Showing posts with label ecosystem. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ecosystem. Show all posts

07 June 2010

Why the iPhone Cannot Keep up with Android

Although I have never owned an iPhone, nor even desired one, I do recognise that it has redefined the world of smartphones. In that sense, it is the leader, and will always be historically important. However, as my title suggests, I don't think that's enough to keep it ahead of Android, however great you may judge the feature gap to be currently. Here's a good explanation of why that is:

Through a bevy of handset makers, Android can offer a variety of phones that will make it difficult for Apple to beat with just one hardware release a year. While it is hard to ever go wrong with an iPhone, Android offers a ton of alternative form factors, price points and carriers: Sprint (NYSE: S) has released the first 4G phone on Android; T-Mobile has a new competitive Android phone with a slide-out keyboard; the HTC Incredible sold by Verizon has been flying off store shelves; and even Google’s Nexus One still boasts some of the latest hardware. Not to mention new Android phones from Samsung and LG (SEO: 066570) coming later this summer.

The thing is, no matter how amazing any given feature of the iPhone, in any iteration, sooner or later (and probably sooner) there will be an Android smartphone that matches it. And alongisde that handset will be dozens of others offering other features that the iPhone hasn't yet implemented - and may never do.

It's an unfair race: iPhone iterations, even blessed by Steve Jobs' magic pixie dust, can only occur so fast; Android innovations, by contrast, are limited only by the number of players in the market. Want a new Android handset ever week? Easy, just wait until the ecosystem grows a little more.

And don't even get me started on the fact that the Android code is already starting to appear in totally new segments, bringing yet more innovation, yet more players....

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

13 March 2009

BBC Team Exposes...its Windows-centricity (Again)

There's something of a brouhaha over this report from the BBC...

On Open Enterprise blog.

03 March 2009

What the Hashtag?!

One of the reasons Twitter has taken off and become so popular (at least amongst sad people such as myself with nothing better to do) is that a rich ecosystem has sprung up around it, with all kinds of serious and silly services that build on its content. Here's one of the better ones, What the Hashtag?!:

Welcome to What the Hashtag?!, the user-editable encyclopedia for hashtags found on Twitter

What's a hashtag?

Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They're like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your posts. Hashtags can be created by anyone simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #myhashtag. Hashtags were developed as a means to create groupings of related content on Twitter.

This is an interesting way to access and index content, and adds an extra level of usefulness to Twitter.

27 November 2008

Mapping the OpenStreetMap Ecosystem

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is not only a great example of the open source methodology being applied outside software, it also started in the UK, which is something to celebrate. Not that's its stayed there of course, as this crowd-sourced mapping system spreads around the world.

One measure of its success and maturity is the fact that a commercial ecosystem is beginning to form around it, just as happened with GNU/Linux in the mid 1990s. Here's an interesting hint of what's to come in this area....

On Open Enterprise blog.

13 November 2008

Novell's Faustian Pact

There is something rather curious about software companies operating in the open source world. Although they may be competitors in a particular sector, the open source licence they employ means that they are also partners: they can generally use the code of other companies if they wish. The stronger those companies become, the more code they produce, and the more code there is available to everyone – including their nominal rivals. This makes the commercial ecosystem that evolves around free software strangely collegiate: everyone has a vested interest in growing the code base, because it is a commons that all can and do draw on....

On Open Enterprise blog.

30 October 2008

Open Enterprise Interview: Dirk Morris, Untangle

One of the reasons the open source development methodology is so powerful is because of the modularisation that lies at its heart. This allows those with a particular expertise to work on the module they are best able to improve, and for all such modules to be slotted together thanks to the clean interfaces between them. And at a higher level, the open source world is made up of many independent projects – unlike the world of Windows, say, where the ecosystem revolves around and is dependent on Microsoft's strategic decisions to a high degree - each able to proceed at a speed and in a direction that suits them best....

On Open Enterprise blog.

29 September 2008

What Microsoft Still Does Not Get

At first, I thought this Computerworld UK story about software vendors “challenging” proposed EU guidelines was just a typical Microsoft whine about the imminent loss of its stranglehold over the government sector in Europe. It is such a bad loser: after having abused its monopoly position for years, essentially telling the world and his or her dog to like it or lump it, it now runs screaming to teacher as soon as there is any suggestion of the playground daring to stand up to its bullying.

But I was wrong; the following comments are no mere knee-jerk whinge, but provide us with a profound insight into the troubled soul of the Redmond behemoth....

On Open Enterprise blog.

25 September 2008

Google's First Open Source Product

So the fabled Googlephone has arrived. It's pretty much as people expected, with tight integration to Google's main services, including a rather nifty use of Google Street View. It undoubtedly lacks the glamour of the iPhone, and even misses a trick or two in terms of basic mobile technology – Apple's use of the touchscreen seems superior – but that is mitigated to a certain extent by the presence of a keyboard for those of us who can't live without such things.

But maybe the most important fact about the G1 is that for the first time Google has shipped a major product that is open source....

On Open Enterprise blog.

28 May 2008

OOo, Look: oooPortal

One of the heartening developments in recent years is the way that OpenOffice.org just goes from strength to strength. Reflecting that growth, there are more resources beginning to appear around it, bolstering the nascent ecosystem. Here's another: oooPortal.

25 April 2008

The Hidden Success of Linux

Embedded systems are something of an iceberg: most of the activity is happening invisibly, so it's easy to overlook how far Linux has come in this sector:

Laut einer Studie des amerikanischen Marktforschungsunternehmens VDC ist Linux das meistgenutzte Embedded-Betriebssystem in der Industrie. 18 Prozent aller Ingenieure aus dem Embedded-Umfeld, die an der Studie teilnahmen, verwenden eine Linux-Firmware für ihre Geräte. Weitere fünf Prozent bedienen sich bei anderen freien Embedded-Systemen wie dem Real-Time-Projekt FreeRTOS, TinyOS oder eCOS.
Anzeige

Gründe für den Einsatz von Linux im Embedded-Bereich sind, dass es viele Entwicklungs-Tools kostenlos gibt und für die Linux-Firmware auch keine Lizenzkosten (Royalties) pro produziertem Gerät anfallen. Als weitere wichtige Vorteile nannten die Ingenieure die große Flexibilität von Linux durch die offenen Quellen, die jederzeit beliebig angepasst werden könnten, sowie eine gewisse Vertrautheit mit Linux allgemein.

[According to a study from the American market research company VDC, Linux is the most-used embedded operating system. 18 per cent of all engineers in the embedded world who took part in the survey use Linux for their devices. Another five per cent use other free embedded systems such as the real-time project FreeRTOS, TinyOS or eCOS.

Among the reasons for adopting Linux are the many development tools that are freely available and that no royalties need to be paid per device. Engineers cited Linux's great flexibility as a result of its open source nature, allowing it to be modified in any way, as well as a certain familiaty with Linux in general as further advantages.]

18 October 2007

Microsoft : Master of All It Surveys

I love Microsoft-sponsored surveys - not for what they purport to tell us, but for what they indicate Microsoft cares about. Here's another one:

In the IT industry, Microsoft and its "ecosystem" of parters are big--on the order of 40 percent of the market. And if any policy makers around the world doubted its influence, it now has the data to prove it.

The software giant commissioned research company IDC to survey 82 countries and measure the economic impact of the IT industry, and Microsoft specifically.

Overall, the results were not surprising, according to Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft. IT contributes to economic growth and job growth more than other industries, according to the IDC study.

The study managed to quantify the Microsoft business universe. There are about 14 million people working at companies that touch Microsoft software in some way, either as hardware distributors, services companies, or software developers.

That number represents about 42 percent of the overall IT market, according to the data. Mundie expects that number to stay consistent in the coming years.

The point is obviously to show how jolly important Microsoft is to all those economies, and how governments had better not fiddle with the delicate ecosystem. But of course what this necessarily overlooks is the huge value of the open source ecosystem - difficult to quantify using traditional economics - not least because open source saves people money, whereas Microsoft's ecosystem costs money. This means it looks smaller when it is simply leaner.

16 October 2007

Why Monocultures are Bad for You

In 1987, the Great Storm struck south-eastern England; one result was the mass destruction of many woodlands:

Because the hill was effectively a monoculture of mature beech trees of a similar age, it did not surprise Mr White that so many were lost in the storm.

Twenty years on, the woods are growing back - some of them naturally, not in a managed way as they were before the storm. The result?

As part of the recovery programme on the hill, the National Trust formed a partnership with English Nature to see what would happen if 50 acres (20Ha) of the 450-acre (180Ha) site was left to recover naturally.

"There is a very high percentage of dead wood in there," Mr White revealed, "which is now home to invertebrates, which birds obviously feed on.

"And the fungi are absolutely magnificent, especially at this time of year. There is a very varied ecology; a mature and advanced ecology."

The lessons for the ecosystem of software will not be lost on readers of this blog....

Parenthetically, I was there when the Great Storm struck. Shortly afterwards, I wrote a cheerful little piece about it, reproduced for your delectation below:

Windy City

Some sat at their desks, fiddling with pencils and paperclips. Others stood in the corridors, dimly lit by the emergency power. With no phones and no electricity, there was nothing to be done. An enormous silence hung over the whole building. Outside, there was a clear blue sky.

Upon waking that morning, it was apparent that something was wrong. The alarm radio had not gone off: its display was dead. Throughout the still house all the electric clocks had stopped at the same moment: 4.34 am; it was as if time had had a heart attack. No light, no hot water, no kettle: the tiny marginal acts of civilisation had been cancelled.

People stumbled into work as if in a trance, more out of habit than from any real sense of necessity. Everywhere there were scenes of destruction: huge trees uprooted, lying stricken across the road. Cars were driven under them with white-knuckled bravado, or gingerly past them, up on the pavement. People milled around, some taking photographs. There were no trains and few buses. An occasional ambulance flashed by.

On the radio the police issued urgent pleas for everyone to stay at home; it was pointless going to work they said. And the radio itself was strangely different. Bulletins were broadcast every ten minutes. The mindless music and vacuous ads had all but stopped. Instead, the catalogue of deaths and disasters, the no-go areas and the helplessness of the authorities were hammered home with a kind of crazy glee. A curious jitter ran through people, as if someone had walked over their collective grave. It felt like the end of the world.

It was the Great Wind of '87. 'The worst weather in 300 years', they said, 'the worst disaster since the war'. The dead, though few, were publicly lamented - so alien to this sanitised world of ours is random, violent death through force of Nature. Everyone felt an aesthetic pang at the sight of centuries of trees laid low in the dust; still majestic like fallen royalty, but doomed and irreplaceable. But most of all people felt themselves chastened, as if they had narrowly escaped something unthinkable. A case of presque-vu.

For winds, albeit of record speeds, had shut down the whole seething, pullulating metropolis of London. No transport, no telephones, and worst of all, no power. Mere air had pulled the plug on late twentieth century civilisation in so comprehensive a manner that people could only stand around and stare impotently. Power and telephone lines were restored after some hours, but the effects of that great wind were felt directly for days after, and the scars would remain for decades.

Imagine, then, a greater wind, an unnatural wind whose very touch is death. After a nuclear explosion, following the huge pulse of radiation, but before the even more horrifying fall-out of radioactive debris, there is a shock wave. That shock wave moves across the land like the Voice of God in the Old Testament: it is swift and terrible and unstoppable. In comparison the Great Wind of '87 will seem a light spring breeze. Looking around at our silent, desolated city, were we not right to be windy?

01 October 2007

KompoZer: Recomposing Nvu

One of the critical apps in any software ecosystem is a web authoring system. Until recently, the main free software offering was Nvu, but things had gone rather quiet on this front. With the launch of KompoZer, "Nvu's unofficial bug-fix release", we find out why:

Why call it «KompoZer» instead of «Nvu»? Because « Nvu and the Nvu logo are trademarks of Linspire Inc. » As Linspire stopped the development of Nvu, there is no legal way to correct any bug in Nvu.
God bless forks. Let's hope this time the project receives enough support from the community to join the open source pantheon of serious apps. (Via Linux.com.)

25 September 2007

Ecosystem Network Effects

One of the most heartening signs of maturity within the open source world - both literally and metaphorically - is the growing number of project tie-ups. The latest is Trolltech, which

has integrated Qt, its flagship C++ based cross-platform development framework, with the popular Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The C++ integration augments the integration currently available for Qt Jambi – a version of Qt for Java development.

This is a network effect, but writ large, at the ecosystem level.

02 July 2007

Wii Opens Up a Bit, We All Gain

Game consoles are notorious for being tightly-controlled, closed platforms. So this news, delivered en passant, is a rather significant vote for openness:

On Wednesday morning, Nintendo will officially announce to the general public its plans for WiiWare, downloadable games for the wildly popular Wii videogame console.

...

while Nintendo, as the retailer, would itself determine the appropriate pricing for each game on a per-title bases, the games themselves would not be vetted by Nintendo. Instead, Nintendo would only check the games for bugs and compatibility

Clearly, the company has recognised that the loss of control is more than outweighed by the benefit of establishing a flourishing ecosystem around the Wii.

14 May 2007

Hold the Front Page - Or Maybe Not

The hot news, of course, is Microsoft's threat to sue the entire open source ecosystem. Or maybe not. As Techdirt rightly points out, this is not a threat, but actually just re-heated FUD. But even more, it's a final wake-up call: we need to get software patents sorted out before they sort out free software.

15 March 2007

Red Hat Exchange: Apotheosis of the Stack

I've written several times on this blog and elsewhere about the rise of the open source enterprise stack. Its appearance signals both the increasing acceptance of a wide range of open source solutions in business, as well as the growing maturity of those different parts. Essentially, the rise of the stack represents part of a broader move to create an interdependent free software ecosystem.

Red Hat has been active in this area, notably through the acquisition of JBoss, but now it has gone even further with the announcement of its Red Hat Exchange:

Red Hat has worked with customers and partners to develop Red Hat Exchange (RHX), which provides pre-integrated business application software stacks including infrastructure software from Red Hat and business application software from Red Hat partners.

RHX is a single source for research, purchase, online fullfillment and support of open source and other commercial software business application stacks. Through RHX, customers will be able to acquire pre-integrated open source software solutions incorporating infrastructure software from Red Hat and business application software from Red Hat partners. Red Hat will provide a single point of delivery and support for all elements of the software stacks.

Through RHX, Red Hat seeks to reduce the complexity of deploying business applications and support the development of an active ecosystem of commercial open source business application partners. RHX will be available later this year.

It's obviously too early to tell how exactly this will work, and how much success it will have. But it's nonetheless an important signal that the open source enterprise stack and the associated ecosystem that feeds it are rapidly becoming two of the most vibrant ideas in the free software world.

14 November 2006

King Coal Rides Again

The greed and cynicism of some is simply beyond words:

Whatever the cost to the ecosystem, it could be an immensely profitable bet. Company executives say the plants will provide cheap electricity for Texas, make lots of money for shareholders, conserve more valuable natural gas and reduce the pollutants that make smog.

"Whatever the cost to the ecosystem": that's us, people.

02 November 2006

The Creative Commons Ecosystem Up Close

Larry Lessig has a nice example of how CC materials can feed off each other in all sorts of creative ways. In this case, the result is the aptly-named "C-shirt".