Tomorrow's World

Jon Udell took a vacation and reflected on some changes in recent times. One telling comment: "Computers and access to the network were fungible commodities that existed everywhere. When you visited friends you'd just use their terminal interchangeably with your own at home. It seems like we're nearly there."

Microsoft and Google

Phil Wainewright writes why Microsoft cannot win:

Google's turf is the Internet. It's not interested in devices that don't connect to it — Microsoft is welcome to that market. It simply wants to extend its reach to any device that does go online.

Meanwhile, Microsoft's focus on desktop capability is the crux of why it can't possibly succeed against Google (or any future Google equivalent). It's focusing on yesterday's market. Microsoft's dominance of the desktop is as relevant to the future of computing as Union Pacific's dominance of the railroads was to the future of transportation in the twentieth century.

Here's a sampling of reasons why Microsoft is history:

* Microsoft wants everyone to have a rich desktop experience, Google wants everyone to have a rich Internet experience.
* Microsoft's business model depends on everyone upgrading their computing environment every two to three years. Google's depends on everyone exploring what's new in their computing environment every day.
* Microsoft looks at the world from a perspective of desktop+Internet. Google looks at the world from a perspective of Internet+any device.
* Microsoft wants computers to help individuals do more unaided. Google wants computers to help individuals do more in collaboration. In the Internet age, who wants to work alone any more, when all the unexplored opportunity is in collaborative endeavor?
* In a few year's time, who's going to still be working at a desk anyway?

eBay in China

TIME writes why eBay must win in China given the Yahoo-Alibaba deal:

The critical importance of eBay's international growth, and of China's piece of that growth, couldn't be clearer. In just a decade, eBay has gone from America's online flea market--purveyor of old 45s, Happy Days lunch boxes and Pez dispensers--to a global powerhouse, with footprints in no fewer than 32 countries. In fact, in the first quarter of 2005, the number of registered eBay users abroad exceeded that at home. According to John Yunker, president of Byte Level Research, "by 2006, and perhaps even by the last quarter of this year, non-U.S. revenue will surpass U.S. revenue." That's because eBay's revenue growth is slowing in the U.S. as the market matures (last year domestic revenues grew 34% to $1.89 billion) and because its international growth has been extraordinary. eBay's gross-merchandise volume (GMV)--the total dollar value of the deals done on a given website--in Britain, France and Italy all increased 100% or more last year. Consider that in 2000, eBay's international revenue totaled $29 million. By 2004, that figure was $1 billion.

For some time, it was simply a given that eBay would take China by storm as the online marketplace exploded, that it would be, as Bear Stearns analyst Robert Peck puts it, a "layup." In 1999, Shao Yibo, a Harvard Business School graduate, started EachNet, an e-commerce company, in China. Shao's site openly aped eBay in style and content, effectively screaming "buy me" at the San Jose, Calif., giant. In 2002 eBay complied, paying $30 million for a third of the company and taking the rest for an additional $150 million the following year. This, arguably, was a hefty price for a start-up in a market in its infancy, but that was hardly the point. China is on its way to having 200 million Internet users. E-commerce is surging, and dotcom companies in general are back in favor. Wildly so.

But eBay's dominance of the next great e-commerce market has turned out to be anything but a layup.

IMS

[via Paul Golding] Excerpts from a Q&A with Greg Papadapolous, CTO and Executive VP for Sun:

There aren't many things in the telecom industry that are more transformative than IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS). IMS is network convergence at its best. We're rapidly moving from a world optimized for voice to a world optimized for data. In the world of IMS, you're able to dynamically co-mingle media types – voice , video, data – in a myriad of ways. This is what multimedia means – the simultaneous existence of several media types. It doesn't matter whether you want to talk, stream a video, instant message or email a picture, and by the way, do so simultaneously with two other callers. The network doesn't care and neither do you. It's just another data type. IMS is changing, irreversibly I suspect, the way in which we will communicate.
...
One big piece of IMS is the notion of session. It's a way to provide call control and manage multimedia sessions over IP networks. Today when you make a phone call, a connection is established and torn down the instant you hang-up or attempt to do something else, like send an SMS or take a picture. There's no ability to combine these services together. A few years ago, the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) decided to adopt the IETF-defined Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) as the basis of a new session-control layer for 3G core networks. Choosing SIP was a significant decision that ultimately is going to have manifold implications in the telecom world. With SIP, operators can can combine services from the circuit-switched and packet-switched domains in the same session, and for sessions to be dynamically created 'on the fly.' Things like adding a video stream while on a voice call will become commonplace. The beauty of SIP is that it's based on HTTP making it fairly easy to create new services. SIP service developers can use all the service frameworks developed for HTTP, such as CGI and Java servlets.

Consolidation of Enterprise Software Companies

Barron's writes:

The enterprise, or corporate, software business faces a world in which there is little organic growth, few compelling new applications and a dearth of untapped customers. Companies that need enterprise software mostly have what they need -- and then some. Roger McNamee, a long-time technology investor and the founder of the private-equity firm Elevation Partners, asserts that the software business isn't just growing up; it has already reached adulthood.
...
Lacking compelling new markets, and facing saturated demand for their existing wares, the industry's largest players are doing the logical thing: They're taking advantage of their strong balance sheets and buying growth. They are, it seems, proving that Larry Ellison knew exactly what he was talking about all along.

TECH TALK: Internet Tea Leaves: Google's Intent (Part 2)

News.com thinks that Google has joined the battle to woo developers: “Google is taking a page from Microsoft's well-worn playbook for tech industry domination: Rather than just rolling out new products and features, the search giant is trying to win the hearts and minds of Web developers…Longtime Microsoft watchers believe it wasn't just the OS that made Microsoft the most profitable company on the planet. The software titan's vaunted developer-outreach network created a rich "ecosystem" of applications that run on Windows and Office, its desktop application suite, driving adoption of the company's core products…Some say that's exactly what Google is now trying to re-create on the Web.”

Om Malik had, earlier in August, speculated about GoogleNet: “What if Google wanted to give Wi-Fi access to everyone in America? And what if it had technology capable of targeting advertising to a user’s precise location? The gatekeeper of the world’s information could become one of the globe’s biggest Internet providers and one of its most powerful ad sellers, basically supplanting telecoms in one fell swoop. Sounds crazy, but how might Google go about it?"

Jason Kottke expanded on a meme he has discussed earlier – that Google is effectively building a WebOS.

This is my best guess as to how an "operating system" based on the Web (which I will refer to as "WebOS") will work. There are three main parts to the system:

The Web browser (along with other browser-ish applications like Konfabulator) becomes the primary application interface through which the user views content, performs services, and manages data on their local machine and on the Web, often without even knowing the difference. Something like Firefox, Safari, or IE...ideally browser agnostic.

Web applications of the sort we're all familiar with: Gmail, Flickr, and Bloglines, as well as other applications that are making the Web an ever richer environment for getting stuff done. (And ideally all Ajaxed up to provide an experience closer to that of traditional desktop apps.)

A local Web server to handle the data delivery and content display from the local machine to the browser. This local server will likely be highly optimized for its task, but would be capable of running locally installed Web applications (e.g. a local copy of Gmail and all its associated data).

That's it. Aside from the browser and the Web server, applications will be written for the WebOS and won't be specific to Windows, OS X, or Linux. This is also completely feasible, I think, for organizations like Google, Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft, or the Mozilla Foundation to make happen.

Jason Kottke’s post was the subject of a lot of comment and discussion around the blogosphere. John Battelle added: “Jason ties together the Google Desktop (which he reminds us was launched as "Desktop Search" but is now just, well, your "Desktop....."), local web servers, and next generation web apps and browsers. In short, he is saying, the Web OS is nearly here. It's why Yahoo bought Konfabulator, and why MSFT is integrating the web into Vista, it's Apple's strategy too.”

Tomorrow: Google’s Intent (continued)

Related Entries:  [All]
TECH TALK: Internet Tea Leaves: Endgame [September 16, 2005]
TECH TALK: Internet Tea Leaves: Defining Themes (Part 2) [September 15, 2005]
TECH TALK: Internet Tea Leaves: Defining Themes [September 14, 2005]
TECH TALK: Internet Tea Leaves: The New Internet (Part 2) [September 13, 2005]
TECH TALK: Internet Tea Leaves: The New Internet [September 12, 2005]