Perhaps it's because they never learned from their biggest mistake, and appear doomed to continue repeating it?
1. Create market leading products (Apple computer)
2. Make large profits from customers
3. Keep everything to themselves in a tightly closed environment
4. Get steamrolled by more open competition (IBM et al / Microsoft)
5. Start downward spiral towards bankruptcy
So what do they do this time around:
1. Create market leading products (iPhone/iPad)
2. Make large profits from customers
3. Keep everything to themselves in a tightly closed environment
4. Get steamrolled by more open competition (Samsung et al / Google)
5. ???
Perhaps if they went easier on 2 and skipped 3 they wouldn't hit 4 and 5?
Have you ever considered taking a leaf out of Ghandi's book when fighting software patents, and organise something disruptive to the US Patent Office or courts? An Anti-Software-Patent day for example, where software developers send large numbers of humorous software patent applications to overload the Patent office staff for the day?
Are you trying to tell me that a patent titled "Determining and/or using location information in an ad system" is unrelated to it's title? No wonder software patents have a bad name...
Geolocation price information appears to be only a small component of the claims, and is IMO an obvious extension on the idea of location based keyword advertising, particularly as price auctions were already used at the time for regular keyword ads.
So obvious, in fact that IIRC, it's in the source code of the advertising engine mentioned in the papers.
A judge with probably a superficial understanding of software, gets to make a technical decision that contradicts the vast majority of software experts.
It's not a legal decision, its a technical judgment of what really constitutes writing software. Writing software should be treated the same way as writing novels. Certainly imagination is involved, but in the plot, and ideas, and not the process of writing. Think what would happen if the plots of novels could be patented: how soon it would cripple the publishing industry? Publishing houses would prevent other authors from copying their plots. Companies would form just to generate new plots in the hope of suing some successful author whose plot bears a faint resemblance to one of their own.
Actually this scenario bears an uncanny resemblance to the current US software industry, with software patent trolls beginning to grind the industry there to a halt.
So please Judges, don't stray outside your field of competence - just ask some programming experts what they think of software patents!
The authors consider that by MSoft controlling the price of their operating system they can influence the relative demand for linux vs windows and always retain market dominance. This might be true of a market in physical products. The problem with this assumption is that price may not always decide which operating system someone uses. For example, if freedom from data-lockin were to become more important than price for users, then the choice of operating system becomes a binary decision of yes or no, and not a floating point decision of "microsoft have lowered their price so much that I find it attractive to give up my freedom." This is already effectively the case at the moment for a section of the market. Microsoft could not pay many linux users to use windows.
First movers may retain their advantage in a particular market, but it's not much good retaining an advantage in horse driven carriages when cars come along, and it's possible open source software development represents a change of this magnitude. It could be a case of Microsoft retaining their first mover advantage in the market of closed source operating systems, and linux having the "first mover" advantage in open source operating systems market. The open source operating systems market might easily grow to be 99% of the overall operating system market. Microsoft might be driven to open source windows to compete against linux, but it will suffer from being late to the open source OS market.
Do I detect a trace of defensiveness in your tone? That you would like to think Python is gaining ground on Perl but you suspect it might not be? And you are confused as to why this is? Why don't Perl programmers leave their language in droves and convert to your favourite one? Why are slashdot, amazon, citysearch, ticketmaster, et al still using perl on their sites instead of Python for example?
It could be that you misjudge Perl. Like judging a book by its cover, you have failed to see that Perl is perfectly capable of performing powerful tasks with simple, clean, easily maintained code. Perl is a practical language, and while dollar and percentage signs (and brackets) might not win a code beauty contest they provide useful information none the less.
Perhaps while promoting Python's discipline over Perl's freedom of expression you have hit upon the reason for Python's failure?
There are already some sites offering searches of local/off-line/bricks + mortar stores. In the US it's shoplocal.com, cairo.com, stepup.com. In the UK it will soon be askthelocal.com, who are in beta. I guess the major search engines will get on board eventually...
Seeing an image, or map, and using an image or map are two different things in this context. For example as a GIS developer I would love to setup my own mapserver of the UK that lets me zoom in to a street level scale, or geocode addresses automatically, but both these tasks while free in the US are prohibitively expensive in the UK to all except large existing companies.
What this means is that it is very hard for a small GIS startup in the UK to get anywhere - so if you have an innovative GIS idea you go to the states or forget about it.
I think they are doing nothing wrong technically - they are just making a fatal marketing mistake. They should have spotted the fashion trend towards linux and followed it wholeheartedly rather than half-heartedly. They should be saying they are a linux company, and lay much less public emphasis on solaris. This way the media would love them - like it does Novell now - and they can still sell Solaris as their top-end solution, just more quietly.
Every dog has its day, and the media like the latest and greatest bandwagon. However, instead of using the buzzword "linux" for their linux distribution and earning media points, Sun aren't even calling it linux, but calling it the "Java Desktop". Java may have some good associations for some developers, but I suspect it's trendyness may be wearing off. (Unless they "open sourced" it when it might become trendy again.)
It just looks like Sun are at a cross-roads, and are about to take the path towards denial like SCO and Microsoft, rather than the path that the market wants to take. The worst thing about it is they have all the open source technology in place to take the right path, but are still looking to go the wrong way.
Perhaps the more advanced civilizations realise it's a good idea not to be discovered by an even more advanced civilization...
Think about what has happened on our planet whenever a more technologically advanced civilization met a less advanced one - the europeans meeting american indians, aztecs, africans, aboriginal australians, maori, etc, etc.
There's a good parallel in political systems. This would be like saying that a dictatorship is inevitable. Probably it is most convenient early on in a political system, but political systems eventually tend towards more democratic models. (Someone who's read Plato's "Republic" can correct me;-)
I think open source, and it's inherent open standards are a natural evolution, like democracy in politics, that is moving to supplant Microsoft's dictatorship. The dictatorship served its purpose, albeit leaving a few competitors "executed" along the road, but it's time for the new system to come into power.
Of course, dictatorships don't go quietly. Once all that power has vested in a dictator they aren't happy to let it go.
It annoys me hearing all the negative comments about this project.
Projects like this should be supported and encouraged, because Linux should build a reputation as a platform that allows innovation, and features cutting-edge software. Doing something like this in Windows would be a much less certain venture, due to the ultimate lack of control of the operating system environment.
Sure, 3D interfaces are difficult to write well, and it will probably take a while to improve user experience, but so long as this is open source, what's the harm in trying. Instead of developers trying to standardise and emulate the characteristics of Windows, spending time diversifying and creating new trends in Linux plays more to its strengths.
Marketing and competition is all about playing to your strengths, rather than going up against your competitors strengths where you are weak. If linux becomes "the platform where you can experiment with new things", it is already making important inroads among technical audiences.
Real benefit will be search market
on
Microsoft Eyeing AOL?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I suspect the biggest benefit for Microsoft buying AOL will be to compete against Google for search market share. Currently the market is split between Google, MSN and Yahoo. If MSN take AOL's share from Google they might be able to claim a majority of the search market when they launch their upcoming search engine.
However, there's a chance this will be another case of the European Union blocking a merger that American anti-trust law OKs?
There is something those outside the USA can do about this: Mobilemaps is the open source alternative. You will need a little geo experience at this stage to make it work outside of USA/UK, and the map and geocoding data must be available in your country.
This solution was around well before google's - or even their programming competition which introduced this to them. We're looking for active help from developers, and it's a shame slashdot don't consider mentioning us. We'll be launching a collaborative geo-crawler shortly, so there should be plenty to do.
I've been working on an open source web crawler, which is part of Mobilemaps, an open source alternative to Google's new "Search by Location" demo.
The Mobilemaps spider acts like a traditional crawler except that it also locates US/UK street addresses on Web pages.
I'm sure the code can be improved on significantly, but it may be worthwhile looking over. It uses MySQL to store the data. It relies on processes rather than threads because of the old LWP perl library I used. It can be hooked up over multiple machines, but is perhaps too processor intensive in the code that conforms to the robots exclusion standard. We've indexed 10's of millions of pages with it so we've had to work around most of the obscure issues you run into doing spidering.
We would also like to move in the directions you plan, namely collaborative spidering - which makes a lot of sense for a location based search like ours because each search engine only needs their local Web pages indexed on a small machine.
The basic problem with outsourcing is that the best software requires a balance of coding with assessment of the problem, and design of the solution. The closer together all these functions are the better the final product.
If there is a transatlantic link that prevents adequate communication between the people with the problem and the people who are going to solve it, then it's unlikely to be an optimal solution even if it's cheaper.
The best software is written onsite - and we're not even talking in some exclusive IT dept, we're talking right next to where the problem is. If the people who have the problem cannot write the code, the next best solution is having the coder sit right next to them!
Besides, surely the changes you mention with coding becoming easier (particularly with more open source code available to use/reuse) should encourage onsite development, because fewer coders are now required to do the work.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps it's because they never learned from their biggest mistake, and appear doomed to continue repeating it?
1. Create market leading products (Apple computer)
2. Make large profits from customers
3. Keep everything to themselves in a tightly closed environment
4. Get steamrolled by more open competition (IBM et al / Microsoft)
5. Start downward spiral towards bankruptcy
So what do they do this time around:
1. Create market leading products (iPhone/iPad)
2. Make large profits from customers
3. Keep everything to themselves in a tightly closed environment
4. Get steamrolled by more open competition (Samsung et al / Google)
5. ???
Perhaps if they went easier on 2 and skipped 3 they wouldn't hit 4 and 5?
Have you ever considered taking a leaf out of Ghandi's book when fighting software patents, and organise something disruptive to the US Patent Office or courts? An Anti-Software-Patent day for example, where software developers send large numbers of humorous software patent applications to overload the Patent office staff for the day?
Are you trying to tell me that a patent titled "Determining and/or using location information in an ad system" is unrelated to it's title? No wonder software patents have a bad name...
Geolocation price information appears to be only a small component of the claims, and is IMO an obvious extension on the idea of location based keyword advertising, particularly as price auctions were already used at the time for regular keyword ads.
So obvious, in fact that IIRC, it's in the source code of the advertising engine mentioned in the papers.
Here are papers published in 2001 and 2003 describing location advertising in the open source mobilemaps search engine:
.co.uk website.
http://www.directionsmag.com/article.php?article_id=281
http://www.directionsmag.com/article.php?article_id=369
This still has a ghost site up on the net. One of the original authors is contactable at abrahaph at yahoo's
A judge with probably a superficial understanding of software, gets to make a technical decision that contradicts the vast majority of software experts.
It's not a legal decision, its a technical judgment of what really constitutes writing software. Writing software should be treated the same way as writing novels. Certainly imagination is involved, but in the plot, and ideas, and not the process of writing. Think what would happen if the plots of novels could be patented: how soon it would cripple the publishing industry? Publishing houses would prevent other authors from copying their plots. Companies would form just to generate new plots in the hope of suing some successful author whose plot bears a faint resemblance to one of their own.
Actually this scenario bears an uncanny resemblance to the current US software industry, with software patent trolls beginning to grind the industry there to a halt.
So please Judges, don't stray outside your field of competence - just ask some programming experts what they think of software patents!
The authors consider that by MSoft controlling the price of their operating system they can influence the relative demand for linux vs windows and always retain market dominance. This might be true of a market in physical products. The problem with this assumption is that price may not always decide which operating system someone uses. For example, if freedom from data-lockin were to become more important than price for users, then the choice of operating system becomes a binary decision of yes or no, and not a floating point decision of "microsoft have lowered their price so much that I find it attractive to give up my freedom." This is already effectively the case at the moment for a section of the market. Microsoft could not pay many linux users to use windows.
First movers may retain their advantage in a particular market, but it's not much good retaining an advantage in horse driven carriages when cars come along, and it's possible open source software development represents a change of this magnitude. It could be a case of Microsoft retaining their first mover advantage in the market of closed source operating systems, and linux having the "first mover" advantage in open source operating systems market. The open source operating systems market might easily grow to be 99% of the overall operating system market. Microsoft might be driven to open source windows to compete against linux, but it will suffer from being late to the open source OS market.
Do I detect a trace of defensiveness in your tone? That you would like to think Python is gaining ground on Perl but you suspect it might not be? And you are confused as to why this is? Why don't Perl programmers leave their language in droves and convert to your favourite one? Why are slashdot, amazon, citysearch, ticketmaster, et al still using perl on their sites instead of Python for example?
It could be that you misjudge Perl. Like judging a book by its cover, you have failed to see that Perl is perfectly capable of performing powerful tasks with simple, clean, easily maintained code. Perl is a practical language, and while dollar and percentage signs (and brackets) might not win a code beauty contest they provide useful information none the less.
Perhaps while promoting Python's discipline over Perl's freedom of expression you have hit upon the reason for Python's failure?
There are already some sites offering searches of local/off-line/bricks + mortar stores. In the US it's shoplocal.com, cairo.com, stepup.com. In the UK it will soon be askthelocal.com, who are in beta. I guess the major search engines will get on board eventually...
Seeing an image, or map, and using an image or map are two different things in this context. For example as a GIS developer I would love to setup my own mapserver of the UK that lets me zoom in to a street level scale, or geocode addresses automatically, but both these tasks while free in the US are prohibitively expensive in the UK to all except large existing companies.
What this means is that it is very hard for a small GIS startup in the UK to get anywhere - so if you have an innovative GIS idea you go to the states or forget about it.
The answer is simple: forget about 'linux' vs 'windows' talk about a Dutch software vendor vs an American software vendor.
No Dutch linux vendor? Then talk about European vs American, or some entrepreneurial Dutch company can repackage the German SUSE.
I think they are doing nothing wrong technically - they are just making a fatal marketing mistake. They should have spotted the fashion trend towards linux and followed it wholeheartedly rather than half-heartedly. They should be saying they are a linux company, and lay much less public emphasis on solaris. This way the media would love them - like it does Novell now - and they can still sell Solaris as their top-end solution, just more quietly.
Every dog has its day, and the media like the latest and greatest bandwagon. However, instead of using the buzzword "linux" for their linux distribution and earning media points, Sun aren't even calling it linux, but calling it the "Java Desktop". Java may have some good associations for some developers, but I suspect it's trendyness may be wearing off. (Unless they "open sourced" it when it might become trendy again.)
It just looks like Sun are at a cross-roads, and are about to take the path towards denial like SCO and Microsoft, rather than the path that the market wants to take. The worst thing about it is they have all the open source technology in place to take the right path, but are still looking to go the wrong way.
Can they do anything about the bugs they find? Apart from asking Microsoft to fix them, and waiting for the next service pack?
Perhaps the more advanced civilizations realise it's a good idea not to be discovered by an even more advanced civilization...
Think about what has happened on our planet whenever a more technologically advanced civilization met a less advanced one - the europeans meeting american indians, aztecs, africans, aboriginal australians, maori, etc, etc.
RPN
A Fan
Am I
Yoda
There's a good parallel in political systems. This would be like saying that a dictatorship is inevitable. Probably it is most convenient early on in a political system, but political systems eventually tend towards more democratic models. (Someone who's read Plato's "Republic" can correct me ;-)
I think open source, and it's inherent open standards are a natural evolution, like democracy in politics, that is moving to supplant Microsoft's dictatorship. The dictatorship served its purpose, albeit leaving a few competitors "executed" along the road, but it's time for the new system to come into power.
Of course, dictatorships don't go quietly. Once all that power has vested in a dictator they aren't happy to let it go.
Simple: The benefit of knowing that if Sun goes bankrupt, or its assets are purchased by Microsoft, the language will continue to exist.
It annoys me hearing all the negative comments about this project.
Projects like this should be supported and encouraged, because Linux should build a reputation as a platform that allows innovation, and features cutting-edge software. Doing something like this in Windows would be a much less certain venture, due to the ultimate lack of control of the operating system environment.
Sure, 3D interfaces are difficult to write well, and it will probably take a while to improve user experience, but so long as this is open source, what's the harm in trying. Instead of developers trying to standardise and emulate the characteristics of Windows, spending time diversifying and creating new trends in Linux plays more to its strengths.
Marketing and competition is all about playing to your strengths, rather than going up against your competitors strengths where you are weak. If linux becomes "the platform where you can experiment with new things", it is already making important inroads among technical audiences.
I suspect the biggest benefit for Microsoft buying AOL will be to compete against Google for search market share. Currently the market is split between Google, MSN and Yahoo. If MSN take AOL's share from Google they might be able to claim a majority of the search market when they launch their upcoming search engine.
However, there's a chance this will be another case of the European Union blocking a merger that American anti-trust law OKs?
mobilemaps.com the open source alternative.
Philip
There is something those outside the USA can do about this:
Mobilemaps is the open source alternative. You will need a little geo experience at this stage to make it work outside of USA/UK, and the map and geocoding data must be available in your country.
This solution was around well before google's - or even their programming competition which introduced this to them. We're looking for active help from developers, and it's a shame slashdot don't consider mentioning us. We'll be launching a collaborative geo-crawler shortly, so there should be plenty to do.
Philip Abrahamson
Mobilemaps Development Team
I've been working on an open source web crawler, which is part of Mobilemaps, an open source alternative to Google's new "Search by Location" demo.
The Mobilemaps spider acts like a traditional crawler except that it also locates US/UK street addresses on Web pages.
I'm sure the code can be improved on significantly, but it may be worthwhile looking over. It uses MySQL to store the data. It relies on processes rather than threads because of the old LWP perl library I used. It can be hooked up over multiple machines, but is perhaps too processor intensive in the code that conforms to the robots exclusion standard. We've indexed 10's of millions of pages with it so we've had to work around most of the obscure issues you run into doing spidering.
We would also like to move in the directions you plan, namely collaborative spidering - which makes a lot of sense for a location based search like ours because each search engine only needs their local Web pages indexed on a small machine.
Philip Abrahamson
Mobilemaps Development Team
The basic problem with outsourcing is that the best software requires a balance of coding with assessment of the problem, and design of the solution. The closer together all these functions are the better the final product.
If there is a transatlantic link that prevents adequate communication between the people with the problem and the people who are going to solve it, then it's unlikely to be an optimal solution even if it's cheaper.
The best software is written onsite - and we're not even talking in some exclusive IT dept, we're talking right next to where the problem is. If the people who have the problem cannot write the code, the next best solution is having the coder sit right next to them!
Besides, surely the changes you mention with coding becoming easier (particularly with more open source code available to use/reuse) should encourage onsite development, because fewer coders are now required to do the work.
It's open source - you are welcome to do better than that.
I've posted below, but in case it's lost in the noise, here's another one - open source search, open source biz plan:
Mobilemaps.com
It's a location search rather than a traditional search, and the demo is of California. Some commentary from Search Engine Watch is here.
The biz plan is geotargeted advertising - articles on it published here , and here.
Here's one - open source search, open source biz plan:
Mobilemaps.com
It's a location search rather than a traditional search, and the demo is of California. Some commentary from Search Engine Watch is here.
The biz plan is geotargeted advertising - articles on it published here , and here.