TiVo PC is not capable of allowing viewers to skip commercials on Hulu.com and the like. Read the reviews (like this one) for proof. It's a device to enable recording of broadcast/cable TV shows on a Windoze box. That's it. It has nothing whatsoever to do with recording net-streaming video, or anything else that regular TiVos currently can't do.
This kind of over-reaching speculation is irritating, distracting, and unhelpful. Andrew Keen is, I think, a little too keen (haha, do you see what I did there?) to create controversy and a little less inclined to check his facts.
The government has recognized this problem and is switching their e-forms client from PureEdge (now owned by IBM and called Workplace Forms) to Adobe Reader. They awarded a new contract to General Dynamics IT late last year (switching from the original integrator, Northrop Grumman) and will be rebuilding the whole thing while maintaining the existing form sets and whatnot. The new Adobe forms are scheduled to be available in early April; see this FAQ for more information.
I wrote about this whole thing on my own site and on my company's blog. It's been a major problem for some research universities in particular, who have a loyal Mac community. But I think Grants.gov's on the road to fixing it.
(Full disclosure: Our company was part of a bid to win the contract that was awarded to General Dynamics. Our team proposed a different approach that would have yielded the same outcomes but we're not part of the GDIT team.)
Is this the first time this has happened, though? A quick look at the GSA Advantage site yields at least one or two results for MySQL database license vendors. Besides which, I don't see any MySQL products on the GSA Schedule mentioned in the article, either. To be fair, it can take some time to update GSA's information, but it may be better for these folks to make public announcements after the t's have been crossed. Still, this is a positive step in the right direction for greater use and support of MySQL in the US federal government.
Before Sun and Microsoft start evangelizing an identity management scheme to the rest of us, perhaps they need to sort out their own schizophrenia.
Microsoft appears to be jumping too quickly getting between "good company" and "bad company" personalities, while Sun's "we're independent and answer to no-one" and "yeah, but we did get $2bn from our biggest competitor" vibrations are reaching breaking point.
That you can see no good reason to contribute to the world's betterment than the lining of your own pocket is self-deprecation of the most tragic kind.
I'm very amused by the complaints about Google starting a foundation. Yes, Google gets a tax break by donating to charity. But so do most US citizens when you give cash (or time, or gas expenses, or whatever) to charitable causes. So suggesting that Google is being somehow underhand by starting a foundation is a petty argument sourced in sheer cynicism... Unless you only contribute to charity for the tax break?
The fact is, Google has scads of money just lying about the place. They can invest it, but sometimes the "return on investment" is better if that same money is invested in good works, such as scientific research, food programs, and the like. It depends on your definition of "return," I guess.
Regardless of what you think about their ethics or business practices, Brin+Page, Gates, Case, and the like have chosen to invest their capital in ventures that will (ideally) generate more than a capital return in the short-term. By doing so through a foundation, they're demonstrating both good business sense and laudable philanthropy. They shouldn't be condemned for either.
Microsoft has said many times that it wants Windows at the center of everyone's digital lifestyle, as the hub for digital content and family life. At the same time, Apple has put strong stakes in this ground, with the iPod, the iTMS, and iLife (iPhoto, GarageBand, iMovie, etc.). In effect, Apple is way ahead of Microsoft in making the digital lifestyle a reality. What they lack is the central hub.
Apple has been trying to make Mac OS X that hub by leveraging the success of the iPod/iTMS. They've even made it easy for Windows users to stream music from one system to another through the iTunes Sharing feature, which is completely cross-platform and so easy to use anyone can get it working in 5 minutes. But Mac OS X is tied to Apple's core products -- Apple computers. And therein lies the problem. Only geeks have computers in their family rooms connected to their TVs.
Tivo represents the only independent, open-platform consumer entertainment DVR vendor that's had any degree of longevity and success in the marketplace. And for that reason alone, it's an attractive target for Apple.
By making Tivo into the Apple-branded/powered equivalent of the Windows Media Center -- with Apple's cache and technical props associated with it -- Apple will have captured the cornerstone of "the digital lifestyle": the family room and TV. And this will succeed because Apple has already seeded the key "spokes" of the digital hub lifestyle, with iPod, iTunes, and iMovie. Other vendors don't have these assets, and the barriers to acquiring them are high.
To be sure, Jobs' ownership of a major content producer will be a boon should he decide to create an iLife Video Store (or whatever). But that's several steps away. The game is not video. The game is about capturing the high ground -- a ground that Bill Gates cannot buy his way into. (Microsoft has been trying to persuade infrastructure providers, such as cable TV companies, to run their boxes off Windows for years and, from what I can see, he's no further along today than he was five years ago.)
Microsoft, for its part, needs another market to dominate, soon. Its desktop dominance is under serious threat, which will only become more acute over time. Microsoft has to extend its monopoly, and has been trying to do so by leveraging Windows alone. But it has always relied upon, and will always rely upon, third party hardware producers to adopt its products. Unlike the genesis of Windows, though, Microsoft doesn't have a pre-made marketplace through which it can persuade manufacturers to sign on to their worldview. In other words, Microsoft has to produce a compelling product before it will have the market support which will equate into success for Windows Media Center (and subsequent iterations of this product).
Apple produces hardware and software. It doesn't need to rely on others to do its heavy-lifting for hardware, and clearly it is successful in this regard. Hardware will never be a core competency for Microsoft; it's always been so for Apple. This has had its downside, of course: their hardware costs more due to simple economies-of-scale (or lack thereof); cross-platform compatibility has sometimes been spotty; and it takes a lot more R&D dollars to execute both innovative hardware and software strategies. But if these fundamental problems can be overcome -- as Apple has largely done by adopting a Unix base for its core OS and by allying its hardware with broadly-used components -- then the chances for long-term success are very good indeed.
Jobs lost the operating system and hardware battle once. But that was never the war, and to believe it was is simply shortsighted. Furthermore, he's begun the process of renewing that very same battle. But the fundamental point is this: Gates and Jobs, and others like them, want nothing less than dominance of how consumers manage their content. Remember: the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. And that's why Apple should buy Tivo.
I think your argument is specific to selling product. Open source has much greater penetration and potency in distinct network layers. Consequently, open source is really applicable when you're selling services (as we do).
I write proposals for IT work in the Federal government. We sell services to several agencies, mainly focused on web application development. When we propose a solution, we look at what the needs are and devise an appropriate response.
The response takes the form of saying, "We'll use product A, product B, and product C, and we'll customize them to serve your specific requirements" (because every agency needs its commercial software customized). Any of those products could be open source: the server OS, the database, the development platform, the application server...
And because they're open source, we're often less expensive than our competitors (who might use, say, WebSphere when we'd use JBoss). Price being a big consideration in government, this is significant.
Our company trades on our 'technology agnosticism.' We're partnered with Microsoft and Oracle (and IBM, to some extent), but we pick and choose the best software for the job. We've already used MySQL, Linux, PostgreSQL, J2EE, and all sorts of other open source technologies and tools to complete projects for the government.
Of course, we also use Oracle and Microsoft when we need to. Introducing these products is important to government when they want assurances of accountability (even though those assurances are completely mythical most of the time; do any of us know of any instance when Microsoft has said, "Yeah, sorry about your failed project. Our marketing folks kinda overstated the capabilities of our product"??). Combating this kind of management thinking takes more than technical argument. Confidence in open source will take time and experience to build. We can only help that along by using open source wherever we can in the meantime.
Right now, open source cannot compete if it's a marketing dogfight based on product. But it can compete when technological and cost constraints are analyzed closely.
If you build a system for the government, the government owns it, and the government can do whatever it wants with it. It doesn't need to be GPL'd to allow this: it's the law.
This is assuming that you're building custom software (say, web applications, as my company does). We make our money by providing follow-on services. No two agencies are alike; every one has its own needs, just as every company does.
The situation is different if it's your copyrighted program code, or whatever. But this is a flawed model: you can't sell exactly the same solution over and over again. You have to customize it. And if you price that base solution too high, someone else could quite easily undercut you if their base solution is GPL'd. And price is everything in government...
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TiVo PC is not capable of allowing viewers to skip commercials on Hulu.com and the like. Read the reviews (like this one) for proof. It's a device to enable recording of broadcast/cable TV shows on a Windoze box. That's it. It has nothing whatsoever to do with recording net-streaming video, or anything else that regular TiVos currently can't do. This kind of over-reaching speculation is irritating, distracting, and unhelpful. Andrew Keen is, I think, a little too keen (haha, do you see what I did there?) to create controversy and a little less inclined to check his facts.
The government has recognized this problem and is switching their e-forms client from PureEdge (now owned by IBM and called Workplace Forms) to Adobe Reader. They awarded a new contract to General Dynamics IT late last year (switching from the original integrator, Northrop Grumman) and will be rebuilding the whole thing while maintaining the existing form sets and whatnot. The new Adobe forms are scheduled to be available in early April; see this FAQ for more information.
I wrote about this whole thing on my own site and on my company's blog. It's been a major problem for some research universities in particular, who have a loyal Mac community. But I think Grants.gov's on the road to fixing it.
(Full disclosure: Our company was part of a bid to win the contract that was awarded to General Dynamics. Our team proposed a different approach that would have yielded the same outcomes but we're not part of the GDIT team.)
Is this the first time this has happened, though? A quick look at the GSA Advantage site yields at least one or two results for MySQL database license vendors. Besides which, I don't see any MySQL products on the GSA Schedule mentioned in the article, either. To be fair, it can take some time to update GSA's information, but it may be better for these folks to make public announcements after the t's have been crossed. Still, this is a positive step in the right direction for greater use and support of MySQL in the US federal government.
Microsoft appears to be jumping too quickly getting between "good company" and "bad company" personalities, while Sun's "we're independent and answer to no-one" and "yeah, but we did get $2bn from our biggest competitor" vibrations are reaching breaking point.
That you can see no good reason to contribute to the world's betterment than the lining of your own pocket is self-deprecation of the most tragic kind.
The fact is, Google has scads of money just lying about the place. They can invest it, but sometimes the "return on investment" is better if that same money is invested in good works, such as scientific research, food programs, and the like. It depends on your definition of "return," I guess.
Regardless of what you think about their ethics or business practices, Brin+Page, Gates, Case, and the like have chosen to invest their capital in ventures that will (ideally) generate more than a capital return in the short-term. By doing so through a foundation, they're demonstrating both good business sense and laudable philanthropy. They shouldn't be condemned for either.
Apple has been trying to make Mac OS X that hub by leveraging the success of the iPod/iTMS. They've even made it easy for Windows users to stream music from one system to another through the iTunes Sharing feature, which is completely cross-platform and so easy to use anyone can get it working in 5 minutes. But Mac OS X is tied to Apple's core products -- Apple computers. And therein lies the problem. Only geeks have computers in their family rooms connected to their TVs.
Tivo represents the only independent, open-platform consumer entertainment DVR vendor that's had any degree of longevity and success in the marketplace. And for that reason alone, it's an attractive target for Apple.
By making Tivo into the Apple-branded/powered equivalent of the Windows Media Center -- with Apple's cache and technical props associated with it -- Apple will have captured the cornerstone of "the digital lifestyle": the family room and TV. And this will succeed because Apple has already seeded the key "spokes" of the digital hub lifestyle, with iPod, iTunes, and iMovie. Other vendors don't have these assets, and the barriers to acquiring them are high.
To be sure, Jobs' ownership of a major content producer will be a boon should he decide to create an iLife Video Store (or whatever). But that's several steps away. The game is not video. The game is about capturing the high ground -- a ground that Bill Gates cannot buy his way into. (Microsoft has been trying to persuade infrastructure providers, such as cable TV companies, to run their boxes off Windows for years and, from what I can see, he's no further along today than he was five years ago.)
Microsoft, for its part, needs another market to dominate, soon. Its desktop dominance is under serious threat, which will only become more acute over time. Microsoft has to extend its monopoly, and has been trying to do so by leveraging Windows alone. But it has always relied upon, and will always rely upon, third party hardware producers to adopt its products. Unlike the genesis of Windows, though, Microsoft doesn't have a pre-made marketplace through which it can persuade manufacturers to sign on to their worldview. In other words, Microsoft has to produce a compelling product before it will have the market support which will equate into success for Windows Media Center (and subsequent iterations of this product).
Apple produces hardware and software. It doesn't need to rely on others to do its heavy-lifting for hardware, and clearly it is successful in this regard. Hardware will never be a core competency for Microsoft; it's always been so for Apple. This has had its downside, of course: their hardware costs more due to simple economies-of-scale (or lack thereof); cross-platform compatibility has sometimes been spotty; and it takes a lot more R&D dollars to execute both innovative hardware and software strategies. But if these fundamental problems can be overcome -- as Apple has largely done by adopting a Unix base for its core OS and by allying its hardware with broadly-used components -- then the chances for long-term success are very good indeed.
Jobs lost the operating system and hardware battle once. But that was never the war, and to believe it was is simply shortsighted. Furthermore, he's begun the process of renewing that very same battle. But the fundamental point is this: Gates and Jobs, and others like them, want nothing less than dominance of how consumers manage their content. Remember: the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. And that's why Apple should buy Tivo.
I write proposals for IT work in the Federal government. We sell services to several agencies, mainly focused on web application development. When we propose a solution, we look at what the needs are and devise an appropriate response.
The response takes the form of saying, "We'll use product A, product B, and product C, and we'll customize them to serve your specific requirements" (because every agency needs its commercial software customized). Any of those products could be open source: the server OS, the database, the development platform, the application server...
And because they're open source, we're often less expensive than our competitors (who might use, say, WebSphere when we'd use JBoss). Price being a big consideration in government, this is significant.
Our company trades on our 'technology agnosticism.' We're partnered with Microsoft and Oracle (and IBM, to some extent), but we pick and choose the best software for the job. We've already used MySQL, Linux, PostgreSQL, J2EE, and all sorts of other open source technologies and tools to complete projects for the government.
Of course, we also use Oracle and Microsoft when we need to. Introducing these products is important to government when they want assurances of accountability (even though those assurances are completely mythical most of the time; do any of us know of any instance when Microsoft has said, "Yeah, sorry about your failed project. Our marketing folks kinda overstated the capabilities of our product"??). Combating this kind of management thinking takes more than technical argument. Confidence in open source will take time and experience to build. We can only help that along by using open source wherever we can in the meantime.
Right now, open source cannot compete if it's a marketing dogfight based on product. But it can compete when technological and cost constraints are analyzed closely.
If you build a system for the government, the government owns it, and the government can do whatever it wants with it. It doesn't need to be GPL'd to allow this: it's the law. This is assuming that you're building custom software (say, web applications, as my company does). We make our money by providing follow-on services. No two agencies are alike; every one has its own needs, just as every company does. The situation is different if it's your copyrighted program code, or whatever. But this is a flawed model: you can't sell exactly the same solution over and over again. You have to customize it. And if you price that base solution too high, someone else could quite easily undercut you if their base solution is GPL'd. And price is everything in government...