All Posts in Technology

|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

When you play bridge, you sometimes overbid. It might be a sacrifice, to prevent your opponents from scoring. Maybe the cards just look good despite the point count. Probably, it’s your partner’s fault, but you’re stuck playing the hand.

Sometimes, you’ll make the contract anyway, which might make you greedy. Then you’ll overbid the next several dozen hands, too.

Your opponents will love you for this. Your partner, however, just might become your ex-partner.

Microsoft isn’t in the bridge-playing business. It has, however, overbid its hand, and it might just be time for you to become its ex-partner.

It is, in short, time to seriously consider Linux as a desktop operating system. If it isn’t time to develop a migration plan, it’s certainly time to perform a cost/benefit analysis.

It’s a triple irony: The timing coincides with Dell dropping its support for Linux; it comes just as Microsoft has finally achieved sufficient OS stability to eliminate that as a differentiator, and it is Microsoft, through its licensing shenanigans — not any of Linux’s backers — that has made Linux a credible option for you.

Microsoft has backed off from its upgrade-by-October-or-else marketing plan for Office XP. So what? Its willingness to play licensing hardball with customers is beyond doubt. Its preference for renting software rather than selling it is overt. And the correlation between its products’ marketshare and pricing is a matter of record.

Which means you no longer know what you’re going to pay next year for Microsoft Office. Think you can evade the problem by avoiding upgrades? Think again: Whether through business growth or retiring older machines with OEM licenses, you’ll need new copies of MS Office, and you’ll buy them under Microsoft’s terms.

The problem is, you don’t know today what Microsoft’s terms will be tomorrow.

Linux lets you avoid these risks. That doesn’t make the migration free and easy. IT and end-user training are obvious costs. The soft costs of reduced productivity and time spent tweaking imperfectly converted files are others.

The hard part, though, will be remembering that despite rumors to the contrary, personal computers are important because they’re personal. You’ll need to help end-users convert or find Linux correspondents to those nasty unsupported or personally developed applications so many IT managers try to prevent in the Windows environment.

If you don’t, an unsupported personal information manager will be the least of your problems. You’ll see renegade copies of Windows appearing on desktops throughout your company.

Now that would be ironic.

Comments

|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

The Roman general Pompey added a grain of salt to his food, believing it would counteract poisons added by would-be assassins. Thinking himself safe, he was eventually stabbed to death.

So take what you read about Web services … a technology that’s solidly in the “hype” phase of the technology life cycle (the other phases being “disillusionment” and “application”) … not with a grain of salt, but with a spoonful of salsa. Neither will prevent assassination, but at least the salsa will spice things up enough to keep you awake at night. And although Web services might turn out to be a useful architecture, it’s doubtful it will turn out as useful as it is now being promoted, so you need to stay alert to maintain the skepticism you need.

Last week we explored some of Web services’ problems, among them production scheduling. When you distribute a batch job over a bunch of computers running in other companies’ data centers and communicating at unpredictable latencies, run times become unpredictable and long.

The most straightforward technical solution is caching, which gives the user control over both computing power and network performance.

But the vendors that create the components you link together to build a Web services application will want to profit from their efforts. My guess is they’ll prefer an ASP (application service provider) model, where customers pay based on usage. Otherwise vendors would just be renting what amounts to a subroutine library, a pretty uninteresting business and one that’s never generated the kind of wealth that attracts venture capital.

Since caching makes ASP-style billing awfully difficult, it’s probably out. What probably will work, though, is similar: You’ll build or license and install web services applications pretty much as you do with existing architectures — on your own hardware in your own data centers. Once all the ASP-modeled Web services vendors run out of venture capital, they’ll rent you their components as libraries, too. They won’t get rich, but they might stay in business that way, eventually becoming something that looks a lot like a traditional software vendor.

If it doesn’t happen this way, Web services probably won’t emerge from the disillusionment stage.

Pompey, who took his food with a grain of salt, was killed in Egypt, where years later an asp killed Cleopatra, according to legend the most beautiful woman of her time. Is it just coincidence the ASP mentality might just be what kills the beautiful architecture of Web services?

Comments