Hear Curt Monash online – three times!
The world has hardly suffered from a lack of opportunities to hear me speak. I first appeared on radio and TV in 1973, first taught a college course in 1977, and have rarely shut up ever since. But until recently, I hadn’t gotten involved with the various forms of Web broadcasting. Well, that suddenly changed, and this month alone you have three different opportunities to hear me hold forth.
1. John Gallant put me on “The Hot Seat” at Network World’s offices, discussing a few provocative questions about the direction of the software industry. The video/audio may now be found on their site. Sadly, while I could quibble and say the camera angle was a bit unflattering, in essence that is what I really look like these days.
2. I participated in a Webinar for SAP called “Beyond Transactions: The Power of Portals.” The theme was that if you want to build or buy an app that’s mainly about data flowing back and forth between parts of the computer system, traditional technologies are fine. But if you want an app that has rich human contact with information, portals are often a superior technology.
I am told a link will be available within the week. Watch this blog for details.
3. On Wednesday, January 25, at 11 am EST, I am participating in – indeed, doing most of the talking for – a Webinar on Memory-Centric Data Management. The host is Applix. The focus will naturally be on the part they care most about (in-memory MOLAP), but it will also be the first time I speak about an area on which I’ve done a considerable amount of recent writing and research.
You can register for this Webinar here.
| Categories: DBMS vendors and technologies, Enterprise applications, SAP | 1 Comment |
Fat clients, thin clients, segmentable clients
My columnist colleagues Frank Hayes and Mark Hall are having a friendly dust-up about fat clients vs. thin clients. If forced to choose, I’ll side with Frank’s view:
Whether or not IT wants to take fat clients away from users, it can’t.
And that’s one of the big reasons I like the idea of solid-state-memory-based PCs. In essence, they segment a PC’s disk, with strong air gaps to protect one part against the others. And if you do that, SOME of IT’s problems go away.
| Categories: Diskless PCs, Hardware | Leave a Comment |
Click Here, You Idiot!
One of the better online spoofs in quite a while has come along, in the form of a lengthy marketing letter. CLICKhereYOUidiot parodies all those marketing letters that are directly deprived from newsletter promotions. And yes, I know about the latter, having been in the subscription newsletter business once …
Like all parodies, it can be a bit heavy handed, but it’s worth a visit and skim.
And it reminds me — does anybody have a copy of the classic site Hey Idiot? That one had the most star-studded creative team of all: Larry Ellison, Mitchell Kertzman, and David Roux. If memory serves, Larry came up with the idea, Mitchell came up with the name, and David wrote the copy. The basic idea was a company that sold only one product — it’s own stock. And there was one rule — each sale had to be at a higher price than the last previous sale …
Here’s all that’s left of Hey Idiot on archive.org. If anybody has more of the site saved, I’d love to see it.
| Categories: Fun stuff | Leave a Comment |
The Google PC could be a winner
EDIT: News reports are now carrying vigorous denials of the rumor. Oh well.
The Register is highly skeptical of the rumored Google PC. Admittedly, it’s playing in the intersection of several areas with bad track records, including:
- Non-Windows PCs
- PCs special-branded for mass-market retailers
- PCs branded by search vendors
Even so, I think there’s a lot of potential for this idea.
To see why, please consider that there basically are four major uses for home PCs:
- Work-at-home
- Gaming
- Internet/communication
- Schoolwork
Presumably, people won’t look to get their work-at-home or gaming PCs at Wal-Mart. That leaves internet/communication and schoolwork. Well, Google is one heckuva heavyweight in internet/communication. If you want a machine to do web surfing, email, instant messaging, and so on, why exactly would Dell/HP/Microsoft be more attractive suppliers than Google?
And how does one do schoolwork on a PC? There’s a lot of internet use, some lightweight use of word processors and other personal productivity tools, and occasionally some use of specialized software (e.g., development tools if you’re learning programming, or various kinds of educational java applets in all sorts of disciplines). Any good machine for communication can meet all those needs perfectly well.
What about IE-only websites, you might ask? Well, the only reason those survive outside Redmond is either total idiocy on the part of webmasters, or a smug reliance on the fact that everybody has IE available at least as a backup browser. But the thing is — they don’t. Mac support for IE has been dropped, and there still are a bunch of Macs out there. IE-only sites, already on the decline, can be expected to dwindle away fast. This is no longer a serious barrier to non-Windows PCs.
Another change from the past is the role of ISPs. These days, there is no role for ISPs, at least in the US. Internet connectivity is being taken over by the telephone and cable TV companies. And they’re just as (in)capable of supporting non-Windows PCs as they are of supporting Windows connections.
Most likely, the Google PC will fizzle at first simply because neither Google nor Wal-Mart really knows how to market it. Besides, the idea of Google as a complete provider of Microsoft-alternative software is slightly futuristic. But if they take their lumps, come back with Version 2 quickly, and then follow Microsoft-like with a kickass Version 3, Google could make a serious dent in Microsoft’s market share.
So that’s the Google threat to Microsoft. Coming soon (I hope) — a post on the Microsoft threat to Google.
| Categories: Google, Hardware, Online and mobile services | 1 Comment |
Diskless PC possibilities
I’m not a hardware guy, so please pardon me if some specifics here are implausible, but an interesting idea has arisen, and indeed turned into the subject of my December Computerworld column. Shayne Nelson raised the subject of diskless PCs based on USB/flash “drives,” and a web search uncovered a Slashdot discussion on the subject a couple of months earlier, which in turn seems to have been based on a now unavailable Yahoo story. The technology certainly would seem to be practical in the near future, and it raises some interesting ramifications and possibilities.
1. The most vulnerable, volatile, and valuable parts of the computer — the programs and data — could now be removable and put in any pocket, or mailed without much fear of breakage. Even better, they could be segmented, on multiple drives per computer. Possible security and administration benefits include:
a. The drive that stores most programs could be locked down, tight. Pick your dream technology or policy for making PC images consistent across your network; it just became a lot more plausible to implement.
b. The drive that stores most data could be entirely encrypted. Flash drive access is several orders of magnitude faster than disk access, making this a reasonable precaution even though it’s not very practical with magnetic storage.
c. What’s more, laptops might still be lost or stolen — but they wouldn’t have to have data on them! An employee whose laptop is stolen is unlucky. An employee who leaves sensitive data in an unattended laptop could now be justifiably fired.
d. In two-factor authentication, the flash drive might be the second factor. No fuss, no bother.
e. You could physically upgrade every user’s disk without shipping PCs around. Just ship flash drives around instead.
f. Enterprises could implement a policy of NO PERSONAL WEB SURFING UNLESS YOU SWAP OUT COMPANY DRIVES (and therefore presumably swap in your personal ones). All kinds of security problems would be ameliorated ASAP, at much less cost to employee goodwill than more draconian crackdowns incur.
2. Environment-specific computer equipment would now be much more affordable. Classrooms, meeting rooms, operating rooms, etc. might have more suitable devices than they now do.
3. Before long, we might not need to travel with laptop computers! Yes, devices in hotel rooms might be problematic from a security standpoint, but there are workarounds for that too. And in any environment that’s more locked down, such as a home or corporate office, the problem is almost nonexistent unless you work for a Three Letter Agency.
4. Disk space would initially be decreased, just as the Web initially made UIs worse. That’s not a huge problem, but it might not bode well for bloatware vendors (e.g., Microsoft).
Obviously, this isn’t a big deal from a business standpoint until the devices are actually manufactured and sold. But it’s fun to think about. And it actually makes a whole lot of sense.
| Categories: Diskless PCs, Hardware | 14 Comments |
Oracle’s defensiveness
I was chatting recently with what is probably my favorite guy among senior trade press editors. The subject came up of Oracle’s confrontational attitude towards analysts, and he said they’re the same way with the press — defensive, oddly demanding of control, etc.
Now, my own experiences with Oracle’s PR department have generally been positive. Typically, I have a run-in with analyst relations, and the compromise is to have PR (a separate department) handle me for that particular story instead. But what this tells me is that the main weirdness isn’t at the level of the analyst relations chief; it comes from higher up.
| Categories: DBMS vendors and technologies | Leave a Comment |
SAP’s corporate blogging
Jeff Nolan seems to be the head of blogging for SAP, or something like that. He’s a little concerned about SAP’s lack of openness. Meanwhile, I’m praising SAP for it’s openness.
I guess it’s all a matter of what your expectations are.
| Categories: Enterprise applications | 1 Comment |
Data warehouse appliance market
Philip Howard — who in my opinion usually asks good questions but commonly comes to the wrong conclusions — offers a quick overview of the data warehouse appliance market. Basically, he says Netezza is going strong, a few startups have failed, and the jury is out on a few other vendors.
My research hasn’t been as extensive as his seems to be, but in this case his conclusions sound right to me.
How the text technology market could ignite
Over on the Text Technologies blog, I have a series of posts arguing that the potentially huge market for enterprise text technologies is being stifled by the lack of a general-purpose ontology management system. I further argue that such a product could be constructed in such a way as to be actually usable and potentially adopted by mainstream enterprises (no, you don’t need a trained librarian to use it). So what are the chances of something like this actually working out, to an industry-changing extent?
First and foremost — if such a product is built, there’s a clear Crossing the Chasm path to major success. There are fairly healthy (> $100 million dollars annually each, at least) technology markets for internal enterprise search, customer-facing search, electronic publishing, text mining, and so. That creates plenty of “bowling pins” for a tool to get established. What’s more, pretty much every sufficiently large enterprise needs internal search; every enterprise with a decent-sized product set needs customer-facing search; and many industries need text mining. So the opportunity for true mainstreaming of text technology is clearly there. I don’t know whether the dominant product category is more likely to be “ontology management systems” or “search whose product differentiation lies in its ontology management subsystem,” but one way or the other the market opportunity is there.
Second, the technology seems eminently buildable. The various “smarts” needed have for the most part emerged, at least in point products. The knowledge representation scheme needed seems like a straightforward extrapolation of current ones. Anything can be given a good UI. Almost anything can be made scalable, and this doesn’t seem like one of the rare exceptions.
So it all comes down to vendor will (and wallet). I’m not aware of any vendor that’s really figured this market opportunity out yet. But sooner or later, one or more of them will surely get the point. If needed, I’ll personally help them see the light …
| Categories: Analytic technologies | 1 Comment |
Microsoft — is the intensity gone?
More and more Microsofties are complaining that the company is corporate and bureaucratic and, to be specific, empty nights and weekends.
I haven’t visited them for a few years now, and have no special insight into whether it’s true. But I can tell you this: It sure wasn’t that way in the past. I still recall a passionate, raised-voices discussion Bill Gates and I had about industry futures … after midnight … while dressed in black tie … at his girlfriend’s apartment. And that wasn’t an isolated incident.
And this spirit kept up well into the 1990s. I was on the phone with Jon Roskill (an influential marketing manager for Visual Basic, in essence, whatever his exact title is or was) on a Monday, and he commented that he was having trouble getting his head back into work after a long absence. I politely inquired as to the nature of his time off. It turned out he’d left work at 3:30 pm the prior Friday and gone camping for the weekend.
Yes, it seems Microsoft has changed a whole lot over the past decade …
| Categories: DBMS vendors and technologies, Microsoft | 1 Comment |