5th Wind: Ideas about Business, Process & Technology

In his article called Long Live Closed Source Software!: There’s a reason the iPhone Doesn’t Come With Linux, Jaron Lanier says that he doesn’t believe that open source is necessarily the best way to go. In fact, he says that he is “not anti–open source. [He] frequently argue[s] for it in various specific projects. But a politically correct dogma holds that open source is automatically the best path to creativity and innovation, and that claim is not borne out by the facts”. This is interesting.

The fact is that, in the contexts that he proposes closed source projects (search engine page rank algorithms, proprietary formats like Adobe’s Flash, etc.), he is correct though not for the reasons he claims. (more…)

How Microsoft (and Apple) will respond to very-low-cost Linux systems by ZDNet’s Adrian Kingsley-Hughes — Here’s how - by trying to make cheap systems irrelevant.

My feeling is that the post linked to in the previous paragraph is a bit shallow. By “making cheap systems irrelevant”, he means MS and Apple building up the eye candy. If eye candy was all it took to keep people on a platform then it would be true but it takes more than pretty graphics. At the end of the day, functionality is what keeps users on a platform.

Using myself as an example, I will probably invest in an ASUS Eee Linux PC because of its small form factor, its ability to connect to the Web and the fact that it uses software that works with open data formats. Now, granted, I am not your typical user (my area of specialization is technology management) but I think that, probably without knowing it, users look at the same three criteria in choosing their platform. Let’s look at each in turn. (more…)

I received the following e-mail on my work account yesterday:

Hi [work.e-mail@here.com],

Daniel Davis has added you as a trusted contact on Spock.com. By accepting trust, you will be able to search each others’ network, share contact information, and get news.

Click here to get started.

What was evil about this is that I know no one by that name. However, since I am on LinkedIn and a couple of other social networking sites, I figured maybe this was someone from one of the trying to make a contact.

So, I followed the link and found that the only way to see who this guy is was to give my e-mail address and create an account. Once I created the account, I found this guy was bogus with a fake MySpace page and other nonsense.

I turned to Google to research this site and couldn’t believe what I was reading. For example, there is this article from wired.com nicely titled Astonishing! Spock Thinks You’re a Pedophile .

I have sent them an e-mail asking that my account be deleted.  That is no way to run a business and it looks like a bunch of kids with no sense are in charge.

However, it presents an interesting question: If you are a Web start-up and you have new account targets to meet, how do you do it?

Spam isn’t the way…any good ideas out there?

It seems that the Internet metrics tracking organization, comScore, has done some research on the effectiveness of Radiohead’s album download where fans decide how much they want to pay for the music. The bottom line is that only 2 out of every 5 downloaders decided they wanted to pay anything for the album. In a minute, I will explain why 40% of your customers paying for a download is not a bad thing. After all, the band gets to keep every penny of the $2.7 million they took in.

In a previous post, I talked about how the music companies and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) are fighting a losing battle against file sharing. My thinking is that they need to understand that the business model that has worked so well for them the last 70 years or so is no longer viable. What they should be fighting for is a new way to make money. (more…)

yesterday announced its open source mobile phone operating system called Android. This came after months of speculation that the company would be releasing its own line of cell phones with, in some whisperings, magical powers. However, it came down as software. This is a very strategic move for Google for a few reasons.  This is a disruptive change in the mobile device industry. Below are the impacts I see: (more…)

Mozilla Labs has just released some information and some preliminary code about its new Prism project. The bottom line of this is that they want to disassociate the Web from the browser. In other words, they want to allow browser-based applications to run on the desktop without a browser. Interesting idea.

So, how does this differ from Microsoft’s Silverlight and Adobe’s AIR? Well, for one thing, Silverlight and AIR both need a browser to run. What it seems the Prism folks are envisioning is something that allows Web apps to become something akin to interactive widgets on the desktop.

Three Good Things about Prism

So, why should we care that Prism has been shown the light of day? I have three reasons:

1. It shows new thinking - The concept is saying that we know you have broadband and we know you do a lot on the Web. Why not just put the Web applications on your desktop and only open a browser when you need it? If applications can be delivered through this technology, the browser might go away to some extent.
2. It could prove to be a good model for service delivery - Businesses keep talking about service oriented architectures. Using this idea, a business desktop could be configured with different Web apps for a job. Instead of jumping from tab to tab, they could just have small web applets residing on the Desktop offering different services.
3. It could change what we expect of Web content - Today, we bookmark our favorite sites and sometimes even subscribe to RSS feeds. If we have, say, Gmail as an application on our Desktops, will be forget that it resides on the Web? If so, will we then expect it to behave differently? Will we not expect it to have advertisements?

These are just a few things that came to mind after reading the blog post linked above. I will have to revisit this again later.

I was reading Walt Mossberg’s blog post about the cellular phone industry yesterday and it made me think about whether there could be such a thing as “open” business models. Not so much business models that can be copied, freely distributed and tweaked, but those than can allow customers the freedom of choice while still turning a reasonable profit for the company deploying it.

Now, we’re all aware that, in the United States, the cell phone companies require you to use models purchased through them which are usually subsidized. Thus, you pay a low price for the phone but you are locked into that carrier for a couple of years unless you want to gulp down a huge early termination fee. I am currently experiencing this because the phone I got for business does not meet my needs but, because of my carrier (<cough> Verizon</cough>), I am forced to use my personal phone for voice calls (again, with a different provider). (more…)

In prior posts, I’ve talked about my belief that companies are so tied to their business models that, when things start to go into a tailspin, they look to external reasons for the problem rather than internally. In a way, you can’t blame them: if it worked for decades, how can it possibly be wrong? It must be an external force that is causing the issue rather than the business model. In this post, I will elaborate on this issue focusing on the record companies. They are collectively a great example of this behavior. Before we move on, take a look at this video from the Wharton School:

We are all aware of the Recording Industry Association of America (better known as RIAA) and their fight to stop music and movie pirating in the United States. They have been leaders in the fight against peer-to-peer networks, mix tapes, mix CDs and just about anything that involves music or movies changing hands without them getting their cut. (more…)

I haven’t posted in a couple of weeks because of some personal household things I had to do. Having said that, I am back and on the road again, doing some of that consulting I love so much.

In the time I spent at home, I had planned on doing a post about the Gutsy release candidate. However, due to things out of my control, I didn’t get a chance to do that. However, before I left, I thought it would be neat to test it on a thumb drive. I had never used a mobile desktop. (more…)

I just wanted to thank Digg users for putting my post about Automatix being obsolete on the front page yesterday.  There were over 19,000 unique visitors.  Also, kudos to my hosting service (www.chihost.com).  I went through the comments and no one had to mirror my site…and, yes, it is WordPress.  Imagine that.

I will be making some changes to the site.  Stay tuned and thanks again.