When the fat lady sings for the mobile web, is it the end of the Opera Mini?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Android, Cloud, Web browser, Mobile on
We’ve been helping a friend get to grips with mobile browsing on his aging BlackBerry. It’s one that’s old enough that it doesn’t get the new browser that arrived with the Bold, so he’d been using Opera Mini to at least get something that approached a decent browsing experience. Even so he was hitting what I think of as the mobile browsing wall: the mobile web is not the web we get on our desktops.
Our friend uses a lot of online forums, and Opera Mini was starting to show its limitations. Most of the social aspects of the sites were lost as he was redirected to mobile versions of the sites - with drastically cut down user interfaces. The in-cloud reformatting the Opera Mini was doing wasn’t helping, either…
Opera recently sent us a whole pile of statistics about how people are using their Mini browser. The numbers make interesting reading, with impressive numbers of people using the service to view huge numbers of web pages. But if I was running Opera I would be getting very worried about my mobile business indeed…
“Nokia phones continue to be the handsets of preference for Opera Mini users, with Sony Ericsson claiming second place. BlackBerry and Samsung phones are the preference in the United States.”
Nokia is in the process of rolling out a WebKit-based browser, which should bring iPhone class browsing to much of its Symbian platform. Sony Ericsson is enroute to Android, and while its Java-based feature phone platform works well for Opera, new Java-based platforms like Bolt are rolling out that give users access to a much more powerful in-cloud browser, with support for Flash and for Silverlight. BlackBerry will get a significant browser upgrade in the autumn with the release of BlackBerry OS 5.0, and our Windows Mobile in-cloud browser of choice SkyFire is currently testing its own BlackBerry version. Samsung’s own browser is also in the middle of upgrading.
The foundations of the Opera Mini business model are crumbling. What was a story of broken browsers and unsatisfying online experiences is changing into one where high end devices like the iPhone are changing the way users think about mobile browsing - and mobile device manufacturers are having to follow. Opera needs to make a jump that takes its desktop rendering engine into the cloud, rather than the current service.
It’ll be interesting to see if Opera Mini can evolve to deal with the demands of its users.
Oh, and our friend?
He’s now using the beta of Bolt and finding the mobile web a much more desktop-like place.
Rated: 20% (1 votes)
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Chrome OS: what happens when “always connected”, isn’t?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in operating systems, Cloud, Web browser, Wireless, Mobile, Google, Microsoft on
We recently met up with Jon Lilly, Mozilla’s CEO. During our conversation he talked about the philosophical difference between Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. Chrome, he suggested was “A window into the web”, marked by its lack of toolbars and its integration of Google’s web services.
This morning we woke up to the news that Chrome the browser is also the front end to Chrome the OS, a thin Linux kernel with a browser intended for netbooks. It’s not Android, but it shares some key concepts - and will run on Intel and ARM processors. There’s still a lot missing from what Google’s said, and much remains to be revealed when Chrome OS finally arrives on hardware - but part of me is wondering if Google has fallen into what I think of as “The Gilder Trap”.
George Gilder was sort of famous in the early days of the Internet. He wrote a couple of popular economics textbooks, and one of his suggestions was that wired and wireless would swap places. Data would flow through the airwaves, into pocket devices and all manner of mobile computing hardware. After all, in the air bandwidth was essentially free. Sadly he missed a trick or two. Bandwidth may be free, but the hardware needed to support it certainly wasn’t - and the back haul from base stations to the wider network needs to be hefty. Copper and fibre still remain the most bandwidth efficient way of delivering that last mile, and wireless data is really only just starting to get significant traction - and is already starting to creak at the seams, especially in busy city centres, as well as in the country. Even so, people still believe his 1990s words…
You may think the 50:1 contention ratio for your home DSL connection is high, but that’s nothing compared to the connectivity at a central London cellular base station. Your 3G data card may well be connected at 3 or even 7Mbps, but there’s often not more than a 1Mbps SDSL connection from the base station to the net - and you’re sharing that with everyone else. Trying to get email over a 3G dongle can be trial, especially at peak hours.
Now imagine having to do that with a million other people using Chrome OS-powered netbooks.
Sure, many of them will be hooked up to “free” WiFi connections, but don’t expect them to remain free for long when the costs of running the services increase with a sudden massive leap in demand. Cloud services are bandwidth hungry, pushing expensive UI functionality down to local devices. Google’s Chrome OS’s reliance on Google’s online services (even with Gears’ offline web functionality) will fundamentally change the economics of offering wireless services - and not in a good way for the network operators.
Gilder, like many of the proponents of free services, was right to say that the digital world makes many things essentially free to the end user. However, again like many of today’s freevangelists, he was wrong to ignore the costs of infrastructure. Yes, 0.01p is almost zero, but when a hundred million people are using that low cost service, that fraction of a penny quickly adds up into sizable amounts of pounds.
That’s why there’s minimal cellular data service in huge parts of the world, and why travelling on the Tube cuts you off. It’s just too expensive.
We won’t be “always connected” as much as we want to be - especially in the current economic climate. Capital and operating expenses are being slashed across the board, and even giants like Vodafone are looking to buy other networks just to get access to their base stations. Rolling out the network needed for Chrome OS to be everything that Google wants will take time, and will also take truckloads of money.
Always on and always connected are wonderful ideals - but that’s all they are. It took me a long time to realise this, even as I spent years consulting on massive wireless Internet projects. Chrome OS needs free wireless bandwidth, and that’s not something that’s going to happen for a long time - and a massive spike in demand is something that could push it even further away.
I’d like to be wrong. I like Chrome the browser, I like the Chrome OS concept - and I’m especially fond of many of the HTML 5 features that Google is building into its latest applications and services. The web needs an upgrade, and Google is driving that upgrade.
The web isn’t the only thing that needs an upgrade - wireless data networks (as much as Telstra and the like talk about HSPA+ deployments) need a massive amount of work. However I’ve come to know the restrictions of the mobile networks, and the economic realities facing their operators. Without substantial infusions of cash, that upgrade is a long long way off.
It’s a problem that affects us all - not just Google and Chrome OS. We’re being sold a hyper-connected online world where everything’s available 24 hours a day, wherever we are - what we used to call “Martini computing”: any time, any place. What we’re actually getting is wireless networks like AT&T and O2 which are struggling to cope with the minimal demands of iPhone users. How are they going to cope with bandwidth hungry Chrome OS users running their entire lives through online services?
Google could just have fallen into an old, old hype trap.
Google is a company that’s built itself on a basis of abundance - cheap CPU, cheap memory, cheap disk. Mobile operators manage a world of scarcity, and work hard to make sure that things remain scarce and expensive. They’re two diametrically opposed views - and Chrome OS is where they’re going to collide.
The real war isn’t Google vs Microsoft. It’s going to be Google vs the mobile operators. I’m just not sure that Google is going to win.
–Simon
Rated: 82.86% (7 votes)
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Waving, not drowning in email
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Cloud, Web browser, Google, Internet on
It’s not often that you get a standing ovation at a technology conference. That’s what just happened at Google IO here in San Francisco, where a team from Google Australia just finished unveiling Wave.
Wave certainly appears to be an impressive piece of work. Developed by the team that created Google Maps, it’s a radical reworking of the many different tools we use for collaboration - mixing IM and email with document creation and editing. Unlike most online collaboration tools it’s a real time experience - and it all runs in the browser. Communication takes place in “waves”, conversations and information streams tied to groups of online IDs - so each participant can be verified. New arrivals can scrub back through the history of a wave to see just what was said and by who.
Anything you type is echoed in the browsers of all the people you’re working with, as soon as you press each key. There’s no waiting for someone to hit return, everything is there as soon as it’s typed, so you can start your reply at the same time as you’re waiting for the last word to come in. Edits are in real time too, and anyone can edit anyone else’s text.
That last feature is ideal for document collaboration. The Wave user interface supports rich text and images, and there’s very little isolation between user edits. Two or more people can work on the same document just a few characters apart, with no locking at all. If you’ve grown used to the line or paragraph locking of most online collaboration tools you’ll find this an effective - and much faster - way of working. There’s even scope for inline commenting in documents, and as comments are associated with users, moving a document from one wave to another.
Google’s Wave implementation is only one possible Wave. Like Microsoft’s Live Mesh the real secret sauce is in the protocols. Anyone will be able to write a Wave server or a Wave client, and they’ll be able to federate with each other - so my Wave server will be able to work with yours in a (sorry, Ray) big mesh of Wave servers all over the world. The open Wave is an interesting place, and it’s one where there’s going to be a lot of innovation - even if it’s not just the Emacs client that Google demoed in the keynote.
As Google goes on to evangelise Wave with the rest of the industry (after several years of complete secrecy), it’s going to be interesting to see just how much uptake we see. It’d certainly be interesting to be a fly on the wall during the call Vic Gundotra says he’ll be making to Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie…
–Simon
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Infrastructure 2.What?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Software, Cloud, Enterprise, Business, Hardware, Storage, HP on
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
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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On (Private) Cloud Nine
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in operating systems, Cloud, virtualisation, Enterprise, Windows, Microsoft on
Microsoft’s Management Summit isn’t your usual IT conference. It’s a gathering of the unsung heroes of the IT pro world, the system administrators and the system managers who run the networks that keep businesses of all sizes running. They’re here in Las Vegas to understand Microsoft’s server management roadmap, and get training with the latest tools.
It’s a long road from SMS to System Center, but it’s one that Microsoft has been diligently treading for a decade now. What started as a tool for managing updates and software installs is now a complete suite of system management tools, covering everything from data protection to virtualisation to service level agreements to Linux (yes, Linux). It’s now a set of tools that will help run all aspects of a heterogeneous business network, with hardware and software from many different vendors.
One of the underlying themes of this years event is The Cloud. Not just the public cloud of Azure, but the scale-up scale-out elastic business networks that are starting to appear in private data centres. Even though they’re private, the automated, virtualised workloads they host share in many of the features of public cloud services - and they will even migrate from one to the next.
Tools like System Center Virtual Machine Manager and System Center Operations Manager help define just where virtual servers can be placed, and rules and policy can manage live migrations from server to server (if you’re using the next version of Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor) - along with application and storage virtualisation tools.
Bob Kelly, Microsoft VP Server and Tools, drilled down into this in his MMS 2009 keynote, calling the private cloud “Reliable, Predictable, Automated”, which he described as a long term investment for Microsoft as part of its Dynamic IT programme. Clouds are platform as a service, designed to scale up and out, and for reuse. They’re reliable highly available systems built for redundancy - which you need to deliver IT as a service.
One example of this is Hotmail, where server failures are replaced on a monthly schedule (the engineers go round the racks swapping out the boxes with the red lights). There’s no rush to make fixes, the load just moves transparently as soon as a problem occurs - what Kelly calls a “self healing system”, where the network has been automated for cost and reliability, reducing the number of people per server and removing the risk of errors. By building this type of infrastructure you do the work up front, so the network is knowledge-based, model oriented, and you can provide remediation in minutes, not days or hours.
It’s all part of the evolution of IT, from mainframe to client server to web to cloud. There are two models:
- A public cloud - very few companies delivering the data centres for this, so there will only be two or three or four public clouds.
- A private cloud - business enterprises will want the same features as the public cloud for their own data centers.
So how do we get there? Kelly talked about the path to cloud computing, which he said was “Virtualise, automate, deliver.” The most important part of the path is virtualisation, as you can’t do any of the rest without it. Once you’ve virtualised, automate what you can and move to service level management with policy control - and finally make sure the business understands what you’re doing and howto take advantage of it.
Private clouds are here to stay - they’re the new mainframe, only this time built on commodity hardware, general purpose operating systems, and open management standards.
Rated: 20% (1 votes)
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It was 20 years ago today…
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Cloud, People, Web browser, Server, Internet on
Tim Berners-Lee may not have been Sergeant Pepper, but his work at CERN has left the world with a vital and powerful communications tool.
CERN has chosen to mark today to commemorate the approval of the initial project that two years later became the public web. It’s been surprising to think just how quickly the Web became the stuff of everyday life, and the place (the cyberspace?) where millions of us work.
I’ve been using the web since a few days after the first public web server went live, with my first access through a university terminal and a little text browser. It was a year or so later that I sneaked into the old SCO offices in Watford on a Sunday afternoon to be shown the the glowing grey pixels of the first release of the Mosaic browser.
It was only a year or so later that Mary and I wrote a round up of all the web browsers then available. It’s hard to imagine in these days of IE, Mozilla, Chrome and Safari that there more than 20 different browsers - a pre-Cambrian explosion of the Web. Shortly after that I moved to Bath, to help found UK Online, one of the first web-based content services - a direct ancestor of the CMS systems that power IT Pro…
Time flies, and the Web has become all pervasive - on our phones, our TVs, even baked into the hardware in our homes. We work using web-based cloud services, and we shop and talk all across the Web.
So, in a flash of historical perspective, here is a picture of the first web server. It’s Tim Berners-Lee’s original NeXT Cube, now in a case in CERN’s small museum. And the sticker? “Do Not Power Down. This Is A Server.”
–Simon
(In Silicon Valley)
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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ScreenCams made easy (for fun and profit)
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Cloud, visualisation, Applications, Windows on
DEMO09’s consumer focus slid over into the business world in more than one place. We’ve already looked at AppZero’s cloud computing tools - but there was one area of business computing that got quite a lot of attention: the screencam.
Often thought of as a training tool, screencams let you capture what’s on screen - with narration and captions where necessary. There are plenty of screencam tools out there, but they’re expensive and awkward to use. The result is that something that could be a quick and useful collaboration tool is relegated to specialised projects and careful authoring.
Two products unveiled at DEMO are aiming to change all that. The first, Pixetell, lets you quickly voice annotate content that’s sent by email. While its annotations aren’t the full screencam experience, they mean that you can quickly describe what needs to be done to a document or a diagram, without having to spend time writing long involved descriptions.
The second, Citrix’s GoView, is much more the traditional screencam - but this time with built-in sharing. You sign up for the free service, download a small application, and you can quickly capture all your on-screen actions, along with your narration. The resulting movie can be edited online, and then hosted on the GoView service. All you need to do is email or embed a link, and everyone who needs to see the screencam is able to view it in a Flash player.
There’s a lot of scope for this type of tool. Support staff can get a view of just what a user’s doing when a repeatable problem reoccurs, while instructions for a new application can be enhanced with real-world screencams showing just how users can get the most from their new tool. They can even become a tool for sharing results and showing how Excel spreadsheets can be explored.
Bringing screencams out of the training ghetto is an important move. It means that a useful tool is now ready for prime time, and for a much wider class of user. There’s a lot of promise here, and a lot that can be done - and (we suspect) much more than we’ve thought about…
–Simon
Rated: 40% (1 votes)
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D2C - evaporating your data centre
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Cloud, virtualisation, Applications, Storage, Server on
We’ve all heard of P2V - taking a physical server and making it virtual. Now it’s time to start thinking about D2C.
Mary and I have just finished an intense couple of days at the DEMO09 event in Palm Springs, where 39 companies had 6 minutes each to unveil a new product. Most were consumer technologies, but there were a few for the IT Pro readership, with one of the most interesting being AppZero’s.
Getting applications to run in the cloud can be an issue. Most cloud services are proprietary, and where there’s scope for you to build and run your own cloud servers, you’re often limited to working through unwieldy and complex web interfaces. Even Amazon’s AWS isn’t that easy to use.
That’s where AppZero’s tools come into play. They can take an existing set of servers and replicate them straight into Amazon’s cloud. First servers are converted into virtual application appliances - whether Windows, Solaris, or Linux. There’s not much overhead - AppZero claims less than 3% - and once wrapped as a single VAA file it’s easy to move them just anywhere - whether it’s around your data centre or up into the cloud. Instead of configuring applications and operating systems, a move is as simple as a file copy.
There’s a control panel to help manage and set up cloud servers for your application appliances - helping you avoid the hard work in setting up EC2 servers. It’s not perfect yet (the DEMO09 version was a beta), and there’s no way of specifying Amazon’s European servers rather than the US network. However, there’s a lot of promise in the service, taking a Datacenter to the Cloud, making D2C reality.
Something to look out for!
–Simon
(in Palm Springs)
Rated: 20% (1 votes)
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