Loving Fireball

Damn, John Gruber can write. What a talented person! This post made me smile and hug my two-year old.

The ride starts. Jonas seems neither scared nor happy. It doesn’t seem possible that a boy could be this tired but still awake. While the ride spins I snap pictures — one-handed, since my left hand remains firmly grasped by Jonas’s right. This grip is the only attention he pays to me throughout the ride.

The ride slowly winds down and comes to a stop, and I scoop the boy out of the boat. I hold him and I start walking toward the boardwalk concourse. “Let’s go home,” I suggest. I’m braced for the worst, worried that he’ll ask for “one more ride”.

But I needn’t have doubted him. “Go see Mama,” he says. He’s too tired to be happy, but he is satisfied.

I squeeze him and kiss him, and I carry him home.

About Schmidt

There has been mucho speculation regarding Eric Schmidt joining Apple. Om Malik:

today’s news of Google CEO Eric Schmidt joining the board of directors of Apple Computer portends potential headaches not just for Microsoft, but for anyone with digital media ambitions.

Interesting – but what is it exactly that Eric can do from the board that Apple and Google can’t accomplish without him on the board?

Perennial hack Dvorak conjectures:

Schmidt would quietly be Sun’s inside man on the negotiations although technically he’s be a neutral party since he doesn’t actually work for Sun. […] Of course, speculation about a Sun-Apple deal has gone on for the last 20 years.

Typical pulled-out-his-ass quote from Dvorak. The last time there was speculation was during 1995-96 when Sun attempted to low-ball Apple for $12 billion. Recently some have speculated Apple purchasing Sun but the murmurs have been from “pundits” like Dvorak, probably in a vain attempt to increase readership. Would the deal make any sense? Apple’s enterprise products are doing relatively well (considering the capital and resources invested), so unless there Steve Jobs thinks there is an opportunity for a big-push this doesn’t make sense. Merely considering that Steve Jobs sucks at enterprise sales makes this hard to believe.

Techcrunch:

Could close collaboration between online giant Google and Apple hardware pose the most viable threat yet to Microsoft’s long held personal computing leadership? It certainly seems possible

Again, why would this close colloboration only result from board membership?

Here’s Apple’s board of director guidelines. It’s all really about corporate governance, there’s nothing about fostering partnerships.

Apple does use board members to learn about their industry and operations. For example, Drexler’s experience was key for Apple’s retail roll-out. If anything, Schmidt’s membership might improve .Mac webservices.

SpiralFrog: ad supported music

The Big Picture profiles SpiralFrog, a new ad-supported free music download site.

Each song takes 90 seconds to download, and while that is along time, the company hopes to keep viewers entertained with Concert information, videos, band discographies, photos, lyrics, etc. — all the trappings of a serious music site. There are also plans for colloborative filtering — as in “If you like this band, then you will like that band.”

Mute. Download in the background. Ignore Ad.

Can anyone remember one ad they have viewed for a day pass at Salon?

Carly Fiorina and the HP way

As HP continues to deliver good results, every few months the inevitable Carly question pops up: is Carly’s vision vindicated? C|Net has this month’s version. Well, the question is what was she indicted for?

The fundamental reason people hated Fiorina and still do is that she completely devalued R&D and rushed to make HP just another services vendor. Services is lucrative but even IBM depends on R&D – witness the $1B in royalties IBM earns annually. Fiorina for some reason was convinced that HP could not thrive as a R&D firm especially considering historically that it had successfully tackled previous challenges (transitioning from scientific equipment to electronic components, to medical devices, to printers ..) Some conclusions you could reach based on Carly’s moves: she did not understand where technology innovation was headed or did not want to HP to go there or was convinced that HP couldn’t get there or couldn’t recruit the people to make the move. So was Carly right? Maybe. Maybe not.

There are only two types of IT firms: companies that build (e.g. TI) and companies that sell other firms products (e.g. Dell) . Fiorina made HP the latter and its hard tell if thats for the better or worse. Long-term I would place my chips on the former.

Like Dave Taylor asked a while back: What does HP invent these days?

Oracle Fusion: $1B in sales? or Halfway to release?

In January 2006, BW indicated that Fusion was “halfway there” and that final version was due in 2008 (amid a lot of skepticism about the product and milestone).

Charles di Bona of Bernstein & Co. was one of several attendees who questioned how the management was measuring they were “halfway” to Fusion, particularly since the final suite won’t be delivered until 2008 and developers are just now starting to write the code. “Is Fusion on schedule?” he wrote in a Jan. 19 report. “The answer remains somewhat a matter of interpretation.”

Imagine my surprise when I came across this article in the Times of Malta (?) which suggests that Oracle Fusion passed $1 billion in sales. Whaa? I guess this means that Oracle is re-defining the old Oracle 9iAS as the new Fusion and accounting for sales that way? Let me ask again: WTF?

Revenue for Oracle Fusion Middleware passed the $1 billion revenue threshold for financial year 2006, the company said in a statement. During the last quarter of the year, Oracle Fusion Middleware license revenue grew 57 per cent year on year. For the entire fiscal year, Oracle Fusion Middleware grew 34.5 per cent year over year in license revenue.

Mercury News

Mike Langberg has a sensible article that highlights a Javelin survey report that suggests fraud and identity theft is mostly an offline problem. Langberg states:

“Despite all the publicity about security flaws in wireless Internet access, there are no documented cases on record — at least none that several experts I contacted last week can cite — of individuals having their identities stolen while using a WiFi hotspot.”

He apologizes on behalf of his fellow journalists for fear-mongering:

On behalf of the news media, I’m willing to accept a big part of the blame for spreading false fears.
Newspapers are full of headlines on the latest stolen laptop containing millions of personal financial records. But we rarely follow through and explain that — in almost all cases — these high-profile incidents result in no detectable cases of identity theft.

Hmm. Here are the top two stories on my Mercury News Business News feed:

Long way to go Mike …

MSFT institutional ownership

Saw this via Mini-MSFT. Fidelity has sold a significant portion of their MSFT holding – in fact most institutions cut back leaving only 56% in institutional hands. In contrast AAPL is held by 72% of firms (though they too have witnessed a slight sell-off by institutions):

Next up – where is Fidelity putting their money?

Corporate stumbles and recovery

BW compares the momentum behind HP and Apple over the last 6 months and contrasts their leadership and products. Apple is probably going through the natural corporate cycle of failures and successes. It has had great run from 1998 till now and its only a matter of time that it needs a breather. As long as its not an Enron like breather, every firm needs to have one. Oracle had it 1990 with their accounting scandal, Microsoft is probably going through it right now, HP had it under Fiorina, IBM under Akers, Dell right now, and, Apple, of course, went through one before its phoenix like resurrection in 1997. Firms can ready themseles for a fall but anticipating all the risks involved needs significant management commitment and investment which may not be high on corporate priorities (usually profits are the primary motivation). Successful firms are built on responses to failures and loss of momemtum. Part of it is not being entrenched within traditional thinking – Apple, well, actually, Steve Jobs, can never be accused of that. And more likely than not, that outside thinking is brought forth from outsiders – Hurd, Jobs (in 1997), and Gertsner. Those that are in denial are the ones that fade away (Digital, Sybase, and maybe Sun?). Interesting times …

SF Chron review of Writely

The Chronicle discovers a few things about Writely:

Writely requires Internet access

and..

Can Writely replace Microsoft Word? Yes, if you have stable Internet acces

and finally..

It lets you type and edit documents with speed and minimal fuss, as long as you have stable Internet access.

I wonder what they’re trying to say.

More on web office suites

Gigaom compiles thoughts on web office suites including this one from Jason Fried of 37Signals:

“The modern office is more about real-time collaboration and group chat, and not just a spreadsheet and processor.”

Actually, there are a couple of more dimensions that drive applicability including usability and firm size. The web presence offers a chance to change the usability factor significantly compared with traditional office suites where updates are far and few in between. In the near term traditional suites probably best web suites, but this advantage hold over the long term. Web office suites are going to be a big consideration for SOHOs and small firms where installation, manageability, and license concerns outweigh short-term usability .