Why isn’t the Apple TV Social?

Apple just launched its own social network – Ping. Why isn’t Ping data featured on the Apple TV?
I’d like see what my friends watched, get recommendations and share stuff I Like.

Where are the Apps?!

The iPhone, iPod and iPad are thriving on a vibrant Apps market. Why can’t the Apple TV do the same?
I was really expecting an iOS driven device where developers could enhance the Apple TV capabilities by providing apps specifically designed to be run on TV set with limited controls.

You could browse social networks (Facebook, Twitter etc.), or watch stock market information, or browse content from your favorite feeds and content providers (imagine something like the iPad’s Flipboard your big LCD TV), or cook with your TV’s help (imagine Jamie Oliver’s iPhone app on the big screen) or get apps from content providers (like local news channels for example) that’ll be able to stream their own content…
There’s tons of stuff developers could do with the Apple TV if given the option.

Apple could have really taken the streamers to a whole new level with this…

In short, I wish Apple TV would be more like Boxee

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Its not a geek device, its a computing appliance. The iPad is a computer with an iPhone OS. Not a full fledged Os like we’re used to, no multitasking, terminal, filesystems… 
Just a list of Apps that can be installed and updated from the net. Simple, elegant, and exactly what most people who aren’t computer geeks need.
The perfect “laptop” for mom and dad…

Apple Sells Relationship, Not Hardware

The iPad’s amazing pricing just shows that Apple is really counting on people using the heck out of their device… that means buying apps, books, music and videos. Its building a relationship with its customer that gets stronger and stronger with each purchase on iTunes.

Customers who have all their applications, games, books, music and videos on iTunes are locked in the Apple ecosystem. They’re vested in it…
They’re not going to easily switch to an Android or a Zune…

HP\Dell\Asus\etc. only make money the moment you purchase their hardware (and on support and stuff) they make no difference if you use it or not. Microsoft too, only makes money when you buy your Windows license.

Apple on the other hand keeps monetizing its customers way after they left the Apple Store with their latest new device – when they buy content for their device. They keep and nurture a profitable relationship with their customers and thats a way better business than a one-off hardware\license sale…

(btw, Microsoft is learning about making profit from a relationship too… that’s what drives its Xbox business)

iBooks Can Change the Publishing Industry

Before the iTunes Music store, buying songs at a ridiculous 99c price was inconceivable. The iPhone App Store did the same to applications, changing the the economy (checkout this excellent App Economy graphic) of application taking prices down.

Same could (and would probably) happend with books…  but there’s more!

Unlike Amazin’s Kindle (and Sony’s reader and the rest of the bunch) which support a very limited interaction – text and some grey imagery – the iPad comes with a big, colorful touchscreen and a CPU that can handle 3D gaming.
The iPad’s hardware is perfect for interactive content and the Times Magazine demo showed during the launch shows a glimpse of  how our future books and magazines should look and feel on electronic media.
Electronic “print” is going to be much more interactive and rich which means the entire process of book production changes.
The publishers’ role changes from mass printing and delivery to production of interactive content, the way authors work changes, and distribution costs drop…

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I found the following comparison between the iPhone and the Droid ads hilarious.

Especially, the following Droid bullets:

• It is fast and it despises aesthetics.
• It is packaged inside missiles launched by stealth jets. (*)
• It is a robot and should mostly be handled by other robots.
• Droid is to be used with robotic hands in a low-lit hi-tech laboratory or warehouse.

Actually, in one of the ads they say they Droid is like a Scud, a soviet missile that’s not known for its accuracy…

In any case, I’ve used an Android device before (the Samsung Galaxy) and I can’t really find anything good to say about the device or the Android OS (and its Apps Market).
I can’t believe there are people in the blogsphere calling the Galaxy and Droid an iPhone alternative… 

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(via Ido Keinan)

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For context, that is almost double the market capitalization of Domino’s Pizza, which has 10,500 employees and had $1.4 billion in sales last year. Twitter has some 60 employees, and although it is experimenting with running advertisements on its Web site, Biz Stone, a Twitter founder, said this week at an industry conference that the company had no plans to begin widely running ads until 2010.

Twitter previously raised $55 million and has said it still has $25 million of that in the bank. So the question is, what will it do with these $100 million? Or, as I see it, who will it acquire now?

As part of it efforts to find a business model, Twitter will most likely acquire companies that’ll help it form that model.I’m thinking\betting on two major trends for such a business model:

Manage Companies Presence on Twitter

Twitter’s most obvious business model is by helping companies manage their presence on Twitter and monitor how their brands are being discussed.

This makes companies who provide all sort of analytics information, CRM integration and even url-shorteners as potential acquisitions for a future Twitter business package…

Local Markets, Local Social Network

The minute I read about Twitter’s $100 million round I thought of companies like Foursquare. I wasn’t really surprised when I read today’s Techmeme and noticed Twitter’s co-founder Jack Dorsey invested in Foursquare.
Also, the twitter team has been working very hard lately to make Twitter location aware, allowing users to share their location via their tweets and browse stuff that is happening around them.

Twitter is great in forming local communities (just checkout the local tweetups everywhere), gather news and provide all sort of local information. Fouresquare as well as other location based social networks doing can really help twitter tap into the long-tail local businesses market and take on companies such as Yelp.

So, what do you think Twitter’s latest valuation? What will it do with its newly raised $100mil?

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Hadoop is a distributed file system and parallel execution environment that enables its users to process massive amounts of data.
In response to frequent requests from the Hadoop community, Yahoo! is opening up its investment in Hadoop quality engineering to benefit the larger ecosystem and to increase the pace of innovation around open and collaborative research and development.
The Yahoo! Distribution of Hadoop has been tested and deployed at Yahoo! on the largest Hadoop clusters in the world.

Hadoop is free Java software framework born out of an open-source implementation of Google’s published computing infrastructure and fostered within the Apache Software Foundation.
Yahoo! has been the primary developer and contributor to Apache’s Hadoop.
In 2006, Hadoop founder Doug Cutting joined Yahoo, which provided a dedicated team and resources, to lead the project of developing the open-source software and turn Hadoop into a system that ran at web scale. Today, Yahoo! is running the largest Hadoop cluster in the world, which includes more than 25,000 servers and provides the framework for many Yahoo properties including Yahoo Search, Yahoo Mail, and several content and ad services.

Yahoo says its opening up the source code to Hadoop to “benefit the larger ecosystem increase the pace of innovation around open and collaborative research and development.”.
As Nigel Daley, Quality and Release Engineering Manager at Yahoo! Grid Technologies, summarizes:

Hadoop is helping us solve key science and research problems in hours or days instead of months. It provides us a platform to solve extreme problems requiring massive amounts of data processing. It underpins major revenue-generating systems. Opening our distribution enables a faster pace of innovation for the entire Hadoop ecosystem and broadens the use — and ultimately the quality — of this key platform across the industry.

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While Amazon’s EC2 has been great so far in allowing companies to run large, computational-heavy distributed tasks on the background, it has been really lacking on allowing companies to run online services in a manner that’s efficient and reliable.

The reason for this lack of support is basically because there was no way to do load balancing on EC2 machines allowing a service to efficiently scale across multiple EC2 instances.

With the launch of Amazon CloudWatch, Auto Scaling and Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon is effectively making EC2 a viable host for online services, not just background jobs. Using these services you can not only scale a service across machines for reliability, you can also automatically add and remove computing resources as demand increases\decreases driving your operation costs down.

You can find more information at the detail pages for Amazon CloudWatch, Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing and on the AWS developer weblog. Also, check out Werner Vogel’s blog post for some background on how Amazon is horizontally scaling its services.

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…But I’d argue Microsoft could simply do a Twitter clone — the same way that it has built its own Facebook-notification-like news stream into Windows Live — and reap similar results. In fact, the Softies are hinting they’ve already been experimenting with adding Twitter-like functionality to its business software (possibly via SharePoint). I’d bet the Xbox and maybe the Pink/Danger mobile teams have been looking at doing their own Twitter-like services too.

Seriously?! Microsoft could simply clone Twitter?!

Sure, Microsoft certainly has some brilliant tech folks that can surely implement or clone anything. It also has the resources to do that.
And yet, its mostly following the pack with its online offering pretty stagnant. Last time it tried anything like that was Live Home with its Facebook\FriendFeed like functionality and that’s pretty much dead…
It can certainly clone Twitter, probably even do a better job at it than the original, but will anyone bother using it?

Twitter has a fast growing, huge and vibrant community. Its also a well known brand name that’s getting a huge amount of media attention right now.
It survived its own fail whales, upgrade owls and all sorts of other nasty service downtimes simply because no one else can beat that…
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But not just any fish, its a Siamese fighting fish, also knows a “betta fish” (or just “betta”).
A subtle Microsoft joke? Hope it does a better job selectively breeding this one (and get rid of some mutations… err… SKUs) …

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About a month ago, Microsoft rolled out its previously announced 3rd wave of Windows Live Services refresh.
The purpose of the release was to position the Live Services as the central hub for everything you do online – the new Live Home shows input from your various services (Hotmail, SkyDrive, etc.) as well as an activity stream composed of your friends’ activities on both Live Services as well as other external services such as Twitter, Flickr and blogs…

What initially seemed like a promising new start for Microsoft, leveraging on its already existing Live Messenger social network now seems, a month or so after its rollout is pretty much dead. Most of the people I know (including myself) that tried using the new Live Home quickly gave it up as its simply as there’s simply nothing to do there – with an anemic design and an activity feed that does not allow any interaction, Microsoft’s new homepage is simply a “Read-only Social Network”.

Microsoft missed out on what makes a social site successful – social interaction! duh!

It should have encouraged users to interact using its platform by allowing rating / commenting / sharing / replying / etc. on feed items.
By not doing so Microsoft is actually making users leave its homepage platform to use other services (Twitter, FriendFeed, etc.) when they actually want to do something with the content – rendering its platform pretty useless.

All that is left now is to wait for the next wave, expected at the end 2009 Q4, and hope for a more mature product that can… well..  Live.Similar Posts:

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If you like the scrolling functionality as implemented in the iPhone (and Zune etc.) you’ll be happy to know its part of the Windows 7 operating system and implemented for anything with a scrollbar.

More Windows 7 goodies on Rafael Rivera’s blog…

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Microsoft announced today its rollout plans for the 3rd wave of Windows Live services.

The goal of this latest release wave, according to company officials, is to simplify the use of the offered services and unify the user’s entire online experience into the Windows Live interface.
Microsoft is planning to rollout the new services, currently in beta, to the public within the 1-2 months timeframe.

Windows Live Goes Social

One of Microsoft’s main emphasis with the current wave of services is on social networking between users using its services.

Microsoft finally figured out that its Live Messenger with about 268 million users worldwide, is by far the most popular instant messaging software in the world, is actually a social networks. With the new release, your Live Messenger contacts are now your Friends and you can see aggregated information about their activities on the net.

Very much like Plaxo, FriendFeed etc. Microsoft allows users to bring into their profile content they create in all sorts of services on the web (Live Services, Flickr, LinkedIn, blogs and RSS feeds, …) and share it with their friends and colleagues.
When users add photos, write reviews, and update their profiles directly on Live.com, that content will be put into their activity stream as well.
This activity stream is exposed in all sort of ways throughout Microsoft’s services interface.

For example, Microsoft’s new Live Home portal shows the latest events in your social network. When emailing a friend or chatting on Messenger you’re also able to interact with that friend’s activity stream and more…

Not just for private consumers…

I’ve been told that all these new service updates will not skip Windows Live Domains used by universities and organizations to create a personalized version of Microsoft’s services.
If that really the case, having all these new social capabilities as part of its domain offering can be amazing for collaboration and communication inside the organization.
While Google doesn’t seem to care about its Google Applications for Your Domains customers its good to see that Microsoft is going forward with Live Domains.
This latest update may just be the final straw I need to make the switch to Live Domains…

Where’s Live Mesh?!

It will be really interested to see where Live Mesh comes into the picture in regards to all of these Live services.
Live Mesh should be the glue bridging between Microsoft’s online services and its offline applications and devices (S+S) allowing users to sync all their content- contacts, photos, events, favorites, etc. – across devices and services.
Unfortunately, there’s no clear answer for that…

During the launch we’ve only heard about Live Sync allowing users to sync photos across computers. Some sources say its an incarnation of FolderShare and in any case it doesn’t seem to be based on Live Mesh technology.
With Live Mesh being one of Microsoft’s core platform offering its really hard to understand why we need to have Live Sync too…

Other notes…

• All the services are released simultaneously in all countries and in 48 (!) languages.
• Windows Live Skydrive size limit has changed from 5GB to 25GB
• Windows Live Hotmail looks and feels a lot better to use.
• I’ve uploaded all the screenshots of the new services to my SkyDrive:

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This year’s Microsoft Profesional Developers Conference is full of announcements and surprises. The next big announcement besides Windows Azure (and Windows 7?) is the new “Office Web Applications” live service. The Office team will be delivering the five most popular Office applications as light weight browser based versions that include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.

Here are some of the demo screenshots available:

The applications will be offered in both a simple HTML/AJAX version and a rich-client Silverlight version.
Office Web Applications are not planned to replace Microsoft’s traditional desktop offering but rather complete it, together with Mobile Office for mobile devices, allowing users to seamlessly work on their documents across all environments.

Providing such a reach collaboration environment isn’t a simple task as you can see in the following interview of Antoine Leblond, Senior VP of Office Productivity Apps and Chris Bryant, General Program Manager:

Although its not meant to replace its Desktop Office offering, one of Microsoft’s biggest cash cows, one has got to wonder about the risk these new services to cannibalize their big desktop brother’s profits. Windows and Office, which are Microsoft’s core business, are likely to stay its core moneymakers for at least the next 2-3 years, maybe even longer.
This move clearly shows that Microsoft is starting to think beyond that and along with its other platform announcements (Azure, Live Mesh…) we can clearly see a trend away from desktop software to rich clients installed from the web….

Office Web Applications will be released to a limited set of partners and customers at the end of this year. The release date will closely align with Office 14 and Windows 7 which will be sometime in late 2009 or early 2010.
Microsoft plans to make Office Web Applications available as a service through its Live platform supporting both an ad-funded and a paid-subscription models.
Business users that require an on-premise will be able to do so through Sharepoint via its traditional volume licensing program.

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Windows Live™Microsoft’s Windows Live ID team just announced their support for OpenID calling it a “de facto standard Web protocol for user authentication.”

Beginning today, Windows Live™ ID is publicly committing to support the OpenID digital identity framework with the announcement of the public availability of a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Windows Live ID OpenID Provider.

You will soon be able to use your Windows Live ID account to sign in to any OpenID Web site!

What does it means for users?

OpenID allows users to maintain their identity information (Name, E-Mail, address, etc.) on a single provider and use that information to register and login to any website that supports OpenID. This relieves the user from having to fill out registration form and maintaining multiple different user names and passwords and profiles on different sites add provides a simplified online experience while increasing security.

Over 400 million LiveID users will soon be able to use their LiveID to do just that – login and provide identity information to any site supporting OpenID without the hassles of filling out registration forms and saving user\password information and with the user experience common to all OpenId sites (or, maybe even common to their familiar LiveID user interface?)

The wide adoption of OpenID led by Yahoo and Microsoft provides the required push for site owners to support OpenID providing the same simple and familiar login interface everywhere…

What does it mean for web developers?

With a simple integration effort that shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes, site owners can relieve themselves from taking care of authentication and registration process while providing their users with a simple familiar interface for signing up and using their services.
OpenID provides an easy and secure mechanism for authenticating and registering users, and with additional online services (like JanRain’s RPX) site owners can handover the entire care of handling their user information to the cloud – cheaper, faster, more secure.

For now, the LiveID team is testing their system’s OpenID Provider which is at a CTP (Community Technology Preview) stage. Widespread support is planned for “sometime in 2009″.

[Update: Screencast Overview]

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Google released its Chrome browser to the world about a month ago. It made a lot of PR noise, a comic book, and squeezed some outrageously favorable remarks from critics.

“When combined with Gears, which allows for offline access, Chrome is nothing less than a full on desktop operating system that will compete head on with Windows. “

Michael Arrington in “Meet Chrome, Google’s Windows Killer” (TechCrunch)

A month later, is Google Chrome even close to the the expectations set on its launch?
Read about it Cloud Avenue…

Update October 21th, 2008:

Be sure to read the discussion on the comments section at CloudAve and Krishnan’s response post…

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Instead of being quite so blatant, Microsoft has taken a quieter back route to achieving the same ends via two related technologies:

1. Baking SharePoint reliance into more and more of its products
2. Requiring users to buy pricey client-access licenses (CALs) in order to use Microsoft’s servers

Microsoft has been basing a growing number of its products on SharePoint technologies to provide basic common services like storage, pub/sub, identity/security infrastructure, communications and collaboration functionalities.

With SharePoint’s BDC catalog and search server it is apparent that Microsoft is targeting SharePoint to serve as an integration layer on top of services and LOB applications in the organization.

With “Oslo” its much more…

In 2007, the company began to roll out Microsoft-hosted versions of three of its servers—Exchange, SharePoint Server, and Communications Server—with more planned. The next stage is a set of online services for application developers that offer OS-like functions, such as application-based data storage, and data synchronization among multiple connected devices.

Microsoft’s “Oslo” vision and roadmap to “Simplify SOA, Bridge Software Plus Services, and Take Composite Applications Mainstream” is largely built with SharePoint backing its platform.

As Microsoft expands its reach into cloud computing it’ll have to adjust its SharePoint infrastructure services, which its other server products rely on, to support this kind of environment.

We can already see signs for this transformation in Microsoft’s last year’s announcement on switching SharePoint to use claim based security.
Performing authentication and authorization using claims allows SharePoint to support federated identities across different services and applications – from integration with common identity services like Active Directory, LiveID and OpenID to service\application specific identity models.
This means SharePoint is no longer limited to using the Active Directory on premise but can integrate with remote external authentication providers enabling SharePoint hosted scenarios.

Office, OBAs and LOB Integration

On February 27th last year Microsoft shared some details on LOBi (Line of Business Interoperability), the next version of its SharePoint BDC, postponing it to be released as part of its Office 14 technology stack:

Consequently, LOBi technologies will now be delivered as a set of capabilities within the Office SharePoint Server as part of the next major set of Microsoft Office product releases (the Office 14 wave).”

LOBi, now known as OBAF (OBA Framework), allows developers to integrate LOB applications (SAP, Oracle, etc.) into SharePoint.

It provides developers with all the necessary services required to develop a composite LOB web application on top of existing systems while also supporting offline synchronization to Office clients (S+S strategy).

With the extensive support in application modeling planned as part of “Oslo” roadmap, Microsoft is positioning SharePoint as an integration platform that will run composite applications.

Dynamics and its other server products will probably leverage this platform, as well as its partners and ISVs.
An example for such an application’s is Duet 3.0, the next version of the SAP integration productivity product jointly developed with SAP, which will be developed on top of the new SharePoint technology stack.

Conclusion

By providing developers with rich set of platform services – security services, data indexing, search, synchronization services and offline capabilities – coupled with a development environment (Visual Studio 10) and modeling support, Microsoft is trying to provide all the essential capabilities required to build and run application in a hosted environment – the beginning of an OS for cloud applications?

Some more links on Microsoft’s Cloud Direction:

• Whatever happened to Microsoft LOBi?
• Here comes the “Windows Cloud”
• Windows HPC Partner- Electric Cloud
• Microsoft Research Work – TechFest Presentations and Demos
• Presentations – Democratizing The Cloud, The Cloud Data Center & The CARMEN Science Cloud & Beyond
• Cloud based Claims Authentication

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Jeff Barr from Amazon Web Service reports that Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) is now storing more than 29 billion, an increase of 7 billion from the previous quarter:

As one of the S3 engineers told me last week, that’s over 4 objects for every person now on Earth!

Our customers are keeping S3 pretty busy too. To give you an example of what this means in practice, the peak S3 usage for October 1st was over 70,000 storage, retrieval, and deletion requests per second.

Amazon is also lowering the prices on S3 storage, with a new four-tier pricing plan that takes effect on Nov. 1st.  Customers storing more than 500 terabytes will get a rate of 12 cents per gigabyte.

With such a huge amount of data, low prices, and abundance of success stories, it really seems like Amazon has got a revolutionary service on its hands…

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What most reviewers seem to ignore is that even if Nokia (or Google, Sony, LG etc.) do come up with a device that matches the iPhone’s technical abilities (and I’m sure they have the required resources to do so) they’re still going to have a tough time competing with it.

Why? They way they sell and support their devices is very different than Apple.

When you buy an iPhone you have one company that control’s your entire experience with the device. From purchasing to ongoing operations and services its all ran by Apple that controls the entire product experience etc.
Apple bundles its iPhone with a set of services (AppStore, iTunes, Music Store…) that are tightly integrated with the device allowing easy consumption by customers which eventually is what’s driving Apple’s business.

Nokia, Sony, LG etc., on the other hand, sell the device through partnerships with different communication companies such as Orange Partner, which in turn, works with local sub-diaries. They rely on these partners for supporting their device and providing services to customers which often results in poor (sometime broken) customer experience.

Speaking at an Israeli GarageGeeks meeting, Steve Glagow, VP of Marketing Operations at Orange Partner VP mentioned that due to the fact they have to work with many regional and local partners, it takes more than 3 clicks and several screens for a user to install an application. Although he said their application installation rate is high (percentage of users who reach the application marketplace and end up installing an application) its a misleading measurement as most users will give up and never even reach the marketplace – only users determined to install an application will go through that effort.

Bundling your device with services is a winning strategy, not just for cellphones. Microsoft’s Xbox Live! platform is another great example on how bundling a device with online services helps increasing its value and perception.

Killing the iPhone will require more than just cool new hardware…

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• Nokia 5800 (Tube) – Not an iPhone Killer?
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Read the complete post at Cloud Avenue.

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Armed with new business models and technologies that take advantage of the internet cloud, new competitors like Google, SalesForce.com and Amazon are threatening traditional software giants like Microsoft, SAP and Dell by changing the way software is built, sold, delivered and maintained.

On the way to making computing an efficient, cheap global commodity we’re facing new difficult business and technological (and some might even add political) challenges. There’s a lot of exciting innovation ahead…

Certainly, such a technology tidal wave deserve its fair share of coverage, which now comes in the form of the recently launched Cloud Avenue – A new blog, edited by Zoli Erdos and Ben Kepes, that will focus on cloud computing topics.

Cloud Avenue where, working with a few like-minded bloggers we’ll focus on the intersection of Cloud Computing, especially SaaS and Business, ranging from small business to enterprise.

… We also have our CloudLab – for product / service reviews.  Yes, we will report on products, but do not strive to be a mini-TechCrunch: we have no intention to report about everything new.  We’re not a news-blog.  We’d rather sit back, analyze a market, find key players, then produce a series of reviews / comparative analysis.  Quality before quantity or urgency.

Launched a little over a week ago, it has been pretty active with over 20 posts already. Below are just some of my personal highlights from the first week:

• What would I do if I was Steve Ballmer?
  I must say I have to disagree with most of what’s there. Still worth a read…
• Oracle Open World’08 Key Note – Cloudy Announcements!!
• Anti-Virus in the Cloud
• Cloud Computing: The myths, realities and everything else – Part 1 & Part 2
• Cloud Computing Making Forensics Easier

So join me in welcoming Cloud Avenue to the blogsphere

Oh, and one more thing…
I’ve been invited by Zoli to join the CloudAve writing team and I’m definitely going to make some writing effort there. Should be interesting…

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The new ad explains that Bill and Jerry are on a quest to reconnect with real people, pretty much like what Microsoft is trying to do with this new campaign.

It’s definitely better than the first ad as there are some funny scenes and a clear message that actually makes sense  – Windows need to appeal to the needs of real people.

However, the Mac vs. PC took just one add to get you hooked and the message across. Microsoft can’t seem to compete with that…

Lets just wait and see what the 3rd ad will be like…

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However, I’ve also heard from several folks who disagree (like Asaf for example).
The main point of the Chrome supporters is that advanced AJAX execution capabilities, coupled with Google Gears offlining capabilities and bundled in a browser provides a platform for next-gen web cloud applications that can seamlessly work online and offline.

The thing is, that no matter how much you optimize your browser’s rendering and JavaScript capabilities, underneath it all our entire web technology still based on old (even ancient in Internet terms) standards set almost a decade ago by W3C – a now defunct organization that is failing to keep up with the rate of technological changes.
Can you really believe that the future is in technology standards set by W3C and updated once, maybe twice a decade?!

It’s W3C’s inability to keep up that is driving companies to develop their own proprietary standards to lead today’s technological trends – Adobe with Flex and Air and Microsoft with Silverlight.

And maybe we’re going towards a browser-less future were we have AIR\Silverlight cloud enabled applications running on our OS?

The point is, taking Apple’s rendering code (apparently, not even the latest build) and putting it inside a featureless window while adding some optimized JavaScript VM is far from being innovative and light years away from the revolutionary expectations that we could hear about before and during the Chrome launch. Adding a few more horses to pull your carriage around doesn’t turn it into a car…

But hey, we’ve had the same story with a boring featureless (sorry, plain and simple) chat program a few years ago

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When combined with Gears, which allows for offline access, Chrome is nothing less than a full on desktop operating system that will compete head on with Windows.

I’ve heard about Google’s Window-Killing abilities before….  where was that?  ah! right! scrolling all the way back to August 2005 where a new Google App is just about to revolutionize the way we communicate, the world, and the very fabric of the universe:

keith.teare: “It’s almost as if Google is implementing the features Microsoft has announced for Longhorn – Sidebar; voice calls inside IM, RSS integration – but doing it ahead of Microsoft, by about 12 months.

A Google layer between Users and the OS.

Rendering the OS a commodity

GTalk… remember GTalk? Google killed Vista with GTalk and will now kill Microsoft entirety thanks to coupling Google Gears to a JavaScript engine (not just any engine… an optimized one!)

And on a more serious note – Google’s business is all about AdSense.
It’s entire products line revolves around AdSense and anything that doesn’t help its business grow – dies. Even Android, under all the open-source and Apple hating PR, it about serving ads to mobiles.
Having said that, I wonder where Chrome fits in…Similar Posts:

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Amazon’s shares jumped by more than 9% following Citigroup analysts Mark Mahaney predicting its Kindle to become the “iPod of books”:

In a report to clients, analyst Mark Mahaney said Amazon could be on track to sell as many as 380,000 units of the Kindle this year. This would match the number of sales for the iPod digital music player in its first year on the market, leading the analyst to predict that the Kindle “is becoming the iPod of the book world.”

Mahaney predicted that the Kindle will likely top the lists of holiday “gadget gifts” this year. He warned that his projections do not account for a possible launch of an updated version of the device.

Personally, I want one! I just can’t wait for Amazon to release a Wifi version that’ll work world wide and will save me delivery costs and time when ordering my books.

I’m exactly the kind of person the Kindle appeals to – a techie who reads lots of books (mostly tech too) via Amazon.
I don’t think its a very large niche…  at least, not as large as the iPod’s target market…

I find it ridiculous comparing Kindle success to the iPod simply because of one people fact: People don’t read anymore!

Apparently, I’m not the only one holding this opinion:

Today he had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading.

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

By the way, the US is ranked 18 in literacy rate…  Just a fact worth mentioning… Similar Posts:

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MyBlogLog unveiled their new design yesterday:

Don’t worry, we still got all the features that you can’t live without; your stats, your widgets and, of course, the New With stuff. Only now everything is framed with shiny shadows and rounded edges! Also notice that on your profile we have moved the most recent visitors module, up on top, not down below the fold so you can quickly see who’s been checking you out.

If you’re a DeveloperZen reader and part of the MyBlogLog community (or just have a Yahoo ID), please join the DeveloperZen community on MyBlogLog.Similar Posts:

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