Several stories filed Monday suggest tomorrow’s Google-Sun press conference will unveil a new initiative aimed at Microsoft’s Office suite:
According to Susan Kuchinskas of Internetnews.com:
Google and Sun Microsystems [are] expected to announce a collaboration to bring StarOffice productivity applications to Google users. StarOffice is Sun’s suite of integrated word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing and database software based on the OpenOffice open source project.
The partnership with Sun seems to indicate that Google’s direction is to build out what is, in essence, an alternative to Microsoft Office. Google already offers e-mail, photo managing and instant messaging applications.
Google already offers Gmail users plenty of storage for their e-mail archives. If it extended that storage to other kinds of documents that were generated in conformance with the OpenDocument standard, and then combined that with a Web-based productivity suite to connect users to their stored information via any browser, the result would be a platform that could transform business collaboration as well as consumer communications.
ZDNet’s Stephen Shankland cites a Saturday blog entry by Sun President Jonathan Schwartz, which closes with:
But value is returning to the desktop applications, and not simply through Windows Vista. But in the form of applications that are network service platforms. From the obvious, to music sharing clients and development tools, there’s a resurgence of interest in resident software that executes on your desktop, yet connects to network services. Without a browser. Like Skype. Or QNext. Or Google Earth. And Java? OpenOffice and StarOffice?
If I were a betting man, I’d bet the world was about to change. And that what just happened in Massachusetts, when a state government made what was to me a very rational statement - we will pick an open standard to protect the right of our citizens to access data and services; we will then buy from vendors that support standards - will be a shot heard ‘round the world. [Note: see our earlier post on the MA decision for more.]
Kuchinskas sees another indicator of an OpenOffice-focused alliance:
Google’s dip into OpenOffice began with its hiring of Joerg Heilig, former director of software engineering at Sun, according to Gary Edwards, a consultant and designated representative of the OpenOffice.org open source community.
Shankland quotes Stephen Arnold, author of “The Google Legacy: How Google’s Internet Search is Transforming Application Software,” and Redmonk analyst Stephen O’Grady on the mutual benefits of a Google-Sun Alliance:
“Google could deploy a version of Google Office at any time. The reason they haven’t (is) they’re not set up to serve enterprises with all the security and name recognition that Sun has,” said [Arnold]. “That’s a very obvious plus for Google.”
And Google has mammoth distribution power, O’Grady said. “Google has the ability to get into exponentially more places than does OpenOffice,” he said, including places that “may never have heard of (OpenOffice.org) in the first place.”
And, notes Shankland, there already are close ties between the two companies:
Google CEO Schmidt was Sun’s chief technology officer in the 1990s; John Doerr, a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, is on the board of both companies; and Andy Bechtolsheim, a Sun co-founder who returned to the company to launch its Galaxy servers, wrote a check for $100,000 that helped get Google started.
In addition, Google is an active Java user. Since 2004, it has been a member of the Java Community Process steering committee that governs the fate of the technology. Though Java hasn’t caught on widely for running desktop software, it has long had the potential to undermine Microsoft’s strength by providing an alternative program foundation to Windows.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 11:40 PM | Print | Comments (0)
The Wall Street Journal reports that:
A federal appeals court on Monday said an antitrust lawsuit against several of the nation’s largest telecommunication providers over whether they conspired to exclude competitors from their geographic markets should be allowed to go forward.
The court did not rule on the merits of the case but instead remanded it to the district court.
The lawsuit alleged the telecommunications companies, which control more than 90% of local telephone service in the U.S., conspired not to compete against one another in their respective geographic markets for local telephone and high-speed Internet services and to prevent competitors from entering those markets.
The complaint says the alleged conspiracy has driven a number of competing local exchange carriers out of business, restrain competition for local telephone and high-speed Internet services and force consumers to pay higher rates than they would have in a competitive environment.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 5:26 PM | Print | Comments (0)
An assortment of news stories today provide a sense of how established and new players are jockeying for position in the video market, as it migrates from broadcast to on-demand modes and, increasingly, to IP-based distribution.
Mediaweek reports that:
Talks between the broadcast networks and cable operators to bring prime-time entertainment shows to video-on-demand platforms are beginning to take on a more serious tone. There’s a strong chance that some networks could launch on-demand services on some systems as early as next summer and almost certainly by the start of the 2006-07 season.
What’s fueling this new sense of urgency is the broadcasters’ desire to come up with a new revenue stream as the costs of producing scripted shows continue to soar. Meanwhile, cable operators are concerned that if they do not have these deals in place sooner than later, broadcasters will instead look to the Internet as a plausible VOD vehicle (thanks in part to the explosion of broadband penetration).
This use of the Internet by broadcasters is the subject of a piece in IP Media Monitor:
To garner more exposure for new programs and test the viability of online promotion, broadcast networks this season have been selectively making premiere episodes of prime time shows available online. Last week, Google Video streamed UPN’s Everybody Hates Chris, one of the most buzzed-about shows of the new season, from Monday through Thursday, leading up to the show’s second episode last Thursday night.
USA Today adds that:
Google Video director Jennifer Feikin says the online airing was clearly promotional, designed to get people to tune into UPN, but she says the next phase of Google Video will be about offering shows on demand, for a fee. “Let’s say I missed an entire season of a TV show and now would like to catch up. There may be an opportunity for a TV producer to say, ‘Let’s put it on Google, and receive a payment in return.’”
But Staci Kramer at paidContent.org says:
This may be one of Google’s most difficult tasks yet. Instead of just taking the material and making it searchable, Google has to work with the networks which in turn have to work with everyone in the rights chain unless it’s network-produced. Even then, the network has to be sure delivering the material online won’t disrupt affiliate relationships or agreements. CBS Digital president Larry Kramer told B&C it took UPN months to get the permissions set for the Chris Rock show promo with Google.
A story in the New York Times discusses some smaller players in the web-delivered video space, including Open Media Network, Veoh Networks and Blinkx, noting that the latter today unveiled a new function called MyBlinkxTV.
The site is supposed to work much like a standard search engine, prompting users to type words or phrases into a search box. But when the user types in, say, “big wave surfing,” instead of displaying links to Web pages, the site starts rolling a string of video clips most relevant to that topic. Users can fast-forward, rewind, pause the video and click a button to save the channel. When they return to it, the technology refreshes the channel with newer, more relevant clips.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 4:53 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Microsoft has been subjected to quite a bit of humiliation over the past few months, and now it seems there’s another indignity. Courtesy of Micropersuasion, Microsoft has jumped on the podcasting bandwagon. But Microsoft is stuck having to call a pod a pod, which happens to be the name (sort of) of a popular product of one of Microsoft’s chief rivals. Here’s the little graphic Microsoft uses when it podcasts:
Is it just me, or is this a funny-sad image, the way a dog tries to look dignified when wearing a costume?
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 4:09 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Steven Johnson helps explain Web 2.0 using an example (the online interaction of a community of poodle-lovers) and an analogy—he compares it to a rainforest.
The difference between this Web 2.0 model and the previous one is directly equivalent to the difference between a rain forest and a desert. One of the primary reasons we value tropical rain forests is because they waste so little of the energy supplied by the sun while running massive nutrient cycles. Most of the solar energy that saturates desert environments gets lost, assimilated by the few plants that can survive in such a hostile climate.
A rain forest, on the other hand, is such an efficient system for using energy because there are so many organisms exploiting every tiny niche of the nutrient cycle. We value the diversity of the ecosystem not just as a quaint case of biological multiculturalism but because the system itself does a brilliant job of capturing the energy that flows through it.
Think of information as the energy of the Web’s ecosystem. Those Web 1.0 pages with their crude hyperlinks are like the sun’s rays falling on a desert. A few stragglers are lucky enough to stumble across them, and thus some of that information might get reused if one then decides to e-mail the URL to a friend or to quote from it on another page. But most of the information goes to waste. In the Web 2.0 model, we have thousands of services scrutinizing each new piece of information online, grabbing interesting bits, remixing them in new ways, and passing them along to other services. Each new addition to the mix can be exploited in countless new ways, both by human bloggers and by the software programs that track changes in the overall state of the Web. Information in this new model is analyzed, repackaged, digested, and passed on down to the next link in the chain. It flows.
This is…good news economically because the diversity of the ecosystem makes it a fertile environment for small players. You don’t have to dominate the food chain to get by in the Web world; you can find a productive niche and thrive, partially because you’re building on the information value created by the rest of the Web. Technorati and del.icio.us both began as small projects created by single programmers. They don’t need huge staffs because they’re capturing the information supplied by the countless number of surfers who use their services, and they’re building on other tools created by other people, whether they work in a home office or in a vast international corporation like Google.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 3:35 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Tim O’Reilly cites Jeff Clavier’s point regarding the low cost of delivery of Web 2.0 applications. “This new generation of applications is built on $50K to $100K,” writes Jeff. Tim agrees that, “for now [this is] very true,” but adds that “[o]ver time, this will go up.”
Jeff refers back to an earlier post of his, which in turn points to another by Joe Kraus entitled “It’s a great time to be an entrepreneur,” both of which discuss why the startup costs of software ventures have dramatically dropped. Reviewing their posts made me want to hear more from Tim about why he believes that over time, startup costs will go up, by how much, and what the implications might be.
Jeff adds some cautionary words for anyone looking to make a quick buck on a small investment in a Web 2.0 startup:
So is it the era of the “disposable startup” ? A company that develops niche functionality of value to a community that will monetize through advertising, and will ramp quickly to being cash-flow positive and recoup the modest investment it took to start ? And then run for a while, and either grow enough to be acquired by one of the “big boys” or actually create a real opportunity that VCs will fund and help grow to $50M to $100M in revenues? And if it does not work, well it was “just” $50 to $100K - trash and move to the next?
Hmmm, don’t think so. First, it is not because it is cheap that it is easy. Second, not everyone will be bought be Yahoo or Google for top dollars (some might get a few million dollar acquisitions, and have an interesting job building their product with the means of a larger company - nothing wrong with that - but noone makes money on these). Third, you still need to build some level of defensibility and differentiation - and not shoot for the path of least resistance (distribution was cited often as a key factor for search engines). Fourth (anyone)?Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 2:04 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Like a promising Silicon Valley start-up emerging from stealth mode, the Open Content Alliance kicked off today with perfectly orchestrated press exposure, a clear sign that Alliance backer Yahoo is pulling strings behind the scene to score points against arch-rival Google. A bevy of major press outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, CNET and others were clearly pre-briefed for the Alliance’s launch.
The Alliance, backed by not only Yahoo but also Adobe Systems, Hewlett-Packard, the Internet Archive, O’Reilly Media, the University of California and the University of Toronto, is pursuing a project to scan books and other materials into a vast online catalog of copyrighted content that users are free to, well, use without fear of running afoul of the copyright laws. The Alliance is giving authors the right to opt-in into the database, a departure from Google’s controversial book project, which has drawn the ire of the Authors Guild, among others.
But Google’s initiative, known as the Print Library project, has also garnered a good deal of respect from copyright thinkers, even if Google’s aggressive vision also frightened them. Google plans to scan in copyrighted material and allow authors to opt out of the process if they wish, a structure sure to result in a far larger library than the Open Content Alliance will generate.
Copyright attorney William Patry sees things Google’s way:
The purposes for the copies in connection with the Print Library project is to give people access to knowledge about the existence of the book as well as a tiny amount of text. That is of great help to researchers and hopefully to authors and publishers of the books too. It in no way harms copyright owners unless the project becomes something else, namely a full-text service which then is a market substitute.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:41 PM | Print | Comments (0)
A piece in today’s IP Media Monitor (a plug for my own publication, I know) takes a look at the replay of the premiere episode of UPN’s “Everybody Hates Chris” on Google. Penned by veteran Hollwyood scribe Paige Albiniak, the article highlights an interview with Larry Kramer, head of CBS Digital Media, which incorporates the online product of both of the Viacom-owned broadcast networks, CBS and UPN.
According to Kramer, Google was the perfect platform for this experiment because the search-driven portal can drive more traffic to the UPN website, giving the effort more promotional punch. “Other portals are less willing to direct traffic to you as well in this process,” Kramer says.
Although Google grabbed headlines with its online video replay of “Chris,” other networks have been debuting TV programs online. WB even offered a sneak preview of its new thriller, “Supernatural,” via Yahoo before the program even aired.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:23 PM | Print | Comments (0)
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