On predictions

It’s that time of year, here’s mine:

1. Kiva will break $100m in loans
2. Microsoft will buy Facebook
3. Google will buy Delicious
4. Microsoft will buy what’s left of Yahoo
5. Jerry Yang will leave Yahoo for good
6. Steve Jobs will step down as Apple CEO
7. Social networking will crack its business model
8. Google’s share of online advertising dollars will fall

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On Carol Bartz

Carol Bartz is Yahoo’s new CEO, and its last. To remain as an independent company Yahoo needs not only a great leader but a great innovator. By appointing Bartz the Yahoo board has signaled it is getting ready for a sale once the market picks back up. I can’t see a 60-year old wanting to hang around too long so Bartz will whip Y into shape, sell it and retire.

To my mind Bartz comes into the ‘manage decline more efficiently’ category of CEO. There is no suggestion in her background that she is a great innovator, her qualification for the job seems to be that she whipped a chaotic Autodesk into shape. Yahoo is certainly chaotic but I suspect Bartz’s job is to bring order in readiness for a sale rather than put it back on its feet, a task which is close to impossible. Charles Arthur picked up on the key phrase in her remarks “I believe there is now an extraordinary opportunity to create value for our shareholders”.

Fairly early on she will start to rationalise the business, getting in cash for valuable yet peripheral assets and selling off a lot of Yahoo’s startup acquisitions. Flickr could go and it would not surprise me to see Yahoo lose Delicious in this fire sale and with Joshua Schachter now at Google that is its most likely destination. She is certainly decisive to carry this off in short order, Bartz was not shy in applying the boot to Sue Decker’s behind. Despite Jerry Yang’s protestations I expect he will formally depart as ‘Chief Yahoo’ once he realises Bartz’s objective is to gut the company ready to be sold.

Arthur points out that Yahoo made “$660m on revenues of $6.97bn”. I wonder how many of its 15,000 contribute to that seven billion dollars. Bartz will not take long to find out and it would not surprise me to see that number cut in half inside a year. That should deliver a short term boost to profits enough to attract a buyer. Once that process is complete Yahoo will go looking for a buyer. The most likely candidate is still Microsoft and they will be attracted by a lower price and willing suitor this time round. An additional benefit to MS is that that can sit back while Bartz does all the dirty work then be seen as the benign saviour rather than moustache twirling villain.

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On Vista

I got my hands on a new Vista laptop yesterday and I have to say I was impressed. I had to set it up from scratch, the only thing which went wrong was AVG, in the end I gave up and installed Avast. Aside from that it was quite a smooth experience. It was quicker to set up than an XP machine and had no trouble detecting the wireless signal I use.

It was Vista Home Basic running on a 1GB Dell Vostro 860 and it was as fast as XP running on a similar spec machine. I think it is slightly slower to hibernate and restart but not noticeably. The interface is nice, generally familiar to an XP user and the search function works well. From the outside it looks like an enhanced version of XP.

Adding applications was simple, aside from my AVG problems everything I tried (Acrobat, Flash, Firefox, OpenOffice 3) worked first time without any glitches. It is a good OS and I’m surprised it gets all the bad press. Perhaps this is because I waited for SP1 and bought it with a new machine so I didn’t see all the infuriating errors. That said in a straight comparison with Leopard I think it stands up well and bear in mind I am running a Mac Pro with 4GB RAM to compare it.

The recently announced Windows 7 suggests MS is going back to quicker iterations of its OS with less fanfare. Looking back we could view XP, XPSP1, XPSP2, Vista and VSP1 as essentially iterations of the same OS in the way OSX has had Tiger, Leopard and so on. I think this is a good sign as Microsoft’s traditional strength is writing competent software, not doing jazzy PR.

Pic: WVS

On HP

The dam starts to crack. Rumours around HP suggest they are building their own OS. Perosnally I wouldn’t bother doing it myself if I was HP. On occasions like these you go to the specialists and in that case it means Canonical. They have years of experience building a consumer friendly version of Linux. In fact I don’t think hardware manufacturers building operating systems is a good idea.

At this stage everyone cites the example of Apple but the fact is their refusal to license any Mac OS contributed to Microsoft’s dominance in the first place. Hardware and software are two different things and I think having companies focused on one or the other is the best way. Some may argue that this is not the case with mobile and give Android’s difficulties as the prime example. The counterargument is Symbian and it’s a pretty good one.

Apple seem to have set their stall out as a niche manufacturer come what may. This is not a criticism, someone has to be the Mercedes of the tech world and someone else the Toyota. I am always skeptikal about one company trying to control all aspects of a system and I think it is better for the consumers when different companies establish common standards and promote competition between application developers. This also allows companies building operating systems to focus on what they are good at.

Microsoft is getting in to trouble now because it is too cumbersome to lead in any of the emerging markets. It is compounding the problem by trying to add even more weight when it should be trying to shed it and trying to get into markets it has no hope of cracking like search.

Pic: fattytuna

On Seinfeld

How the mighty have fallen. Jerry Seinfeld’s Microsoft ads have been the subject of much speculation and now we can all see what the fuss is about:

Terribly unfunny. Here’s how it should be done Jerry:

On Chrome

Another bloody browser, this time from Google. It’s a crowded field and Google’s efforts outside search have a mixed track record. Gmail is excellent but Knol is terrible. I installed Chrome and it’s nothing special. On the plus side it has a nice simple UI, on the minus side it’s not very intuitive. For my money Opera is still the best and I won’t be switching any time soon.

What’s more interesting is where Google is going with this. I think Arrington is right. Google is preparing to enter the OS market and Chrome is the first shot. Microsoft have foolishly left this avenue open first by allowing Linux to creep up on them in the UMPC market and then by not addressing the sector properly and leaving it to XP. Now I have nothing against XP, it’s a good OS. I’m just surprised MS hasn’t put out a purpose built UMPC operating system. W7 may have something along these lines but I don’t think MS can afford to hang around here. They may wake up in 2010 with their core business gone if they are not more careful.

Back to Goog. To keep denying they are working on an OS when they have already begun the Android project is clearly ridiculous. They basically admit as much in the Chrome announcement:

At Google, we spend much of our time working inside a browser. Like all of you, we search, shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends – all using a browser. People are spending an increasing amount of time online, and they’re doing things never imagined when the web first appeared about 15 years ago.

They are right here. These days all I use my OS for is to drive my browser. This minimises the importance of the operating system if all it has to do is run a browser and the associated plugins. My next machine will probably be a Dell E running Linux. This will be plenty to browse the web and send emails which is all I really need. The days of everyone having heavy operating systems are gone. Some people will still need dedicated desktop apps but I expect this small market to be dominated by Apple and high end macs.

The era of MS dominance is at an end. So on the Google browser I say no thanks but on the OS yes please. The more competition the better.

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On the death of Office

Google Apps is starting to turn from a sideshow into a proper business. Google seems to be using revenue from its search business to undermine paid for software of a competitor, Microsoft. Ironically this is how Microsoft killed Netscape and unfortunately for MS it is a very effective tactic. There are far too many advanced features in MS Office which means it is vulnerable to a stripped down competitor like Apps. Google charges comparatively nothing ($50 per year for the premium service) and hosts everything itself.

This approach is not without weaknesses if Google wants to get out of the SME market. As they grow some enterprises may want to take all their applications in house, not host them on Google’s servers. At the moment Google only offers its enterprise apps stuck to its own servers. Cloud computing is very attractive but any large organisation will want to control its own cloud.

Theory Y

Ultimately what I really want is the capability to hack together different suites into one service. So for example we could use Gmail for mail, SocialText for wikis, Sonar Dashboard for networking and Connectbeam for tagging and search. New services should be easy to trial and add to enable quick decision making when someone finds a new app they want to try. At the moment getting a new application added to a corporate environment is a very time consuming process with the result that the applications being used are miles behind what is available.

Software alone is not the solution though, these tools can only support good management. I am currently reading the Human Side of Enterprise. It was first published in 1960 but is fresh as the day it was written. The approach to management it espouses is maximum freedom and maximum responsibility for employees. Most organisations are not run this way and still cling to the idea that people are naturally lazy/incompetent and need to be constantly corralled by a management class. The alternative view is that people are naturally enterprising and will respond positively to a challenge so long as they aren’t constantly interfered with. Organisations like WL Gore & Associates and Semco have succeeded taking this approach long before collaborative software became a reality. And to really get the best out of collaborative software, management will have to change too.

Read more:
On balance
On Gmail
On trampolines

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On Microhoo getting boring

Microsoft issued a press release yester……. Oh I’m losing the will to live. Come on dudes, pee or get off the potty. We’re all tired of it now.

Read more:
On breaking up Yahoo
On Yahoo’s problems
On Microsoft’s biggest mistake

Pic: foreverdigital

On Powerset

After reading that Microsoft wanted to buy Powerset for $100m I decided to have a go on the now legendary new search engine. I wasn’t amazingly, amazingly amazed with the outcome. Google and Powerset came up with broadly the same answers and in one case Google had on its first page what I had in mind when I typed the query. In both cases the search string was identical and parsed in the natural language in which Powerset supposedly has the advantage.

I don’t think it is a bad buy by Microsoft, if nothing else it may help persuade Silicon Valley types that MS is a cool place to work. This is so long as MS doesn’t suffocate Powerset under its bureaucracy after the purchase goes through. This is what Yahoo did to delicious, and it is painful to see such a good idea still sitting on the launch pad. I’ve said many times before delicious is the best bet for anyone to come up with a better text search engine than Google. It has the potential for personalised search in a way Google never will but only Digg seems to do anything about it. Maybe PARC will come along and rescue delicious but since they have no record of acquisitions and came up with Powerset in the first place then I doubt it.

Voice, not text

I think natural language search does have a bright future but not as a text search engine. I was watching one of Bill Gates’ many valedictory interviews and one thing he said that caught my attention is that MS hasn’t yet given up on voice interaction with computer. This brings to mind the scene in Star Trek IV when Scottie says ‘hello computer’ into the mouse but it is intriguing. Text search engines are actually better without natural language search as it is less arduous to type in keywords. However natural language search comes into its own with voice. At the moment Powerset requires you to type the query in but it seems to me that this is not what MS has in mind for it.

I think that MS is looking beyond text search altogether. Gates has already posited his view of the future in which people interact with computers in new ways. Now I know he has left MS full time, but he’s still spending one day per week there. It wouldn’t surprise me if linking Powerset to the voice technology he is excited about is what BillG is spending his 20% time on. If he is then watch out Google.

Read more:
On Joshua Schachter
On Yahoo
On Bill Gates

On Gmail

To paraphrase the Arctic Monkeys it’s the beginning of the end for Outlook. TechCrunch reports that the Australian schools system has switched from Outlook to Gmail. Outlook is the canary in the mine for MS Office, it may be the first to fall but the other apps are not far behind.

Gmail is the best email system in the world. It’s not perfect but it is the best. Threaded conversations are the best. A near perfect spam filter is the best. Its UI is the best.

Where does it need to improve to become truly revolutionary? For my money what it needs is integration with a broader enterprise network. That means going beyond the clunky calendar functions in Outlook and melding Gmail into something like Connectbeam or Trampoline Systems, then it would be truly remarkable and part of a worthy enterprise tool.

Now Google has the makings of this with its apps suite but they need to show more imagination. In this they are behind MS which has already started tinkering with enterprise networks in the shape of TownSquare. Now I fully expect TownSquare not to make it as MS seems to have taken its eye off the enterprise apps ball, apparently believing that all they have to do is trundle out endless Office updates and all will be well. Gmail starting to replace Outlook shows they are heading for a rude awakening.

Read more:
On trampolines
On TownSquare