Adobe quits Apple pursuit

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try to preserve a relationship, you reach a point where it becomes clear the two of you have simply grown too far apart and it's time to cut your losses. After a long and unsuccessful campaign to persuade Apple to embrace the Flash multimedia platform on the iPhone, Adobe has finally found itself at that point, and it's goodbye Apple for Adobe now.

According to Mike Chambers, the principal product manager for developer relations for Flash, the final straw was Apple's recent ban on apps built with unapproved tools and converted into an iPhone-compatible format.

IDC analyst Al Hilwa offered a big-picture view of Apple's developer restrictions: "From a developer perspective, the new legal language is bad news. The application development field is very diverse and many platforms are inherently layered with API's often stacked on top of one another as application platforms evolve. Apple's legal language seems to preclude even Apple evolving its own platform down the road when new languages or interfaces become more popular as computer science evolves. ... While this restriction can be seen in the prism of the Apple and Adobe relationship around Flash, this is not just about Adobe, but potentially a problem for every developer runtime or language that wants to hold on to developers and maintain its longevity. It is about programmers maintaining their livelihood. Probably even more importantly, it is about the flexibility to evolve computer science and software development."

Amen.

Converting an IT horizontal into an industry vertical

Leveraging IT is not just for outsourcing vendors in India. Other Industries are fast catching up. I would say it's a fantastic opportunity for sectors that are not particularly doing well, Real Estate and Construction for example.

HCC is a Bombay based infrastructure and construction major in India. The industry is going thro some real rough weather but that doesn't seem to have influenced their business propensities. Though operational departments have been sagging, the IT department of the company has warmed up to the situation and is now pitching in with its own might of experience gained so far. It is trying to develop as an end-to-end IT solutions service provider for the infrastructure industry. According to Satish Pendse, CIO, initially, the services sought to be provided by the upstart could be SAP implementation, GPS-based tracking devices, multiple-packaged application implementations, and end-to-end services going forward.

Innovation does not just mean feature addition or product enhancement. It can also me converting a horizontal into a vertical.

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Why I turned the Google Buzz off

There are three separate issues, only one of which is the defaults:

1) Having an engineering culture drive a social product.... And I'm not just trying to be snarky. Social isn't a technical problem it's a people one and Google's culture doesn't seem geared that way.

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2) Layering a social sharing product (explicit social) on top of a private communication product like email (implicit social). Why would anyone assume that I'd want to do this? I might email business partners, clients, doctors (mine), lovers... why would you ever assume that frequency of email connections maps to 'want to share with the world?"

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3) The settings. I despair of `society' as an industry sometimes. Ever since the earliest concerns over privacy a decade ago, people insist on ignoring obvious things - you don't opt people in just to build an audience and force them to opt out. You don't auto-subscribe them to a bunch of followers then make them removed those people one by one. You don't suddenly violate customer trust by changing the nature of a familiar product to suit senior management. These aren't hard or obscure lessons... but time and again otherwise bright people screw up by ignoring them.

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IT outsourcing vendors run for cover

"In what could be an important decision for the IT outsourcing industry and its customers, a London court recently ruled that EDS (now division of HP) must pay damages to a former outsourcing customer for failing to live up to its sales pitch.

British Sky Broadcasting (BskyB) had signed a £48 million outsourcing contract with EDS to build a customer service system in 2000, but terminated the deal early in 2002 after what it said was "woeful" performance by the IT service provider. SkyB alleged deceit, negligent misrepresentation and breach of contract by EDS.

Although the total costs and damages will be determined at a later date, BskyB said it expects EDS will be liable to pay at least £200 million—more than four times the amount of the original contract."

Enough India's famed IT vendors? Now don't go promise the moon and hope customers would tolerate project failures like before. Though the U.K. court ruling was decided largely on the basis of facts from one person's statements as opposed to systematic failings of the outsourcer or outsourcing vendors as a whole, dissatisfied outsourcing customers may go digging through notes from the pre-contract courtship phase of their relationships to see if arguments around fraud can be made.

Tweak that Kindle, Jeff !

Amazon Kindle gave me a lot of hope. I was looking forward to ever-fresh, non greying pages no matter how many times I read a book. I longed for bookmarking at the press of a button, no chopping woods for paper etc.etc. The Kindle, I was told was all that and more.

But it hardly seems to be the case.

Ok. There’s no clutter, no pile of paperbacks next to the couch. A Kindle book arrives wirelessly: it’s untouchable; it exists on a higher, purer plane. It’s earth-friendly, too, supposedly. Yes, it’s made of exotic materials that are shipped all over the world’s oceans; yes, it requires electricity to operate and air-conditioned server farms to feed it; yes, it’s fragile and it duplicates what other machines do; yes, it’s difficult to recycle; yes, it will probably take a last boat ride to a Nigerian landfill in five years. But no tree farms are harvested to make a Kindle book; no ten-ton presses turn, no ink is spilled.

Too bad it doesn’t have a little kickstand,” . “You could prop it up like a dresser mirror and read while you eat.”

I experimented with the text-to-speech feature. The robo-reader had a polite, halting, Middle European intonation, like Tom Hanks in “The Terminal,” and it was sometimes confused by periods. Once it thought “miss.” was the abbreviation of a state name: “He loved the chase, the hunt, the split-second intersection of luck and skill that allowed him to exercise his perfection, his inability to Mississippi.” I turned the machine off.

Photographs, charts, diagrams, foreign characters, and tables don’t fare so well on the little gray screen. Page numbers are gone, so indexes sometimes don’t work. Trailing endnotes are difficult to manage. (Cook books / Recipes will suck when you try a new dish to see if the outcome tallies with the intention) If you want to quote from a book you’ve bought, you have to quote by location range—e.g., the phrase “She was on the verge of the mother of all orgasms” is to be found at location range 1596-1605 in Mari Carr’s erotic romance novel “Tequila Truth.”

Read in the sun the letters began to disappear. Readers had to press Alt-G repeatedly to bring them back. I clicked Next Page as I reached the beginning of the last line, and the page flashed to black and changed before I’d read it all

The Sony Reader’s page-turning controls are better designed than the Kindle’s controls, and the Reader came out more than a year before the Kindle did; also, its screen is slightly less gray, and its typeface is better, and it can handle ePub and PDF documents without conversion,

You can’t give them away or lend them or sell them. You can’t print them. They are closed clumps of digital code that only one purchaser can own. A copy of a Kindle book dies with its possessor.

And then you cut out the bad tobacco odor that you often get while opening books in a library.

The "Bing" outing

Ok. Microsoft is out with its own search engine, oops, they call it a decision engine – Bing.

There will be inevitable exploration of the meaning of the moniker. (Bing has a certain ring to it. It's much better, of course, than the boring "Live Search.") Plus there is the bigger question of whether Bing will make a dent in Google's dominance. But search for clues to another issue Bing brings up: Will it end the Microsoft-Yahoo search flirtation?

Anyways, Bing seems like it would be more useful than a Google or Yahoo search. If you're searching for something you'd like to buy, for example, Bing theoretically will serve up reviews, as well as places to buy the item and related accessories, laid out in a prettier and more organized way than just a simple vertical list of links. On a whole, a big positive for Microsoft: The depth of the searches seems to offer more opportunities for ad revenue.

Of course, people think simple is best, which is part of why Google's so successful. Early impressions suggest Bing will lure some people who want to achieve a specific goal when doing a search, but that users' trust in Google to bring them the most relevant results in the most basic of manners won't wane. The trick will be to get people to think of Bing, too, when they think they might want an enhanced search. Microsoft will be spending a lot of money on the Bing branding campaign, take CEO Steve Ballmer’s word.

So this brings us to what this means for the long-running Microsoft-Yahoo partnership possibility. Is it still going to happen? After all, would Microsoft invest so heavily in Bing if it really thought a deal with Yahoo was imminent?

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My new find "Twitter search"

What makes Silicon Valley so much fun? Nothing is invincible there forever.

The motto posted on Twitter’s search page is intriguing “See what's happening — right now." And many people do exactly that. During a live event or amid breaking news, a growing number of people are turning to Twitter search to follow the conversations among its users.Very quietly, one of Twitter's most powerful applications has become its ability to allow people to conduct real-time searches. But the fact that Twitter's potential to disrupt the search market is being seriously discussed shows just how quickly the sands can shift under the feet of even a colossus like Google.

Typically, when such goliaths are slain, it's because they failed to recognize the threat and make the necessary changes until it was too late. So, it'll be interesting to see how Google — or even if Google — feels the need to throw some kind of counterpunch. In theory, Google has created a culture to keep it flexible and innovative. On the other hand, its track record of new products has been a bit lackluster.

There's always the chance, of course, that Google will quickly deploy real-time search and simply crush Twitter. But that's harder than it sounds. Twitter already has an estimated 6 million users and is growing rapidly. It would be hard to convince someone to switch to a new microblogging service at this point, and it might be just as tough to get users to search Twitter through Google when they can just do it through Twitter itself.

It might be tempting for Google to try to take some of those billions of dollars stuffed in its mattress and overwhelm Twitter and its investors with an offer that dwarfs the reported $500 million Facebook offered for the company. But such a move could also attract a healthy once-over from antitrust regulators. “Then again, I wonder how buying a zero-revenue company factors into antitrust rules” – exclaims Chris O’ Brien.

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