The West Coast edition of the annual Enterprise 2.0 Conference earlier this month generated some noteworthy debate about the evolution and efficacy of social software in enterprise environments -- debate corporate coders would be wise to track.
Start with the opposing views of Martijn Linssen in his blog post, "Enterprise 2.0: the Prodigal Parent," and Andrew McAffee's post, "'Social Business' is Past Retirement Age." ZDNet's Dennis Howlett weighs in on that discussion on his "Irregular Enterprise" blog. So does Bob Warfield's, who analyses on his "Enterprise Irregulars" blog. All worth reading.
I, too, noticed that, among the headlining keynoters -- IBM, Jive, Adobe -- the term "Enterprise 2.0" was all but replaced by "Business Social," or some variation. But I'm not as sure as these guys seem to be about where we are and where we're headed with the enterprise application of social media.
I spoke with Suzanne Livingston, senior product manager for IBM's Social Software group, before the show about this subject. Depending on how you define "social software," you could say that IBM has been in this market since it launched Lotus Connections back in 2007.
"We've seen a lot of customer demand for these types of tools," she said. "That's why we're investing in this technology. That's why we pulled our tools together into a platform early on. I think it's clear that the market is growing and customer demand is growing, but also, we're seeing a whole new series of use cases emerge for how to integrate social into the business work we do day to day."
My favorite example here is IBM's decision to combine social software with the Rational Team Concert environment. The idea was to give developers "instant" access to the experts they need to get issues resolved faster and to receive feedback from communities to help ensure that projects meet their intended goals.
"This is about building a network, but it's also about working more effectively with people, leveraging their expertise and the social data they have shared, so in essence, this is social collaboration," she said.
Ross Mayfield, chairman, president, and co-founder of Palo Alto, Calif.-based Socialtext, claims that his company was the first to deliver social software to businesses way back in 2002. The company's first product was a wiki, which has been built out over time into a platform that includes wikis, blogs, social networking, a widget dashboard, activity streams and microblogging (Twitter for the enterprise.)
"In the early days, Enterprise 2.0 was about bottom-up adoption," Mayfield told me. "People would use hosted services or open source within their work group or department. Today, Enterprise 2.0, or enterprise social software, or whatever you want to call it, is a mainstream category. You've got your niche players, and your stand-alone solutions, like Socialtext and Jive. But you've also got large, established vendors coming into this category -- IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce, what have you -- and that's an important type of validation."
Call it Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Software, or Social Collaboration, this is not a trend any of us can afford to dismiss, even if the ROI hasn't shown up just jet. Maybe it'll just be a cost of doing business. Forget the current hype-level and remember that 500-plus million Facebook users and a gazillion tweeters are already changing the way social media-savvy workers and customers expect to interact with the enterprise.
Posted by John K. Waters on November 26, 20100 comments
Vendor announcements were flying fast and furious at the recent second edition of the Northern California Enterprise 2.0 Conference.
The conference, which "explores the integration of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise, from both strategic and tactical perspectives," drew an estimated 1,400 attendees to the Santa Clara Convention Center. The Boston edition has been running for 6 years.
During his conference keynote opener, conference director Wylie called Enterprise 2.0 observed that "just a couple of years ago, as a market, we were all fighting for legitimacy amid the broader enterprise applications market, and today you all are leading what many believe to be the next truly transformative shift in business, the shift to more people oriented social and collaborative applications."
Okay, he's the conference director, so he can be forgiven this bit of hyperbole. And he also had some actual news: The conference organizers are launching a new website next year, called The Brain Yard, a site focused on the E2.0 community that he promised will be "chock full" of industry news, analysis, opinions, and case studies on the enterprise collaboration and social software industry. Should be interesting.
IBM announced a new release of its Lotus Connections enterprise collaboration platform, as well as an enterprise social software support service. (Say that three times fast!) Version 3.0 adds a new set of "social analytics" to mine the growing piles of social data growing today within the enterprise.
Socialtext unveiled version 4.5 of its namesake enterprise social software at the show. Socialtext 4.5 is designed to make it simple for employees to share relevant knowledge across departmental boundaries, and to sort, curate, and discover that information later with the context in which it was generated. A feature added to the product last summer, Socialtext Connect, lets companies integrate social software with their traditional systems of record, such as ERP or CRM. Socialtext 4.5 also adds Socialtext Explore, which lets employees access microblogging messages, pages, posts, pictures, and files they share with each other at work.
Some other noteworthy vendor announcements:
- Moxie Software announced the Winter 2010 release of its social enterprise software, Spaces by Moxie. This release puts the company's knowledgebase at center of the platform, "bridging the gap between Social CRM and enterprise 2.0" with capabilities for capturing and sharing knowledge among employees, trusted partners, and customers.
- NewsGator unveiled News Stream for Social Sites 2010 and Idea Stream for Social Sites 2010, modules designed to leverage the company's RSS and management technologies to boost information sharing for Microsoft SharePoint 2010. According to the company, Social Sites is the only social computing suite to fully integrate with SharePoint.
- Oxygen Cloud, a company that combines cloud storage and collaboration "to transform the way business users work," showed off Oxygen Stream, a new application designed to allow users to follow, communicate, and engage in collaborative projects through a unified activity stream.
- Rhomobile introduced what it describes as a new category of software: MEAP 2.0, which is "a comprehensive, multi-pronged solution enabling enterprises of all sizes to utilize the power and productivity of web technologies and the cloud to develop, distribute, deploy and manage native smartphone applications and data to their mobile workforce."
- Sococo announced the commercial availability of its first service, Team Space, an always-on group communication service for distributed teams. Team Space is designed to provide an "intuitive spatial layout" that allows people to see office interactions as they occur and initiate ad hoc meetings. (One of the cooler products at the show.)
- TicTacDo launched a business edition of its TicTacDo social productivity service. On top of a collaboration and task management platform, this edition provides a "know-how" system, based on ready-to-use checklists and experts.
- Traction Software introduced a new action-tracking feature that's integrated with the Traction TeamPage. "One click adds an action tag to any page, comment, status post or paragraph with automatic rollup by person, date, milestone or project, putting project management in the natural flow of work," the company says.
- Yammer, a provider of enterprise social networking solutions, showcased its newest applications: Polls, Events and Questions. The apps are designed to enhance the actionable structure of Yammer messages.
Posted by John K. Waters on November 18, 20101 comments
When software developers Ian Gallagher and Eric Butler unleashed "Firesheep," an add-on they developed for the Firefox Web browser that allows users on unsecured Wi-Fi networks to identify and capture the social networking sessions of others on that network, Butler declared on his blog that their intention was to throw a spotlight on the lack of effective security among popular social media Web sites, such as Facebook and Twitter.
"This is a widely known problem that has been talked about to death," Butler wrote, "yet very popular Web sites continue to fail at protecting their users." He went on to scold Facebook and Twitter in particular for failing to fix the problem, adding, "Web sites have a responsibility to protect the people who depend on their services. They've been ignoring this responsibility for too long, and it's time for everyone to demand a more secure Web…."
But you know this already. The add-on was reportedly downloaded more than 500,000 times between its mid-October release and early November, and "Firesheep" was among the Top Tweets on Twitter for weeks.
Firesheep is dead simple to use. No skills needed. You just download it from the Web, install it on Firefox, click on a button, and viola, you can collect any session cookies floating around the Wi-Fi network to which you're currently connected. Session hijacking has never been easier.
Julien Sobrier decided it was too easy. The senior security researcher at Zscaler, a Sunnyvale, Calif.–based provider of cloud security solutions, and his crew created their own Firefox add-on to defend against Firesheep. Dubbed BlackSheep, the Zscaler add-on is actually based on the Firesheep source code.
"To understand how it works, you have to first consider how Firesheep works," Sobrier told me. "Firesheep listens for HTTP connections to popular websites and looks for specific cookie values which will identify a user. When it detects a connection to, let's say, Facebook, it connects back to the same website with the same cookie values to retrieve information about the user. What BlackSheep does is to regularly generate fake traffic to this website with fake cookie values. Just like Firesheep, it listens to HTTP connections and notices if anyone else is going to the same site with the same fake values. And then it gives a warning and the IP address of whoever is using Firesheep."
BlackSheep is an elegant parry to Firesheep's thrust, and it's another freebie.
"This is what we do," Sobrier said. "We try to help people to protect themselves and help them to be aware of the security threats that are out there. Not just our own users, but everybody. Firesheep gave us another opportunity to do this."
Zscaler unveiled BlackSheep on a blog through which the company keeps readers informed about new and ongoing security threats. Definitely worth reading. Here's the blog post on BlackSheep. This is also the download site.
To give them the credit due, Butler and Gallagher's dramatic demonstration not only put the security inadequacies of popular social media sites in the spotlight, but underscored the growing appeal of these sites to malicious hackers.
And now to download BlackSheep so I can post my freakin' Facebook status from Starbucks!
Posted by John K. Waters on November 17, 20100 comments
Halloween may have passed, but some of last week's Java news is still casting a creepy pall on the Java landscape. Last week I reported on Apple's decision to deprecate Java on Mac OS X and Doug Lea's departure from the JCP's Executive Committee, but as my conversations with analyst and industry watchers continued, and I thought the additional insights were worth sharing.
Forrester Research Senior Analyst Jeffrey S. Hammond, for example, reminded me that the rules for the upcoming Mac App Store reject deprecated or "optionally installed technologies."
"What we're seeing here is the emergence of the application store as the new strategic control point for platforms," Hammond said. "From my perspective, Apple's decision is an extension of its low-intensity warfare against the Java platform, the Flash platform, and everything else that allows people to do cross-platform work in their ecosystem."
Which made me wonder if maybe a zombifying virus had gotten loose in Cupertino and caused Apple management to go crazy. The numbers vary from analyst firm to analyst firm, but the basic picture of the developer world going forward includes a steadily expanding community of Java jocks for around a decade before we even see a plateau. And I know a bunch of developers who consider the Mac to be a great machine to code on. How can Apple just dismiss so many Java-loving codederos?
"Here's your choice as a developer," he said. "You can write in Java as you've always done and have it ported to the Mac through third-party efforts, or you can write in Objective C and go directly to the consumer and make more money. Which would you chose?"
Ovum Senior Analyst Tony Baer's assessment was no more comforting. "It's all about making the Mac more iOS like," Baer said. "Jobs may talk up an HTML5 storm, but what he's really saying is: 'Develop natively for the Apple platform.' Java is not part that plan.'
Baer sees Doug Lea's departure from the JCP's Executive Committee as "the natural attrition that comes in the wake of any acquisition." You know, like when the seething mass of sentient jelly from outer space devours you and then sloughs off the bones.
"But there are other things at play here, too," he said. "It's clear that Oracle is taking a more active commercial role in managing the Java platform. You can see it in the Google litigation. And they've persuaded IBM to join rather than fight, and so there will be various as-yet-to-be-specified 'reforms' to the process. But Oracle will make the JCP more corporate."
In fact, Baer suggests that the JCP may become essentially irrelevant to the evolution of Java.
"The core issue is that Java itself has been something of a mongrel," he said, " not quite open source, not quite proprietary, in spite of the open source dalliances of the [former Sun Microsystems CEO] Jonathan Schwartz years. Sun's position was adequate when Microsoft was perceived as the evil empire, but rapidly grew irrelevant as other centers of power (what former Burton analyst Richard Monson-Haefel called the "Rebel Frameworks") emerged over the past six/seven years in response to impatience with Sun's more-equal-than-others approach and the rigidity of the JCP process. As innovation began happening elsewhere, the JCP grew less relevant. It's interesting that their focus has shifted from Java EE (bypassed by Spring) to Java SE, while Java ME has largely been stalled on arrival."
Eclipse Foundation Executive Director Mike Milinkovich confessed to being bewildered (if not bewitched) by the Apple decision to deprecate Java on the Mac OS X, but he had no doubt about the future of the JCP.
"Look, the JCP is here to say," he said. "Doug [Lea] wasn't wrong to leave, but his reasons for leaving were based on faulty assumptions. I think Doug and many others are conflating an effective standards organization with a vendor-neutral standards organization. The JCP was never vendor neutral. The only thing that's changed since Oracle took over is that they've made it a little bit clearer that they're in charge. Anyone who thought Sun wasn't in charge was laboring under a delusion. Nothing has changed fundamentally at the JCP, and it now has an opportunity to return to being effective, where it certainly has not been for the past three years."
He also reminded me that both the fate the JCP and Apple's decision to deprecate Java will affect more than just Java jocks.
"The number one IDE for PHP developers is Eclipse," he said. "Android developers use Eclipse as their default set of Android tools. The tools you get from Adobe for building Flash applications are built on Eclipse. And despite the back and forth between Apple and Adobe around Flash on the Mac and various Apple devices, there are an enormous number of graphic designers out there who use the Mac with Flash as their development platform. So this stuff has implications that ripple beyond just the Java development tools market."
In other words, lots of people are going to be haunted by this decision.
Milinkovich has more to say in his latest posting to the "Life at Eclipse" blog, "Take a Deep Breath, Then Vote for Eclipse: Our View on the JCP."
Milinkovich's colleague, Ian Skerrett, offers a more be-fanged reaction to recent developments in the Java space in his blog post: "Dear Oracle, Get a Clue." Skerrett is the usually soft-spoken Director of Marketing for the Eclipse Foundation, but I think the moon was full when he penned this missive, because he takes a bite out of Oracle here. But don't be put off by his growling. He makes a good point.
And be sure to catch Baer's excellent blog post on the Oracle-IBM partnership on OpenJDK on the OnStrategies Perspectives page.
Posted by John K. Waters on November 1, 20108 comments
QCon, my very favorite tech conference, is right around the corner and I'm already wishing I had the powers of The X-Men's Multiple Man, so that I could get to more sessions! (I actually wish that a lot.)
I've been to quite a few trade shows and user conferences in my 15-plus years on the tech beat. I don't mean to sound pollyanna, but most of them have been pretty good events. But in terms of the quality and scope of its content, QCon stands out. Conference organizers characterize it as a "practitioner-driven event." I think of it as the Cornucopia Conference.
This isn't just a single-technology show; the program includes two tutorial days and three conference days, with 15 tracks covering Java, NoSQL, JRuby, Node.js, hypermedia, Ruby on Rails, SOA, Agile, Clojure, security, inter-disciplinary design, JavaScript, parallel programming, REST and cloud computing.
This is the fourth year for the San Francisco event; there have also been four QCon's in London, two in Beijing, two in Tokyo, and one in Sao Palo, Brazil. The conference is a joint venture of the InfoQ online enterprise software community (whence it gets its name) and Trifork, a provider of financial and public-sector IT solutions in Denmark. Conference organizers expect about 550 attendees this year.
I chatted last week about this year's conference with Floyd Marinescu, CEO of C4Media, which organizes the QCon events.
"This conference is a combination of things that make you think and things that you can apply," he said. "That makes us different from many development conferences, which seem to be mostly about the latest APIs. We're trying to encourage more software generalists, and that requires historical perspective, so our keynotes are always a combination of old guys with beards and fair-faced young technologists."
Among the 80 speakers booked for this year's QCon is a rock-star lineup of old-timers and young turks, including: Dan Ingalls, the principal architect of five generations of the Smalltalk environment; Twitter engineer Nick Kallen, author of Arel, NamedScope, Cache Money, and Screw.Unit, and co-author of FlockDb, Twitter's distributed graph database; Martin Fowler, chief scientist at ThoughtWorks and (his words) "Loud-Mouth on Object Design;" Patrick Copeland, Google's director of engineering; Michael Nygard, author of Release It: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software; Randy Shoup, distinguished architect in the eBay Marketplace Architecture group; Stuart Halloway, author of Programming Clojure and Rails for Java Developers; and Dan North, who coaches teams in Agile and lean methods, and originator of Behavior-Driven Development (BDD).
"QCon is definitely an event that's trying to push the envelope," Marinescu said. "We want QCon to be a force that's helping our community to evolve, but with a sense of what it's evolving from."
Marinescu is especially proud of another new track, "Architectures you've always wondered about," which he helped to develop with Randy Shoup, and which looks at some of the most well-known and high-volume Web applications in the world, including Twitter, Netflix, Zynga, Amazon S3, Facebook, LinkedIn and eBay, among others.
My one complaint about this show: They keep billing it as "designed for team leads, architects and project management." I get why they do it, but this is a show for codederos, too. One of this year's new tracks, "Dev and Ops: A Single Team," should be of particular interest to developers. The track "explores the challenges of bringing both Development and Operations together into a single team." (And no, it's not being held in a padded room.)
"There's definitely a part of the culture, especially in the U.S., who see 'architect' as a bad word," Marinescu said. "But I do think that's changing. And when we say 'architect,' we don't mean an ivory tower guy. We mean a guy who is both designing and coding, and maybe getting more involved in solutions architecture and putting the pieces together."
The fourth annual QCon San Francisco event runs from November 1-5. Videos of keynotes and presentations from previous events are available on the QCon and InfoQ sites for free.
Posted by John K. Waters on October 26, 20100 comments
Big announcements coming out of the annual Adobe MAX conference, underway this week in L.A. Lots of talk about the "multiscreen revolution," of course, and how to get your apps and your content to work across PCs, smart phones, tablets and TVs. Adobe is touting its Flash platform as well as HTML5 for Web sites, digital publishing, online video, gaming and even enterprise apps.
The list of announcements at this event is a long one. The company is extending its AIR runtime into this new cross-screen world. AIR 2.5 now supports smart phones and tablets built on Android, iOS, and BlackBerry Tablet OS, as well as desktop OSes. Samsung says that it's going to be the first television manufacturer to ship Adobe AIR in its SmartTV devices; RIM, Motorola, Acer, HTC, Samsung and others handset makers are planning to ship AIR on smart phones starting this year and in early 2011. The company is launching a new service, dubbed Adobe InMarket, which aims to allow developers to easily distribute and sell their applications on app stores across different device types from Acer, Intel and others.
There's also an upcoming digital publishing suite built on Adobe's Creative Suite and InDesign CS5, which the company is pitching to major magazine publishers as the digital publishing tool they need to move from dead-tree tech to the tablet.
But it's the unveiling of version 2.5 of Adobe's LiveCycle Enterprise Suite that should wiggle the antennae of enterprise developers. LiveCycle ES2.5 is designed to provide "a standard toolset and methodology for design, modeling and development of user-centric enterprise RIAs," the company says in its press release. This release adds process management, data capture and content services to mobile devices, enhances the framework for building enterprise RIAs, andd lets developers to embed real-time social components into their apps -- things like chat, voice, video, screen and application-sharing features.
What strikes me about this year's event is the confidence at Adobe that the enterprise truly understands the importance of the user experience (UX), both for its customers and its employees. It has sort of become a given.
"All of these releases springboard from a set of conversations that we've been having with our customers," Adobe's UX guy, Ben Watson, told me last week during a conference preview call. "Those conversations led us not only to uncover and productize repeatable solutions that are built on top of our enterprise platform, but to help our enterprise customers to bring user experience to the forefront of their application development and delivery mandate."
Somewhere in all the marketing-speak, Watson is making an important point: Adobe's enterprise customers are making the UX a priority, not just for their customers, but for their employees.
"We've seen an incredible explosion in the focus on the user experience," Watson said. "It seems that the social and general consumer Web sites have led people to be increasingly frustrated with complex and unnecessarily sophisticated interfaces that are plunked on top of enterprise systems. I think everybody is coming together and recognizing that sticking people with legacy enterprise software with a clumsy and awkward interface is counterproductive."
Watson argues that user-centric design -- the end-to-end focus on the user experience -- ultimately can unlock the ROI in the legacy systems by making them easier to use, but can also serve as a kind of insurance on new systems, making sure that they're more quickly adopted with less training, used by happier employees, and ultimately by more satisfied customers.
Adobe MAX 2010 runs through Wednesday, October 27.
Posted by John K. Waters on October 25, 20100 comments
The big news this week for developers was the revelation that the new keeper of the Java flame, Oracle, is getting into bed with IBM on the OpenJDK project. The blogosphere was buzzing with the news, but a few posts stood out, reminding me to make sure I follow these guys.
Bob Sutor, vice president of Open Systems and Linux in IBM's Software Group, posted a widely quoted commentary on the partnership on his blog. This is where the news broke that IBM would be "shifting its development effort from the Apache Project Harmony to OpenJDK." Sutor is an IBMer, but his blog is thoughtful and worth reading. He also maintains a great list of other bloggers under "People and Places."
Mark Reinhold, chief architect of Oracle's Java Platform Group, also blogged about the announcement. Reinhold handled Oracle's side of the story, but also offered his own predictions and expectations about who'll be doing what. Reinhold's blog is worth following for the news he provides, but also for the feedback he gets. Good conversations that include some questions and comments from the likes of another favorite blogger, Simon Phipps, and a bunch of first-string Java jocks
Danny Coward also blogged about the news. Coward was the chief architect of Sun Microsystems' client software -- that's Java SE, Java ME, and JavaFX. He also serves on the Executive Committee for the Java Community Process. This post on The Aquarium site, seems light and breezy because of its style, but it's full of hard data and links to hard data. He's an Oxford-trained number theorist, so that's not surprising.
Finally, Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation and a savvy Java-space watcher, commented on the news on his "Life at Eclipse" blog. "All of us who live within the Java ecosystem need to recognize that this fundamentally strengthens the platform, enhances the business value of Java, and offers the hope of an increased pace of innovation," he wrote in part. Definitely a blogger to follow for his own observations, but also because he links so often to other interesting sources. For example, in this post he points to comments from Redmond analyst James Governor and The ServerSide's Joseph Ottinger as examples of the conventional wisdom that there is a fork in Java's future, which the Big O/Big Blue agreement challenges.
Posted by John K. Waters on October 15, 20100 comments
Google treated a group of reporters to lunch last Friday in its San Francisco offices (sushi and pizza -- yum!), and we got to meet some happy users of the App Engine and chat with the Google team behind it.
Google's App Engine is a suite of the tools and services for building and scaling Web apps on the company's infrastructure. Applications developed using the App Engine Software Development Kit (SDK) can be uploaded and hosted by Google, and those apps can then utilize Google's bandwidth and computing power. That's a big selling point, Google argues, given Big G's vast, road-tested infrastructure, which is also hosting its own apps.
The App Engine went GA in May 2008, after lots of tire kicking by 10,000 invitation-only beta users. At first, the only runtime environment was Python, but the company soon added a Java runtime and a bunch of other goodies to appeal to a range of developers. A new Business version was unveiled last month, and this week the company released the App Engine SDK 1.3.8 with new admin tools and performance enhancements.
Among the vendors at the meeting was Fred Cheng, founder of San Francisco-based startup Simperium, who demoed his company's Simplenote app. Think of this app as a simpler Evernote, emphasizing the ability to keep text-based notes, lists, etc., and access them from a desktop, a tablet, a mobile device or the Web.
Simplenote was developed a year ago as an iPhone app written in Python. When user feedback led the company to consider expanding the scope of the app to other devices, it used App Engine to create a low-cost, scalable backend. Simplenote started the year with 10,000 users, Cheng said, but now claims nearly 200,000 users today.
"We chose App Engine because we didn't want to worry about system administration or scaling," Cheng said. "We heard at one point that Demi Moore tweeted about us, and she has more than three million followers. That day was a crazy day, but we never worried about the servers going down."
Another App Engine user, Dan Murray, co-founder and managing director of WebFilings, demoed his Los Alto, California/Ames, Iowa-based company's cloud-based financial reporting solution. WebFilings looks to be first to market with an app that streamlines the cumbersome, manual process that companies currently go through to draft and file Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) reports.
"With every platform, you run into issues," Murray said. "That's just inevitable. But every single time we had an issue, the Google people were on it within a matter of minutes."
Also attending was Tihomir Bajic, a software developer at Rypple, a Toronto/San Francisco-based startup with an enterprise social networking application, a Twitter-like feedback generator for companies. Rypple used the Google Web Tools (GWT) to build the app's front end, but then hosted it on the Rackspace cloud. They also used Google analytics and Google AdWords in the application.
"For GWT there's an existing community of developers," Bajic said, "outside and inside the company, who are very active and contribute back the code and share what they learn with one another."
Rypple used the App Engine for prototyping, Bajic said, but went initially with Rackspace to allay security fears of some customers. But he said that his company is "closely monitoring" developments, and expects Google to resolve these concerns, soon.
I'm one of the few reporters I know who actually likes product demos (or admits it, anyway), and I thought each of these apps were pretty cool in their own way. But I'm not in the minority when it comes to speculating on exactly what Google, a search company that makes money on advertising, has been up to with App Engine. None of us speculators has come closer to the mark in my opinion than Gartner analyst Yefim Natis. I talked with him almost exactly a year ago about the App Engine and how Google is using it.
"Google is an ambitious vendor," he told me. "They have Android, which is going to compete with Windows sooner or later, and they know that the operating system is only the bottom of the stack. They want to be able eventually to compete with the whole stack for the mass market customers…. I don't think they're aiming at large enterprises. They are aiming at small and medium businesses, at least in the beginning. I don't think they are investing in the kinds of things high-end enterprises care about…. But they understand that they need to get into the layers above the operating system, and just offering applications is not enough for their ambitions. In order to be a complete solution provider, they have to do more. So, to have an application platform as a service is actually critical."
He added: "The platform is where the commitments are made, and Google knows this. They are building not for on-premises. That's not their world. They are building it for the cloud. But they have a lot to learn. Being an enterprise player takes a lot of time to learn."
But Kevin Gibbs, the originator of the App Engine project, technical lead, and all around vision guy, sees a different motive behind Google's efforts to build a developer ecosystem: "Our goal is to help developers to make the Web better," Gibbs told us. "I'm excited to hear about a developer who uses any tool we offer. App Engine is a great product, but it can't do everything yet. I don't know if it ever will. But if any part of what Google is doing is helping the developers, then we're winning, we're moving the Web forward, we're making the experience of the Internet better."
Posted by John K. Waters on October 15, 20101 comments
Microsoft has been lobbing water balloons at Google's Android mobile operating system for months now, but on Friday the Redmond software maker tossed a Molotov cocktail in the form of a lawsuit alleging infringement of nine of its patents by Motorola's Android-based smartphones. Microsoft filed in the International Trade Commission and in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington.
In a statement posted to Microsoft's News Center Page, Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's corporate vice president and deputy general counsel of Intellectual Property and Licensing. wrote: "The patents at issue relate to a range of functionality embodied in Motorola's Android smartphone devices that are essential to the smartphone user experience, including synchronizing e-mail, calendars and contacts, scheduling meetings and notifying applications of changes in signal strength and battery power."
Microsoft is seeking triple damages, compensatory damages and court costs, along with a permanent injunction against Google.
Al Hilwa, Program Director in the Applications Development Software group at International Data Corporation (IDC), shot me an e-mail as soon as the news broke. He has a pragmatic view of Microsoft's action.
"Patents are the way of tech today," he wrote, "whether we like it or not. Companies regularly engage in licensing discussions and deals with their partners and competitors, who are often the same. These lawsuits come up when there is a breakdown in the discussions. Android was a great gift to the industry, but lawsuits like this are beginning to throw doubts on its provenance. Microsoft is, of course, launching Windows Phone 7, for which it charges handset makers some dollars. The lawsuits around Android make the point that device licenses for the technology stack may be viewed as inexpensive when measured against the legal fees that might be incurred."
Florian Mueller, the founder and former director of the NoSoftwarePatents campaign and author of the FOSS (free and open source) Patents blog isn't so sanguine.
"These patent suits brought forward by industry giants with massive patent portfolios unmatched by Google are dark clouds over Android," he wrote in an e-mail. "Google must now act constructively and try to work out amicable arrangements with those right holders. Otherwise I'm afraid that third-party application developers investing their money, creativity and hard work in the Android platform will be harmed because of an irresponsible approach to intellectual property in a market in which patents have always played an essential role. Android phone vendors and other parties will also be affected, but application developers are the ones I'm most concerned about in all of this."
Microsoft just announced its Windows Phone 7 operating system (due for public unveiling on October 11), so I guess I'm not surprised about the timing of the lawsuit. Maybe it's just business, but the company has been making noises for years about 235 patents it claims are being infringed by Linux vendors (Android is based on the Linux kernel). Why strike now?
"We have a responsibility to our customers, partners and shareholders to safeguard the billions of dollars we invest each year in bringing innovative software products and services to market," Gutierrez added in his blog. "Motorola needs to stop its infringement of our patented inventions in its Android smartphones.”
Microsoft isn't alone, of course, in claiming Android patent violations: Oracle is suing Google over Java patents the company alleges are violated in the Android OS. And Apple sued phone maker HTC earlier this year for infringing on more than 20 patents in the Android OS. (HTC sued back, claiming five infringements.) And this weekend, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told the Wall Street Journal that HTC is paying a license fee for its use of Android, and that other phone makers will end up doing the same.
Microsoft is currently in fourth place in the U.S. market for smartphone OSes, according to comScore, behind RIM, Apple, and Google.
If I had only 12 percent of the market for what is rapidly becoming the dominant computing platform, I guess I might throw an elbow, too. Companies certainly have a right and obligation to protect their intellectual property. But this suit could do some real damage to developers who have invested their time to develop their Android chops. Consider this: A recently published survey of nearly 2,400 app developers around the world conducted jointly by IDC and Appcelerator, a Mountain View, Calif.-based maker of an open source application development platform called Titanium. According to the survey, 72 percent of developers say Android "is best positioned to power a large number and variety of connected devices in the future," compared with 25 percent for Apple's iOS. In the survey, 59 percent of developers favored Android's long-term outlook, vs. 35 percent for iOS. This gap has grown by 10 points since a similar survey was conducted in June.
It'll be interesting to see what the next survey reveals.
Here's a list of the patents Microsoft is claiming were infringed:
- Patents No. 5,579,517 and 5,758,352: "Common name space for long and short filenames."
- Patent No. 6,621,746, which is related to the flash memory management techniques.
- Patent No. 6,826,762: "Radio interface layer in a cell phone with a set of APIs having a hardware-independent proxy layer and a hardware-specific driver layer."
- Patent No. 6,909,910: "Method and system for managing changes to a contact database."
- Patent no 7,644,376: "Flexible architecture for notifying applications of state changes."
- Patent No. 5,664,133: "Context sensitive menu system/menu behavior."
- Patent No. 6,578,054: "Method and system for supporting off-line mode of operation and synchronization using resource state information."
- Patent No. 6,370,566: "Generating meeting requests and group scheduling from a mobile device."
Posted by John K. Waters on October 4, 20105 comments