Author: Rajesh Jain

An Entrepreneur based in Mumbai, India.

IBM’s Linux Strategy

From News.com in a broader article on Linux, starting with some OS history:

Windows trounced OS/2 in a furious operating systems battle back when George Bush Sr. was president and Lou Gerstner was still busy at RJR Nabisco trying to sell folks more Velveeta and Tang.

Smartly retiring from a contest it had little chance of winning, IBM left the field to Microsoft, which cemented its desktop dominance and emerged as the most powerful software company in history.

There things stood for over a decade, but–F. Scott Fitzgerald aside–there are second acts. In this rematch with Microsoft, Big Blue has the stronger hand, owing to its very public embrace of Linux three years ago.

IBM is bent on making a commodity out of Intel-based hardware with an operating system derived through the open-source process. Its pitch to corporate Unix customers running Sun Microsystems’ Sparc or other proprietary chips is that Linux on Intel offers virtually the same performance–but at a far lower hardware price. Once they bite, that then opens the door for IBM to rake in the money selling middleware and services.

If IBM pulls it off, Microsoft risks getting cut out of a lot of corporate business.

Action@Home

From BusinessWeek: “Much of the truly exciting innovation in technology is now being developed for consumers.”

It adds: “The real key to the exciting new products on display at CES — and soon, at a discount electronics chain near you — is that all these digital products are starting to work together in ways that make them much more useful. It’s now relatively painless to film a child’s birthday party with your camcorder, edit it on your PC, and burn it onto a DVD to send to relatives. Technofiles can display their own digital photos on their digital TVs’ vibrant liquid-crystal displays. Or they can send audio files from a PC over their home wireless network to the new “media hub” — a combination digital hi-fi stereo receiver, media server, and wireless router (think of a souped-up set-top box) — in their living rooms.”

End-to-end Network

Writes David Isenberg (IEEE Spectrum) on the move of network intelligence to the edges rather than being centralised:

The Internet, the world’s overarching end-to-end network, is now the connectivity medium of communications. Yet telephone company networks are still centralized networks designed for a single application, voice. Phone companies still make more money from voice than from other network traffic, even though the volume of data traffic now exceeds voice. Furthermore, Internet voice is getting better and betterits quality can, in fact, far exceed the “toll quality” voice of plain old telephone service.

In addition, smart end devices can set up and manage telephone calls far better than a centralized network. (Why dial a number when you can double-click on it?) In fact, when voice is implemented in end devices, the ability to mix it into other kinds of interactionsonline game play, collaboration, mutual Web surfing, and many more yet to be discoveredthe idea of a “call” as a special, discrete event could well disappear.

The Internet stands on the brink of making the entire functionality of the telephone company obsolete. But that’s not allwith access improvements within the grasp of today’s technology, the Internet can do video entertainment better than broadcast, cable, or satellite television can. The Internet stands on the brink of subsuming the value of all existing special-purpose networks.

Simplifying Information Storage

From 0xDECAFBAD (via Scripting News and Jeremy Zawodny):

Years ago, when I first started using email, I did indeed do this with procmail and other arcane beasties. Then, I found myself cursing that I couldn’t do cross-folder searches very easily. Also, the filters and folders started making less sense as their structure represented only one possible scheme for finding what I was looking for, and I was needing many possible kinds of schemes over time. So, eventually it all ended up in one pile, and searches became my way of finding things.

I abandoned bookmarks for Google by the same principle. Now, my bookmarks consist completely of bookmarklets and a few stray links to local on-disk pages like Python documentation. In fact, I’m wishing that I could create bookmark folders that are fed by Google API powered persistent searches.

that’s what I want to see: Storage without explicit organization, but with super-rich metadata for super-fast searches. Allow me to create views made from persistent searches – my “project folder” is simply a collection of resources tied together by a common tag, one of many. And, if I want to form a project hierarchy, make my persistent searches into file objects too.

The main thing in all this, though, is that it be woven very deeply within the OS. I don’t want a helper app. I want this to replace the standard metaphor completely.

For a start, I am doing to do one thing with my email folders. I have zillions of folders hierarchically organised in my Evolution (with all data stored on our “thick server”). Just have a single folder called “Keep” for all the emails I want to keep. Others are either in the Inbox or Deleted. And then, when I want to find an email, I just do a Search on the “Keep” folder (and perhaps the “Sent” folder, since that has a copy of everything that I write). Goodbye to all them folders. Lets see how it works.

Bill Gates Interview

From Fortune, here are a few quotes by Bill Gates:

  • Inside a company you’re doing sales analysis, project planning, project budgeting–does software make that stuff as easy as it should be? The answer is, Not within a million miles. I mean, you sort of forecast based on what your Siebel customer-relationship management [CRM] software tells you, and you try to look at your SAP enterprise resource planning [ERP] data, but there’s not really a process that systematically deals with all that…And then there’s your work flow during the day. An information worker gets lots of e-mails as people want you to bid on something or respond to a problem. All these “events” are coming in on your PC. Does the software help you know which of those you should ignore or pass along to somebody else, and how to prioritize them? No. We don’t do that yet…The goal [for Office] is to come up with software to make information workers more productive: helping them manage their schedules, prioritize their events, understand the business processes they participate in, and keep their information secure. And we are nowhere near that yet.

  • One of the interesting boundaries inside a company has always been between back-end systems like ERP or CRM software and the knowledge workers sitting at their desks living in a very unstructured world of phone calls, faxes, and e-mails. A business transaction between two companies actually involves at least four dimensions: The knowledge workers in company A talking to knowledge workers in company B, and these same knowledge workers on both sides also interacting with their own back-end systems. So we really have to understand these boundaries both within a company as well as between buyers and sellers. That’s what web services is all about.

  • There are five form factors: wall-sized, desk-sized, tablet-sized, pocket-sized, and wrist-sized. What we need is a more complementary relationship across the devices so that you can think, “Because I have an electronic calendar on my PC, then my wrist device can tell me about traffic conditions without my even asking, because it knows where I’m going.” But to work, the devices have to work well together.

    • Fortune on Linux

    Two articles. The first talks about Linux’s growth in enterprises, and how it threatens a Sun bastion (Wall Street): “Linux believers say a system using Sun’s servers offer no demonstrable advantages over the plain-vanilla servers running Linux, despite being roughly 50% more expensive. Linux may also carve into Microsoft’s NT server software market, but since NT is significantly cheaper than Sun’s Unix offerings, it hasn’t been hit as hard yet on Wall Street.”

    The second article is about Linux for consumers in the form of Lindows.

    can Lindows become a viable business? After all, Microtel is now paying about 25 cents a copy on average [for putting Lindows on its USD 199 PCs being distributed by Wal-mart], and in January it will start distributing the machines on Amazon.com and on CompUSA’s site, dropping the price per copy even further. That’s fine for [Lindows CEO] Robertson. He’s hoping Lindows consumers will then pony up $99 a year for unlimited downloading at a Lindows site full of Linux software. Among the offerings are Sun’s Star Office, which typically sells for $80, and thousands of other Linux titles. Historically it has been hard for all but the geekiest to find, download, and install Linux programs. Robertson’s so-called Click & Run Warehouse divides the Linux world into neat shopping aisles with automatic downloads and installs. Robertson won’t say how many have anted up for the service but admits that 30,000 customers “isn’t that far off the mark.”

    I still feel that the big consumer opportunity for Linux is in the emerging markets, which few companies seem to be looking at. This market needs USD 100 (Rs 5,000) PCs.

    Best of Linux World

    Writes Brian Proffitt:

    – Best Network/Server Application: SuSE Linux OpenExchange Server
    – Best Developer Tools: IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer v5
    – Best Data Storage Solution: IBM Tivoli Storage Manager
    – Best System Integration Software: Microsoft Services for UNIX 3.0
    – Best Security Solution: Computer Associates eTrust Antivirus
    – Best Front Office Solution: Ximian Evolution
    – Best Productivity Application: HRsmart Applicant Tracking
    – Best Cluster Solution: Red Hat Advance Server
    – Best Sys Admin Tools: SCO Volution Manager

    Cisco v Huawei

    WSJ reports that Cisco has sued Huawei, “saying the Chinese company copied its software and violated its patents.” Huawei has fast become a competitor to Cisco in markets like China (where it is based) with its strategy of providing lower-cost products in the networking space. Adds WSJ:

    Founded in 1988 as a maker of telecommunications equipment, Huawei branched into computer-networking gear in recent years and opened offices in the U.S. It is the largest and best-known of the Asian-based competitors challenging Cisco’s dominance in the region by offering similar gear at much lower prices. Huawei reported sales last year of $2.7 billion, down 12% from a year earlier.

    Huawei’s gear is so similar to Cisco’s that some analysts have questioned whether the Chinese company had stolen Cisco’s technology or developed it independently by “reverse engineering,” or examining the guts of Cisco’s equipment.

    Analysts said the lawsuit may be aimed less at protecting Cisco’s sales in China, and more at stymieing Huawei in the rest of the world.

    Continue reading Cisco v Huawei

    South Africa’s Open-Source Choice

    From Business Day:

    For months the (South African) State IT Agency had winced at the incessant expense of buying software licences for hundreds of thousands of staff spread across government departments. Now the agency has declared that it will ditch expensive brand name software in many cases and switch to opensource alternatives.

    The move should save at least R3bn a year, says agency chief information officer Mojalefa Moseki. The policy should also help to create a new generation of programmers skilled in developing their own applications.

    “Government spends close to R3bn a year on software licences alone,” says Moseki. With support and upgrade costs added, the total bill was a punishing R9,4bn last year. “Barely a cent of that is spent in SA because all the companies like Microsoft, Sun, IBM and Lotus are multinationals, so the money goes abroad. SA is a consumer of software, but we can develop it ourselves.”

    More governments need to do the same. They are the biggest spenders on technology, and can be the greatest beneficiaries in terms of cost savings. Besides, they can also a fillip to their domestic software industries.

    23 Bright Ideas

    From Fast Company. This is what Jeff Taylor, founder and chairman, Monster.com says:

    We all need to go into the corn-storage business. By that, I mean developing “silo expertise” in emerging business areas — such as health care, government, biotechnology, and pharmaceuticals — that haven’t gotten much attention in the past five years. Those are the places where money is still being spent.

    We’re using that approach at Monster. For example, 71% of federal-government workers will be eligible to retire over the next eight years. My conclusion: I have to figure out how to do business with the U.S. government. So I put employees in a number of different departments who wear a government-solutions name badge. They represent a silo of expertise that’s going to help me win that business.

    Call them “silos” or “niches,” “business units,” “communities,” or “channels.” I like “silo” because it represents a harvest. The market-place in 2003 is more specialized, competitive, and focused. If you want to harvest revenue, then you’ll have to get into the silo business. You’ll have to build 20 of them, each with a different expertise. Then, depending on the size of your business, you could make $5 million or $300 million in one of those silos and substantially increase your revenue productivity.

    What does this mean for each of us? We can’t be generalists anymore. If you want to have a chance, you need to be a specialist. Be bold about your industry or niche expertise. If you’ve been in pharmaceutical sales, trumpet your expertise in the industry, not just your sales skills. You need to become a silo yourself.