Jason Stamper's Blog: October 2005 Archives

Companies Urged to Switch Off PCs: Remote Access Vendors Less Keen?
October 25, 2005

New research just out from Fujitsu Siemens highlights the cost of employees leaving their PCs on overnight - the company said £123m is wasted every year in the UK alone powering PCs that should have been shut down or left in hibernation mode, while of the 1,000 employees surveyed, some 370 never turn off their computers before leaving the office for the day.

Of course, employees are not the only ones to blame for leaving their computers on - if their PCs booted up a little faster in the morning they may be less hesitant to turn them off at night. Hibernation may reduce power outputs but some organisations have standardised power scheme profiles that do not always enable system hibernation, and other employees wouldn't know that hibernation is an option anyway.

IT departments could do more to educate users about the importance of shutting down or hibernating when they leave their desk, or they could even enforce a policy using automated systems management tools that shut a computer down after a period of inactivity or at a certain time. There are issues, yes: work could be lost if a computer suddenly shuts down; people work late, and so on. Education is probably a better approach in the fist instance.

But what happens if companies start insisting that employees turn off their computers at night, or even install automated systems management functionality that ensured PCs switched off automatically or hibernated if they had been inactive for a certain period of time? Well it would save on power, cost and the environment, which is definitely a good thing. It would also spell trouble for one group of software vendors - the remote PC access software players.

Companies like Citrix GoToMyPC, Laplink, Network Streaming, RealVNC, Anyplace Control and 3am Labs' Log Me In and many more are in this space.

Those companies specialise in giving you full access to your office (or home) PC when you are out and about or after hours, offering access to your remote PC via any browser or through a small client download. Forgot that presentation on your work PC? No problem. In Rome but left the directions to the conference on your work PC in London? No problem - log in remotely and access the information you need. Only one problem - you have to leave your remote PC powered up for the host software to give you remote access. What if you have to turn it off?

If companies enforce powering down PCs at the end of the day, employees would not be able to use those remote PC access solutions outside of work hours - which is often when it's useful. Many have been installed by the individual user anyway, rather than the central IT department. The remote access software has incredibly rigorous security built-in these days, but for some IT departments installing a remote host server would still be considered 'against policy', so individuals may get little sympathy from IT.

Of course, the remote PC access software would still be used to give you remote access to your PC at home when you are travelling, so that market would be unaffected. Unless people balk at leaving their PC on while they're out of the house, that is. People tend to be more aware of the cost of power at home than they do in the office - strange that.

Perhaps the remote access software vendors will be able to find a way around the issue - perhaps by enabling their software to "wake up" a hibernating computer when a remote user needs to access it. I'll be asking them what they think of the issue over the course of the next few days, and how they plan to address it. I'll let you know what they say.

  Email this entry to a friend

Posted by on 07:24 AM | Comments (1)

Evidence Deadline Approaches for SCO Versus IBM
October 24, 2005

After two and a half years and hundreds of legal filings, the open source community should finally get what it has been waiting for this Friday, when SCO Group is scheduled to present its evidence against IBM.

In July, US District Judge Dale Kimball set both companies an interim deadline of October 28 to submit their evidence in the long running contract and copyright infringement case, with a final deadline of December 22.

Lindon, Utah-based SCO first sued IBM in March 2003 claiming IBM breached a contract by contributing Unix code to the Linux open source operating system, while also making public statements that Linux contained SCO copyright code.

Both IBM and the Linux community at large have denied any wrongdoing, and there have been numerous calls from the open source community for SCO to identify the code in question so that Linux developers could remove it from the operating system if it was found to infringe on SCO's copyright.

Despite repeated public declarations that it has evidence Linux contains SCO copyright code, the company has yet to present any evidence to the court, leading to Judge Kimball to state in February that: "it is astonishing that SCO has not offered any competent evidence to create a disputed fact regarding whether IBM has infringed SCO's alleged copyrights through IBM's Linux activities.

SCO's chief executive officer, Darl McBride, has stated many times that the company was looking forward to having its day in court. That day is fast approaching, and while the two-stage process of submitting evidence might mean that December 22 is the key date to watch out for, Judge Kimball's July order also made it clear that October 28 was the day to "disclose with specificity all allegedly misused material identified to date.

The last time SCO presented evidence designed to back up its claims that more than 1.1 million lines of code from 1,549 files of derivative works had been donated to Linux by Unix licensees, the open source community quickly responded to shoot down its claims, and Friday's deadline will no doubt have open source advocates on tenterhooks.

At its Forum event in 2003, SCO showed interested parties some of the code it said had been copied line by line from Unix into Linux. Unfortunately for SCO, open source advocate Bruce Perens almost immediately identified the code with the help of other members of the Linux community. According to Perens, the code presented had twice been published under a BSD license in the past, first by AT&T and then by SCO in its former incarnation of Caldera.

The interim deadline also applies to IBM's counterclaims against SCO, which were reduced following its recent offer to drop patent infringement claims in order to expedite the legal process.

IBM's eleven remaining claims against SCO include breach of contract, unfair competition, unfair and deceptive trade practices, breach of the GNU General Public License, interference with prospective economic relations, and violation of the Lanham Act.

SCO has twice changed its legal case against IBM but its claims include two cases each of breach of software agreement and breach of sublicensing agreement, copyright infringement, unfair competition, interference with contract, and interference with business relationship.

As well as the contract dispute with IBM, SCO is also embroiled in an ongoing legal case with Novell Inc over the ownership of the Unix copyrights, while Linux distributor Red Hat Inc sued SCO in an attempt to get a declaratory judgment that its business does not infringe SCO's copyright.

SCO also sued AutoZone in March 2004 claiming that the retailer infringed SCO copyright as part of a migration from SCO OpenServer to Linux. The case was put on hold in August 2004 until SCO's ongoing legal disputes with IBM, Novell, and Red Hat, have been resolved.

Meanwhile its case against car giant DaimlerChrylser for allegedly running uncertified copies of the Unix operating system was thrown out of court in July 2004 after said DaimlerChrylser it hadn't used SCO's software for seven years.

The December 22 final deadline for evidence will give both SCO and IBM an opportunity to update their evidence based on any newly uncovered evidence before the close of fact discovery on January 27, 2006, and any other discovery matters on March 17, 2006.

That will be followed by a series of expert reports, and dispositive motions, before a special attorney conference and settlement conference on January 30, 2007. The five-week jury trial is scheduled to begin on February 26, 2007.

  Email this entry to a friend

Posted by on 09:56 AM

Ballmer: Microsoft Losing More Than Winning Against Linux
October 20, 2005

Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer was on good form during a Q&A session with an audience at a Gartner Symposium in Florida yesterday, having the audience in stitches on more than one occasion, as well as coming out with the kind of marketing speak wont to baffle and enlighten in equal measure.

Asked for his thoughts on the fact that when it comes to platform migrations, more people are moving from Unix to Linux than from Unix to Windows, he conceded that: "We're not winning more than we're losing." Which is a roundabout way of conceding that it's losing to Linux more often than winning.

In the context of people considering a migration of their Unix applications, which is what Ballmer was talking about, that's not surprising: there's a hell of a lot more work needed to migrate Unix applications to Windows (if they can affordably be ported at all) than it is to migrate them to Linux.

Ballmer said that Microsoft wins only around 25% of Unix application migration deals that it competes for, but of course there's surely a huge number of migration deals where Microsoft would not be asked to turn up and compete.

Ballmer also had the grace to concede that Microsoft cannot claim that it has a better (Unix) operating system than Linux: "The day I come in front of a Gartner audience and say I have a better Unix than Linux, that'll be a good day," he said, adding, "We're not quite there yet." It's not entirely clear whether Ballmer means simply that Windows Server is not as good as Linux, or more likely, that it's not as good as Linux when it comes to Unix-like features, functionality and application support.

That question also harks back to the issue of just how Unix-like Windows Server is, and even the age-old rumour that Windows Server was actually based on Unix in the first place. It wasn't. The first version of Windows NT came about when Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) engineer Dave Cutler started work on an operating system to replace DEC's VMS.

Cutler called the project 'Mica', but for some reason DEC had second thoughts and dropped the idea. Microsoft hired Cutler, who immediately started work on what would become Windows NT. DEC sued because it believed Cutler had put Mica or even VMS code in NT, and Microsoft eventually paid up $150m. As part of the settlement Microsoft agreed that Windows NT and its BackOffice applications would offer support for DEC's Alpha processor, which is why DEC Alpha was the only RISC chip that supported both Digital's version of Unix and Windows NT - quite a coup for DEC.

To cut a long story short, Windows has more in common with DEC VMS than Unix, and it is certainly not 'based on' Unix. VMS wasn't 'based on' Unix either - it was designed initially to run on DEC's proprietary VAX architecture, and was largely written in VAX assembly code, though it later had a Unix compatibility layer added to become OpenVMS.

The point is, Windows Server is not very Unix-like, which is one of the major reasons Microsoft only wins 25% of the Unix application migration deals it competes for, another being the attraction of Linux's low up-front purchasing cost (the question of the ongoing total cost of ownership is quite another matter, but I won't get into that here).

Nevertheless, Ballmer insisted that Windows should be able to win business away from Linux. He sees "big opportunities" for Microsoft to take business from Linux, including the lure of its high-performance clusters - currently a Linux stronghold representing about 20% of all Linux systems - and also the combination of its Visual Studio and ASP .NET as making Windows more attractive as a web hosting platform.

Ballmer said Microsoft has had a lot of interest in Windows clustering and already seen some success in web hosting migrations.

Away from the whole Linux-Windows-Unix debate, Ballmer was yet more bullish, saying Microsoft would beat Google in search technology by out-innovating generally, but specifically out-innovating Google when it comes to serving business users who want more consistent and effective search technology both within and beyond their company's four walls. He was dismissive of what Google may have up its own sleeve, saying: "If you believe what you read in the papers today, then other than curing cancer, Google will do everything."

He got his biggest laugh by being derogatory about Microsoft's own products, asking: "Anybody ever get a message that says something like [adopts silly, booming voice]: 'An error has occurred, do you wish to send to Microsoft? Yes or No'. Anybody ever seen that message? Statistically, anybody who didn't put their hand up is misrepresenting the facts!"

But he said Microsoft is not embarrassed about such messages, because it uses them to gather statistics on the experience of those using its products so it can fix the problems faster. He said the company nevertheless wants to move from this kind of 'crash analysis' towards systems that are more resilient in the first place. Some of this work should get done in the next version of Windows Server, code-named Longhorn Server and possibly due out next year, though that's by no means certain.

Ballmer said the company wants to get the most important new features for its products in more regular product updates, saying, “We can’t make customers wait three to four years for things they need every few months.”

Finally Ballmer was greeted with ironic laughter after the discussion moderator had asked how Microsoft plans not only to keep up with the competition, but "trounce" it. "We don't trounce our competition, we compete with the competition," retorted Ballmer mischievously.

  Email this entry to a friend

Posted by on 05:09 AM

Palm, RIM Team Up for BlackBerry on Treo
October 17, 2005

Palm and Research In Motion said they are working together to bring BlackBerry Connect to Palm's Treo 650 smartphone - so where does that leave the recent news that Palm will support Windows Mobile on a forthcoming Treo?

Palm said that through RIM's BlackBerry Connect licensing scheme, it will enable its Treo 650 and future Palm OS based Treo smartphones with secure, push-based wireless email via BlackBerry Enterprise Server. The phone with BlackBerry support is expected early next year.

Yet it was only late September when Palm made its shock announcement that it is to support Microsoft's Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system on another forthcoming Treo smartphone. The news was somewhat surprising as it is a blow to rival mobile operating system player PalmSource, which used to be part of Palm and is still pushing its Palm OS.

On the announcement of support for Windows Mobile back in September, Microsoft's Bill Gates said: "In our view, every professional will have a phone that connects up to their email. They'll have a phone that works super well with Exchange and Outlook and all of Microsoft Office."

The ActiveSync features of Windows Mobile 5.0 allow phone-Outlook synchronization and, when used with Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2, push email along the same lines of systems offered by Research in Motion and Intellisync.

But it seems despite the choice of Windows Mobile and its ActiveSync features for one of its Treo phones, Palm is still opting for RIM's BlackBerry Connect and Palm OS on others. Yesterday a Palm spokesperson would say only that the support for RIM's BlackBerry Connect was simply about giving customers more choice. It's clear that Palm wants to be at least a little operating system and mobile middleware agnostic.

Announcing its support for Windows Mobile in September, Palm's CEO Ed Colligan said that the company was still committed to selling phones running Palm OS, though he conceded that, "Sure there’ll be some cannibalization [of Palm OS sales]... There will be people who will want to move to this [Windows Mobile] platform. No question about that. But I think it expands the market too. I think it gets more people seeing Treos who want to use this type of functionality."

Palm said the Treo 650 running Palm OS with BlackBerry support will be available early next year. The 3G-enabled Treo running Windows Mobile with ActiveSync support will also be available early next year. It's possible, of course, that users will still have the option of using the BlackBerry functionality on the Windows Mobile Treo, because RIM is working on a Windows Mobile client.

According to Palm and RIM, the combination of the Blackberry support on the Treo will mean not only support for RIM's push-based email using BlackBerry Connect with Palm’s VersaMail email client, but also support for Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Domino; wireless calendar synchronization; remote address lookup of corporate email directory; email-attachment viewing; triple DES encryption and IT policy enforcement and commands.

  Email this entry to a friend

Posted by on 10:10 AM

Who Really Runs the Internet?
October 14, 2005

Guest blog by Kevin Murphy:

Paul Mockapetris, who invented the internet’s domain name system, was asked a few years ago what else he wished he could have invented. He answered: “A directory system for the internet that wouldn't be controlled by the politicians, lawyers and bureaucrats.” Tough luck, Paul.

Not only is the DNS controlled by politicians, lawyers and bureaucrats, but politicians, lawyers and bureaucrats from all over the world have been spending vast amounts of time and effort arguing over which politicians, lawyers and bureaucrats should control it in future.

Never was this more apparent than two weeks ago, when diplomats from 153 national governments gathered in Geneva in a last-ditch attempt to come to agreement on the matter of “internet governance” and who should control the DNS.

They failed, again, and as the meeting close they scheduled another last-ditch attempt meeting for immediately prior to the UN World Summit on the Information Society, which will be held in Tunis, Tunisia in November.

The International Telecommunications Union, which is trying to pry the DNS from the clutches of the US-backed Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers, called the meetings “grueling” but predicted Tunis will be the “Summit of Solutions”.

While the September meeting, called PrepCom-3, did manage to achieve consensus on no-brainers like nations having sovereign policy-setting rights in their own country and the private sector having a role to play, more contentious issues remain unresolved.

Most countries that have publicly expressed an opinion want WSIS to set up some kind of multilateral forum where governments can set international policies on matters such as cybercrime, cross-border e-commerce and anything else that crops up in future.

The major sticking point is the DNS and the pool of IP addresses, both of which are managed by ICANN under contract with the US government.

Many countries want this relationship dissolved and replaced with one where ICANN or ICANN’s successor reports to this hypothetical multilateral UN-linked forum.

And the ITU, faced with the inevitable transition to a fully-IP telecommunications world, wants desperately to be ICANN’s successor.

The US is fiercely resistant to this change. Ambassador David Gross, representing the US at PrepCom-3, repeatedly stated that the US’s three-month-old policy of overseeing ICANN indefinitely is non-negotiable.

The anti-US camp has been led most vociferously by Brazil, China, and Iran, and supported by the likes of Cuba. With the possible exception of Brazil, none of those countries are on George Bush’s Christmas card list.

So what’s the big deal? All that is at stake, in essence, is control of two small databases, only a few hundred kilobytes of data.

But they are among the few logically central parts of the internet. One contains the authoritative list of over 250 top-level internet domains, generic TLDs such as .com and .biz, and country-code TLDs such as .uk, .cn and .us. This is known as the root zone file.

The other, broadly speaking, lists which IP addresses have been assigned to which ISPs, so no two computers can have the same address. Collectively, these are known as the IANA databases. Both are currently controlled by ICANN.

Conventional wisdom has it that these files could easily be managed by one person. IANA was, in fact, for many years, managed by one person. The key question, as wiser folk than us have pointed out before, is: “Who tells that guy what to do?”

On Monday, David Conrad, former chief technology officer of Nominum Inc, became That Guy, when he took over as IANA general manager from Doug Barton, who quit earlier this summer. He has a small staff at ICANN’s headquarters in California.

Procedurally speaking, the IANA manager is told what changes to make to the IANA TLD database by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a unit of the US Department of Commerce.

NTIA just tells Conrad to do whatever the ICANN board of directors resolves. It has never vetoed an ICANN decision, but theoretically it could. And there’s no telling whether ICANN has ever refrained from a decision based on the quiet threat of a veto.

It’s worked like this since 1998, and it works reasonably well, although there are frequent complaints and there have been incidents, such as the time last year where a breakdown in communication led to Libya disappearing from the DNS for a week.

The US fear appears to be that if the NTIA was replaced with the UN or some UN-linked body, the door would be open for nations that do not share American ideals to impose, say, freedom of speech restrictions on DNS policy.

In addition, many fear that a UN-linked body may end up a weighty bureaucracy, slowing down ICANN policy-making even more. Until recently, the US has overseen ICANN with a light touch.

There are surely political reasons too. In the US nowadays, any mention of the UN wielding power is treated by liberals and conservatives alike with the same kind of patriotic blustering as you hear from Britons when the EU attempts to regulate the length of their bananas.

It seems to be quite acceptable lately to invoke the UN oil-for-food scandal, say, as a reason why the US should retain oversight of the internet, while cheerfully ignoring the multitude of brazen corruptions in America’s own political system.

That said, very few Westerners would argue that a more suitable venue for managing the internet is a body that could so easily be steered by censorial, authoritarian regimes like China and Iran (like, say, PrepCom-3 was).

It would go against the principles of openness, designed into the protocols and enthusiastically embraced by those who use the network to communicate, on which the internet has operated for the last decade.

But, equally, unilateral US oversight of ICANN leaves the policymaking process open to capture by the views of those in power. Currently, that means politicians who are frequently influenced by the lobbying of right-wing Christian activists.

In August, the NTIA broke seven years of relative silence on the matter of deploying new top-level domains, when it asked ICANN to delay final approval of .xxx, a proposed new TLD that would serve the pornography industry.

It did so because of a letter-writing campaign orchestrated by conservative lobbyists such as Focus on the Family (the name is misleading -- it’s a religious group), which has the ear of the Bush administration.

If a hypothetical UN-linked ICANN overseer could be criticized for being open to steering by un-democratic regimes, could not US oversight be criticized for being open to steering by groups that more secular nations consider, at best, fringe?

Of course, it’s not just the US that has concerns over .xxx. Brazil, for one, has criticized ICANN for its decision to approve the domain, although whether that was a moral stance or a cheap political shot at the US is debatable.

The US’s opponents have other fears, too. What if the US enters a trade embargo with Bulgaria, say, and unilaterally orders IANA to take .bg off of the internet? It’s hard to imagine, but it’s technically possible under the current arrangements.

Also, ICANN’s contract with the NTIA requires it to approach nations to sign contracts acknowledging ICANN’s powers. As long as ICANN is beholden to the US government, that seems like an unpalatable dilution of sovereignty to many nations.

They’re also not happy with what they see as ICANN’s Western bias. One observer told us recently that some Asians get irked by the perception that ICANN thinks it “has Asia on board” to a given policy if it secures the support of Japan alone.

The internet has been a mass medium in most of the developed world for about a decade, but ICANN, IANA, and the Internet Engineering Task Force still hasn’t figured out a safe, standard way for Koreans, for example, to have URLs resolve in their own language.

To be sure, ICANN is not exclusively American. The members of its board of directors are drawn from all over the world, a policy enshrined in its bylaws. Not all its staff is American, and its president is an Australian former civil servant.

In addition, it has an influential Government Advisory Committee in which any nation is free to participate. ICANN’s board has never overruled the advice the GAC doles out, unlike the advice of some of its other constituencies.

But some governments want more of a role. Hence, the impasse at PrepCom-3.

Latest indications are that support for the US position is dissolving. The big shocker at PrepCom-3 was the decision by the European Union, represented at the meeting by the UK, to jump ship and throw its lot in with the opponents of US unilateralism.

The US still appears to have the support of the Japanese and Canadians. But other than that, its position has become a minority one. Not even the Brits are on its side this time.

  Email this entry to a friend

Posted by on 06:31 AM

Microsoft, Yahoo IM Deal Aimed Not Only at AOL
October 12, 2005

News that Microsoft and Yahoo are forging an agreement that enables users of each of their instant messaging (IM) applications to talk to one another is aimed at competing more effectively with the current IM champion, AOL. But it could also be a pre-emptive strike against Google's IM ambitions.

AOL's AIM had more than 50 million US users at last count, compared with around 27 million for Microsoft's MSN Messenger and almost 22 million for Yahoo's Messenger. By enabling MSN and Yahoo users to IM each other, Microsoft and Yahoo can put up a more robust fight against AOL dominance of the IM space.

But they may also be getting in a pre-emptive strike against Google. Google released Google Talk this summer, a bare-bones IM client with VoIP functionality, and promised server-side interconnect with IM networks from rivals EarthLink and SIPphone. While it’s too early to tell how successful Google Talk will be, the search company does have a large and loyal following and an increasingly powerful brand. And its IM software runs a different protocol to the one favored by Microsoft and Yahoo.

There is also the possibly that Google may one day integrate IM functionality into the Google Toolbar. Rumours in that direction have been rife in the 'blogosphere' for some time - then again, there are few things that Google has not been rumoured to be up to at one time or another.

  Email this entry to a friend

Posted by on 08:27 AM

Inaccuracies Abound as Media Digests Sun and Google Pact
October 06, 2005

The more that is written about the alliance between Sun and Google announced on Tuesday, the less it appears to resemble anything even close to the truth. But the Times of India really takes the biscuit - sorry guys, but how could anyone who listened to the announcement come to the conclusion that Sun and Google have merged?

According to the Times of India, "Google has announced a strategic merger with giant Sun Microsystems, in a deal that is expected to create another dent in arch-competitor Microsoft's monopoly over the Internet."

Many of you will have spotted two pretty significant problems with this sentence. Firstly, Sun and Google announced an alliance, not a merger. Second, Microsoft does not have a "monopoly over the Internet". No-one does. Microsoft may have the lion's share of the browser market, but that's not the same as having a monopoly over the Internet. Besides, the Sun-Google collaboration is not so much about changing the dynamics of the browser market as it is about changing the dynamics of the desktop applications market.

The Indian Express fared slightly better, but they too seem to have witnessed a completely different press conference to the rest of the world. According to the paper, "Google Inc took a big step toward challenging Microsoft Corp's dominance in computer word-processing and spreadsheets with the announcement today that it would distribute Java technology from Sun Microsystems Inc." Wrong again - Sun will distribute the Google Toolbar when people download Java from Sun. So far, Google has not said it will be distributing Java. They are exploring other ways to collaborate, they say, but there is no firm news yet.

Besides, how would Google's distribution of Java increase its challenge against Microsoft's word processing and spreadsheets applications business? 20 million people already download Java every month. 54 million people have downloaded Sun's StarOffice and the open source OpenOffice applications suites. Now if Google were to distribute OpenOffice, it may hurt Microsoft Office a bit. But you can already get it for free pretty easily already, and if you don't know where to look you can always do a search on Google for it.

Then there was the strange news from Australia's Brisbane Courier-Mail. While there was indeed - and still is - a huge amount of speculation as to whether Google will eventually offer to run OpenOffice in a hosted manner on its servers, the companies fell short of confirming that at the conference. Indeed they were pressed on this subject and would say only that it is all "legitimate speculation". Tell that to the Brisbane Courier-Mail, which wrote that: "Internet search engine Google has declared war on Microsoft, announcing plans to launch free spreadsheet and word-processing software online... Google has joined forces with US-based technology giant Sun Microsystems to allow web users to access Sun's OpenOffice from any personal computer."

Incredibly that story was also picked up and run as fact by at least one UK IT publication. But neither company announced any such thing. The only distribution deal announced was that Sun will distribute the Google Toolbar when people download Java. That will increase Google traffic and the use of Google services perhaps, but has no bearing on Microsoft Office.

While there is indeed still speculation - I stress that it is speculation - that Google may later in the deal offer to either distribute OpenOffice to people visiting Google websites, or indeed host OpenOffice on its servers so people can create, store and share office documents right in their browser, neither of these will necessarily make a massive dent in Microsoft's Office business.

As I say OpenOffice is already widely available. The added publicity may see some people turning to it but some have done that already - 54 million of them. OpenOffice, though an excellent office applications suite considering it is free, is not as feature rich as Microsoft Office. There are free open source application servers, and they have not killed off WebSphere or WebLogic, though they have created pricing pressure and forced those products to take in broader and broader functionality.

As for the idea of a fully hosted office suite, well that will not kill Microsoft Office either. For one thing, you would only be able to use that when you were online. What about when you are not? There are questions over performance for anything more intensive than writing a simple letter - think of the server farm Google would need to enable thousands of people to do complicated spreadsheet analysis concurrently.

There are questions as to whether Google would display adverts next to the letter you are writing. There are questions of privacy and security (though people already trust Hotmail, Yahoo, GMail et al with their email). There is the question of whether a hosted version would be as feature-rich as Microsoft Office, the issue of people's familiarity with Office, the issue of Microsoft's massive marketing budget, the issue of Microsoft's forthcoming even-tighter integration between its various Windows applications, etcetera etcetera.

To cut a long story short, whatever Sun and Google have up their sleeves, they are unlikely to be able to march in and steal market share quite so easily. Microsoft won't sit back and watch one of its best sellers take a drumming. But it will be watching developments closely, to be sure.

  Email this entry to a friend

Posted by on 07:56 AM

Sun Basks in Google’s Reflected Street Cred
October 05, 2005

So after all the fuss before Sun and Google's press announcement yesterday evening, the truth turned out to be a lot less exciting than the speculation that preceded it. Here the US editor of our sister publication ComputerWire, Kevin Murphy, explains what they did - and just as importantly what they did not - announce.

Sun Microsystems wants to be cool again, and it has signed up Google to help it. That’s the biggest takeaway from yesterday’s much-ballyhooed joint press conference, in which the chief executives of both companies made vague promises to work together and revealed almost nothing about their plans, if indeed they have any. [Image: Sun's McNealy and Google's Schmidt at the conference yesterday, announcing the Google Toolbar distribution deal.]

The substance: Sun has agreed to distribute Google Toolbar as an optional add-on when people download the Java Runtime Environment from java.com, and the two companies will “explore opportunities” to promote OpenOffice.

Everything else is speculation, and speculation that Sun boss Scott McNealy seemed particularly keen to promote.

“You could speculate all day long about all the different places and ways we could go and work together, and they’re all legitimate speculation,” he said, when one reporter pushed him unsuccessfully to put some meat on the PR skeleton.

The announcement that Google and Sun are buddies is not insignificant, however. Longer term, indications are that the companies will collaborate on some kind of platform play. That’s what they want us to think, anyway, and it’s evidently what we want to believe.

“Will these products be enough to replace Windows?” one reporter, from a widely read non-technical publication, asked eagerly.

“So tell us all about this new operating system you’re going to build,” asked another, with a knowing smile in his voice.

Somehow, somewhere, the media has got it into its head that Google is a whisker from blowing away Microsoft’s operating system monopoly, and no amount of announcing trivial software distribution deals is going to dilute that consensus.

“We’re in the end user search business,” Google boss Eric Schmidt said plainly, in one of the press conference’s occasional moments of clarity.

Another came when McNealy said: “We, a long time, ago were pretty hot, then the bubble kinda burst, and we’ve been kinda retooling and re-strategizing and making a very aggressive push to take back Wall Street.”

“We were the hot web server, we were the dot in dot-com in the olden days, and we want to take it back,” he said. “What better way to make a statement than to partner with the leader of web services here with Google.”

The deal “sends a very clear message to internet service providers, to web sites, to big scalable web sites, that we’ve got the technology” McNealy suggested, hopefully.

Even though Sun will distribute the toolbar, it is telling that this part of the arrangement is not quid pro quo. Schmidt admitted that it would “make sense” for Google to distribute Sun’s technology, the JRE maybe, but the company will not.

Sun appears to be exhibiting the same kind of mentality as some of Google’s print advertisers, who believe that being associated with the Google brand, even just as an advertiser, is good for business, and are willing to pay for the privilege.

McNealy spun it the other way. “What Netscape did for the Java runtime we believe the JRE can now do for the Google Toolbar,” he said. Schmidt added that he expects tens of millions of additional Toolbar downloads from the Sun deal.

As unexpectedly dull as yesterday’s news was, it is the potential future developments that Google getting into bed with Sun could produce that are gathering all the interest.

The companies’ promise to “explore opportunities to promote and enhance Sun technologies, like the Java Runtime Environment and the OpenOffice.org productivity suite” gives the best indicator of where they could be headed in the medium term.

No specifics were given, and suggestions that Google may make a hosted web services version of OpenOffice available, maybe using the Ajax application development technique, were not directly addressed.

That notion was probably a long shot, given Google doesn’t even natively support OpenOffice’s OpenDocument Format in its Google Desktop search application.

The two companies do appear to be aligned on the future of computing. That is to say, McNealy and Sun president Jonathan Schwartz rolled out their time-tested “network is the computer” theories, and Schmidt was sitting on the same stage not disagreeing.

McNealy, an ice hockey fan, said the companies are aligning on “where the puck is going, not where the puck has been, in terms of a platform environment. It’s back to the future -- the network is the computer”.

Schwartz observed that Google has made a habit of exposing application programming interfaces for most of its applications, allowing developers to extend them.

“As Google looks to expose more and more APIs, as they are in the Java Community Process for a reason, they’re looking to make sure the platform evolves in an interesting way for them, there’s lot of opportunity,” he said. “Web services are becoming programming platforms.”

The implications, unlikely as they still seem, were clear -- Microsoft had better watch out because in future we’re not going to need its software. Applications are all going to be hosted and thin-client and bandwidth will be so cheap it won’t matter.

“Basically, Windows is still the only remnant of the old client-server computing model and people still writing desktop .NET client-server applications,” McNealy said. “That’s so last millennium.”

There were a couple of other minor areas of partnership outlined during the press conference. Namely, Google is buying an undisclosed number of Sun servers, and Sun is buying an undisclosed amount of advertising on Google.

  Email this entry to a friend

Posted by on 07:58 AM

Google and Sun Join Forces: But For What?
October 04, 2005

Sun and Google are gearing up to make what looks like it could be an historic announcement later today, with Google chairman and CEO Dr. Eric Schmidt and Sun CEO Scott McNealy to announce what they will so far only describe as a "collaborative effort".

The fact that they have picked the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California for the announcement suggests to us that this is going to be big. It's also notable that despite huge industry speculation as to what might be announced, neither company has done anything to manage expectations to a lower level by leaking news of what might be announced - that again suggests something that genuinely is headline news.

So what could they be planning? Well as I wrote in my blog yesterday, rumours have persisted for some time now that Google plans to come out with a web-based office suite of applications to compete with Microsoft Office. As the 299 comments (and counting) on Slashdot - where my story was picked up yesterday - will attest, there are those for and against the idea of a web-based office suite. Concerns over performance, security, privacy, even the thought of potential adverts alongside your office documents, were all voiced.

But while it is true that all of these concerns would need to be addressed somehow, and that there will surely be people who shy away from using a web-based office suite in favour of more traditional software like Microsoft Office, Sun StarOffice and the like, there are others that would see a low cost or free web-based office suite as absolutely compelling.

However I don't think Sun and Google will announce a web-based office suite later today - though that may come later. I believe they will offer an office-based web suite. I'll explain what I mean, but think of it as an integration of Sun's StarOffice office suite or OpenOffice with all of Google's network services, without requiring a browser. Think 'StarOffice Google'.

There were some pretty strong hints that this may be the news in Sun president and COO Jonathan Schwartz's latest blog, in which he wrote about some big changes afoot in the software distribution space. Schwartz wrote: "The first thing the internet did was allow companies to bypass Microsoft's legendary distribution power. From eBay to Google to opentable.com, the rise of industry standards allowed services to emerge on an open network platform... But the technology, frankly, was less valuable than the services themselves. I did say was."

He also said that: "Value is returning to the desktop applications, and not simply through Windows Vista. But in the form of applications that are network service platforms. From the obvious, to music sharing clients and development tools, there's a resurgence of interest in resident software that executes on your desktop, yet connects to network services. Without a browser. Like Skype. Or QNext. Or Google Earth. And Java? OpenOffice and StarOffice?"

The fact he says "without a browser" seems to suggest that we are not just looking at a version of StarOffice hosted by Google, but some kind of integration of Google technology into StarOffice and/or OpenOffice that adds network services - like search, Google Maps, GMail and the like, without having to switch from StarOffice to your browser and back. Think of StarOffice as your new portal, in fact. It is the place where you create office documents, consume Google network services, and collaborate with your contacts. Welcome to Google StarOffice?

Of course, it's still possible that Schwartz is throwing us off the scent deliberately, and that the announcement will be of a version of StarOffice hosted by Google. After all, StarOffice was designed initially to be able to run in a hosted manner. Some will remember that when the first versions were launched Sun even used to call it a thin client office suite. Sun had ambitions of its own in the hosted office applications space - go back to 1999 and Sun was showing off StarOffice Portal, a server-based version of StarOffice, later renamed WebTop, which ultimately fizzled out.

What Sun lacked back then was the traffic, brand equity and ambition to take on Microsoft with its web-based office suite, and besides, early versions of StarOffice were a shadow of what it is today. Google, if anyone, has the brand, the traffic, and the ambition to take on Microsoft Office. But while a fully hosted version of StarOffice may well be in the wings, given Schwartz's comment about "without a browser" and "resident software that executes on your desktop, yet connects to network services", I think it will stay in the wings for the time being.

So my guess is StarOffice Google Edition, or at least news along those lines. I could be completely wrong. We won't know for sure until after 6.30pm GMT today. I'll keep you posted.

  Email this entry to a friend

Posted by on 04:24 AM