Finally, a blog that brings a Whig-ish sensibility to the 21st century! It looks like The Economist has had a blog going since late last month.
Tags: MSM, blogging, The Economist
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Well, since Joey asks, I do have an opinion on this "Microsoft (hearts) Novell" thing. And, he's right, it's more of the eye-glazing, important-for-enterprise-IT nature than really interesting for normal people stuff.
Microsoft's embrace of Novell's SUSE Linux looks like they're extending an olive branch to open source, but may really just be a step towards extinguishing Red Hat and VMware.
Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc. today announced a set of broad business and technical collaboration agreements to build, market and support a series of new solutions to make Novell and Microsoft® products work better together. The two companies also announced an agreement to provide each other’s customers with patent coverage for their respective products. These agreements will be in place until at least 2012. Under this new model, customers will realize unprecedented choice and flexibility through improved interoperability and manageability between Windows® and Linux.
“They said it couldn’t be done. This is a new model and a true evolution of our relationship that we think customers will immediately find compelling because it delivers practical value by bringing two of their most important platform investments closer together,” said Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. “We’re excited to work with Novell, whose strengths include its heritage as a mixed-source company. Resolving our patent issues enables a combined focus on virtualization and Web services management to create new opportunities for our companies and our customers.”
The agreement begins with patent cross-coverage. Microsoft and Novell each pledge not to assert their patents against each other (or drag their customers into it) until at least 2012.
Technologically, the two companies say they will work together on three fronts. First, they'll collaborate on virtualization offerings. Second, they'll improve customers' ability to manage mixed SUSE and Windows environments by improving their respective system management tools and directory services. Third, they'll work on document format compatibility between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org.
Now, if this was truly a customer-driven initiative, it would make far more sense for Microsoft to have partnered with the company selling the top Linux distro in the enterprise, Red Hat. The fact that Microsoft's giving a boost to the #2 player (and just days after Oracle took a kick at Red Hat's core maintenance business) clearly begs for a second, cynical look. I think Alfresco's Matt Asay's onto something when he says:
Microsoft clearly does not view Novell as a threat. You don't link up with those that threaten to crush your business, not unless customers are demanding it. Given the relative market shares of Red Hat and Novell, it's a near certainty that if Linux and Windows integration is desirable (and it is, and customers are asking for it), then the most desirable partner for Microsoft (from a customer standpoint) would be Red Hat.
If SUSE gains from these agreements ("It's the Linux that Microsoft loves!"), it will come at the expense of Red Hat.
And while each element of this relationship is designed to, in some way, make life difficult for Red Hat, I think the virtualization aspect is also meant to address another of Microsoft's competitors. After all, as Mary Jo "All About Microsoft" Foley says, "Microsoft didn't need a special alliance with Novell in order to get Windows to run virtually on SUSE Linux or to make SUSE Linux to run on the Longhorn Server Hypervisor."
When you hear "Microsoft" and "virtualization" in the same sentence, it's usually a hint of Microsoft's pitched battle with VMware for the virtualization market. Thus far, Microsoft has had trouble dislodging the industry leader, but they're trying their damndest to change that with upcoming releases of Windows Server Longhorn and Windows Virtual Server. They're planning to optimize ("enlighten") how Windows Server Longhorn performs with their their "Viridian" hypervisor (all part of an ongoing overhaul of Windows Virtual Server), so a Windows guest OS will perform better than another guest OS (say, RHEL) running on Windows Virtual Server. VMware, of course isn't keen on Microsoft being able to tout a proprietary performance advantage for their server consolidation solutions. Does the Microsoft-Novell deal mean that SUSE will selectively be given access to Microsoft's optimizations, so that SUSE Linux outperforms Red Hat when running on a Viridian hypervisor? Not only would that ding Red Hat, it would also create some pain for VMware. (A related, but tangential question would be whether anything in this agreement will lead to a SUSE-controlled virtualization platform will be able to take advantage of Microsoft's Enlightenment API, thus allowing Windows Server Longhorn to run just as well on SUSE as it does when hosted on Windows Virtual Sever? That may mean licensing some very non-GPL code to XenSource, so we'll have to wait and see)
Destpite my getting into a speculative lather, I think this agreement nets out to a few things: Microsoft wants to put the boots to Red Hat, and if they can take on VMware too, so much the better. Novell's probably got intellectual property assets in operating systems (they own UNIX), networking, and office productivity that make them a formidable legal threat to Microsoft, so a patent truce is probably worth everyone's time. The technological points of collaboration as described don't seem so deep as to merit a formally announced relationship, so what gives? All we can do now is wait to see how it shakes out, and speculate in the interim.
Tags: Microsoft, Novell, Windows, Linux, SUSE, virtualization, VMWare, patents
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Cookin' With Your XBox 360
How hot does the triple-core PowerPC chip in the XBox 360 run? Hot enough to boil water, flame sambuca and cook scrambled eggs, if this video is any indication.
I am so buying a Nyko Intercooler this weekend.
I'm having trouble maintaining any level of interest in the strategic partnership/unholy alliance between Microsoft and Novell. Maybe it's just my developer's perspective, but all I see is a partnership between the people who make the operating system that geeks don't like and the people who make the Linux distribution that geeks don't care about.
Maybe George has some insights.
Someone at the office told me about an article in Google Blogoscoped that said that Gmail now offers to let you edit spreadsheets attached to email. I decided to give it a try.
First, I created a dirt-simple spreadsheet. No formulas or calculations, just a table. This is hardly an unusual use of Excel; lots of people use it for creating tables and lists like this:
I then saved the spreadsheet and mailed it to my GMail address. Checking GMail, I saw that it offered an option for the spreadsheet attachment:
Clicking on that link led to a short wait, which resulted in this page:
I have no idea how complex a spreadsheet Google Spreadsheets will support, but it's a sure bet that full Excel compatibility (or at least a very high degree of compatibility) is Google's goal. The .XLS format is the lingua franca of spreadsheets, and Google is embracing it through support and extending it by taking away some of the pain in the tedious “download/edit/upload” dance that we all do when working collaboratively on a spreadsheet.
I wonder how long it'll be before they do the same thing for Word documents.
As a “regular” of Logan Airport's Terminal C (perhaps a little too regular), I know how to get free wifi there. If you take your laptop to the seats near the Terminal C side of the walkway joining Terminals B and C, you'll be within range of the Continental President's Club's open wifi connection. I discovered this trick while stuck at the airport for hours during the blizzard of January 2005.
If you want to access wifi anywhere else in Logan, the only way to do it was to fork over US$7.95 to use the wifi service run by Massport, the public authority responsible for running airports, seaports and the transportation infrastructure in the state of Massachusetts. Massport has always jealously guarded its wifi monopoly in the airport, forbidding tenants to run their own wifi access points, citing bogus safety reasons. In addition to their long-standing wi-feud with Continental, Massport has also crossed swords with T-Mobile, forcing them to shut down their Terminal B access points and threatened Delta with legal action if they offered wifi in Terminal A.
The two-year battle between Continental and Massport ended yesterday when the FCC issued its ruling in Continental's favor, stating that they have a clear right to offer their own wifi service (one of the standard amenities of the President's Club). Hopefully, this ruling will set a precedent that prevents landlords from forcing their tenants to use a landlord-controlled wifi service.
The general reaction to the decision has been positive, but it can't hold a candle to the over-the-top statement made by FCC commissioner Jonathan S. Adelstein:
Today we strike a victory for the WiFi revolution in the cradle of the American Revolution…The WiFi movement embodies the spirit of American freedom, and in our action we say “Don't tread on me.”
One wonders what he'll say if we ever get network neutrality enshrined in law or practice.
Not everyone's cheering, however: David DeJean over at InformationWeek believes that it's a victory for big business. Massport, he argues, is a government agency and as such was providing a public service for a minimal charge. He states that the ruling effectively privatizes a public service and that in the end, it was just the FCC serving its corporate masters at the expense of the public. I think my bullshit detector is about to overload.
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The Merit of Nothing
Aaron "Reddit" Swartz recounted an experience I found both amusing and thought-provoking:
Once I went far outside the city to have lunch with an author I respected. He asked about what I did, wanted me to explain it in great detail. He asked how many visitors we had. I told him and he sputtered. "I've spent fifteen years building an audience, and you're telling me in a year you have a million visitors?" I assented.
Puzzled, he insisted I show him the site on his own computer, but he found it was just a simple as I described. (Simpler, even.) "So it's just a list of links?" he said. "And you don't even write them yourselves?" I nodded. "But there's nothing to it!" he insisted. "Why is it so popular?"
At first, you might take this as an indictment of the value we place on the services created by business in general. It's a discontent we can aim as easily at YouTube as we can at Reddit; $1.6BB for a site where people share inane videos (with none of that money going to the videos authors, directors, or actors)?
Upon a little reflection, though, it struck me that the "nothing" the author saw is the key to the value of a service like Reddit. It's supposed to help me sort and sift through an unmanageable pile of information. To do it right, Reddit has to do it simply. So simply, that it's almost invisible to me. It approaches (but never reaches) nothing.
The internet has never had a problem with content scarcity. If anything, the problem is overabundance. We've got too much something. There's real merit in helping people find what they need without adding to the problem. Perhaps that's the "nothing" Aaron's author saw.
Tags: Reddit, Aaron Swartz, nothing, simplicity, overabundance