Open Web

Interesting theory, but can you really train a Java developer in under 3 months? Great list of training services provided in this blog. excerpt: They're handing out Gutenberg printing presses out there: with services like Treehouse (http://goo.gl/MCeTL) and Codecademy (http://goo.gl/kw2j9) (and its expertly-timed year of code), countless university courses free online, Google Code University (http://goo.gl/IJeB), the warm embrace of Stack Overflow, in-person courses like Dev Bootcamp (http://goo.gl/RPPxi), summer camps for kids, even the promise of a one-day result with Decoded (http://goo.gl/I6wGD) (the six-minute abs of learning to code), and great organizations like CodeNow (http://goo.gl/n4IO7) reaching out to teach code in underserved communities. I'm sure I've left many out. Treehouse   (http://goo.gl/MCeTL) Codecademy (http://goo.gl/kw2j9) Google Code University (http://goo.gl/IJeB) Dev Bootcamp (http://goo.gl/RPPxi) Decoded (http://goo.gl/I6wGD) CodeNow (http://goo.gl/n4IO7)

Node.js tutorials and script library resources

Commission v. MIcrosoft Redux.

Need to speak with Brian about this :)

Summary of a very interesting Vanity Fair article (linked) describing why the failure of Microsoft is certain.  A second Forbes article titled,  "That's All Folks:  The Writing is on the Wall at Microsoft", compliments the Vanity Fair piece.  Good stuff.  Hasta la bye-bye Microsoft. Nice knowin ya. excerpt: Vanity Fair has an article in its August issue that tells the story of how Microsoft "since 2000 . . . has fallen flat in every area it entered: e-books, music, search, social networking, etc., etc." According to a summary available online, the article finds a devastatingly destructive management technique at the heart of Microsoft's problems.

Some good questions are being asked about the future of Google Wave and collaborative computing.  He misses however another important play for Wave; moving to the center of the emerging Open Web Productivity Environment. excerpt:  Google Wave is another grab for the Holy Grail of collaborative computing. But, will it be more successful than previous attempts? Whenever you see something compared to Lotus Notes, as Google Wave has been, you know to expect an uphill slog. Add a comparison to Microsoft Groove, which I have not seen but seems reasonable, and you can expect deep trouble. Both Notes and Groove are wonderful, innovative applications that have never caught on as I had hoped. Why? They are too difficult to use and develop for. They were way ahead of their time. Maybe Google Wave, a workplace collaboration application that is being rolled out to an additional 100,000 beta testers, has arrived at the right time, finding the right mix of power vs. ease-of-use, and the right metaphor for delivering it. We have an excellent story that offers "Five Reasons To Dive Into Google Wave." That is, if you can find a way to get into the beta. The big question: Can Google Wave succeed where seemingly every collaboration application that has gone has failed?

The U.S. Justice Department has opened an investigation into allegations that International Business Machines (IBM.N) abused its dominance of the mainframe business, said Computer and Communications Industry Association chairman Ed Black.

Microsoft claims that WordPerfect fell into disfavor because it came late to Windows; Novell, which owns the WordPerfect Office technology (after selling the rest of the company to Corel), claims that Microsoft unfairly used its knowledge of Windows APIs to give itself a competitive advantage. There's one very solid piece of evidence in Novell's favor - a 1994 email from Bill Gates that states: "I have decided that we should not publish these extensions. We should wait until we have away to do a high level of integration that will be harder for likes of Notes, WordPerfect to achieve, and which will give Office a real advantage . . . We can't compete with Lotus and WordPerfect/Novell without this."

Playing with the software now. Unite is a cloud integration, with a directory on your system identified as a directory to be shared with the cloud storage. Haven't really got into it yet, but I see options to keep the data in the folder private, to share it with those who know the password, and to publish the directory to the world. There are roughly 25 Unite applications not discussed in the press release here. http://unite.opera.com/applications/ My first thought was that Google will have to respond in kind, while Microsoft --- which doesn't get the power of "free" --- will respond but with a less generous offering.

Opps. I was wrong. There is no online storage. It is as stated in the press release, an integration of a server with the Opera browser. The shared content is served by the local machine. Which means that the local machine must be running in order for others to access the shared content. But according to the Unite FAQ, this also means that there are only practical limits on the amount of content shared, e.g., hard disk capacity and bandwidth. Why bother with setting up a LAN or VPN if you can share files over the internet using Opera? And how will Google and Microsoft respond?

I posted two lengthy comments here.  Can't see the forest for all the trees is the idiom that comes to mind. excerpt: With Silverlight, Microsoft continues to make it clear that they intend to use this web application framework, which they developed, to power much of what they are doing on the web going forward. Again, the problem here is that not only does Microsoft control this, but it requires a plug-in to use. Sure, they've made the plug-in available to most browsers, including the ones by rivals Google and Apple, but it's still a plug-in. It's something that's going to stop everyone from seeing the same web no matter which browser they use. This has of course long been an issue with Microsoft. Despite a clear shift within the rest of the industry toward web standards, Microsoft long played difficult with its Internet Explorer browser. They could afford to, and maybe you could even argue that it was in their interest to, because they were so dominant. It was only when a standards-based browser, Mozilla's Firefox, started biting off significant chunks of IE's market share that Microsoft shifted their position to play more nicely with standards.

excerpt: "Once upon a time, Microsoft bestrode the software world like a ruthless cartoon villain, gobbling up rivals and defying pleas for restraint from regulators. But the once-impregnable giant has now been humbled: following an acrimonious 10-year anti-trust battle with European regulators, Microsoft on Wednesday finally agreed to open its Windows operating system to rival web browsers in Europe." Great opening line!  But they get the story wrong.  Woefully wrong!  Just the opposite is happening.  Microsoft has moved from the browser Web application to the Web itself.  It's the platform stupid!!! No one understands platform better than Microsoft.  Control the platform's base formats, protocols, interfaces and internal messaging system, and you control all applications, services and devices using that platform.   The problem for Microsoft has been that the Web is a platform used by all, but owned by none.  It's based on open standards that no one owns or controls.  So as the Web evolves into a universal platform for converged communications, content and collaborative computing, Microsoft was facing the one fate every monopolist fears - having to compete on a level playing field! While it took them well over ten years to come up with a counter strategy and effective implementation, Microsoft has finally achieved the impossible.   They have carved out a huge section of the Open Web for their proprietary and exclusive use.  

List of 2010 predictions from Mark Anderson.  Interestingly he points out that Microsoft's loss in the mobility market is the leading factor in their loss as a consumer facing provider.  No mention of the Web being split between a Google dominated and consumer facing Open Web, and a Microsoft owned enterprise facing proprietary Web. excerpt: Microsoft started out its life as a consumer/developer-focused company. The company subsequently switched strategies and became a largely enterprise-focused vendor. These days, consumer is king for Microsoft - at least as far as corporate strategy and where its ad dollars go. But what if Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie and other leaders at Microsoft are wrong and integrating the consumer and business worlds doesn't really matter? One very influential market watcher, Mark Anderson, author of the Strategic News Service newsletter, is betting that instead of a melding, there will be an increasing chasm between the consumer and business market.

Matthew Papakipos, the engineering director for the Chrome OS project, and Eitan Bencuya, from Google PR. Over the course of the interview, Papakipos and Bencuya go into considerable detail about topics that range from big-picture perspectives on how Google develops software and where it sees the Web going with HTML5, to the nuts and bolts of what Chrome OS is slated to offer in specific areas. In short, we cover the following ground: ... How and when the Chrome OS project was conceived... The relationship between Chrome OS and Android... How Google is trying to tackle the same "file handler" problem as Windows OLE and the registry, but in the cloud.... Who Google sees as the target audience for Chrome OS, how did they decide which projects and features to pursue... The convergence of the phone and the computer... Nuts and bolts details, like native client execution, security, and UI issues... The significance of Chrome's built-in media player

Janco notes that from February 2009 to February 2010, IE dropped 6.21%, from 70.99% to 64.78%. "The major findings are that in the last 12 months Microsoft's browser market share has continued to erode - Microsoft lost over 6% in the last 12 months; Firefox's market share is unchanged for the last 12 months; Google Desktop and Chrome now have just under 6%; and Netscape is no more," reads an excerpt from the Browser and Operating System Market Share White Paper.

ARCELONA - This year at the Mobile World Congress is the year of Android. Google's operating system debuted here two years ago. Last year we expected a slew of handsets, and saw just a trickle. This year, Android is everywhere, on handsets from HTC, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and even Garmin-Asus. If this were the world of computers, Android would be in a similar position to Windows: Pretty much every manufacturer puts it on its machines. This is great news for us, the consumer. Android is stable, powerful and now it even runs Flash (I got a sneak peek of Flash running on a Motorola handset here at the show. It crashed). It's even better for the manufacturers, as - unlike Windows Mobile - Android is free. It's also open, so the phone makers can tweak it and trick it out as much as they like. And they do like. Most of the Android phones here at Mobile World Congress are running custom versions of Android, which differentiates them and, in theory at least, makes them easier to use, hiding the complexities of a proper multitasking OS from the user.

Whether a patent constitutes "property" in the U.S. is an issue on which the Supreme Court has apparently never ruled. However, there is no question that the nation's founders viewed it only as a government-granted privilege, not a "property" right. The U.S. Supreme Court quoted Thomas Jefferson on the topic: Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body. VI Writings of Thomas Jefferson, at 18

Right now, we're all worrying about Apple's patent claims against HTC, but Android may face a similar attack from Microsoft. It's not terribly well known that Microsoft claims that it owns significant intellectual property used in Linux, the operating system at the heart of Android. Starting in 2006, Microsoft began reaching licensing deals with a number of companies that use the open source OS, among them Novell,  I-O Data, Samsung, LG Electronics and most recently, Amazon. All these deals are similar, but as an example, Amazon has agreed to pay Microsoft licensing fees to use Linux on Amazon.com and on the Kindle. Read that again and let it sink in. Many have voiced skepticism that Microsoft could successfully defend their claims, but so far, companies have rolled over and complied rather than take the question to court.