Hot-rod
The fuel-cell laptop seems like a great idea. Definitely has more upside than batteries. Buy some Zippo lighter fluid and you are set for the week. I wonder how much heat they generate?
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The fuel-cell laptop seems like a great idea. Definitely has more upside than batteries. Buy some Zippo lighter fluid and you are set for the week. I wonder how much heat they generate?
I think the RIAA is really on to something here. Let's see: we'll piss off all of the college students so that they will go out and buy CDs instead of downloading the music for free. Yea, right.
No one can deny that they their are copyrights being infringed and I'm sure it would be possible to put a damper on rampant file sharing through such tactics, but this could backfire in a big way or simply push the sharing off-shore. Maybe a little creativity in the face of a structural change in their market would work better?
The idea of running Microsoft Office on Linux seems a little silly to me. If you really want to run a specific application designed for Windows it probably makes most sense to run it on Windows. Why would you mess around with Linux in that case? How much money would it really save you per desktop? How much additional productivity risk would you be incurring? Would Microsoft give you any kind of support for this configuration (I doubt it)?
I like Linux and think that for technical users, it's great. But for a horde of unsophisticated users, it just doesn't seem to make sense. Before Linux gets on the desktop, needs to have an excellent end user experience and solid productivity applications. There is a long way to go on both fronts.
Since ERP vendors have been in the press so much recently, I've been thinking about the real value of ERP systems. I guess I would define real value for a corporation as something that sustainably improves profitability. In most cases, such a competitive advantage would have to come from some kind of unique position in the marketplace. For example, it is easy to imagine an ERP system can further reduce the unit costs of a cost-leader in a particular environment (say, manufacturing). Whether a unit cost reduction is worth the initial expediture is one that you'd have to work out, but it is pretty clear that such savings could manifest themselves. Is that sustainable? Since your competitor can go out and buy a similar system (possibly even learning from your mistakes) and reproduce your cost environment, it just doesn't seem like a long-term winning solution.
Now, what do ERP systems offer companies that do not compete purely on cost? I suppose all companies have some kind of accounting requirements that can be met with ERP packages. You could see that installing an ERP might reduce costs (read: headcount) in the back-office operations of a company. But, is that really a sustainable competitive advantage? Such cost savings are easily reproducible and might have little to do with competitiveness in a environment that isn't very sensitive to costs (say, fashion).
I don't think that companies make hugely irrational investments in these systems and, overall, I'm bullish on the ability of IT to help competitiveness, but I'm not sure what the rational is for off-the-shelf systems sometimes. Is it herd mentality? Can the systems be customized enough to provide a unique advantage? Is just using the system well a unique advantage? Just wondering.
I've recently been playing around a little bit with R, which is an open source implementation of S-Plus. It's a powerful statistics package that seems to be very mature, reliable and flexible. The graphics it produces are very high quality and I would imagine it would be a great teaching package for statistics. I haven't tested its overall capacity, but it ran very quickly with the largest datasets that I had to throw at it.
Anyway, it is certainly worth taking a look at if you are looking for something that goes a little beyond Excel and don't want to shell out the big bucks for a commercial product.
The breakdown of where the money goes from commerical music on the Internet is quite interesting. There are so many hands in the pot on this thing. The big question that hits me in the forehead from the distribution of the funds are the big chunks that go to the labels and the publishers. I guess the labels spend significant money on promotion and should get a return on that, but 30%? Seems a little bit lopsided that the people who actually came up with the music get a third of that.
I'm sitting outside on my back porch with a good cup of coffee on a lovely Sunday morning as I write this. It's 70 degrees, the sun is shining and the birds are chirping. You really have to like Wi-Fi. Plus, although I've been happy with my Dell 8500 since I bought it, I'm now even more impressed with the brightness of the screen - it is quite readible outside in full sunlight.
Some interesting background information on the folks at SCO. It seems that they are serial litigators. Also has a good analogy of Linux and religion: the righteous always believe they will win but sometimes the forces of evil have better lawyers.
Apparently, I was wrong. I really thought that Oracle's bid for PeopleSoft was just a way to instill some FUD in the ERP market and allow Oracle to gain some more momentum. Now that the bid has been raised to something more realistic, it looks like he is serious. Larry really wants to kill PeopleSoft.
With the currently declining market in ERP, that might not be a bad idea. There will certainly be some consolidation (regardless of what happens with this thing, JD Edwards is gone as an independent company). But, from the numbers I've seen, it looks more like both PeopleSoft and Oracle are losing ground. I guess throwing money at eliminating a competitor looks better than improving their own products and positioning. Maybe $6.3 billion dollars doesn't go as far in creating and promoting a solid product as it used to.
I love the concept behind Bullfighter from Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu. Basically, it is a grammar checker that looks for technobabble in your documents. So, it is a "Workflow-enabled communication empowerment solution" ;-)
The kind of Wi-Fi to WAN roaming described in this Infoworld article might be a good reason to upgrade to a new wireless service. In any event, it has that always-on cool factor. I guess it really depends on the real throughput (i.e. will you notice a dramatic difference between Wi-Fi and WAN) and the cost. If it isn't that much more than a cell plan, you could see this kind of thing working. But, I'm sticking to my original story on this: make my phone work, then ask me for more money.
The underwhelming progress of 3G wireless technology has been in stark contrast to the hype that preceeded the roll-out. In this article, strategy+business looks at the reasons why this has happened. Although it reads like something written in 1999 with all of the references to B2B, B2C and B2E, it basically notes that most of the success has happened in internal corporate applications (so called B2E).
I mostly agree with the reasons listed for the disappointing growth in this area (lack of network speed, lack of consumer demand, mobile device limitations, consumer unwillingness to pay [isn't this the same as #2] and lack of worldwide wireless standards), basically I think the reason is that most wireless phone companies suck and people don't want to give them any more money. Get my wireless phone to work reliably and maybe I'll want to expand to other services. Right now, no way.
John Dvorak has an interesting take on the SCO case: basically, he thinks that open-source leaders aren't taking this thing seriously enough and that some kind of settlement could lead to an injunction on Linux (or at least parts of it). I'm not as bleak about the possible outcomes of the case for Linux and I hope it doesn't kill the OS.
But, the legal environment surrounding this is very unstable and could prove catastrophic to corporate use of Linux if a clear solution is not achieved. Why would you want to incur the additional legal risk of going with Linux when you have alternatives that are much less risky?
On a totally different subject, as I wrote in a previous item, I recently was in Manhattan for vacation. We went out to a number of bars and restaurants during our stay and I have to say that I'm a big fan of the New York City smoking ban. I don't smoke myself, but I wouldn't consider myself a rabid anti-smoker. In fact, I believed that the ban on smoking in bars and restaurants to be too draconian. After all, drinking and smoking just seem to go together and I do believe that smoking is a choice that adults should have in this country.
But, after experiencing some smoke-free clubs and really noticing that it was just more comfortable to be in a smoke-free environment. Plus, the clothes I wore didn't reek of smoke (a little spilled beer, but that's another story) and I didn't feel as hung-over as I might have had I just felt like I'd been smoked out. Anyway, I think I would go out more if there were a similar ban on smoking where I lived - it's a better experience.
A possible cross-platform story for C#/.NET? I've played around with Mono a bit in the past and it seems to have some promise. Maybe this kind of support from an ISV will help it gain some more ground? It can't hurt anyway...
An interesting AP piece explores the death of cursive handwriting. Now that kids use computers at a very young age (my 3 year-old is pretty comfortable with a keyboard), it seems that they aren't developing handwriting skills as well as they used to. Of course, this makes sense: it is pure substitution of one skill for another.
Personally, I find that the only thing I write using pen and paper these days are meeting notes and quick jots while I'm on the phone or working on something on the computer. On the rare occassions I have to write something out in longhand that needs to look good (like a thank you card or something), it is very hard for me to do.
This article from Mitch Wagner's Weblog on the Palm-Handspring merger is interesting. I have to say that I agree with his conclusions: everyone who wants a handheld probably has one. I tried it out a few years ago, but decided that pencil and paper was more convienient for me. The market for handhelds is probably not going to get a lot better.
I do think the idea that he talks about (super-mini Tablet PCs) is interesting. As kind of an ersatz way of doing this I have one of those USB Memory Key things and it is great. I don't remember how much it cost me, but it was less than $30 and it holds enough data (including the files to this weblog) that I can pretty much work on any computer with a USB port and a modern OS (I suppose applications help as well).
Is it 1999 again? With big mergers occuring daily in the tech environment, one might think so. I guess the same rationale for the Peoplesoft aquisition of JD Edwards applies to Oracle taking over Peoplesoft as well. But, I'm not so sure this is a sign of strength for any of the firms involved - the market for enterprise apps is still tepid. Also, while it seemed to me that Peoplesoft and JD Edwards had pretty distinct customer bases, so you could make the case that Peoplesoft was basically buying customers, it seems that Oracle and Peoplesoft have the same type of customers. Might make the merger less risky, but doesn't really broaden the customer base by much.
On an interesting entreprenurial note, I read in a little side blurb in Intelligent Enterprise that Savantis, a company that provides a switch which creates a layer of indirection between database servers and clients, was started with an idea developed by market research instead of a product idea. I guess they just asked CIOs what problems they encountered and developed the database switching idea based on the responses. It almost always seems that technology companies are spawned product first with market research coming relatively late in the game - maybe there is something to be learned here? After all, they did get $12M of VC money for the company... (Of course, that goes totally against the grain of how you should start a software company ;-)
Apparently, I'm not the only one who has some doubts about the Peoplesoft/Oracle aquisition. From the weekly ARC newsletter, ARCWire, sent to me via email today:
ARC Vice President John Moore says, "This is obviously a pre-emptive bid to thwart PeopoleSofts move to buy J.D. Edwards. The Oracle acquisition would hurt PeopleSoft Customers. Many of PeopleSofts senior management came from Oracle, and do not want to return."
Oracles offer of $16 a share, about a 6 percent premium over yesterdays closing stock price of $15.10, pushed trading in PeopleSoft stock to $18 on Friday, and Moore noted that "PeopleSoft had been trading for nearly $22 a share in January this year. Therefore, ARC believes that this is also not a good deal for PeopleSoft sharesholders."
ARC European Research Director Simon Bragg, says "Oracle clearly wont sell PeopleSoft solutions to new customers, but will develop scripts, etc., that enable Peoplesoft customers to upgrade to Oracles e-business suite. It is not good news for Peoplesoft customers, who have essentially chosen Peoplesoft and not Oracle or SAP. They are now forced to choose Oracle, unless SAP also develops low-cost migration solutions."
Ouch.
One of the reasons Microsoft will be able to stand-in against open source is the importance of interface. To the typical business software consumer, the user interface is the software. They don't know or care how it operates under the hood. It is very difficult in a diffuse and not-for-profit project to get someone to do the hard slogging to refine and improve the user interface (and let's not even start on documentation). Although making a pretty good interface is possible just by following solid user interface principles, exceptionally usable software requires investment in usability testing and refinement. This kind of interface design and evolution is not something that open source projects have proven to be good at.
Maybe there is a business model in there somewhere? But I'm not sure you could get past GPL to make your interface proprietary and thus worth investing in.
I like Web Services. Although the WS hypemachine went into overdrive the past few years and really raised expectations without there being much really deployed in the trenches, WS technology does have the potential to make application integration much easier. The idea of having a platform-neutral contract that can be used to call services is very powerful. The hype is starting to die out and it is time to do the hard slogging of actually making it work in practice. Some very useful solutions based on Web Services are starting to emerge.
As a case in point, consider XMLA. This is a technology that I've been working with for a few months now and I really think that it offers a better way to provide OLAP services to distributed clients. It is by no means perfect and it is still to early to tell if the technology will really take off. But, it shows real promise and gives me hope about Web Services.