Group items tagged

Opera quotes about DG Competition announcement.

I posted a digg on Peter Glaskowsky's CNET article discussing the Intel - TSMC deal. In 1995, i somehow managed to get between Intel and TSMC regarding funding for Virtual Realty, a video conferencing based loan origination / real estate transaction processing company that used Intel ProShare. TSMC wanted to invest a ton of money in VRi, with the idea of providing a full graphical listing, brokerage and transaction service for all of Asia. Intel needed a business model proving the value of ProShare, and capable of putting down the basics of a wide bandwidth video conferencing communications-data network they could grow into a platform.

At first this seemed to me like a win-win for everyone. Then i found out how seriously pissed Intel was about TSMC's deal with ViA and the resulting "WinBook". Although this is not the time or place to tell the story, i was truly stunned and shocked when i saw the Intel-TSMC deal announcement. Wow!

My response to Peter focuses on his comments about how this deal will impact Nvidia. And then, how the Nvidia vision of an ION-Atom motherboard impacts WebKit and the future of the Open Web.

Here we sit at the dawn of "The Age of Visual Computing" and Intel makes a deal with their arch enemy, low cost-high volume SOC producer TSMC. Peter Glaskowsky argues that the Intel-TSMC alliance announced earlier this week is a good thing for both companies, but not for the reasons stated by Intel. Peter discusses Intel's problem of competing with low margin manufactures like TSCM. He walks through the challenges and options Intel has, describing why this is a killer deal for both Intel and TSMC. The losers however are Nvidia, ViA and ARM. Great discussion! Looks to me like Intel is very concerned about Nvidia and the ION-Atom motherboard. So much so that they are willing to risk a massive anti-trust action.
There are a number of articles and comments at the diigo "Future of the Web" group discussing Nvidia's Jen-Hsun Huang, the ION-Atom motherboard, and Jen's "Age of Visual Computing" vision. His views on legacy x86 CPU processing power and why we need a combined GPU-CPU architecture are fascinating. Soon enough, i expect to see a netbook running the Google Android OS on a ION-Atom or ION-ViA motherboard. What a day that's going to be.

From 2005, a year after Sun and Microsoft became partners in Microsoft's assault on the Web.

The recent announcements by Microsoft detailing Windows Mobile (WM) 6.5 and to a lesser degree WM 7.0 have left many questioning the continued relevance of Windows Mobile in the future.  The incremental update to WM has been received as expected with some excited for the future and others declaring "too little, too late."  Take the next version of WM as you will, Microsoft faces a great challenge to keep WM relevant in today's smartphone market"...... Good discussion about Microsoft's failure to show at the Barcelona World Mobility Conference with anything worth talking about. Apple doesn't even show up, but the iPhone dominates all discussions! So what's up with Microsoft? Have they finally dropped the ball on the device end of their emerging Web platform? I've posted a lengthy comment about WebKit, the iPhone and the emergence of a next generation visual document model that also works as a Web application.

This is a must see discussion!!!! Especially if you've seen the Ted Nelson series of talks at Google. (Ted Nelson invented Hypertext, and continues to promote the XANDU view of highly graphical and interactive computing based on an advanced "digital" document model). Jen-Hsu fully embraces the sugarplum document model, dissing i a gentle way the legacy of x86 text-number processing designed to replace typewritters and calculators to produce the same printed document.

Nvidia has also announced an ION based board optimized for the Google Android Mobile-Telecommunications OS!

The hope is that a new specification will help companies finally handle and manage all the information stored in different repositories throughout the enterprise. Enterprises have been struggling for years to leverage all the information on business processes they have stored away in order to conduct business better. The problem is much of this information is created in unstructured documents, such as spreadsheets and word processing documents, rather than in a database, making it difficult to control and manage. Several vendors offer enterprise content management (ECM) solutions to deal with unstructured documents, but different vendors' solutions do not talk to each other. Businesses store their unstructured documents in multiple repositories from different vendors, so they have to spend a great deal of time and money to integrate these repositories so they can communicate with one another. A potential solution, the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification, was announced today by tech heavyweights Microsoft, IBM and EMC.

There's a change in Google's business model indicated by that last paragraph, sharing Google ad revenues with publishers. Publishers have been suing Google in Europe and the U.S. for indexing their web site news content. Is sharing Google Ad-Sense revenue with publishers the compromise that will bring the world an explosion of information previously unavailable online in easily searchable form? Most newspapers' archives are not available online and with far too many that are, subscriptions are required to search a single newspaper's archives; e.g., the New York Times. Sounds like Google may have its sights set on eroding the information subscription business model that the news business -- along with advertising -- has been built around for centuries. This announcement might mark a paradigm shift.

ZOHO Speaks about Chrome: "The biggest losers in Google's announcement are not really competing browsers, but competing rich client engines like Flash and Silverlight. As Javascript advances rapidly, it inevitably encroaches on the territory currently held by Flash. Native browser video is likely the last nail in the coffin - and Google needs native browser based video for its own YouTube, so we can be confident Google Chrome and Firefox will both have native video support, with Javascript-accessible VOM (video object model) APIs for web applications to manipuate video. As for Silverlight, let me just say that if Silverlight is the future of web computing, companies like us might as well find another line of work - and I suspect Google and Yahoo probably see it the same way too. More speculatively, I believe we will witness the emergence of Javascript as the dominant language of computing, as it sweeps the client side and starts encroaching on the server. The server landscape today is split between "enterprise" platforms like Java and .NET on the one side (we ourselves are in the Java camp on the server side), and "scripting" languages like PHP, Python, Ruby on the other, with Javascript firmly entrenched on the client. Languages like Ruby promise tremendous dynamism and flexibility to the developer, but their relatively weak execution environments have held them back. It is telling that both Java and .NET come with state of the art just-in-time compilers, while none of the major scripting languages do......" Interestingly, ZOHO already has a prototype running on Chrome! Solves tons of performance problems for them, as well as givign them an on-line / off-line story (Gears). The success of Chrome depends on Chrome "killer apps"; Not browser surfing features! And we already have a number of killer apps that will immediately take advantage of Chrome: gMail, gReader, gMaps and Google Docs! ZOHO will no doubt use Chrome to put themselves squarely i

Corel is apparently for sale.

the growing popularity of cloud computing means corporate data centers will increasingly start to look like Internet data centers. Cisco has already recognized that as the "network" continues to become the focal point around which our digital personal and work lives revolve, the opportunity to make money will be immense. That's why Chambers never misses an opportunity to talk about "collaboration." For instance, in the press release announcing the company's latest numbers, he said: "We believe we are entering the next phase of the Internet as growth and productivity will center on collaboration enabled by networked Web 2.0 technologies." But Cisco isn't the only one with this vision - Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG) are thinking along these lines as well, and are much further ahead in the game.

Adobe positioning AIR for a move into embedded systems? E.g., from Wikipedia: "Because of their power saving features, ARM CPUs are dominant in the mobile electronics market, where low power consumption is a critical design goal. Today, the ARM family accounts for approximately 75% of all embedded 32-bit RISC CPUs, making it one of the most widely used 32-bit architectures. ARM CPUs are found in most corners of consumer electronics, from portable devices (PDAs, mobile phones, media players, handheld gaming units, and calculators)." Don't miss page two of the linked article.

PALO ALTO, Calif., January 12, 2010 - VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Zimbra, a leading vendor of email and collaboration software, from Yahoo! Inc. Zimbra is a leading open source email and collaboration solution with over 55 million mailboxes.  As an independent Yahoo! product division, Zimbra achieved 2009 mailbox growth of 86% overall and 165% among small and medium business customers.

Separately, Microsoft and Apple have announced that both company's browsers will boycott VP8 in favor of H264, which is encumbered by more than a thousand patents.. But if VP8 becomes ubiquitous on the Web, that's a hard position to maintain.  

[Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski is preparing to make a big announcement on Thursday. It's sure to be filled with platitudes about the benefits of broadband and boosting the economy. But the devil, as always, will be in the details. And that's how we'll know whether the FCC is sticking up for the consumers they're supposed to represent, or whether we're witnessing the agency's complete capture by the industries it's supposed to regulate. ...]

While i don't see Google or anyone else replacing the MSOffice productivity environment, i do see Google challenging Microsoft wherever the Web comes into play. And as far as i can see into the future, that pretty much means everywhere. The tricky part will be that re-purposing play. ChromeOS is a blockbuster announcement. Not a declaration of war, but a shot across the bow that shouts; Google will defend the Open Web, and profitable business they have there. ~ge~

Good article from Aaron Ricadela. The focus is on Java, Sun's hardware-Server business, and Oracle's business objectives. No mention of OpenOffice or ODf though. There is however an interesting quote from IBM regarding the battle between Java and Microsoft .NET. Also, no mention of a OpenOffice-Java Foundation that would truly open source these technologies.

When we were involved with the Massachusetts Pilot Study and ODF Plug-in proposals, IBM and Oracle lead the effort to open source the da Vinci plug-in. They put together a group of vendors known as "the benefactors", with the objective of completing work on da Vinci while forming a patent pool - open source foundation for all OpenOffice and da Vinci source. This idea was based on the Eclipse model.

One of the more interesting ideas coming out of the IBM-Oracle led "benefactors", was the idea of breaking OpenOffice into components that could then be re-purposed by the Eclipse community of developers. The da Vinci plug-in was to be the integration bridge between Eclipse and the Microsoft Office productivity environment. Very cool. And no doubt IBM and Oracle were in synch on this in 2006. The problem was that they couldn't convince Sun to go along with the plan.

Sun of course owned both Java and OpenOffice, and thought they could build a better ODF plug-in for OpenOffice (and own that too). A year later, Sun actually did produce an ODF plug-in for MSOffice. It was sent to Massachusetts on July 3rd, 2007, and tested against the same set of 150 critical documents da Vinci had to successfully convert without breaking. The next day, July 4th, Massachusetts announced their decision that they would approve the use of both ODF and OOXML! The much hoped for exclusive ODF requirement failed in Massachusetts exactly because Sun insisted on their way or the highway.

Let's hope Oracle can right the ship and get OpenOffice-ODF-Java back on track.

"......To gain

Interesting discussion at Business Insider. I disagree with the Eric Krangel somewhat in that Oracle does benefit from working with Google Apps. Check the comments section for my response.

"If Google (GOOG) is going to get big companies to pay for its Google Apps service, plugging into other enterprise software is going to be helpful. So it's good news for Google that Oracle (ORCL) is willing to play along."

"This morning the two companies announced a new collaboration between Google Apps and Oracle's Siebel customer care/CRM software. With the new "Oracle Gadget Wizard for Google Apps," it's now easier to port data between Oracle and Google Apps spreadsheets..........." That gives Google a new selling point as it deploys salespeople to the enterprise in its bid to convert Microsoft Office users into paying Google Apps customers.