Open Web

Very interesting read that says a lot about the new economy and where it's going. "Between 2010 and 2020, the business sector is projected to add 3.8 million new jobs, according the U.S. Department of Labor. Here's a closer look at five jobs expected to flourish, and what it takes to achieve success in them. "

And so there will be only three major web page rendering engines, webkit, mozilla's gecko, and MSIE. with only webkit in the ascendancy. 

This page includes the opinion of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on an interlocutory appeal from a district court decision to dismiss two California state law causes of action from an ongoing case, leaving only the federal law causes of action. The Ninth Circuit disagreed, vacated the district court's decision, and remanded for consideration of the dismissal issue under the correct legal standard. This was a pro-plaintiff decision that makes it very likely that the case will continue with the state law causes of action reinstated against all or nearly all defendants. This is an unusually important price-fixing case with potentially disruptive effect among mobile device component manufacturers and by such a settlement or judgment's ripple effects, manufacturers of other device components globally. Plaintiffs are several major  voice/data communications services in the U.S. with the defendants being virtually all of the manufacturers of LCD panels used in mobile telephones. One must suspect that if price-fixing is in fact universal in the LCD panel manufacturing industry, price-fixing is likely common among manufacturers of other device components. According to the Ninth Circuit opinion, the plaintiffs' amended complaint includes detailed allegations of specific price-fixing agreements and price sharing actions by principles or agents of each individual defendant company committed within the State of California, which suggests that plaintiffs have very strong evidence that the alleged conspiracy exists. This is a case to watch.    

One of the "Lessons of Massachusetts" is that the key lock-in point for Microsoft's monopoly is their iron fisted control of the productivity environment, anchored by MSOffice and the Windows local workgroup client/server system.  Key to office productivity is the compound document model that fuels every business process and business productivity system.  It's the embedded logic and database connectivity (OLE, ODBC, MAPI and COM ActiveX controls) that juice the compound document model.   Convert a compound document to another format (or PDF), and you BREAK the both the document, AND THE BUSINESS PROCESS!!!! It was the breaking of the business process that stopped Massachusetts from moving to the Open Document Format !!!! So now comes a story with consumer sales vs enterprise sales numbers that seemingly shatter the Lessons of Massachusetts.  How is that? My take is that the numbers Microsoft touts are true.  Consumers are making new purchases - NOT enterprises.  The simple truth is that, as Microsoft introduces new OS and Application Services geared to Mobile / Cloud Computing, these new systems BREAK legacy business systems.  It's still way too costly for businesses to transition to the new models. Eventually though, businesses will replace those legacy business productivity systems with Mobile / Cloud Computing systems.  And it will be a rip-out-and-replace transition; not the gradual "value-added" transition everyone hopes Microsoft will provide.   Interesting stuff. excerpt: "If Microsoft is an enterprise company, then why is it spending so much time and money on stuff like Bing, Xbox, Windows Phone, and the Surface RT? It should be going all-in on cloud computing and services. If you were to ask Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer, his answer would probably be: It's a dumb question, we're both. In an interview with Jason Pontin at MIT Technology Review, he said: ""Our number-one thing is supplying products to consumers. That's kind of what we do.

Note that rip-out-and-replace to get to the cloud is a very risky strategy for MSFT because the company forfeits its vendor lock-in advantage; the question for the enterprise then becomes "replace with what?" The answer in many cases will be non-Microsoft services. And traditionally, what the enterprise uses has driven what enterprise workers use at home far more than vice versa.

"Add Hitler to the list of people frustrated by Google's decision to shut down Google Reader. In the latest addition to the Hitler Reacts meme, Hitler fumes over the news that his favorite RSS reader is being killed off. "Why on Earth do they need to destroy all things good?" Hitler says at one point. "How dare they take away Google Reader. I have over 300 feeds in there. Have they any idea how much effort I've put in?" When one of his lieutenants tries to tell him that the product has been shut down so Google can focus on other areas such as Google Glass, Hitler shouts that Glass is the worst product idea since Google Wave, before going back to his rant. "What are my alternatives now, huh?" he shouts. "Getting my news from what's retweeted by Stalin?" Fair warning: there's some NSFW language in the video. "

This years list is all about infrastructure, again.  Very interesting though.  Next year will the year of productivity, with business systems and business process migration services leading the way.  Maybe :) "The Top 10 mixes track record with potential. Some startups, such as Aryaka Networks and HyTrust, are more established and have long lists of customers wins. The list also includes more recent startups that are included more for their potential than their current status in the market. Several of these newer companies are helping determine just how the cloud computing market will evolve. They include dinCloud, Nebula and SaaS Markets."

"Gary Edwards on Mar 15, 8:25 PM said: There are only three apps i load at boot-up: gMail, gReader, and gWave. Ooops! Google Wave was cancelled over a year ago. Owning the end-users attention at boot-up proved to be an essential factor to the Microsoft monopoly. They built an iron fisted empire out of owning the point of boot-up. So it's very strange to see Google give up the very thing other cloud platform contenders would no doubt kill for. Very strange. Even stranger though is the perception that Google + will somehow now move to center stage? The only reason i use Google+ is because it's easy to point to an article and post a comment from Google Reader to my + circles. Other than that i have no use for +. Nicolas Carr posted an interesting comment on Google's cancellation of gReader yesterday. He tried to argue that there is a difference between "tools" and "platforms", and Google was more interested in building a platform than maintaining "tools" like gReader. So, Google+ is now essential to the Google Platform? Unfortunately, the otherwise brilliant and cosmic insightful Mr. Carr, fails to make that case. Microsoft became a platform when they succeeded in positioning their OS as the essential factor bridging an explosively innovative and rapidly commoditiz'ing Windows hardware reference platform, and, he equally rapid and innovative Windows software application platform. Both software and hardware were being written and developed to the Windows OS, with features doubling and costs being halved at a rate that even Moore's Law envied. Microsoft fully cemented the emerging hardware - OS - application platform with a business productivity environment that necessitated the use of the MS Office suite of servers and apps. That lock on business productivity has yet to be broken. And even though the mighty Google Apps has made some progress convincing businesses to rip-out-and-replace their legacy business productivity systems and re write to the Google Cloud P

Excellent list with both quick and extended reviews.  Excellent recommendations and critique.

Impress.js editor still in beta but lots of fun!

Awesome analysis!  Very useful observations as to what makes for a stunning, unforgettable presentation.  Note to self: read this before starting every presentation effort!!  No exceptions.

Hubspot has posted a slide deck stating their "Cultural Principles".  Very interesting and thought provoking piece.  I enjoyed the surprisingly quick presentation.  Easy to understand. but make no mistake;  some serious thought and effort went into this. "The workplace is changing at rapid pace - it's mobile, decentralized, and flexible. "The biggest problem most companies have is that they operate much like a company from 50 years ago - despite the fact that the world has changed," says HubSpot CTO Dharmesh Shah. "The second biggest problem is that they don't think of their culture as being for the people. Culture is not about perks and parties. It's about what you believe and how you behave." People work for a purpose, not a pension The 9-5 workday is dead So is the idea of staying at one company forever And so it's not just a manifesto, but becomes part of a company, and everyone participates in creating and changing it.

Nice tutorial for building a responsive framework using the open source "WireFly" framework solution.

Fascinating story about Chris Kemp of OpenStack fame, and his recent effort to commoditize Cloud Computing hardware/software systems - Nebula excerpt: "Though it doesn't look like much, (about the size of a four-inch-tall pizza box) Nebula One is the product of dozens of engineers working for two years in secrecyin Mountain View, Calif. It has attracted the attention of some of Silicon Valley's top investors. The three billionaires who made the first investment in Google-Andy Bechtolsheim, David Cheriton, and Ram Shriram-joined forces again to back Nebula One, betting that its technology will invite a dramatic shift in corporate computing that outflanks the titans of the industry. "This is an example of where traditional technology companies have failed the market," says Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems (ORCL) and famed hardware engineer. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Comcast Ventures, and Highland Capital Partners have also backed Kemp's startup, itself called Nebula, which has raised more than $30 million. The origins of Nebula One go back to Kemp's days at NASA, which he joined in 2006 as director of strategic business development. In 2007, he became a chief information officer, making him, at 29, the youngest senior executive in the U.S. government. In 2010, he became NASA's chief technology officer. Kemp spent much his time at NASA developing more efficient data centers for the agency's various computing efforts. He and a team of engineers built the early parts of what is now known as OpenStack, software that makes it possible to control an entire data center as one computer. To see if other companies could take the idea further, Kemp made the software open source. Big players such as AT&T (T), Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Rackspace Hosting (RAX) have since incorporated OpenStack into the cloud computing services they sell customers. Kemp had an additional idea: He wanted to use OpenStack as a way to give every company its