That's what Ray Ozzie said. The future is ubiquitous fast connectivity to any device, and speed is king. You don't want to wake up at night, think "must remember to buy some milk" and have to wait for the current generation of smart phones to boot up before you can tap that into your tablet. If Google do it right, client devices will be another market like pocket calculators in the '70's. The value is in the network, and the client devices will lower in cost relentlessly.
It's called HP iPrint. Works fine printing stuff from an iPod Touch to the little Deskjet D1470 hooked up on my iMac at home, so don't think the iPad will have much trouble...
annoyed here in the UK. All the announcements said end of April and they even went as far as blacking out vacation for Apple Store employees here for the weekend around April 23rd. The new pre-order date is May 10th with deliveries at the end of May, when i'll be in San Francisco anyways.
At least we should have a firmware update after all the beta users in the USA have helped debug the WiFi issues for us.
Ian W.
FWIW, the Queen has the Executive Power. She can choose to dissolve Parliament anytime she chooses. If a Primeminister wants it dissolved, then it's a quick trip down the Mall to ask her permission first.
I know my wife would happily cough up $7 or so per episode just to watch the latest edition of Nip/Tuck or Californication every week. She'd be quite happy if something like Hulu or Amazon allowed her to post her money to the content providers in exchange for this, rather than just buying the DVD set (at the end of each series screening) every time we visit the USA. Wholesale blocking doesn't do the industry any favours.
Didn't Techcrunch allege that Intel charge more for their chip if it's destined to a machine with a 12" laptop rather than A 10" one? Or that it was because the lowest spec Windows 7 distribution only works with screens up to 10" in size, so a 12" one, for cost reasons, would effectively be Linux only??
My mother died of Motor Neurone Disease at age 42. In the end, all the hospital would do was to "run tests" on her. Those appear to be the same words being used on the news bulletins in the UK atm.
Red Hat Directory Services over tens of thousands of users... so if you the pay-for-support option, you go to Red Hat, for the bleeding edge, "no paid support but tell us about or contribute bug fixes", go for the Fedora option.
One of my large bank customers has both Windows and UNIX (moving to Linux) active directories, with software from a UK company called Fortefi that syncs changes between the two as soon as either is updated. See http://www.fortefi.com/products/account-provisioning/index.shtml
I recall Scott Oki (International VP of Microsoft at the time) keying meeting notes into one of these things in May 1983 - around the same time Bill Gates was demo'ing a thing called Windows on a Compaq Plus sewing machine to us.
Could still use one of these things today...
Ian W.
The central crux being that one unit is crashing occasionally (why not ask for a replacement), and the author has a view that the OLPC folks can't take criticism (no examples cited). While I normally hold the Economist in the highest regard, this article is a poor botch job - and not of the quality of journalism that normally occupies their pages. Better to interview a kiddie who's received one and to get a real story - based on them using the software on the machine. The way it liberates the way kids learn is the real story to follow - not "I wanted a cheap replacement for my expensive PC".
That apart, it looks a classic case of a company wanting to be inside the tent pi**ing out, and outside the tent pi**ing in, both at the same time. These things don't normally mix too well...
Nintendo are still advertising the Wii and the DS on TV here - and both are as common as rocking horse droppings. My wife's had to settle for a silver DS after I couldn't get her a pink one. 50 years old and her first console - starting with "Imagine Babies" of all things.
But, hats off to Nintendo. Brilliant execution after everyone had written them off...
... that ringtones often made more money for the companies than the original song itself. Are RIAA members really depriving the artists that supply the content to them to sell? That's quite a broken business model...
According to Robbie Bach, Microsoft's president of the Entertainment and Devices Division, Zune will meet the goal of 1.000.000 players sold by the end of June, set at launch.
I've yet to see one this side of the pond, and the statement doesn't say who Microsoft sold them to and and what price. Given they appear to be able to hit the volume just in time for Microsoft's financial year end, how do you spell "write off"? And isn't market share normally measured by what proportion appear to be in the hands of consumers??
Trafficmaster's Smartnav has been routing drivers around traffic jams in the UK for over 4 years. They have roadside sensors on most of the UK road network, and any blockage or slowdown is communicated to all the units using that road on their journey in real time. Given there's a mobile phone in the unit, it can also be used as a stolen car monitoring device as well. Pity the only version needs to be installed in your car - whereas the handheld units have all the market share now.
At least one well known mobile phone based Satnav system here in the UK manages to squeeze the users GPS location into 3 bytes in the caller ID field. So whenever that person calls, you know where they are...
the American billionaire who helped develop Microsoft Word
This is the same guy who started up Microsoft's applications business - so i'm sure Multiplan and Excel have a lot of influence from him too. He was featured in "Programmers at Work" by Susan Lammers years ago. I think the only other guy tat Microsoft o get to the same technical "level" as Simonyi was David N Cutler, who led Windows NT after arriving from Digital (also the lead for RSX-11M, a lot of VAX/VMS, VAX PL/1, the MicroVAX-I and Mica at DEC). Very clever guys... and probably the two technical leads for the two parts of MS that make the most money these days.
It doesn't exactly take brain of texas to work out it's servers where Linux already dominates, so if they want market share, they go for... desktop PCs. Brain transplant please - the survey is far from credible...
If you've banging your head on the ceiling trying to do data analysis on more than 64,000 rows, or if you'd like to sort cells by the colo(u)r of their background, Excel 2007 will be more useful to you. Whether it's worth the cost of the upgrade - well, that's your call.
If by "dominant" you mean less than 6% share and dropping, then yes, SUSE is "dominant" in Europe. Unfortunately Red Hat is 92% share, even this side of the pond - and neither Novell nor Oracle are making the tiniest dent in their figures.
Most of the Novell figures are sleight of hand, bundling SUSE inside Netware (read: OES) and hoping the stock market will confuse units shipped = units being used. Ask for the active subscription figures, and you'll see the real story.
The subtext is that a $100 (or $130, or $170) laptop running Linux with an AMD processor would rapidly undo the business models of some entrenched "interests" in the G7. Maybe it's fud now, or have the possibility it will "leak" into their current volume sales markets. Well, I know i'd buy one (or a couple - my wife would like one with Cath Kidston paintwork if her fingers weren't too big for the keyboard - if it was commercially available here).
I seem to recall Negraponte naming two companies who were p*ssing all over the project. If my memory serves me right, one made microprocessors and the other was in Seattle.
Premium pricing indeed. This side of the pond, Red Hat costs:
AS (4-16 CPU servers), 24/7/365 support, 1 hour response, £1,388/year ($2,636 at todays spot $ rate) AS (4-16 CPU servers), working hours Mon-Fri, 4 hour response, £833/year ($1,582) ES (1-2 CPU servers), working hours Mon-Fri, 4 hour response, £444/year ($843) ES (1-2 CPU servers), 30 days install support then just updates, £195/year ($370)
and those are unlimited incidents, and no CALs for each user (put as many on as you wish with no further charge).
If Oracle were smart, there's nothing stopping them having the billing relationship with the customer and subcontracting back. They could even afford to throw that in free of charge with most Oracle DB licenses without denting their profits too much. That way, customer still get their updates in a timely fashion, and Oracle have no CentOS type infrastructure to set up that (a) costs money and (b) delays the updates.
Still, Oracle are fairly well embedded in large customers at the very top end, and do not have the reach to address Red Hat's base in any significant way. Even MySQL lap the total size of Oracle's installed base twice every day of the week.
It's almost if someone's thrown their rattles out of the pram when Red Hat spurned a "we'll buy you" proposal. If it were true, the clever bit is that Larry managed to get the share price to dip, when most attempted takeovers have the opposite effect!
IBM SWG's chief business issue is that they are hyper-concentrated at the top end - several hundred of their customers account for 90%+ of their revenue. They tell us that this available market is growing circa 2% a year, so the only way to increase market share in that segment is by acquiring other company's technology and customer bases... or by switching to more service orientated business (Business Process Outsourcing or Redesign is growing 100% a year at the moment). Or both.
Same thing is happening for Oracle.
They're also all looking over the fence at Small and Medium sized business, whose IT growth is 9%+ a year. So there's some effort to engage reseller channels to take them down lower, albeit more into the high-end of "M" rather than the "S" in SMB (in this case, Small and Medium size businesses). IBM are trying hard, other enterprise software vendors less so.
So, all part of a general trend at the high end, where you get to embed yourself in business processes that are fairly core to enterprises hooked on spending lots of money. The more interesting things will happen once that consolidation has taken place, and the enterprise vendors really have to try hard to move down market to get growth.
There's a good section in the book "Lean Solutions" by Womack and Jones, that looked at Fujitsu Services UK applying lessons from the Toyota Production System on their call centre business. Instead of measuring # calls handled, # rings, # tickets closed, they ended up persuading clients to compensate them on the number of people who *could* potentially call them... and then set about doing rigourous "root cause" analysis and corrections to stop customers having to call in the first place. The end result being that more customers were satisfied, call volumes dropped dramatically, level of service went way up while the costs plummeted.
Most call centres are still back in "rote stock answers territory", so the life of the end consumer never gets to improve. In the final analysis, it's the fault of the company who decides to outsource in the first place. If they got a statistician or someone who could map out customer value streams, they'd save more costs than outsourcing to the cheapest battery farm - wherever it is located..
More like he made it in front of the parade that Len Kawell started years before at Digital (with Notes 11), then at Iris Associates - all in turn inspired by "The Network Nation" by Hiltz and Turoff - published in 1978). With a little help from Tim Halvorsen too (whose name appeared on the VAX/VMS microfiche as the author of $SHOW DEVICE/FILES in VMS V2). Ray may have contributed, but I think it lousy that he never corrects PR that positions him as the "father" of Lotus Notes.
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That's what Ray Ozzie said. The future is ubiquitous fast connectivity to any device, and speed is king. You don't want to wake up at night, think "must remember to buy some milk" and have to wait for the current generation of smart phones to boot up before you can tap that into your tablet. If Google do it right, client devices will be another market like pocket calculators in the '70's. The value is in the network, and the client devices will lower in cost relentlessly.
It's called HP iPrint. Works fine printing stuff from an iPod Touch to the little Deskjet D1470 hooked up on my iMac at home, so don't think the iPad will have much trouble...
annoyed here in the UK. All the announcements said end of April and they even went as far as blacking out vacation for Apple Store employees here for the weekend around April 23rd. The new pre-order date is May 10th with deliveries at the end of May, when i'll be in San Francisco anyways. At least we should have a firmware update after all the beta users in the USA have helped debug the WiFi issues for us. Ian W.
FWIW, the Queen has the Executive Power. She can choose to dissolve Parliament anytime she chooses. If a Primeminister wants it dissolved, then it's a quick trip down the Mall to ask her permission first.
I know my wife would happily cough up $7 or so per episode just to watch the latest edition of Nip/Tuck or Californication every week. She'd be quite happy if something like Hulu or Amazon allowed her to post her money to the content providers in exchange for this, rather than just buying the DVD set (at the end of each series screening) every time we visit the USA. Wholesale blocking doesn't do the industry any favours.
Didn't Techcrunch allege that Intel charge more for their chip if it's destined to a machine with a 12" laptop rather than A 10" one? Or that it was because the lowest spec Windows 7 distribution only works with screens up to 10" in size, so a 12" one, for cost reasons, would effectively be Linux only??
My mother died of Motor Neurone Disease at age 42. In the end, all the hospital would do was to "run tests" on her. Those appear to be the same words being used on the news bulletins in the UK atm.
I wouldn't wish this condition on my worst enemy.
Ian W.
Red Hat Directory Services over tens of thousands of users... so if you the pay-for-support option, you go to Red Hat, for the bleeding edge, "no paid support but tell us about or contribute bug fixes", go for the Fedora option.
One of my large bank customers has both Windows and UNIX (moving to Linux) active directories, with software from a UK company called Fortefi that syncs changes between the two as soon as either is updated. See http://www.fortefi.com/products/account-provisioning/index.shtml
Ian W.
I recall Scott Oki (International VP of Microsoft at the time) keying meeting notes into one of these things in May 1983 - around the same time Bill Gates was demo'ing a thing called Windows on a Compaq Plus sewing machine to us. Could still use one of these things today... Ian W.
Or you could go ask GNU Solutions or PCMS about how they fitted out one grocery retailer in the UK with an end to end Linux Point of Sale system.
Ian W.
The central crux being that one unit is crashing occasionally (why not ask for a replacement), and the author has a view that the OLPC folks can't take criticism (no examples cited). While I normally hold the Economist in the highest regard, this article is a poor botch job - and not of the quality of journalism that normally occupies their pages. Better to interview a kiddie who's received one and to get a real story - based on them using the software on the machine. The way it liberates the way kids learn is the real story to follow - not "I wanted a cheap replacement for my expensive PC".
That apart, it looks a classic case of a company wanting to be inside the tent pi**ing out, and outside the tent pi**ing in, both at the same time. These things don't normally mix too well...
Ian W.
Nintendo are still advertising the Wii and the DS on TV here - and both are as common as rocking horse droppings. My wife's had to settle for a silver DS after I couldn't get her a pink one. 50 years old and her first console - starting with "Imagine Babies" of all things.
But, hats off to Nintendo. Brilliant execution after everyone had written them off...
Ian W.
... that ringtones often made more money for the companies than the original song itself. Are RIAA members really depriving the artists that supply the content to them to sell? That's quite a broken business model...
Ian W.
I've yet to see one this side of the pond, and the statement doesn't say who Microsoft sold them to and and what price. Given they appear to be able to hit the volume just in time for Microsoft's financial year end, how do you spell "write off"? And isn't market share normally measured by what proportion appear to be in the hands of consumers??
Ian W.
At least one well known mobile phone based Satnav system here in the UK manages to squeeze the users GPS location into 3 bytes in the caller ID field. So whenever that person calls, you know where they are...
This is the same guy who started up Microsoft's applications business - so i'm sure Multiplan and Excel have a lot of influence from him too. He was featured in "Programmers at Work" by Susan Lammers years ago. I think the only other guy tat Microsoft o get to the same technical "level" as Simonyi was David N Cutler, who led Windows NT after arriving from Digital (also the lead for RSX-11M, a lot of VAX/VMS, VAX PL/1, the MicroVAX-I and Mica at DEC). Very clever guys... and probably the two technical leads for the two parts of MS that make the most money these days.
Ian W.
It doesn't exactly take brain of texas to work out it's servers where Linux already dominates, so if they want market share, they go for... desktop PCs. Brain transplant please - the survey is far from credible...
Ian W.
If you've banging your head on the ceiling trying to do data analysis on more than 64,000 rows, or if you'd like to sort cells by the colo(u)r of their background, Excel 2007 will be more useful to you. Whether it's worth the cost of the upgrade - well, that's your call.
If by "dominant" you mean less than 6% share and dropping, then yes, SUSE is "dominant" in Europe. Unfortunately Red Hat is 92% share, even this side of the pond - and neither Novell nor Oracle are making the tiniest dent in their figures. Most of the Novell figures are sleight of hand, bundling SUSE inside Netware (read: OES) and hoping the stock market will confuse units shipped = units being used. Ask for the active subscription figures, and you'll see the real story.
The subtext is that a $100 (or $130, or $170) laptop running Linux with an AMD processor would rapidly undo the business models of some entrenched "interests" in the G7. Maybe it's fud now, or have the possibility it will "leak" into their current volume sales markets. Well, I know i'd buy one (or a couple - my wife would like one with Cath Kidston paintwork if her fingers weren't too big for the keyboard - if it was commercially available here).
I seem to recall Negraponte naming two companies who were p*ssing all over the project. If my memory serves me right, one made microprocessors and the other was in Seattle.
Ian W.
Premium pricing indeed. This side of the pond, Red Hat costs:
AS (4-16 CPU servers), 24/7/365 support, 1 hour response, £1,388/year ($2,636 at todays spot $ rate)
AS (4-16 CPU servers), working hours Mon-Fri, 4 hour response, £833/year ($1,582)
ES (1-2 CPU servers), working hours Mon-Fri, 4 hour response, £444/year ($843)
ES (1-2 CPU servers), 30 days install support then just updates, £195/year ($370)
and those are unlimited incidents, and no CALs for each user (put as many on as you wish with no further charge).
If Oracle were smart, there's nothing stopping them having the billing relationship with the customer and subcontracting back. They could even afford to throw that in free of charge with most Oracle DB licenses without denting their profits too much. That way, customer still get their updates in a timely fashion, and Oracle have no CentOS type infrastructure to set up that (a) costs money and (b) delays the updates.
Still, Oracle are fairly well embedded in large customers at the very top end, and do not have the reach to address Red Hat's base in any significant way. Even MySQL lap the total size of Oracle's installed base twice every day of the week.
It's almost if someone's thrown their rattles out of the pram when Red Hat spurned a "we'll buy you" proposal. If it were true, the clever bit is that Larry managed to get the share price to dip, when most attempted takeovers have the opposite effect!
Ian W.
IBM SWG's chief business issue is that they are hyper-concentrated at the top end - several hundred of their customers account for 90%+ of their revenue. They tell us that this available market is growing circa 2% a year, so the only way to increase market share in that segment is by acquiring other company's technology and customer bases... or by switching to more service orientated business (Business Process Outsourcing or Redesign is growing 100% a year at the moment). Or both.
Same thing is happening for Oracle.
They're also all looking over the fence at Small and Medium sized business, whose IT growth is 9%+ a year. So there's some effort to engage reseller channels to take them down lower, albeit more into the high-end of "M" rather than the "S" in SMB (in this case, Small and Medium size businesses). IBM are trying hard, other enterprise software vendors less so.
So, all part of a general trend at the high end, where you get to embed yourself in business processes that are fairly core to enterprises hooked on spending lots of money. The more interesting things will happen once that consolidation has taken place, and the enterprise vendors really have to try hard to move down market to get growth.
Ian W.
There's a good section in the book "Lean Solutions" by Womack and Jones, that looked at Fujitsu Services UK applying lessons from the Toyota Production System on their call centre business. Instead of measuring # calls handled, # rings, # tickets closed, they ended up persuading clients to compensate them on the number of people who *could* potentially call them... and then set about doing rigourous "root cause" analysis and corrections to stop customers having to call in the first place. The end result being that more customers were satisfied, call volumes dropped dramatically, level of service went way up while the costs plummeted.
Most call centres are still back in "rote stock answers territory", so the life of the end consumer never gets to improve. In the final analysis, it's the fault of the company who decides to outsource in the first place. If they got a statistician or someone who could map out customer value streams, they'd save more costs than outsourcing to the cheapest battery farm - wherever it is located..
Ian W.
Ian W.