Category: Business

Some are more equal than others

Android developers are less than pleased with the management of Google’s Android platform:

Google vowed that its Linux-based Android mobile platform would empower enthusiasts and amateur developers, but today we have seen compelling evidence that this is an empty promise. Third-party Android application developers, who have grown increasingly frustrated with the lack of SDK updates, were shocked to discover that Google has been secretly making new versions of the Android SDK available to the Android Developer Challenge (ADC) finalists under non-disclosure agreements.

Perhaps it was an inadvertent error.

Non-merger Fallout

According to the Merc:

Yahoo faced a shareholders’ rebellion Monday as the stock market punished the pioneering Internet company for its weekend rejection of Microsoft’s $47.5 billion bid.

I’m thinking about buying some Yahoo! stock just to vote against Jerry Yang. It looks to me like the dude screwed his shareholders to hang onto his job. What exactly does Yahoo! do that everybody else in the world doesn’t do better?

Google falling

The inability to retain key employees is the first clear sign of company in decline, so this news has to be disturbing to Google shareholders:

Facebook hires away Google’s top chef

Is it “poaching” when a company steals a rival’s chef? At Google, executive chef Josef Desimone scrambled cruelty-free eggs by the truckload. Now Facebook has hired him to replace steam-heated trays of takeout with the kind of free food Googlers are used to. For engineers, Facebook is the new dreamland, and a company cafeteria is the kind of perk they’ve come to expect.

The end is near for the search monopoly.

Bad Time for Silicon Valley IPOs

This can’t be good:

Brenon Daly, who tracks IPOs and mergers in the technology and telecom industries for the 451 Group in San Francisco, said both the avenues VCs use to achieve liquidity have been drying up for months.

“The IPO market is dead,” Daly said flatly. Acquisitions had been strong through 2007, when big firms spent $476 billion to buy 3,559 smaller firms in Daly’s market, but a good chunk of that activity was buyouts by private-equity firms like the flailing Carlyle Group, now caught in the credit crunch. So that means fewer M&A buyers in 2008, he said.

Having recently left one privately-held firm for another, this is the last thing I wanted to hear, but facts are facts and we all have to face them. It’s a damn shame that the crisis in the mortgage markets would reach out and smack down promising high tech IPOs, but it has.

The coming bumper-crop of news

My old blogger buddy Jeff Jarvis is trying to figure out what’s happening to the news, and how to inject a little optimism into the business:

This Friday, I’m giving a keynote at the University of Texas International Symposium on Online Journalism. My topic: “The end of the mourning, mewling, and moaning about the future of journalism: Why I’m a cock-eyed optimist about news.” I’d like your help. Tell me why you’re optimistic about news: what we can do now that we couldn’t do before, where you see growth, where you see new opportunities. (I’ll put the spiel up as soon as I figure out how to export Keynote with my notes.)

Here’s what I’d tell the children:

The good news about the news is that there’s no shortage of news. The best experts forecast a nearly boundless supply of news clear into the next century, so the news conservation efforts of the past (recycling, echo-chambering, and other forms of plagiarism) are no longer necessary and will phase out as soon as we have the means to harvest the coming bumper-crop of news.

And things aren’t just rosy on the supply side, they’re looking real good on the demand side. Previous generations of news consumers had to get by on two newsfeeds a day, one before work in the morning and the other after work. Now we can graze and forage on news all day long without becoming over-educated.

The challenge to news harvesters is in the construction of the apparatus that harvests raw news, processes it, and takes it to market. In previous generations, this process was most efficient when centralized in local news factories, but today and tomorrow the process will become more decentralized, sometimes even taking place on consumer premises under the control of news robots which sift, sort, organize, and filter according to consumer preferences. The process of moving these functions from central offices to consumer equipment is just beginning, although we’ve had working prototypes of the news robot for 25 years.

The revenue picture has never been brighter, as each feed is easily supported by multiple sources of ad and subscriber fees.

The key elements are understanding that decentralization is in fact multiple centralization, and that each center of news processing is a potential revenue generator. That’s all I wish to say at the moment, but you can do the math.

And Hook ‘Em.

Until they’re old enough to drive

I’ve always wondered how the Google kids get to work, and now I have my answer:

Google is improving its green credentials by offering all of its employees a free bike to ride to work.

The bikes, manufactured by Raleigh Europe, will be offered to around 2,000 permanent employees of the search engine giant in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. All of the bikes – plus free helmets – will be branded with the Google name.

Holger Meyer, Germany’s first Google employee, came up with the idea and staff will be able to choose from a range of models including a “cool cruiser” – a folding bike for those that only make part of their trip to work under pedal power – and men’s and women’s hybrids.

I hope the bike giveaway isn’t so exciting that it cuts into nap time.

Aruba’s nervous breakdown

It’s come to our attention that Aruba Networks, the wireless LAN company that recently filed for an IPO, is terrified by the new architecture of the Trapeze wireless LAN system. To summarize the issues, Trapeze and Aruba both build enterprise-class wireless switches, consisting in both cases of wireless Access Points and back-end Ethernet switches. Both systems present a control point on the Ethernet side, and both switch traffic between the wire and the air.

But the new Trapeze architecture has a wrinkle that makes it much faster, more resilient, and more scalable than the Aruba system: local switching. In the Aruba system, all traffic originating on the air has to go back to a Big Ethernet switch before it can be decrypted and delivered to its final destination. But the Trapeze system, with local switching enabled, makes forwarding decisions at the edge of the wired network, not in a big switch that can become a traffic bottleneck.

Hence the Trapeze system can handle larger numbers of users with lower latency with no loss of management flexibility: you manage it as if it were a Big Fat Switch system, and it right-sizes its forwarding functions according to traffic needs, not the blinders of a mediocre group of system architects.

This has Aruba running scared, so they’re in full FUD mode as the e-mail below indicates. I’ve interspersed the Aruba message with a fisking from Trapeze.

Enjoy.

From: Alan Emory [mailto:[email protected]]
Subject: Trapeze Takes A Step Back – Selling Fat APs

We need to start with the subject of the message. Trapeze actually has taken a big step forward by combining the best of fat and thin APs in a single comprehensive solution. Aruba and Cisco force you to make a choice…one size fits all. Only Trapeze allows you to use the right tool for the right environment. It is very important to note that the customer can run the entire Trapeze system in a completely thin, centralized way if they so choose. Smart Mobile provides more flexibility in case that isn’t the right answer for your environment. Aruba? If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Continue reading “Aruba’s nervous breakdown”

In their own words

Occasionally, we run across someone who claims the New York Time lacks a liberal editorial slant, and we find that bewildering. In the announcement of Gail Collins’ retirement as editor of the editorial pages, the Times acknowledges it:

The Times editorial page has long been regarded as one of the most liberal within the mainstream media, and the change at the top is expected to continue that outlook.

It seems to me that this should clear up the confusion.

Microsoft going nuts

This whole Bill Gates stepping down thing is totally weird:

In a press conference held Thursday after the stock markets had closed for regular trading, Gates announced that over the next two years he will gradually step away from his daily responsibilities at the company he co-founded some 30 years ago.

Microsoft’s Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie will immediately assume the title of chief software architect,

Gate has admired Ozzie for a long time, for reasons never clear to anybody but himself. Ozzie created Lotus Notes (“Usenet with pictures”) and a gruesome Notes clone called Groove. If Ozzie’s vision replaces Gates’, Microsoft surely will go into the dumper.

The two-year transition plan bears close watching. My guess is that before two years is up Gates will change his mind and realize he needs to stick around.

The stock is basically flat since the announcement, I’m guessing Wall St. doesn’t believe it either.

Jeff Jarvis, the guy who wants the FCC to regulate the Internet but not TV, comments at the Guardian’s site:

Gates was merely the best businessman ever born. He was ruthless. But capitalism is ruthless. It is a system. And it is that system – not his operating systems – that made Gates so damned big. Gates was not an inventor and innovator and I’ll argue that – his prognosticating books aside – he was no visionary. He was an exploiter.

…and I respond:

When I first met Bill Gates he was head of a 12 man company struggling to find buyers for BASIC (and that counts the part-timers and contractors.) He struggled and fought to get where he is.

His legacy is actually very simple: a computer on every desk. (And also: in every briefcase, and soon in every living room.) It’s an awesome legacy, and nobody should try and diminish it with sour grapes, class envy, or basic stupidity.

When he had to, he wrote original code; when he could, he bought code from others (MS DOS was bought from Seattle Computer, where it was called SB-86); and when he absolutely needed to, he created hardware such as the cute little ergonomic keyboards and mice that are the best in the business today.

Is the software perfect? Of course not, it never is, but it’s a several steps above Linux and in stability and hardware support, and massively more popular than the boutique Mac OS.

Microsoft has so many bitter critics that it doesn’t get the credit it should. Word for DOS was light-years ahead of Wordstar, and a direct descendant of the word processors its architect Charles Simonyi had build for Xerox and at UC Berkeley. Windows was designed by the same guy, according to methods he’d devised at Xerox again. Apple’s Mac and Lisa were stolen from the same lab.

Gates’ genius was in part the recognition that software doesn’t have to be perfect to be useful, but it does have to strive to out-perform the competition one way or another.

But it was also in part the recognition that any opportunity that he didn’t grab would be taken by somebody else, sooner or later.

I’m not convinced we’ve seen the last of Bill Gates. The anointed successors aren’t half the man he is between the whole lot of them, and I can’t see him sailing off into the sunset to sip drinks with umbrellas in them while there are so many fun new things to do with computers that would otherwise not have his name on them.

If this is the end of the road for Gates, the computer business will be the poorer.