obviously lacks cojones and is derisively called chicken. You might ask about brains versus testes but here we are, the chicken is the one who "blinks first". Now, let's turn to the launchpad. Picture the NASA control room before the launch of an expedition to the moon. Hundreds of (mostly) men in white short-sleeves shirts, pocket protectors and eyeglasses, hunched before screens, keyboards, and telephones. Each one monitors a subsystem: left liquid hydrogen tank, backup gyroscopes, main engine telemetry... In the huge air-conditioned control room, five of these men are sweating, something's not quite right with their baby. The temperature keeps rising, the pressure is falling, the telemetry link is weakening. Almost but not quite in the red zone. If the parameters keep drifting like this, they'll have to pick up the red phone. But who wants to be the one who aborts the launch? So, they sweat some more and hope someone else blinks first. There you have it: Launchpad Chicken.

Now, move the imagery to projects with complicated subsystems. You see how the NASA metaphor made its way to Silicon Valley. There is always hope some other engineer will raise a hand and spare me the embarrassment of admitting my part of the project could crash the launch. This is what happened for MobileMe, with a twist on the cojones, so to speak. No one had enough brains and guts to risk humiliation, to raise a hand and say: Chief, we're not ready here, let's stop everything. As a result, MobileMe badly crashed on launch. A couple of weeks later, we have a leak: an "internal" memo from Steve Jobs. The e-mail states the retroactively obvious, the project should have been delayed or at least launched in stages. No less obviously, a new leader is appointed, Eddy Cue, he'll continue to run the iTunes systems as well. Charitably, the deposed MobileMe boss is granted anonymity, he might have been misinformed by his charges, or he might not have asked the right questions at the right times, it doesn't matter anymore.

But, you'll ask, that doesn't tell us what went wrong, which liquid hydrogen tank sprung a leak. This now gets us into two more topics: sync and size. Sync here means keeping information identical, consistent over two or more devices. Less abstractly, for a simple example, I have a phone and a computer, I want their address books to identical or, at least, consistent. On simple cell phones, I use a cable (or a Bluetooth wireless connection) plus software to copy (parts of) my computer address book to the phone. But, wait a minute, I entered numbers on the phone that are not on my computer; I don't want the copy from the computer to wipe out those new numbers. Trouble starts, as if connecting the cell phone to the computer and running the program wasn't buggy enough. You want the software to compare the two address books, the phone's and the laptop's and decide what to keep and what to change, on both devices. But what about homonyms, or different numbers for the same person's home? The program, hopefully, raises those "exceptions" and lets a human arbitrate.

We're just warming up. Now picture a more real-life situation. One traveling consultant with one laptop, one smartphone, both carrying mail, address books, and calendars, and one assistant in the office with a desktop computer. In Microsoft Exchange's lingo, the assistant is a "delegate," has access, including modifications and new entries, to the traveling consultant's data. Everything must be kept identical, consistent, in sync. How is this done?

Using the Exchange server as an example, it keeps the "true" data. And the "clients," meaning the smartphone, the laptop, the assistant's PC submit changes, new mail, an updated appointment, a new contact home phone to the Exchange server. In turn, the server propagates changes to the clients. We say the updates are "pushed" to the smartphone or the laptop, just as they "push" new mail or a new calendar item to the server. You can easily imagine conflict situations: the same appointment changed by the consultant and the assistant, address updates and the like. By now, at least on Exchange, these "exceptions" are well understood and generally well-handled. But it took years of practice. Just as it has taken years for RIM (founded in 1984), the BlackBerry (launched in 1999) creators to polish what is the best-selling synchronized smartphone. Details, details and more subtle mistakes and special cases found and fixed. The BlackBerry got its stardom from truly delivering the Simple, Easy, Invisible proposition referred to in the beginning of this essay.

MobileMe aspires to deliver a similarly invisible level of synchronization for people who don't have an Exchange server, hence the "Exchange for the rest if us" slogan. But seeing the launch glitches, I wonder how many people at Apple stooped to using a BlackBerry with an Exchange account. Doing this would have sobered them a little in advance of the launch, or delayed the whole thing, or tempered the boasts. Shortly after MobileMe's first missteps, Apple publicly and smartly retracted its use of "Push" to describe MobileMe's synchronization and the "Exchange for the rest of us" motto is no longer seen on the company's Web site.

Moving to size: quantity begets nature. At some (often mysterious) point, more of the same becomes something different. One server, ten servers, more of the same. One thousand servers or, in Google's case, running one million servers is of a different nature. Meaning different people with different knowledge and appetites than the ones needed to run a company's email server. If every other iPhone customer wants to sync a PC or Mac with the newly (or old, with the 2.0 software update) purchased iPhone, MobileMe will soon serve millions and, in a not too distant future, tens of millions of iPhones. Besides knowing or not knowing the Buddha of sync, did the MobileMe team have the experience, the knowledge, the appreciation of the "size" problem before them? Very few people in our industry do. Ask Google's rivals why they were trounced by someone coming late to the game but with a better handle on the "size" or "scale" problem. (See this paper from University of California, Berkeley, where ultra-large scale computing is actively researched, with private industry subsidies.) In passing, 10 million MobileMe subscriptions at $100/year is a nice piece of change, one billion dollars, worth the trouble.

Let's step back a little. Apple "pushes" somewhere between 100 and 200 megabytes of updates per month to each Mac user. Last week, the iPhone 2.0.1 update was announced, I connected two iPhones within minutes, the 200Mb files were downloaded and installed without a hitch and I haven't heard any blogosphere complaints on the matter. iTunes has sold billions of songs, serves tens of millions of customers every day and everything works with very few exceptions. In other words, some very large scale Apple systems do work. As discussed above, the iTunes boss (some say slave driver, a meliorative term in context) in now also in charge of MobileMe.

And, last week, parts of the Gmail service were down for 15 hours or so. Last month, Amazon's respected Web Services went down. And, last year, RIM's servers went down for about half a day in the Western Hemisphere, freaking out Wall Street investment bankers and management consultants. Even the best players must endure their share of false notes.

Back to MobileMe today: if you ask subscribers who've never experienced a BlackBerry's smooth delivery of sync, they love MobileMe. It works, it's easy to set up and in the simple (most frequent) case of a PC/Mac with an iPhone, it does the wireless (OTA, Off The Air) sync job as now advertised. We'll see how this scales once iPhones are sold in 21 more countries, 43 total starting August 22nd.

Jean-Louis Gassée is a general partner at Allegis Capital. Prior to his venture capital career he founded Be, Inc., which was sold to Palm in 2001. Gassée also held several positions at Apple Computer. He started Apple France in 1981, and in 1985 became president of the Apple Products Division. Earlier in his career Gassée as worked at Data General, Exxon Office Systems and Hewlett-Packard.

JP Rangaswami, managing director of service design at BT (British Telecommunications plc), has a vision for the future of the telephony industry.

"The telcos have lost control of the device. When you start building genuinely agnostic services, when you don't know the target device, it requires a different form creativity," he said. It's a move from closed networks to more open software platforms, and part of BT's transformation from a telco to a platform-based, software-driven services company. "Everything we do at BT is embeddable as workflow for customers. Voice is a feature embedded in the workflow," he added.

Rangaswami's vision explains why his company plunked down $105 million to acquire Ribbit this week. (see Techmeme). Ribbit's software allows developers to integrate voice features to Web applications, such as Salesforce.com, Facebook, and the iPhone. In the coming weeks, BT will integrate Ribbit with its 21CN network, which is available in more than 120 countries.

Ribbit built a set of voice APIs that only make sense as part of a global network services company like BT. "The market moved from voice as a silo to voice as applications, and is still stuck there. Voice as a feature is our starting point," Rangaswami said.

He is depending on what he called the "magic of the community" to "see things we cannot" and innovate with BT's development platform and network. "We have become background catalysts, building better tools for the channel and developers," he added.

"The value only comes if you have applications that are used in an all-IP environment, and you can deploy services at the touch of a button rather than fiddling around with jumpers and cables. Ribbit is Silicon Valley's first phone company where you fiddle with software, not cables," Rangaswami said. "The story is not about cost reduction per se or telling customers what they must do to change or a backplane move. It's about innovation. The primitives of the network are exposed."

The fact that Ribbit is located in the midst of Silicon Valley, and a hotbed of developers, was also a factor in BT's decision to buy the company.

GigaOm's Om Malik likes the vision, but is skeptical about BT's ability to execute.

The 21CN plan included a platform that allowed developers to embed voice into Internet applications. That platform still exists, but one wonders if anyone is using it. So perhaps they had to go out and buy what is essentially a Class Five switch with a pretty Internet interface.

Ribbit, as an independent company was able to get some--not a lot--of developer interest. I am not sure how BT is going to do that. It is after a telecom operator, who wants to operate like an Internet company. Sure, in a circus you can make a dog walk on two legs as well.

As Malik implies, Rangaswami's next challenge will be getting the developer community to adopt his voice-as-a-feature-at-the-edge-of-the-network approach. It won't be difficult to convince people that voice features, like social networking, should be available to any Web site or application. Competing against Google's forthcoming Android, the iPhone, and other developer platforms will be trickier. As Rangaswami said in a video about the deal, "Execution is the name of the game now."

If you weren't aware, a war--more like a tug-of-war--is happening in the mobile space. The iPhone is quickly rising as the development platform to beat, despite its paltry share of market versus Nokia (Symbian), Java BREW, Blackberry and Microsoft Mobile. In addition, Google's fledgling open-source Android platform is also a challenger to the incumbents.

At a Mobile Web Wars Roundtable held by TechCrunch more than 20 mobile wonks discussed that state of mobile platforms (see the list of participants below). The purpose of the roundtable was to determine which mobile platform is best for developers. The iPhone has set a new standard for smartphones and most importantly developers are fawning over it, and iPhone users appear to be far more active users than those on other phone platforms. In the first few weeks of iPhone 3G more than 30 million applications have been downloaded.

Another iPhone advantage is that it takes the iterative model of Web development and extends it to the mobile client, said Jed Stremel, director of mobile at Facebook.

But the iPhone is not the universal answer from a business perspective. Loopt CEO Sam Altman said his strategy is choose a single platform (the iPhone) and if a feature becomes popular bring it to other platforms.

David Hornik of August Capital said that he is excited about iPhone because thousands of applications were distributed after it launched--living proof of the viability of the platform. Like Facebook applications, VCs see some potential in funding in iPhone developers. Having the iPhone app store and not having to go through the carriers to access applications is a bonus for distribution. Omar Hamoui, CEO of AdMob, said the value of ads on the iPhone served by his company is three times other platforms.

But the iPhone doesn't have a sizable market yet, compared to Facebook or Windows, Hornik said. "It's not venture scale," he said. Venture capitalist Richard Wong of Accel made the case that there aren't any developers creating applications just for the iPhone today. "It's about finding the largest addressable audience," said Walt Doyle, CEO of uLocate. Yahoo supports everything under the mobile sun and reaches 600 million devices with its mobile services, according to Marc Davis, chief scientist for Yahoo's mobile group.

The idea that the iPhone has invented or is reinventing the mobile Web is an overstatement, according to David Rivas, Nokia, vice president of Technology Management for S60 Software, citing Japan and Korea as far ahead of the U.S. in mobile usage. "The idea that there wasn't a mobile before the iPhone is absurd," Rivas said. He also defended Nokia's recently open-sourced S60 platform, saying that it has applications similar to what are available on the iPhone. On the other hand, it doesn't have the buzz or browser of the iPhone, but Nokia produces a phone every 14 seconds, garnering 60 percent of the market. Rivas was asked about a merging of Symbian and Android, and responded that there are no such plans.

Tom Conrad, CTO of music service Pandora, said that the iPhone is fundamentally better for streaming devices and as a multifunction device appeals to consumers in different ways than other phones. Regarding Google's Android platform, Conrad said, "I need Android like I need a hole in the head. The last thing I need from a technology standpoint is a platform that sits on top of buggy firmware, with hundreds of phone manufacturers and different screens."

Loopt's Altman gave Android credit for being more open and capable of running background processes. Jason Devitt of Skydeck gave RIM (Blackberry) props for getting email right and noted that Android has serious challenges ahead. "The biggest challenge for Android is that it is totally dependent on hardware manufacturers and for the carriers to deliver," he said. This is distinct from the iPhone and Blackberry approaches, in which the devices are completely controlled by Apple and RIM, respectively. Developers are taking a wait-and-see approach to Android, which lacks any user base currently.

In summary, developers are enamored of the iPhone and hope that Apple sells hundreds of millions of units, but they will spend their development time and dollars on whatever platforms have volume.

Mobile Platform War participants:

David Rivas, Nokia, Vice President of Technology Management for S60 Software

Walt Doyle, CEO Ulocate

Tom Conrad, CTO Pandora

Greg Yardley, CEO of Pinch Media CEO

Bart Decrem, CEO of Tapulous

David Hornik, partner, August Capital

Jed Stremel, Director of Mobile at Facebook

Guy Ben-Artzi, Founder of Real Dice and CEO of Mytopia

Jason Devitt, CEO of Skydeck

Gannon Hall, CMO of Kyte

Sam Altman, CEO of Loopt

Marc Davis, chief scientist, Yahoo mobile group

Omar Hamoui, CEO of AdMob

Richard Wong, partner at Accel

Andreas Weigend, former chief scientist, Amazon

Tatsuki Tomita, SVP of Consumer Product, Opera

Mike Rowehl, chief architect, SkyFire

Mary Ann Cotter, CEO Cooking Capsules

John Faith , GM and VP of Mobile for MySpace

Forget about flashy Web 2.0 applications. The real, geeky coolness of the Web is the growing acreage of data centers that deliver bits to billions of devices. At GigaOM's Structure 08 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, infrastructure--"clouds" of servers, storage and networks--was the headliner.

Jonathan Yarmis, vice president of advanced, emerging and disruptive technologies at AMR Research, said changes in the next five years will make the past Internet revolution feel like child's play. He didn't explain exactly how the next five years will be more revolutionary than evolutionary, but outlined the convergence of several technology trends.

The combination of social networking, mobility, alternative business models (advertising and different license and revenue models) and cloud and stream computing are mutually reinforcing trends that are driving innovations. The average life of a cell phone is 21 months, which allows users to take advantage of improvements in infrastructure.

"Cloud computing is not just for software as a service, but EaaS--Everything as a Service. Many things as discrete products become cloud-based offerings. It offers us an independence of device and location that is profoundly important," Yarmis said. Spoken like a true analyst--come up with another way to market a concept that is also known as on demand, cloud, SaaS, or utility computing.

One of the infrastructure challenges is not just storing and analyzing the growing body of data but reading, reacting, and responding in real time to disposable streams of data, Yarmis explained. The network and software needs to get much smarter and faster to enable real-time filtering and streaming for every user.

"We've reached a tipping point. All of the waves of disruptive tech are coming together at the same time," Yarmis said. He predicted that the economic downturn will help spur the adoption of cloud computing. Given the lower cost model and technological advances pioneered by companies like Amazon, Google, and Salesforce.com in cloud computing, that's a sure bet.

Click here to see more stories from the Structure 08 conference and on cloud computing generally.

Beet.tv's Andy Plesser has an interesting interview with Michael Zimbalist, vice president of R&D at The New York Times Co. He describes how the newspaper company is finding ways to link print and online in the mobile arena and how rich annotation of content will lead to more personalized delivery of information and the Semantic Web.

Lenovo has taken a page straight from Apple's playbook. The parody of the Macbook Air commercial promoting the ThinkPad X300 ultramobile PC has an effect similar to Apple's series of ads with John Hodgman and Justin Long that put down Windows.

It's not what you would expect from the Chinese company that acquired IBM's PC business, but it works. The ad is getting passed around like candy, and it is really funny and points out the weakness of the Macbook Air. (It lacks some ports and an optical drive.) Expect the Macbook Air crowd to strike back with a parody of its own.

Check out our reviews of the pricey X300 and the sleek Macbook Air.

In this week's EIC Squared podcast, ZDNet's Larry Dignan and I discuss the latest news, including SAP's management changes, Dell's woes, Intel's new mobile chip, life extension for Windows XP, and Google's lottery winners.