Market leaders:Your position might not be there forever

I would not like to be in WMWare's shoes now. Microsoft has now released its virtualization software Hyper-V that Microsoft released before its planned schedule. Based on an article from Redmond Developer News, the beta had more than 1.5 million downloads. What makes this a killer is that it is priced retail for $28 and this is something that WMWare is going to struggle with as their comparable solution is between $7000 to$14.000 based on an article from Tietoviikko.com. WMware has been the gorilla in this market and now Microsoft is going to take a stab at this market by going with pricing that is a fraction of what WMWare is asking. This is yet another case where assumed marketleaders can face competition beyond their dreams. Mary-Jo Foley (author of Microsoft 2.0 book from Wiley).

Salesforce strengthens ties to Google: competition of the cloud is getting heated

June 25, 2008 — Building on their recent linkup, Salesforce.com and Google are aiming a new toolkit for Google Data APIs at developers. Salesforce released last month the Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs,which helps to build software programs that could run on Salesforce’s platform-as-a-service offering. The competition is getting heated and the rules of sofware development with it. I truly believe that there is a huge shift in mental attitude towards how software is built and how clients/end user customers sees it. The new generation (10 year olds) are the ones that will not even question whether things are done in the "cloud" or old tranditional way. Vendors have to be looking at this new generation.

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Salesforce.com Aims to Grow Into a Utility Computing Power: is it going to be like electricity?

Salesforce.com will stake its future growth for the next decade on delivering a computing platform as a service. Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff wants to change the landscape by moving from software as a service to "platform as a service" and this means that Salesforce.com wants to contentrate on delivering data center and application development services, including server capacity, storage, management services and the labor that goes with it to businesses of every size. What I have heard is that Salesforce.com is not very friendly to its partners and wants to do all of it themselves. This is to the contrary to Microsoft that is trying to fill in the pipeline for its business partners. Regardless, the competition is going to heat up and during my doctoral defence in 2004, I said that software will change to utility computing like electricity is today. Maybe this trend is finally here?

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Microsoft's 'Oslo' to implement modeling alternatives: Is this a good fit for domain-specific modeling (DSM) languages?

June 4, 2008 — ORLANDO — If you can’t beat them, absorb them. That seems to be Microsoft’s theory as it prepares its big entrance into the modeling arena by talking up extensibility here at the Tech·Ed Developers conference.According to Steven Martin (director of product management in Microsoft's connected systems division), "Oslo" modeling language will be a low-level language, one to designed to work withi domain-specific modeling (DSM) languages as well as BPEL and Unified Modeling Language (UML). Furthermore, Oslo will be have an XML base and Microsoft will provide a roadmap for its support of other modeling languges later this year.

According to Martin, "Oslo technology will feature a repository that is meant to capture all necessary information related to an application, such as its business logic, deployment, and identity and governance policies". Furthermore, another Oslo component, known as Architecture Explorer, is a graphical environment for model design. Based on the article, Microsoft will reveal more at this fall's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles.I have been working with different companies, their prouduct development strategies for quite a while and it surprises me how far we still are of having an unified environment for developers. Based on the article, Oslo is according to Microsoft standards based on horizontal approarch, not vertical like domain-specific approach assumes. DSM is geared to take care of domain-specific things, which helps developers to grasp the issues and architecture of what they are trying to solve. It is going to be interesting to see where Oslo takes the development community.

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Tech job moving abroad? Offshore yourself with it!

If your job is moving overseas, maybe you should move with it. Many American IT workers have looked with increasing worry as programming and datacenter jobs shifted to India, China, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere, with companies seeking cheap labor and Internet connectivity making offshoring a plausible business option. I like the approach that this article proposes. First of all, there is a lot of skills in the US that countries would benefit from and there is no return from the fact that work is global today. In my book that came out before Christmas 2007 in Finland, I urge Finns to view the world from a new global perspective using a new framework of mind. The ones that understand this, will be the winners of next decade.

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Interesting debate from Salesforce.com Marc Benioff and SAP Hasso Plattner

I run into an interesting debate from YouTube where Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff and SAP Hasso Plattner debate about enterprise software.

Strong statement from Nokia: Open source developers should play by our rules

"We want to educate open source developers. There are certain business rules [developers] need to obey, such as DRM, IPR [intellectual property rights], SIM locks, and subsidized business models," Jaaski told attendees of the Handsets World conference in Berlin. In other words, the open source community needs to learn how to keep things closed.I have been blogging multiple times about the ins and outs of open source movement.

A few days ago, the Finnish IT weekly journal Tietoviikko puhlished a story where the director responsible for Nokias software Ari Jaaksi defends Nokia's approach to open source development. Tietoviikko got the article from InfoWorld's Neil McAllister who asks how come Nokia can dictate concludes in his blog how Nokia can dictate open source movement. This type of discussion is natural as nobody really understands the true foundation of open source and how companies can protect their IP both in the short and long run.

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Microsoft Buys Navic to Add TV Ads to Web Campaigns

June 18 (Bloomberg) -- Microsoft Corp., the third-largest seller of Internet ad space in the U.S., will add television spots to its advertising system by acquiring Navic Networks, stepping up competition with market leader Google Inc. This move takes Microsoft to a new area and Microsoft will get clients such as Wal-Mart Stores, Nissan Motor Co and Allstate as its clients in the television commercials domain. It is fascinating to see how the competition changes the landscape of our daily lives. It is good for everybody.

Haven't bought a Macbook Air yet? Try the HP ENVY!

For all you Macbook Air holdouts, HP has just announced its ultra-thin HP Envy which is actually thinner and more powerful than the Macbook Air. At just .70 inches thick, the Envy still packs a 1.8/1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo along with an 80 GB hard drive or a 64 GB SSD. Here's the cool part, the power brick doubles as a wifi router.

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BI steps into the cloud: are we getting closer to reality? How about ETL, OLAP cube building and Data Warehouse

Business intelligence functionality has made its way into cloud computing as Panorama Software on Thursday unwrapped PowerApps. The SaaS model is becoming a strong contestant in the business intelligence space and Panorama is the first one to really push it. This will create huge competition between the main players. It is going to be interesting to see how BI can play in highly intensive data integration initiatives and data loads. I believe that reporting/dashboarding can be done in SaaS world, but how do one create effectiveness in extraction, transformation, load (ETL) processes and data warehouse/cube building.

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Redemption Time for the UMPC: is it worth now

Due to early flops, the Ultra-Mobile PCs (UMPCs) started out with a bad rap. Recent models are going a long way to remedy that. I have been looking to buy an ultraportable laptop for almost a year, but the models from Samsung and Sony has not been what I expect them to be. Soon, the right type of device is here. Based on the article frmo PCMag.com and also my reviews from other models, the HP 2133 Mini-Note PC and Fujitsu LifeBook U810 seem to be taking first place. Also, last week, I saw the first time the upcoming Dell model that is pretty sweet.

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Ballmer: Software makers face big challenges

Software makers need to create natural interfaces, simplify programming tools, and create better search tools for a new computer revolution to happen, Microsoft CEO says. Furthermore, "Ballmer also suggested that software development is still too complex, and integrating separate computer systems still too difficult. The complexity of software development is still the "bane" of the IT industry, he said. I have been part of teams developing software products to the international marketplace and I fully agree with Ballmer. Until we find more abstract ways developing software, we will not get out the productivity that is required. Domain-specific modeling (DSM) is the way to go if the company is in the process of modeling and creating a languge for a given domain.

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Tech-Ed: Gates' Farewell to Developers Focuses on Silverlight, Velocity, Oslo

Redmond Developer News reports from Tech-Ed: Gates' Farewell to Developers Focuses on Silverlight, Velocity, Oslo. One of the key areas where Microsoft is focusing on is to enhance its development tools to enable richer and more enhanced user interfaces, more capable data-driven applications and better management of enterprise-scale software projects. The article also portays how Gates discussed new tooling to help developers model and architect applications. New architecture tooling in Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) lets developers check application flows, drill down into the architecture layer and validate program code against the architecture design. Harry also noted that VSTS will let developers automatically check for architecture design violations at check-in. I am pretty sure that the development tool industry will focus more on providing higher abstraction levels for developers to avoid laborsome, code intensive development. Developers and achitects should be enabled with tools that enable development such as has been the case with DSM (domains-specific modeling) and DSL. It remains to be seen where the trend of development tools takes us.

Microsoft Windows 7: What the Future Holds

PCmag.com submitted an interesting article about upcoming Microsoft Windows release 7.0. According to the article, Microsoft is preparing a modular kernel without a graphical user interface (GUI). This would Microsoft allow to use the kernel across different hardware devices such as mobile phone and other embedded devices. Intresting stuff..... I am sure there is going to be lots of "leaks" going forward about what the strategy might be for the new upcoming Windows platform.

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The Best Media Extenders according to PC Magazine.com

I have been researching the next generation wireless technology to my house... not only for music playback but also for video streaming. This article describes well the options that you have to do things. I invited the "professional team" from Bestbuy to suggest to me what I should buy and install to my house and when I asked a question what they would suggest as media server, both technicians looked at me and said "we typically get only questions about flat panel tv's and we do not know anything about any servers". Needless to say, I threw these guys out from my house. They were useless. So, if you have basic understanding of wireless technology, media servers etc., do not invite anybody from a "generic" retailer to your house. They do not have a clue. I have now tested them multiple times and found this to be the case.

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