We have touched the Linux supremacy before on this blog. As well as the fact that low cost (<$400) devices will naturally be Linux based. But I think it goes without saying a little refresher never hurts. But instead of me going on lets let someone else provide a view on this shift of fortunes –

The truly deadly news, however, is at the end of the article:

Equipping Linux on a computer costs about $5, compared with $40 to $50 for XP and about $100 for Vista, according to estimates by Jenny Lai, a Taipei-based analyst at CLSA Ltd. [...] “The engineers designing computers understand that if they want to cut costs, the only way to do so is to get rid of Microsoft,” IDC’s Chang said.

When even financial analysts are figuring this out, you can bet Microsoft is already in deep trouble.

Among other things, it is effectively certain that the netbook makers have already used the threat of Linux to bargain Microsoft down to price parity with Linux, though each one doubtless has a signed-in blood agreement not to discuss it in public and the price drop may be disguised as bulk discounts or rebates for marketing support. The initial threat to Redmond’s monopoly from Linux-only products put Microsoft’s nuts in a vise; there is no way the netbook makers, operating on the tight margins they do, would miss the opportunity to extract equally favorable terms of business.

This means that Microsoft’s per-sale revenue on netbook XP licenses has probably dropped by at least a factor of 10 relative to what it makes on PCs. That’s a hell of a margin hit, and as netbooks displace a larger slice of traditional PC sales it’s going to get worse. And we can count on that happening; what we’re seeing here is a classic disruption-from-below of the PC market, just as PCs disrupted workstations and minis in the early 1990s.

There’s another problem. Vista is so dead that Microsoft is already touting its successor “System 7″. Not end-of-lifing XP on schedule means they’ll actually have to support three different operating systems for at least the years until System 7 ships, and some time afterward. Even Microsoft is going to feel the strain, and ISVs are likely to play safe by writing to the minimum (XP) specification.

Netbooks also put Microsoft in a strategic bind about its future product direction. For System 7 to be lean enough to run on netbooks, it will have to give up backward compatibility with Vista and many of Vista’s features. That means that at the same time Microsoft’s profit margins are being hammered, it will lose a significant portion of its application base.

Fundamentally, what’s going on here is that Microsoft, long used to effective monopoly and to the profit margins and strategic maneuvering room monopoly brings, is losing all three of those. Microsoft is no longer a price-maker; the hardware manufacturers hold the whip hand now, and all they have to do to beat Redmond into making ever less money per sale is to push Linux harder.

[Emphasis mine.]
More on Uncritical Mass

For a period of time I was involved in our call center operations at a former employer. They live and die on head count, bill hours and ASA ratings. Things are tracked down to the minute on a reps time to resolve a call. Sometimes to the detriment of the customer base.

Well many call centers end up being like sweat shops as a consequence. The pressure to clear the call forces many reps to ‘resolve’ it by hanging up. In that same vein management in order to meet reduced buget numbers do stuff like this –

Lawyers are noting a new type of lawsuit, in which employees are suing over time spent booting [up] their computers. … During the past year, several companies, including AT&T Inc., UnitedHealth Group Inc. and Cigna Corp., have been hit with lawsuits in which employees claimed that they were not paid for the 15- to 30-minute task of booting their computers at the start of each day and logging out at the end. Add those minutes up over a week, and hourly employees are losing some serious pay, argues plaintiffs’ lawyer Mark Thierman, a Las Vegas solo practitioner who has filed a handful of computer-booting lawsuits in recent years. …

Management-side attorney Richard Rosenblatt, a partner in the Princeton, N.J., office of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius who is defending a half-dozen employers in computer-booting lawsuits, … believes that, in most cases, computer booting does not warrant being called work. Having spent time in call centers observing work behaviors, he said most employees boot the computer, then engage in nonwork activities. “They go have a smoke, talk to friends, get coffee — they’re not working, and all they’ve done at that point is press a button to power up their computer, or enter in a key word,” Rosenblatt said.

My first observation is Mr. Rosenblatt, if I show up for work and start sharpening an axe in preparation for the days tree felling while the boss harnesses the horses I AM AT WORK. The same could be said for an employee waiting for the PC to boot up. Even in a boot up, I could be preparing other documents prior to the machine coming on and that too is work.

Management is induced to these extremes by a mentality to shave every dime and a belief that employees are always cheaters. But in a nutshell the issue of not being paid for boot up times needs to be laid at the hands of IT management. If it takes 20min to boot a PC because the company has key loggers, bad configurations, over worked servers and a poorly equipped network then management handed labor a dull axe.

Management needs to pay for it.

Linky.

Oh, yeah the Boss did. Or shall I say he alluded to it. Well since we are sharing text pads over the net lets expand the experience. Like for free to boot. The service is called DimDim. You can set up a online conference for up to 20 souls for free. And if you want to up the experience you can go the commercial side and up the tool count and participants. –

Doing a conference now is in the realm of everybody with this tool. Now you do need the bandwidth. A good DSL connection is a minimum. IDSL need not apply here. A cable or FIOS feed would be even better. Considering that most folks, small business included would use less than 20 connections many can get by with the free service. Though I would if you are a SMB that uses this service often, please work out a deal with the DimDim. The Pro version is only $99/year/user using their hosted service. If you want to use it free at home to see the daughter in college then support this service in your business. Income is what keeps this going.

The other feature of this provider is you can use their servers or if you want you can host DimDim on your own servers if you wish. Just understand you aren’t going to host a 10 person conference on your cable connection. And yes, there is an open source server version is you want to try it out on your own.

Linky.

Akamai has had the edge service delivery space all to themselves for quite a few years now. Its a tough game to play. You have to be cheap enough to make it worth your subscribers to consider you. Yet you have to have sufficient income stream to have PoP’s to make the service worthwhile. Its not even a game that Verizon plays, they use Akamai for content delivery.

Well there is a new player in town on edge delivery services. Amazon. Old player, new venue. The service that Amazon is offering is called CloudFront. Amazon is using their data center presences around the world to provide this service. 14 PoP’s in all. The best thing about CloudFront is the ease of set up. If you possess a AWS S3 account you are already half way there as AWS Blog relates —

Like all of our other services, CloudFront was designed with ease of use in mind from the very beginning.  There are no minimum usage commitments, no monthly fees, and no need to even talk to us. Here's what you do:

1. Sign up for CloudFront.
2. Put your most frequently accessed static content into an Amazon S3 bucket and mark it as publicly readable.
3. Create a new CloudFront Distribution using a single REST-style POST call. Capture the domain name returned by the call.
4. Generate fresh URLs for your content using the domain name from step 3 and hand them out. By using our CNAME support you can even make the content appear as if it is coming from your own domain. You can associate up to 10 CNAMEs with each distribution.

CloudFront will take care of the rest. Requests originating anywhere in the world will be routed to one of 14 edge locations (8 in the United States, 4 in Europe, and 2 in Asia). If the content isn't already present at a particular edge location it will be fetched from S3 and cached at the edge.

You will be charged based on the number of requests that you make and the amount of data that you transfer. Pricing is covered in depth on the detail page. Because our costs vary by location, pricing for data served from edge locations outside of the US varies, and is currently slightly higher. You will also pay the usual S3 price for the "origin fetch" which take place when a requested object is transferred from S3 to an edge location, and for storage of the object in S3.

The essence of CloudFront is a pay per dip service. For a small software shop or content provider with worldwide reach CloudFront is probably a better fit that the monthly contractual that Akamai usually operates under. For us little guys CloudFront is a better fit.

Take note Akamai. Pricing pressure is headed your way more than you will ever know.

InfoQ article.
AWS article.

Information flows are changing the planet. When production can be done anywhere practically, capital gathered on the world stage and product plans sent in a blink of an eye old ways of doing things are being shoved aside.

The one exception to that rule seems to be software development. Oh sure, there are automation tools of a sort. Smart IDE like Eclipse can complete the mundane tasks. But we are still one programmer munching out code. It was that way in 1983 when I did it, the same as today. However there have been shifts in how we do it –

• Assemble and Macro code was the way it was done initially. Tedious and time consuming and prone to error.
• Logical compilers and the logical languages showed up. Fortran, Basic, Cobol, C, etc. Improved productivity and reduced errors.
• Then the seminal change. With the Internet showing up on the scene it was no longer just a desktop/server programming environment but a client server internet world.

Well what’s wrong with that one might ask. Well it doubles the effort. As it is right now the desktop world and the Internet net world only intersect on the periphery. Microsoft is still cranking out code releases for Word, Excel and Project. You don’t see them on the net. Instead you have a separate world of Google Docs, Zoho Suite, etc. Similar metaphors of how things are to be done but separate they are. The lone exception is Googles attempt at bridging the gap with Google Gears. Not only does it double the effort but it requires end users to either make a choice between the two worlds or learn 2 platforms to get work done.
More on Next Software Shift

There are a whole slew of Media PC software engines — MythTV, Freevio, LMCE, etc. All base their lineage to a marriage of generic hardware and FOSS software in most cases. What sets XMBC apart is they have gone and made their product cross platform. It operates on Linux, Mac OS X, Windows and XBox. No one else in the Open Source Media Center can make that claim. Well XMBC has rolled out their Atlantis release —

Team-XBMC is proud to announce the cross-platform release of XBMC Media Center for Linux, Mac OS X (Leopard, Tiger, and Apple TV), Windows, and Xbox, code named ‘Atlantis‘.

We’ve reached the end of over 3 months of bug bashing, and have closed 425 tickets for this release and, while there are still some bugs outstanding, we feel that ‘Atlantis’ is reasonably stable, and thus it’s time to move on and get cracking on new features. We’ve branched for release, and will maintain this branch with critical bug fixes while we move on and begin working on new features in the main linuxport trunk.

Thanks to all in the community who have made this possible by reporting bugs and suggesting improvements. In particular we’d like to recognise the sterling efforts of Sho who was our release manager for ‘Atlantis’, diligently handling the trac system on behalf of developers. We’d also like to thank our new QA team of Arnova, SandmanCL and ShortySco for their help verifying bug reports and making it easier for the devs to concentrate on fixing bugs.

Downloads are available at the website.

Do you use Google Docs? Do you also from time to time do simple project management, but not enough to warrant spending >$100 for Microsoft Project? Well give note, if all you really need the project management tool for is the Gantt chart feature then there is a add on to Google Sheet you can use to accomplish that task. In the Sheet application go to Insert->Gadget->All->Gantt Chart. Add the package and start using it.

The folks over at Viewpath have developed a Google Gadget to install with the Google Sheet. You develop a simple 6 column layout of the task, begin and start times, WBS, etc. The Viewpath tool does the rest for you. A video is here. For the simple stuff this maybe all most small businesses need. It includes the magic word — free.

If you need even more power you can sign up for Viewpath’s professional version that provides collaboration, multiple projects, reporting, actual vs planned tracking, etc. Only thing I saw missing was CPM. Professional pricing was $20/month/person. Sounds steep but in practice that is not a bad rate. If you consider that the MS Project Pro goes for around a $150/person. Someone would have to update the master project sheet constantly. Or alternately go MS Project Server which means over a $1000 investment plus dealing with IT for install. Any multisite project of less than a year or more would be cheaper to plan and design with the ViewPath tool than its MS Project equivalent. When you are done, you just stop using it; no lost investment.

An example of cloud computing at its finest.

Tapping the Boss here for confirmation but both here and our sister publication ThirdPipe.com we have noted that when a general purpose compute device drops below $400 the threat to Microsoft is Dear indeed. The obvious being that the OEM has a choice up their retail price with the MS license fees or go Linux and pocket some of that cost for themselves. Well noted in passing at SlashDot –

“Analysts at Bloomberg noticed the tumble in Microsoft’s traditional software sales last quarter and blamed it on netbooks: ‘The devices, which usually cost less than $500, are the fastest-growing segment of the personal-computer industry — a trend that’s eating into Microsoft’s revenue. Windows sales fell short of forecasts last quarter and the company cut growth projections for the year, citing the lower revenue it gets from netbooks. When makers of the computers do use Windows, they typically opt for older and cheaper versions of the software. Equipping Linux on a computer costs about $5, compared with $40 to $50 for XP and about $100 for Vista, according to estimates by Jenny Lai, a Taipei-based analyst at CLSA Ltd.’ This is why MS declared war on the segment last year and palm top computers in previous years. While they may have successfully tamed the Asus EEE PC, they can’t hold back everyone who wants to make a buck on cheap hardware and free software. Analysts have predicted the fall of MS’s business model when computers break below $250/unit retail. We are there now, and it has shown in the bottom line.”

The problem for Microsoft is two fold. First under the current pricing structure for hardware it is not sustainable for them to produce a low end or nettop OS. They got away with it for XP as that product has the second longest shelf life of any OS they have produced with the exception of DOS. How that will hold up when W7 comes around might be an entirely different matter. If W7 uses the Vista code base they might not fit in a nettop anyhow. But to spend billions only to sell the OS for pennies would require breadth of market and technology horizons that are afforded to no one.

Second is the coming realization that OS development cost one damn lot of money. It is rumored that to build the Debian base from scratch would cost betwee 1 to 2 billion in todays dollars. I would suspect that Microsoft spent equivalent level of dollars for the 35m lines of code in Vista. The problem of course is the burn rate to make that next variant. For Open Source the core kernel comes from the Linux Kernel Development effort that is shared across most of the OS bearing that name. It is up to the distros laying down the GUI’s and apps on top of that kernel to come up with something new. But that separation is an advantage. Now consider Microsoft. Their desktop experience is intrinsically linked with the core. So if MS wishes to go in a different direction they have to understand what needs to go with the core to make it work. If the changes on top are drastic then core components may need a rewrite as well. A price is paid.

Ultimately Microsoft must fall behind FOSS based on cost of effort alone. What has kept Microsoft going so far is a jackrabbits head start. But the FOSS tortoise is catching up. An interesting example of this is the fact that Mono the open source variant of Silverlight has matched and is now surpassing the original. This will continue.

Linky

Lou Dolinar, over at NewsDay.com has a kickin’ TightWad type of article. He lays down all the usual recommendations that we have been saying here all year. All the way to sending your photos out for processing to a printer. And one we had not considered — sending your scanning offshore to be processed. –

For an all-purpose computer you need to kick it up a notch. The Asus Eee PC 1000HA, considered a netbook, goes for $425, has a 10-inch screen, a 160-gigabyte hard drive and Windows XP. A year ago that price would have been considered stunningly cheap. But things have changed: Traditional laptop manufacturers are adjusting their prices to cope with the expected netbook onslaught. For example, I recently saw a TV commercial for a Dell Inspiron 1525, with 15-inch screen and other superior tech specs, for a little more than $600. By the time I got to its Web site, they had instituted a rebate to bring the price down to $500. When I went back and checked the specs an hour later, the base price was $479.

Could we do better? I think we could.

• Go to the refurb shop at Dell. You may find the very same machine for $50 less. But it was returned for defect which was subsequently fixed.
• Don’t need portability? Well then consider a desktop from WalMart. They still have $199 deals. Add a 17″ LCD and you still save about $75.
• Consider Linux over Windows even if it is OEM with the unit. You will never be tempted to pay for software again. Priceless.
• If you are going to a lot of trick photo or icon work then consider Gimp in your graphics tool kit. Its Free.
• If you are lucky enough to be in the right area AT&T offers naked DSL. $22 mo. Once you have that in place consider using Skype or another PC to PC service to make many of your phone calls.

When you get into the groove of this, the trail seems nearly endless, the options varied.

Well it did not take long for some competitors to latch on to the MS format. That lead has been burnt, only the pain remains. Google now provides for being able to at least read the .docx, .xlsx, .pptx formats. The first in GMail proper. The second in web searches as a converted to HTML format of the document.

If you need to edit the ‘x’ format files then this won’t help you. try Zamzar which we have covered here previously.

HT: Google Operating System