Month: May 2004

I know Outlook is a memory hog, but…

“Do not archive your mail. 30 days. This is not something that you get to decide. This is company policy.”

– VP Jim Allchin’s email to Microsoft employees during antitrust litigation from Burst.com in 2000. Lawyers claim the directive was to “save computer memory space”.

“There is very little reason for anyone to throw anything away…You can store every conversation you have ever had, from the time you are born to the time you die.”

– Microsoft Research leader Rick Rashid at WWW 2004, describing MSR initiatives in capturing your entire life via technology.

VON Canada 2004 – fair game

Just got back from VON Canada 2004, held in Markham from May 18-20. Not the best conference I’ve been to, I’m afraid. Hard copies of the presentations were absent. Attendees didn’t even get notepads. The presentations seemed hastily prepared, with the presenters themselves lacking good public speaking skills. The exhibit area only featured nine exhibitors. Telus was the only “big name” booth there; Bell Canada didn’t even bother to show up.

Carl Pulver rationalized that it was because they had only 10 weeks to prepare – less than half the typical implementation time. This was also their first Canadian VON conference. The catering and the location, the Hilton Suites, was top notch, however. Still, for a conference that cost a cool $2,095 per person for three days, I expected a bit more.

The highlight of the conference was undoubtedly the keynote delivered by the deliciously disruptive Niklas Zennstrom, founder of Skype Technologies SA.

Zennstrom is the creator of Skype, a peer-to-peer Internet telephony software available for free download. (He was also the man behind KaZaa, the P2P application that’s giving the RIAA so much grief.) He mentioned that Skype, currently in beta, will be formally launched in the summer in three different flavours:

  • Skype – a free version for customers to engage in high quality PC to PC voice calls to each other.
  • PocketSkype – a free version that works on a wireless PocketPC – essentially turning a WiFi-enabled PDA into a VoIP phone.
  • Skype Plus – a subscription-based version with voicemail functionality and the ability to call a PC running Skype from a regular POTS phone (POTS to PC).
  • SkypeOut – a premium prepaid version that allows PC to POTS phone calling, and compatibility with headsets and cordless phones. Skype Technologies is talking with Seimens and Plantronics on developing Skype-enabled cordless phones and handsfree Bluetooth headsets.

Skype Technologies currently has secured about $18.8 million US in VC funding. While still in trial, Skype boasts over 4 million users worldwide.

Girish Pathak, Chief Customer Strategist, TELUS has a similar but different vision. He thinks businesses should foresightfully consider mobile platforms as the primary method of deployment.

The competitive landscape will become much larger. The providers can be anything from Skype to ILECs. Data systems could be provided by IBM or Microsoft. Finally, the content, such as entertainment, has w vast market of players involved.

He does express doubt in Skype’s success, however, saying the all-too-true adage, “bandwidth isn’t free.” It is true that the IP network is dumb, making the incumbent carrier a fifth wheel, but Pathak believes that the true intelligence of the network will be with the content provider. Whoever can obtain that position, whether they are an ILEC or not, will win in the new VoIP market.

Welcome to teh intarweb

Have you ever been to some event, and then saw it covered by the news? Didn’t you think that the newsreporter and yourself must have gone to different places? That was my thought, coupled with horror, this blow by blow account of Fox News’s human interest story on blah blah blogging:

“And here Matt Weiler has to patiently explain the difference between a weblog and a chat room. No kidding, they asked both of us about that. It’s like getting a squirrel confused with a mailbox because they’re both on the sidewalk.”

It includes not one, not two, but three hard-hitting interviews with Random Morons On The Street.

I don’t even want to know how the newsmedia will react to eccentric Flash animations such as Hey Hey 16k – Animation by Rob Manuel; Song by MJ Hibbett. I remember my first exposure to computer gaming was Ultima IV on the Apple IIe. The skeletons looked kinda like Sinead O’Connor. These guys are right, what *does* 16k get you today? An Outlook macro virus, maybe.

You too can be a crazy cat person with hundreds of cats with The Infinite Cat Project. Basically, someone takes an adorable photo of their cat, post it for someone to take a picture of their kitty looking at the image on the monitor, ad infinitum. Being me, I’ve noticed an unusual number of Sony Trinitrons in this crowd.

In the D drive: Codename: Gordon, a 2D sidescroller inspired by the upcoming Half-Life 2, available for free on Steam. A silly time-waster, and a good way for Valve to test and demonstrate their Steam content preloading and delivery systems.

De asini umbra disceptare

The Cheese Boutique, our local gourmet food store, gives out these pale yellow notepads, and I noticed the other day the words “De gustibus……” printed at the bottom of each page. Ever curious, I went on the net and found this delightful article on sage Latin quotes from this Looksmart Food Management article.

FM’s readers will be especially interested in phrases that allude to food or appetite. Fames optimum condimentum, for example (hunger is the best seasoning). Or Fabas indulcet fames (hunger makes everything taste good; literally, hunger sweetens beans).

When one tinkers with a recipe, it is Ad gustum (to one’s taste,” as in adding salt). It is usually best to leave such matters to an arbiter elegantiae (an authority in matters of taste).

BTW, the quote in full, “De gustibus non est disputandum” means, “In matters of taste, there are no judges”. I’ll drink to that.

Money rolls, cars and code

IT Manager’s Journal gives seven open source business strategies for competitive advantage.

  1. The Optimization Strategy: Use open, modular and conformable architecture to drive optimized applications of greater value up the software stack. i.e. Oracle’s 9i database running on top of Linux.
  2. The Dual License Strategy: Give software away in public license. If users want commercial distribution rights, they can buy a commercial license of a “Deluxe” version of the same product. i.e. MySQL.
  3. The Consulting Strategy: Enterprise solution costs are 70% implementation. Consulting costs are all higher margin than licensing. i.e. 10X Software provides consulting and strategic analysis of open source software.
  4. The Subscription Strategy: Selling software as a service. Revenue comes from maintenance, training and support; Red Hat is most famous for pulling this off.
  5. The Patronage Strategy: Supporting an open source project to drive standards adoption, or to once again drive value up the stack to something you can make money off of. Execution is key, however: you have to contribute code, money, and guidance. IBM pushes Linux and Eclipse to get people to buy their middleware and DB2, not to mention IT consulting from their Global Services division.
  6. The Hosted Strategy: Using open source to reduce engineering costs and increase performance to your hosted services. Google delivers accurate and fast search results thanks to a titanic computer cluster of 100,000 Linux servers.
  7. The Embedded Strategy: Using Linux in embedded systems means less capital outlay, lower hardware expenses and standards compliance. It also frees up manpower to concentrate on value-added software. ie. Neoteris.

Will you make as much money going open source as you did with proprietary software? It’s not guaranteed, and many OSS-focused companies have shrunk or disappeared. However, the only sure thing is change. Tthis anonymous comment sums up my thoughts on the paradigm shift in the software market:

The point is that companies do not have the right to make money in any specific way. As long as they add value, they make money…Open source/free software does not make any difference in this. It is a sign that the market is settled. We know how to make an operating system. Do not try to make a living by incrementally optimising it – it is not profitable any more. Build something on top of it, or start potato farming.

Pragmatism and a clear business strategy is key.

Open Source Conference: Finale

Interesting fact: the conference was also presented online in realtime to attendees around the world. They used ePresence, a LiveMeeting-esque interactive webcasting system developed at UofT. They plan to release that software as open source in the near future.

Trackbacks

  • Daniel Allen has set up the unofficial wiki for OSCONF.
  • Slashdot With links to articles from the Ottawa Citizen and Newsforge.
  • ITBusiness.ca Only covers the morning of Day 2, and then angles it as Young (Red Hat) vs. Matusow (MS).
  • GrokLaw PJ expresses interest in the ePresence system used for webcasting this conference.

Webcasts of the conference will be also be available for free on the website.

Pet Peeves
Scheduling: This conference could have easily been four days. Day 2 ended at 9pm AT NIGHT. And many attendees were turned away from the microphones due to lack of time.
conference 021.jpg
Do what we say, not as we do: In Day 1, Brad Behndorf apologized before hand if his slides were a bit messed up, since the presenter laptop used PowerPoint. Gary from Teledyn pointed out the conference website ran on Microsoft IIS 6.0. It

Open Source Conference: Day 3

I missed the morning of the final day of the Open Source Conference at the University of Toronto, but I did get back in time to see the closing arguments and final keynote.

Joseph Potvin, Public Works, Government of Canada, pledged that the Canadian government was serious about standards, and committed to embracing the “full conference 020.jpg
spectrum of software models”. He reasons that since the government is for the people, they should have a stake in running free/open software by the people. He also runs GOSLING, a community dedicated to promoting the use of OSS in government.

Two poetic descriptions of the open source community: “a wellspring of human spirit” and “a group consciousness”.

The panel concluded by saying that knowledge sharing is a sign of a heathy economy.

In the end, open source advocates agree on one thing: the FLOSS ideology appeals to the heart and also the mind. They feel there are

Open Source Conference: Day 2

While everyone else on this planet was at E3, I hunkered down to conference 019.jpg Day 2 of the Open Source Conference at the University of Toronto. Today’s themes were business models and technology. This day ran over 12 hours long – from 8:30am to 9pm!

“Business Models Don’t Matter”

Bob Young, co-founder of Red Hat and Lulu.com and current owner of the Hamilton Ti-Cats, was even more pragmatic when discussing Red Hat’s business model; that is, they had none. Having just been laid off from being a computer salesman, Young’s goal was to feed himself. Their strategy was to listen to their customers’ needs.

Lamenting the free market: “Customers are evil. They always want more for less money. The second less evil people are your employees. The only people who understand you are your competitors.”

In the early years, most industry insiders predicted Red Hat was doomed to fail. In 1994, Scott McNealy joked that it was “hard to calculate a P&L without a P”. Despite this, Red Hat continued to flourish, because only at Red Hat could customers “get software that could do what they wanted it to do”. Red Hat ended up winning InfoWorld’s OS of the Year award five years in a row, from 1996 to 2000.

Continue reading Open Source Conference: Day 2

Open Source Conference: Day 1

It’s the collaborative development of software through peer-review. It’s a constitutional right that will beckon a new age of civil liberty. It’s a business model for making great, cheap programs. It’s a disruptive economic factor that will level the playing field in the software market, a market currently dominated by monopolies.

These are some of the opinions given at the Open Source Conference at the University of Toronto on May 9-11. In a three-day schedule, speakers discussed open source software’s social, legal, business and technological implications.

Not Just for Nerds

The attendees at this conference were technically very savvy. Many had Wi-Fi enabled devices. The teenager in front of me was reading Slashdot on Firefox while running Eclipse. Another man was using Microsoft OneNote and MindManager. (I chatted with him briefly, it turns out he’s working on his Ph.D. thesis, which is an Outlook add-on that intelligently organizes your email). Who’s here: Bell University Labs, IBM, Government of Canada, Sun Microsystems, Nortel Networks, and University of Ottawa. Most were also very passionate orators with multitudes of opinions themselves.

Romancing the Source

To understand open source, we must go back to the beginning. The term “open source” was coined in 1998, but thirty years ago, virtually all software was released into the public domain.

Continue reading Open Source Conference: Day 1

Personal Displays of Affection

Dana fantasizes about his idea of a perfect PDA – fortunately for him, most of his wishes are already commercially available (and the laser keyboard is coming soon).

I hate PDAs. There is something banal about using a plastic stick to scratch tiny characters onto a small patch of plastic while peering into a murky plastic screen just doesn’t grab me.

What I want, does not yet exist:

  1. Ultra-high contrast, ultra-high resolution true colour screen
  2. Make that a flexible e-paper screen
  3. Or a projector screen. I’m not picky.
  4. WiMax or FireWireless access, or some other newfangled broadband wireless standard
  5. User design is built around a portable web browser
  6. Voice recognition; so I can just say “Weather for Toronto” and go straight to that webpage
  7. Open document format – because I don’t feel like having to pay for some proprietary locked copy of Alice in Wonderland, thank you

PDALive showed a concept of the PDA of 2010 by Popular Science. Yeah, that’s kinda what I’d like. Until then, I’m lugging this notepad with me. It doesn’t lose charge, and I can even use it as a coaster.