Have Google and Microsoft swapped places? Are Microsoft and Adobe going to race each other to open source key technologies as Google gets bogged down by antitrust investigations over Google Books? Not really – but Google is in line for some antitrust grief.

Welcome as the open source announcements this week are, don’t read the wrong things into them. This isn’t religion.

Adobe doesn’t want to open source Flash; it’s a huge business for them. They want phone manufacturers to pay to put Flash on mobile; but Apple said no and Mozilla and Google said ‘video on HTML 5, in Android and Fennec’. Adobe’s response was the Open Screen Project, starting with getting the chip vendors to support Flash and offering a ‘pre-integrated’ version of the Flash run-time. Taking it down to the chip level isn’t just about the multimedia support; it means that none of the hardware guys will want to miss out on a feature their competitors are going to have.

Adobe is swapping licence revenues on phones for ubiquity on phones; as Adobe’s Zeke Koch puts it “now you can have it for free - in return you have to make it open.” That’s open as in ‘Adobe gets to check it’ rather than open as in source. And it means users don’t go off Flash because of shoddy implementation, Flash stays in demand and Adobe can make money on the Flash development tools – and get in a few digs at anyone who doesn’t support Flash as not being open.

And while releasing Linux drivers under the GPL is a good thing both for Hyper-V and anyone who is fed up with the religious debates over operating systems and licence philosophies and Microsoft deserves credit for working through the problems, it’s possible Microsoft didn’t originally plan to release its drivers under the GPL. Supporting Linux in enlightened mode on Hyper-V is crucial; without it VMware can boast better support for more server OS’s. But according to a blogger who calls himself Linux Network Plumber, in the first version “the driver had both open-source components which were under GPL, and statically linked to several binary parts. The GPL does not permit mixing of closed and open source parts, so this was an obvious violation of the license.”

And actually, the most credit here goes to the anonymous Plumber who, rather than “creating noise” (and you can imagine the noise if Microsoft had been accused of violating the GPL) contacted Novell to find the right person to approach at Microsoft. Result: less of a news story, more of an actual result, grown-up behaviour all round.

As for Google, the EU has a hearing on Google’s acquisition on publishing rights scheduled for September 7th (expect the estate of George Orwell to have an opinion); the House Judiciary Committee might meet sooner than that. Google brushes both off as ‘fact finding exercises’ but Christine Varney  predicts “a repeat of Microsoft”. As the attorney who got Netscape’s case all the way to the anti-trust settlement, she should know.
-Mary

No-one has made a business out of Web 2.0 - not in the traditional sense of business success, the IPO. Nearly $30 billion has gone into Web 2.0 startups since 2001; why haven’t we seen a business success there? Mozilla CEO John Lilly thinks we’re looking for the wrong things and asking the wrong questions about what it means for a business to succeed today.

“I would say this is one of the questions of our time,” he told us; “like what does it mean to have a career, what does it mean to do meaningful work?” He’d count Mozilla as a success; they might be fish out of water” at big-name events like Google IO and All Things Digital (where he says “we were the only non profit that went up on stage”) but that’s not the important thing. “For Mozilla, we made the decisions be a public benefit because we thought the Web was too important to leave just to purely commercial interests. We created what’s effectively a hybrid company; we compete in the market but we have this non profit mission and I think we’re pretty successful by any measure other than our revenues. ”

Mozilla Labs is probably unique; Lilly doesn’t expect exactly the same model to work for any other company, but there are plenty of opportunities, even in this financial climate. “I believe there will be more companies that start on less money and require less cash flow to be successful. I believe you’ll see those. Craigslist is one of them.”  Anyone else? Yes, he says. “OpenTable went up and did IPO. Craigslist is a going concern; they’re dominant and being incredibly influential. Facebook is minting money. In China you’ve got Tencent QQ. You’ve got any number of companies that have changed the world and are making reasonable cash flow.”

But what about the big success that all the venture capitalists were hoping for, with those $30 billion. That’s a coded question, he says, and what thinks it really means is “Will we see another Google or Microsoft? Well, we hadn’t seen another Microsoft till we saw Google. Microsoft emerged and got giant in the mid 80s; Google emerged and got giant in the mid 2000s. Before that, I’m not sure what you look at before Microsoft, maybe Data General or maybe DEC but it’s probably in the 60s or the 50s. These are once-a-generation companies. Asking ‘where the hell is the next Google, why hasn’t it shown up yet?’, I think, is premature.”
-Mary

It’s probably about buying market share and reducing the competition that drives down prices, but there’s a new problem for mobile operators to think about these days - bandwidth and backhaul.

No matter how fast the 3G chipset in your mobile phone, you’re not getting on the Internet at that speed; you might have 3, 7 or 14Mbps between your phone and the base station but that base station is connected into the net at the same DSL speed as your home broadband. And you’re sharing that with everyone else  connected to that base station; say the 50 people in the same mile radius on the same network. Wimax and LTE promise speeds of 80-100Mbps; that means backhaul will have to get much faster and wider - according to a recent In-Stat report, backhaul capacity has to triple by 2013 to a worldwide total of 90,000Gbps to match demand. To get faster speeds needs faster physical  connections; faster DSL, expensive fibre optic cable or laser links. And that costs money…

Vodafone and T-Mobile both use BT for backhaul. Last year Vodafone started rolling out Tellabs’s Ethernet-based backhaul to replace the legacy voice network it was previously built on top of (getting an IP network for next-generation services at the same time);or rather BT is doing it for them (it’s all part of the ’21st Century Network’). O2 is taking the same service, and T-Mobile had signed up for it a year before that. Currently the system promises to deliver up to 60Mbps (a big improvement on the 2Mbps at most base stations). If T-Mobile is further along with the rollout, buying them could give Vodafone better bandwidth faster - and in the long run that could be worth as much as buying market share.

T-Mobile users might want to cross their fingers that the deal goes through (which is far from certain). Coverage and the weather and device configuration and the number of other people around and whole bunch of other variables make it hard to compare networks precisely, but of all the networks I test phones with Vodafone consistently gives me the best connection and coverage.
-Mary

The ’screaming deals’ Microsoft is claiming for Windows 7 are causing a certain amount of screaming - from people upset that they don’t get a pre-order upgrade price for Ultimate. That’s probably because Microsoft thinks of Ultimate as a ‘niche’ version; I’m not sure that disk encryption should still be thought of as niche, but if they did include it in all versions, that would be something else the EU would suggest might be an abuse of the dominant position of Windows, the way it’s complained about the inclusion of Internet Explorer.

Microsoft’s response to the EU is to take IE 8 out of Windows 7 in Europe. That means ‘upgrade’ versions for end users are clean install versions at upgrade price (with limits on not moving them onto a new machine).  The complaints for this will be aimed at the EU and Microsoft, with a few brickbats for Opera for causing all this trouble in the first place. The end result will be (we predict) a lot of people buying Windows 7 online from the US to save the trouble of re-installing all their apps, and a lot of small businesses deciding that as you can buy the Enterprise version of Windows 7 through Software Assurance for as few as five users, it’s time to switch to volume licensing - because SA versions of Windows 7 will allow in-place upgrades, on the grounds that when you have SA, you build an image with the components you want and if you don’t want IE you don’t put it in, so it was never forced on you and you don’t have to be given the choice. Microsoft is happy to use consumers for a game of brinkmanship with the EU over browser choice; businesses who mandate IE for internal use because they don’t want to rebuild line of business apps are too important to them for that.

What about the battle that really matters - what browser goes on new PCs? That’s up to the OEMs and they don’t care as much about choice as they do about cold hard cash, which is bad news for Opera again. Why so?

Well, OEMs have several browser choices. There’s the devil you know, the devil your customers know and the easy option - Internet Explorer and the Live Essentials (including the really rather good Windows Live Photo Gallery). Expect Dell and perhaps HP to offer this, along with a number of smaller ‘just hand me the CD’ OEMs.

There’s ‘we have a pot of cash and we’re going to use it’ Google; expect to see the Mountain View boys to pay to put their only-as-popular as Firefox 2 browser, Chrome onto the best selling version of Windows ever. There’s ‘would you like a nice deal bundling iTunes on your home PCs?’ Apple with Safari (currently neck and neck with Chrome). Firefox is free, which always appeals. And then there’s this little company in Norway that would like the OEMs to pay them money to put a copy of their Opera browser on new PCs. Sounds like Opera’s attempt to get more market share is going to backfire on them.

Taking a step back, do Europeans really need to have browser choice forced on them, at the expense of easy upgrades? Not according to the latest figures.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Browser Market Share - click through to see share by browser version

IE has more market share than Firefox in Europe - barely - if you group together all the versions of IE. IE 6 is slightly more popular than IE 8 (oddly - perhaps it’s all those IE 6 LOB apps). But the hand-down winner at nearly 36% is - Firefox. Perhaps Opera should complain to the EU about the Mozilla foundation?
-Mary

We live in an industry driven by the Darwinian evolution of buzzwords. Many start down the memestream to mainstream acceptance, but most die along the way. Some are weeded out early, others struggle to survive in the fringes of the blogosphere. It’s interesting to watch evolution in process.

One of the terms that’s making its way through that great filter is Infrastructure 2.0. It’s still struggling to drive the agenda, but it managed to make its way onto the schedule for last week’s Future In Review conference in San Diego. The question was still “Just what is it?”, and there were interesting definitions from all parts of the industry.

Mark Hurd, HP’s CEO, was quite clear in his thinking, noting that POCs, servers, storage and network hardware were all converging on the same basic set of components. The only thing that would differentiate them was the software, saving money and making it easier to maintain an infrastructure. That’s certainly an important piece of the Infrastructure 2.0 jigsaw, but it’s still only a small part of the picture.

Amazon’s AWS, VMware’s VSphere and Microsoft’s Azure are another piece. They’re attempts to build a univeral operating system for cloud and virtualised workloads, where workload migrates to and from on premise datacenters - making them what Amazon CTO Werner Vogel calls “more elastic”. The mix of in-cloud and on-premise is key to the flexibility that businesses need, but it’s also a new complexity that needs a lot of management, and deeper consideration of just where your data is at all times.
Here’s a scary thought: Infrastructure 2.0: it’s 12 am. Do you know where your data is?

Data protection regulations aren’t ready for data that flows to where the workload is - and those workloads need to be geolocked, able to keep information inside the appropriate data protection regime.

Then there’s the thorny question of user interface.

Is a PC screen what the next generation of applications and services need? There’s a lot to be said for the traditional application, mixing rich data and rich display. Tom Malloy’s research group at Adobe is looking at next generation run times that can speed up cross platform rich internet applications. Tools like Adobe’s AIR and Microsoft Silverlight simplify user interface development, and bring Web 2.0 user experiences to the desktop.

Perhaps the most telling piece of the puzzle was one simple phrase: “We need to stop treating IT pros like Victorian file clerks”. It’s a statement that hit home - we do treat our IT pros as glorified clerks, waiting for them to do things by rote. What we really need is an automated infrastructure that flexibly configures itself to deal with the tools, applications and workloads we need to use every day.

Pull apart all the different definitions from all the vendors out there and that’s what Infrastructure 2.0 boils down to. It’s a world we really need to build - if only to show the world just what value IT really brings to business.

–Simon

Is it really just a buzzword? Since 2001, the venture capitalists who fund start-up businesses have invested $29 billion in Web 2.0 companies, but there hasn’t been a single company in the sector that’s been successful enough to have an IPO and become a rich, successful company (and pay back the VC investors). Even if you want to push the definition of Web 2.0 to include Skype, they got their investment in 1998.

In fact, talking at the Future in Review conference this week, Seattle VC Rick LeFaivre of OVP Venture Partners says only 15% of venture funds have made money since 2001.  “VC as we know it is over”, says Jeb Terry of Aberdeen Investment Management and the US has some hard lessons to learn. Engineers and developers who used to train in the US and start companies in the US now go back to China or Japan and set up there. US companies and products aren’t always setting the standards for the rest of the world either, he says; “The idea that if you won here you could be successful elsewhere is no longer true. You have to think about the rest of the world.”

For Australian companies, the US used to be 65% of the global market; Roger Buckeridge of Australian VC Allen & Buckeridge says it’s down to 30-40%. And start-ups in other countries get more support - from government or other programmes - than new US companies. “Everyone is trying to solve the same problems all around the world and in other countries they’re helping far more than we are helping,” says Michael Pfeffer of Kolohala Ventures in Hawaii. “How much time does a start-up spend fund raising? Five, six months out of the year? If there’s some guy in Israel working on the same problem and all he’s doing is building value in his company, you’re at a disadvantage.  We all have to think globally now.”

If investors don’t get a return from start-ups, they’ll stop putting money in and we’ll stop seeing new companies and new products. The venture capital business has made so much money it’s not going to stop overnight, but it is going to change. The VCs are going to be more involved in fewer companies, for a longer time.  Expect more tools to come from start-ups in countries other than the US as well.
-Mary

What’s the difference between a hacker, a security expert and someone looking for a job? Hackers play around with systems, find vulnerabilites and exploit them - for fun, fame, or profit. Security experts play around with systems, find vulnerabilites and report them to the vendor - which occasionally brings fame or profit. Both methods improve the system in question, but exploiting vulnerabilities instead of reporting them - even exploiting them to get vendors to pay attention - puts users at risk. You might be doing it for the best of reasons, but someone less altruistic now knows how to attack the system. Proving that you can get past security on live systems looks good on the CV, but what about the ramifications?

Twitter has had more than its share of attacks recently, many of them pure social engineering (was Jack Straw really stranded with no better way of asking for help?), others the good old virus-disguised-as-video. The 17-year old behind last weekend’s StalkDaily and Mikeyy worms turned his hacking into a job application and has been picked up by a Web development and hosting provider in the US, who presumably value the combination of tech ability and publicity nose more than any moral issues about whether recruiting black hat hackers quite so openly is a good idea. The spate of public messages the CEO has fired off to the founder of Twitter are a combination of disingenuous defence and more publicity seeking: “hope u understand Mikeyy did u favor and could have compromised personal information,” he says. Some favour…

Security companies have always hired hackers; usually white hat hackers who stuck to penetration testing and notification. Some black hats grow up and turn responsible. Frank Abergnale - whose story is far more interesting that the film (Catch Me If You Can) - went to the FBI; after his sentence and because he wanted to. Kevin Mitnick didn’t take consulting gigs until after he came out of jail.

Mikeyy (to whom I’d like to suggest that naming malware after yourself isn’t the way to stay undetected) has a new job. His new employers have plenty of publicity. And everyone who uses Twitter has to hope that the service patched all the holes he found so that someone looking for more immediate rewards can’t use them.
-Mary

 Says the man who never pays for his own phone. It’s very easy as technology commentators  to say that an open technology market is always best. We see new devices and services that we’d like to use and we think users will want too and then we see the mobile operators more as a barrier to get past than as an enabler, dictating what devices people can use, how they connect and what you can do with them.

A lot of that negative opinion is the networks’ own fault: the way to avoid becoming a big dumb bit-pipe is to offer smart services, not to try and control everything and lock users into the walled garden of your branded portal. But the fact is that the mobile network has to support everyone, not just the enthusiasts who are happy to pay for features. Without subsidised handsets, we’d have a lot less innovation because far fewer people would buy the latest and greatest phones.

The iPhone broke out of the enthusiast market to make mainstream users care about being able to put applications onto their phone. But when Mossberg interviewed Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer and AT&T’s CEO Ralph de la Vega, the man who brought out the iPhone first, at the Mobile World Congress this week, Vega told Mossberg he doesn’t want apps to stay on the iPhone. Not unnaturally, because AT&T sells a lot of other phones, he wants cross-platform applications that use standard APIs (like the OMTP BONDI proposal) to access resources on the operator network “in a standard and secure way”.

It’s not that AT&T has got the open religion (it’s likely they’re one of the reasons you don’t get many VOIP clients or turn-by-turn navigation systems on the iPhone). It’s lucrative business accounts he cares about: “I came back from meeting our top customers and CIOs and what I’ve said is almost word for word. They told me they were tired of trying to get apps to work across BlackBerry and iPhone and Windows Mobile and other platforms.”Me too.

Given that we’re getting more and more operating systems and platforms rather than fewer (you can add Android and Palm Web OS to the list since the last time operators hinted that they’d like less work to do rather than more), Vega doesn’t cherish the pointless hope of a single application platform on all phones. He think that a lot of phone applications can be front ends to the Web - and a network is pretty happy if you can only use your applications if you’re using the data network (and before you say offline sync, remember the sync part of that means going back online later).

Steve Ballmer understands this (rather better than Mossbeg seemed to); he pointed out that “The Internet is at the back end of all these apps. It’s not like most of these are actually applications: most of these are really front ends to the web site and doing that is easier because the interoperability comes from the Web site itself, from Facebook or whatever.” Count the My Phone service in that camp; it only runs on Windows Mobile (sorry, Windows phones) and backs them up, but once your data is up there an app running on another phone could easily work with it.

My main complaint about My Phone isn’t that there are other sync services already (some cost money, some chew battery, some use a Flash UI on the Web site that hangs and while I don’t expect any of them to fail suddenly, one thing you can say about Microsoft is that it’s going to be around long enough to be a safe place to keep a backup). It’s that you’re limited to 200MB, when I can buy an 8GB microSD card for about a tenner. I went around calling Microsoft inexplicably mean for a while, until someone on the My Phone team said the limit was to keep the operators happy: another theme of this week was how many services are springing up to do bandwidth shaping and user data capping and having 5GB of backup streaming to my new phone could be enough for them to tell handset manufacturers to leave the client off their phones.

There are issues with apps that are just alternatives to firing up a browser (talking of which, if you’re using the Skyfire browser on Windows Mobile, get the updated version: I’m finding it faster and more stable). Certifying that those apps - and the sites behind them - are legal, decent, honest and truthful is an ongoing issue (because you’re going to holler to the operator if the to-do list site you found in their application store turns into an adult portal overnight), but the smarter operators are already thinking about how to keep tabs on that. You can’t yet submit a URL to O2 Litmus, but it’s on the cards.

Litmus is one of the smarter mobile developer programmes. It’s not just another app store (and I have my reservations about how many of those we actually need and from whom); it’s a way of turning enthusiastic O2 customers into beta testers. It’s O2 using what they know about their customers and their network to help developers create better apps. And that’s not very Soviet at all…

-Mary

Almost everyone believes there should only be two or three versions of Windows; no two people agree on which two or three versions those should be (to paraphrase Brandon Le Blanc over at the Windows Team Blog).

With the SKU list for Windows 7, as Simon pointed out, any one person will only ever see two or three versions. If you’re a home user you’ll see Home Premium (and wonder what’s premium about it), Starter if you’re looking at the cheapest of netbooks and Ultimate if you look at really over-powered gaming rigs. If you’re a business user you’ll see Professional or Enterprise, depending on the size of company. It’s Windows Me and Windows 2000 all over again. So no, there aren’t too many versions of Windows 7; there are the number almost everyone thinks we should have.

But regardless of whether these specific versions are the right ones for users (I think they probably are, although I still see people calling for Windows Home Runs On All My PCs For The Same Low Low Price, Windows Poor Student, Windows Actually-Poor Teacher, Windows Small Business Because I Don’t Realise That’s What Professional Is, Windows Componentization Because That’s My Theory For ‘Fixing’ Windows and a few others); does it make sense for Microsoft to continue to have more than one version of Windows?

Don’t tell me there should be one version of Windows because there’s one version of OS X. There’s one version of OS X because there aren’t enough business features to need a separate business version.

It is a good thing to have a cheaper version of Windows that doesn’t have business features home users don’t need like joining a domain. It’s a good thing to have irrelevant options, like joining a domain, totally removed from home versions so no one turns them on by accident (or by following a tweaking guide that promises to fix things that weren’t broken in the first place). It’s good to be able to upgrade from Starter to Ultimate when you realise that not being able to use an external monitor with your netbook is annoying, or from Home Premium to Ultimate if you want to use BitLocker (which I still think should be in Windows 7 Professional). It’s good for businesses who buy Microsoft software year in year out to get a loyalty bonus with SA and Enterprise. But does Microsoft make enough money out of the different licences to make all the hard work make business sense?

There’s the management time to decide what’s in the different SKUs, explain to everyone, explain it a couple more times and justify it a whole bunch more times. There’s the programmer time to mark each feature for each build, and the regression testing to make sure each SKU of features works properly together. I’m willing to assume, given the high bar the Windows 7 pre-beta and beta have set that we’re not going to have a backup interface that offers me features that won’t work in my version, for instance.

There’s also the cost of the encryption system that protects all the features that aren’t in the SKU I’ve bought, because they’re all on the hard disk whichever SKU you install (so no, having different SKUs doesn’t save me disk space on features I’ll never use. And given that Windows 7 handily unloads services I’m not using any more and reloads them as needed, I wouldn’t be wasting memory or cpu cycles on them either). There’s the legal costs of pursuing people who have a go at cracking that encryption. There’s pressing DVDs with two labels and printing two sets of boxes and retailers managing two areas of shelf space….

I asked Laurence Painell, the UK Windows marketing manager who deals with OEMs. His answer is that Microsoft doesn’t discuss those kind of commercial questions and that the same protection system is used for Office-ready PCs where you don’t have to install Office for all your users, you can just distribute the keys and it appears as if by magic, so it’s not all on the Windows balance sheet. 

Either the OEMs and customers want multiple versions of Windows enough that all these costs are worth it, or having different SKUs turns out to make Microsoft more money than having one version. I rather suspect it’s the former. I just hope I’m not going to be looking at too many netbooks with Windows 7 Starter on next year, because I’ll be upgrading them straight away…
Mary

Thinking about a netbook as a last-minute stocking filler for yourself? There are some very usable netbooks now, especially the Dell Mini 9 and the new Lenovo. But they’re still cheap and cheerful personal machines with consumer features, and many of them look it.

In an ideal world, the ultraportable you want for business needs a few more features. A fingerprint sensor and Vista with BitLocker encryption would be a good start, along with a keyboard you can actually type full documents and emails on. A battery that lasts a full day saves you starting every meeting by looking for a power socket. Built-in 3G is more efficient, giving you better bandwidth and using less power than a USB dongle. And while looks aren’t everything, it doesn’t hurt to carry something stylish that marks you out as a success. Many of the netbooks on the market have basic looks to match their basic price and basic features. Customers and partners will want to take a look at a netbook and may be impressed by how much you can get done on it despite the limitations, but they can go away with the impression that you can’t afford anything better.
 
You certainly won’t give that impression with the unfeasibly light Toshiba R600 or the slim, sleek Sony TT. At the launch, the Chinese  artist commissioned to produce signature chops for the journalists at the launch kept saying. TT. Like the Audi? That’s not a bad impression to leave people with.
 
After Steven Sinofsky flashed a Lenovo S10 around on stage at the Windows 7 announcement at PDC, Mike Nash did a little repositioning of the Windows 7 netbook story, telling a story about visiting a big-box store where the 20-year-old assistant insisted that the only people buying netbooks were “really old people!” Really old people? How old? “Old! 40 or 45!”

Leaving aside the way anyone over 21 looks old from a certain angle - like the New Yorker map of the world, where anything outside Manhattan might as well be in Australia - and whether white plastic looks more like a child’s toy than black metal, the real question is what can you achieve on a cheap machine. Hardly anyone wants a PC just for Web browsing, especially now the iPhone and the BlackBerry Bold and even Windows Mobile with Skyfire (http://get.skyfire.com) mean you can see real Web pages on a phone. There’s the ‘familiar applications from Windows’/'any application that does something similar so Linux is fine’ debate. And there’s can I run the applications I want, fast enough to do something useful and with enough battery life to make it worth carrying a netbook with me. Three hours doesn’t cut it for me, I want to be able to run five Office applications and a Web development tool, and I want a fingerprint sensor and a TPM while I’m at it.

It’s like the HTC Advantage, which I still think of as the first Mobile Internet Device by Intel’s definition; as soon as the screen was big enough and the processor fast enough I wanted all my usual PC applications instead of the cut-down Windows Mobile equivalents. I prefer Office to Google Docs because I like features like document reviewing and AutoCorrect and colour conditional formatting to show values visually as well as numerically. And I’d rather have an ultraportable than a cheaper netbook, because it does more. It’s nice if it looks as good as the Sony TT, but the Toshiba Portégé R600 isn’t any prettier than a netbook; but it is the thinnest, lightest machine I’ve ever picked up, which also has a DVD drive. Just as Apple products are undeniably desirable on a visceral level, netbooks are a hard to resist combination of cheap and cute. But if they don’t do what you really need, they’re no bargain.

-Mary