Snapshot of AOL's current status, with analysis of near-term scenarios:
To call AOL a shadow of its former self is an understatement. The company formerly known as America Online, once a goliath among Internet service providers (ISPs), boasting 30 million subscribers, has seen its customer base shrink to less than 19 million since merging with Time Warner in 2001. Now, AOL is poised to shrink further.
Source: Will Less Be More for AOL?
Details still seem a bit fuzzzy, but:
Despite efforts around the country, no universal wireless network is up and running in a major American city. The task force report in Boston anticipates that it will take up to two years to blanket the city with radio transmitters, or routers, and wireless Internet access points.
Timely update/snapshot:
For 30 years all of Oracle Corp., maker of the database software that drives thousands of big businesses around the world, has revolved around its founder. Larry Ellison owns a 23% stake worth $18 billion, and he rarely sells. He tweaks Oracle's print ads; he fiddles with its press releases; he peppers techies with arcane questions. "I've run engineering since Day One, and I still run engineering," he says. But Ellison is turning 62 on Aug. 17. Isn't it about time he identified a successor? Bill Gates, 11 years younger, managed to do that.
Source: Irreplaceable? - Forbes.com
Fascinating snapshot of the dead-tree part of the tech info business; read the full post.
Link to O'Reilly Radar > State of the Computer Book Market, Q206, Part 3: How Publishers Fared
An overview of yesterday's analyst briefing from NYT's Steve Lohr, with an interesting aside:
In private conversations, Microsoft executives said that the skeptics were taking a short-term perspective and that Microsoft had repeatedly proved skeptics wrong.
Craig Mundie, the chief research and strategy officer, noted that in the 1990’s, when Microsoft began to move into corporate data centers with server software, many industry experts scoffed. Microsoft, they predicted, would surely fail.
Last year, Microsoft’s server and tools business reported revenue of $11.5 billion and operating profit of $4.3 billion.
Source: In Microsoft Plan for Future, All Roads Lead to Internet - New York Times
Two -- complementary -- platforms:
Online software should be "largely additive" to Microsoft's traditional PC and server software, not compete with them, he said. For businesses, CIOs will need to make choices about "cost vs. control" when deciding whether to use Microsoft's Web products. Over time, however, the cost benefits of Web-based software may be difficult to ignore, Ozzie added.
"This is more of an additive model than it is a replacement," said Ozzie. "I do not believe the Web is the be-all and end-all of experience delivery." As part of its online effort, Microsoft will start tracking more data about consumption of online software, in a way that respects PC users' privacy, Ozzie said.
From the interesting times dept.:
Microsoft’s new top technology visionary on Thursday declared an end to the PC era as the software company made its latest attempt to deal with the threat to its traditional business from the rise of the internet.
Ray Ozzie, who took over the title of chief software architect from Bill Gates last month when the Microsoft chairman announced his plan to leave the company in 2008, laid out a vision for the company in which internet-based services, rather than PCs, lie at the centre of its worldview.
Source: FT.com / IT / Microsoft Milestone - Microsoft’s Ozzie declares end to PC era
Fun hallway conversation in Redmond:
John Fontana, a reporter with Network World, stood in front of a refrigerator in the hall outside Microsoft’s annual Financial Analysts Meeting, weighing his refreshment options.
When offered a cold can of “Windows Vista” sparkling water, he asks: “Can I open it?
Then, less innocently: ”Or do I have to wait until January?” he asked.
Source: Windows Vista: I’ll have a cold one - Reuters Newsblogs
Not ready for prime time, at least not at the front of crowded rooms:
At Micrsoft’s annual Financial Analyst Meeting on Thursday, Vista product manager Shanen Boettcher set out to show just how easy to use the speech recognition technology built into upcoming Windows Vista software will be. Like, for example, dictating aloud a simple, hearfelt letter to mom, and having one’s voice automatically transcribed into a computer.
The result was a disaster.
There's an excellent speech recognition-related reality-check interview with Jordan Cohen in the latest issue of ACM Queue, but it's only in the print version of the pub at this point, not posted on the ACM Queue web site yet -- go figure... I'll post a reference to the interview when it's published on the site.
Source: When good demos go (very, very) bad - Reuters Newsblogs
A stark assessment from The Economist:
The personal computer spawned a new industry. But many of the firms that initially flourished in the PC era are now finding life difficult. Dell, the leading PC-maker, issued a profit warning last week that sent its share-price to a five-year low. Intel is trying to regain ground lost to AMD, its increasingly confident competitor. Microsoft has just announced that it will buy back 8% of its shares for around $20 billion—a sign that its high-growth days are behind it.
The article goes on to explain that the market leaders are in relatively good shape -- compared with the vendors in the following graph:
Source: Technology dinosaurs | Evolve or die | Economist.com
IBM tries a new (and risky) form of open source:
The collective wisdom of crowds depends on your crowd, and IBM (IBM ) has one of the sharpest crowds around. CEO Samuel J. Palmisano knows this, and he wants to leverage it. He is pulling people together for the online equivalent of a town meeting. His hope: The opinions of some 100,000 minds will lead to catalytic innovations so powerful they will transform industries, alter human behavior, and lead to new businesses for IBM. He calls the project an Innovation Jam.
Source: Big Blue Brainstorm
Read the full post for analysis of YouTube's licensing update. Excerpt:
For those who live under rocks, YouTube is at present the most successful web site solely devoted to hosting video submitted by its members. There are similar sites from Google, Yahoo, and many others, but right now YouTube is the biggest in terms of average daily plays, serving up a claimed 100 million very short shows every day. But who actually owns those tens of thousands of short clips of friends doing the samba or falling off motorcycles? Facing a copyright infringement suit filed on July 14th intended to answer exactly that, YouTube management a few days ago decided to clarify in their terms of use exactly who DOES own all that video.
They do.
$.07 says the new license and/or YouTube won't last long...
Source: PBS | I, Cringely . July 27, 2006 - What goes on the Net stays on the Net
It'll be interesting to see the service providers try to spin and work around this development:
Web sites like Amazon.com and MySpace.com may soon be inaccessible for many people using public terminals at American schools and libraries, thanks to the U.S. House of Representatives.
By a 410-15 vote on Thursday, politicians approved a bill that would effectively require that "chat rooms" and "social networking sites" be rendered inaccessible to minors, an age group that includes some of the Internet's most ardent users. Adults can ask for permission to access the sites.
In the Zune context:
Microsoft would have started its work on Zune a year ago if it could have, showing that even with 71,553 employees, there are limits to the number of new areas it can enter at once.
"Frankly, we took some of the top folks out of the Xbox 360 effort, and right after 360 shipped that became the Zune team," Ballmer said. "I wish we would have done it earlier. We just didn't have the right talent capacity at the time."
Source: The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Microsoft's busy multitasking
Read the full article for details on MSN Spaces => Windows Live Spaces. Excerpt:
So far, MSN Spaces has proven to be enormously popular. The service sports 123 million unique users, with roughly 3 million users visiting MSN Spaces every second. Users upload six million photos to the service every day, requiring 1TB of additional storage every nine days. To put these numbers in perspective, it took MSN Messenger six years to reach 160 million users: MSN Spaces will reach 130 million users in only 18 months.
Source: Windows Live Spaces to Take on Social Networking Services
Playing offense...
WSJ: You had said earlier that Microsoft is a hot company to work at. Arguably, it's less than it was.
Mr. Ballmer: But can we get the facts instead of all the rhetoric? It's just flat-out wrong. Let me give you at least three things to think about, which I'm happy to defend.
No. 1, we're hiring more senior people and more great talent off college campuses today than any other time in our company's history. We've hired six or seven CTOs [chief technical officers] or heads of engineering from start-ups this year. We've hired a bunch of senior people from a variety of companies in our industry, online companies, enterprise companies. Fantastic recruitment, like never-before recruitment, frankly. I'm just talking about the technology side; by the way, the business side is going pretty darn well, too -- best recruitment we've ever done.
The second thing: retention. Our retention rates are almost too high -- in the sense that I always hope we're working hard on helping people who don't belong here not to belong here. But we're around 3% or so of what we call unwanted attrition. The only time we've ever been lower was right after the dot-com bubble burst.
And No. 3, we're one of the highest payers in our industry. So on all three dimensions -- attraction, retention, compensation -- I just think there's a whole bunch of random malarkey out there. That doesn't mean we don't lose people; we do, and I watch it carefully.
Source: WSJ.com - An Imprint All His Own
More timely & insightful analysis from Nicholas Carr; read the full post
In his column in the Wall Street Journal today, Lee Gomes tries to debunk Chris Anderson's Long Tail theory, and on his Long Tail blog today, Anderson tries to debunk Gomes's debunking. It's an interesting - and important - debate, and I find myself agreeing with both gentlemen.
Source: Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: How large is the long tail?
The bigger picture:
HP has spent the last few years snapping up smaller software management firms such as Peregrine Systems, Novadigm and Consera Software, but none have been large enough to significantly impact the company's software revenue, Ptak says.
Source: HP's Mercury buy only tip of wide-ranging software plans - Network World
A flash (ideally hybrid) drive is high on the requirements list for my next PC:
When combined with Windows Vista's new underlying SuperFetch memory-management technology, Microsoft's ReadyBoost delivers application performance improvements by automatically loading in flash memory the applications you use most often. SuperFetch keeps track of the apps you use most frequently, and is even date aware, recognizing the difference between business days and weekends.
Apparently a lack of intelligent design in some respect:
OpenDarwin, an attempt to build an operating system around the open-source "Darwin" core of Mac OS X, is pulling the plug.
Encouraging news:
Subscriptions to US high-speed Internet services rose 33 percent last year, with telephone companies' digital subscriber lines gaining ground on cable-modem connections.
The number of broadband lines jumped to 50.2 million at year-end from 37.9 million a year earlier, the Federal Communications Commission said in an e-mailed statement yesterday.
Source: Broadband Internet subscriptions jump - The Boston Globe
Here's another great reason to explore workspaces (as complements to email and other types of communication channels) for collaboration:
Analysis of the contents of millions of e-mails has revealed that less than 4% is legitimate traffic.
Further work has shown that most of this junk mail is originating on hijacked home computers.
Source: BBC NEWS | Technology | More than 95% of e-mail is 'junk'
71,533 employees as of 2006/06/30
Microsoft Corp. bulked up for battle with Google and other rivals by adding more than 10,000 employees worldwide in the past year -- the largest annual increase in the company's history.
New employment figures, quietly disclosed Wednesday on an informational section of the company's Web site, represent twice the amount of growth that Microsoft had publicly projected at the start of the fiscal year. The single-year increase is more than Google's entire work force.
More details from Microsoft Presspass:
Azyxxi was designed and developed to capture, integrate and display data from wherever it was created. The system can answer clinician-specific questions with great speed; it uses existing data in new ways to enable situational awareness and facilitate the recognition of patterns in the data.
The Azyxxi system excels in environments with fragmented systems that traditionally don’t share data. It manages more than 40 terabytes of live data while offering sub-second response times, and delivers data through a dynamic interface that can be defined by the user and accommodate almost any query. In use at Washington Hospital Center, Azyxxi has increased hospital efficiency, enhanced operational capacity for emergency room cases, improved patient safety, and reduced time for rounds reporting. Azyxxi was so successful that it was exported and deployed throughout MedStar Health’s other hospitals.
Built on the Microsoft .NET Framework and with Microsoft SQL Server™ database software, Azyxxi is able to scale across a range of devices including Tablet and Pocket PCs, and handle a large volume of work stations and terabytes of data to address the needs of any size of institution. Azyxxi’s intuitive, user-friendly interface also supports easy installation by requiring minimal training, and has proved itself to be extremely stable in mission-critical hospital environments, with almost zero downtime.
Investors in Time Warner Inc., whose shares touched a two-year low in mid-July, are seeking signs of a turnaround on August 2, when the world's largest media company is set to introduce its fourth plan in five years to save its online unit AOL.
AOL is widely expected to announce that it will give its e-mail and Web services away for free, hoping to win back customers who had switched to other free services from rivals like Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc.
I still don't get it -- the first word that comes to mind, when I think of the AOL user experience, is "garish". I'm sure there will be lots of at least temporarily more-happy current AOL users if the subscription fee is dropped, but I don't see why current non-users would want to switch, fee or no fee.
More on Microsoft's new health care strategy:
Mr. Neupert, 50, is leading Microsoft’s new strategy in health care. In 1998, after 11 years at Microsoft, he left to become chief executive of Drugstore.com, an online retailer of pharmacy and health products. From 2003 to 2005, Mr. Neupert served on President Bush’s Information Technology Advisory Committee and helped run a subcommittee focused on technology in health care.
Mr. Neupert returned to Microsoft last September, after convincing Steven A. Ballmer, the chief executive, and Craig Mundie, a senior strategy executive, that Microsoft should be doing more in health care.
“I’ve had an opportunity to see how messed up the health care system was,” Mr. Neupert said. “And to really have an impact, you need a footprint like Microsoft’s.”
Source: Microsoft to Offer Software for Health Care Industry - New York Times
p.s. general note: from now on, in my posts, indentation => quotation
Interesting development:
Microsoft has bolstered its health care lineup with the purchase of Azyxxi, database software for patient records, and with an alliance with the MedStar Health hospital group.
Source: Microsoft coughs up for health care software | CNET News.com
Welcome back to the blogosphere, Sim. An excerpt from Sim's post on the Metcalfe's Law debate this week (read the full post for his insightful analysis):
The industry is at it again–trying to figure out what to make of Metcalfe’s Law. This time it’s IEEE Spectrum with a controversially titled “Metcalfe’s Law is Wrong”. The main thrust of the argument is that the value of a network grows O(nlogn) as opposed to O(n2). Unfortunately, the authors’ O(nlogn) suggeston is no more accurate or insightful than the original proposal.
Source: HighContrast » Metcalfe’s Law: more misunderstood than wrong?
