Gartner believes that software and hardware companies do better in 2013 than last year. I hope so this happens, it would be good for the industry. Gartner Says Worldwide IT Spending Forecast to Reach $3.7 Trillion in 2013. That would be 4.2 percent increase from 2012 spending. At the moment uncertainties surrounding prospects for an upturn in global economic growth are the major retardants to IT growth. According to the IT market research form Forrester IT market will grow globally by 3.3 per cent this year in U.S. dollar terms. Europe continues to decline (except Nordic countries, Switzerland and the United Kingdom), and growth is slower in Japan and India.
Worldwide IT spending increases were pretty anemic as IT and telecom services spending were seriously curtailed last year. Gartner believes that this uncertainty is nearing resolution and thus Earth’s anemic IT budgets to bounce back in 2013. Wall Street Beat: 2013 IT Spending Forecasts Look Upbeat article mentions that fiscal cliff deal will help unlock spending on mobility, analytics, collaboration and security technology.
According to the EPA, the average office worker uses about 10,000 sheets of paper each year. There is again a Campaign To Remove Paper From Offices. A campaign started by HelloFax, Google, Expensify, and others has challenged businesses to get rid of physical paper from their office environment in 2013. The Paperless 2013 project wants to move all documents online. The digital tools that are available today. The paperless office technology is here – we just need to use it more than our printers.
Intel x86 and ARM duopoly will continue to dominate this year. Both of the processor will sell well on their own main application fields, and they try to push to each others territories. This means that ARM tries to push to servers and x86 is trying to push more heavily to mobile devices.
Software manufacturers aim to hardware business: Microsoft, Valve, Google etc..
Still IT buyers expect too much from software they buy. This has happened earlier for long time and I expect that to continue. IT systems are easier to develop than user brains, but still system that are hard to learn are pushed to users.
IT service companies sill “sell air”. It is a good business to sell promises first and then when you get money try to do make the promised product with it. And are you sure that the backups your service provider makes can really be restored?
This year will not be a year for Linux on desktop. The fact that currently Amazon’s top selling laptop runs on Linux does not change that. Linux is more heading to smart phones and tablets that to win normal desktop.
Gaming on Linux gets boost. Valve released Steam gaming system for LinuxUbuntu users have run to use Steam game service (at the moment 0.8% of Steam users use Ubuntu, the service was started to as beta on December 2012). Valve will release this year it’s own Linux based Steam Box gaming console. Exclusive interview: Valve’s Gabe Newell on Steam Box, biometrics, and the future of gaming.
Windows 8 slow start continues. Windows 8 sales are well below projections. Computer sales dropped after release of Windows 8. U.S. consumers hesitant to make switch to Windows 8. Uncertainty could turn Windows 8 into the next Vista. Independent report says that Windows 8 Even Less Popular Than Vista and Microsoft voice says that its new OS are chugging along quite nicely, thank you very much, in much the same fashion as Windows 7 before it. Who to believe? Let’s wait and see what happens. I expect that some users will get Significant booting challenges on EFI systems when upgrading to Windows 8.
Interest in Java will decrease compared to other languages for various reasons, recent security issues playing part on that. C Beats Java As Number One Language According To TIOBE Index. It happened already.
Software optimization becomes again talked about when CPU usage on cloud system is easily measured and costs money. Cost-Aware Architectures will be talked bout. Keeping control over cost, architecturally, is just plain hard. Usually engineers we are remarkably badly trained in thinking about cost, but corporate bean counters can now start to ask how we save cost in running the software in cloud. Pinterest Cut Costs from $54 to $20 Per Hour by Automatically Shutting Down Systems.
The world of smart connected devices (desktops, notebook, tabs and smartphones) is becoming bigger and bigger on the expense of traditional PC manufacturers. At the end of 2012 HP is still top of PC league, but trailing fourth in all-devices rankings. Samsung leads the pack in terms of device shipments and Apple is next. Lenovo is the third biggest shifter of devices on the planet. The bets for increased sales are being placed behind smartphones and tablets.
It’s deja vu all over again. You see the phrase “any time, any place, anywhere” in relation to mobile access. Mobile devices bring back that old client-server feeling. The realization dawned that client-server brought with it as many problems as it solved. Following a period of re-centralisation using Web-based architectures, it looks as if we are beginning to come full circle. When the next generation is getting all excited about using mobile apps as front-ends for accessing services across the network, we can’t help noticing parallels with the past. Are HTML5 and cross-platform development and execution environments are now with us to save us? In the real world, the fast and reliable connectivity upon which this model depends just isn’t there in most countries at the moment.
End of netbooks as we know it. Netbook sales go to zero. All major manufacturers in this category has ended making netbooks. They have been replaced with booming tablet sales.
Tablet PC shipments are expected to reach more than 240 million units worldwide in 2013, easily exceeding the 207 million notebook PCs that are projected to ship, according to NPD DisplaySearch Quarterly Mobile PC Shipment and Forecast Report. The market that has been dominated by one major player, Apple, but Android tablets are quickly getting more market share.
Thin client devices seem to be popping up here and there. Dell introduces HDMI stick that turns any screen into a thin client PC. And so will several other small stick computers coming. Raspberry Pi pocket computer is selling like hot pies (nears one million milestone).
Directly soldered to board CPUs are already norm on smart phone, tablets and some laptops. There will be more and more questions when manufacturers start to drop CPU sockets on the computers. Rumors about Intel Corp.’s plan to abandon microprocessor sockets in the future has been flowing and official response has been:
Intel to Support CPU Sockets for Foreseeable Future. AMD Vows Not to Drop Microprocessor Sockets in Next Two Years. Question is still when transition to BGA starts to happen on desktop PCs.
USB speed will increase again this year. So there is again a new USB version. The future of USB 3.0 coming mid-year with data speeds doubling to 10Gbps. USB 3.0 speed to DOUBLE in 2013 article tells that USB 3.0 – aka SuperSpeed USB – is set to become 10 gigabits per second super-speedy, with a new specification scheduled for a mid-2013 release. The aim is to brings USB closer to the class-leading Thunderbolt standard. It is expected that the new specification ends to consumer hardware a year later.
Higher resolutions will become commonplace. Earlier full HD was a target. Now high end devices are aiming to “retina” and 4K resolutions. Panasonic shows off 20-inch Windows 8 tablet with insane 4K resolution Qualcomm outs Snapdragon 800 and 600: up to 2.3GHz quad-core, 4K video, due by mid 2013.
Solid state storage becomes cheaper and cheaper. You can get ssd-storage at as low as less than one dollar per gigabyte. Moore’s Law may not be running out of steam in memory as we have an insatiable appetite for memory these days. Nowadays our tastes are changing from DRAM to nonvolatile flash memory used in SSD device. For example Kingston just unveiled the world’s first 1TB USB stick and SSD drives are also getting bigger every day. We are already encountering floating-gate scaling problems for NAND flash and answer to the scaling problem appears to be growing devices “up”.
2013 in storage is dominated by flash and file systems. We will finally see some all-flash arrays starting to ship from the big boys – and this will bring credibility to some of the smaller players. Management tools are going to be big again. Expect a lot of pain as infrastructure teams try to make things just work.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft Windows Weak Demand Drives Worst PC Decline on Record
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-10/pc-shipments-shrink-14-in-first-quarter-for-worst-recorded-drop.html
Personal-computer shipments plummeted in every region of the world in the first quarter as buyers opted for smartphones and tablet computers and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)’s newest operating system met with weak demand.
Global PC unit shipments fell 14 percent in the first quarter — the worst such decline on record
Every PC maker except China’s Lenovo Group Ltd. (992) experienced declines as businesses chose to install Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system on employees’ computers instead of the newer Windows 8
“We don’t have a lot of reason to be optimistic that the market will remain in more than replacement-cycle mode,” Chou said.
The last time worldwide PC shipments experienced a double- digit percentage decline was in the third quarter of 2001
Tomi Engdahl says:
Computer Sales in Free Fall
Quarterly Shipments Drop 14% as Windows 8 Fails to Stem Advance of iPads
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424127887324695104578414973888155516-lMyQjAxMTAzMDEwMDExNDAyWj.html
The personal computer is in crisis, and getting little help from Microsoft Windows 8 software once seen as a possible savior.
In a surprisingly harsh assessment, IDC said Windows 8 hasn’t only failed to spur more PC demand but has actually exacerbated the slowdown—confusing consumers with features that don’t excel in a tablet mode and compromise the traditional PC experience.
“The reaction to Windows 8 is real,”
Mr. Chou said not only has Windows 8 failed to attract consumers, but businesses are keeping their distance as well.
Ricoh Americas Corp., which replaces about a third of its 17,000 PCs every three years and upgrades to the most current operating system available, said this year it is sticking with Windows 7, released in 2009. Tracey Rothenberger, the company’s chief operating officer, said the benefits of switching to the new software aren’t worth the effort of training employees to use it.
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with [Windows 8],” said Mr. Rothenberger. “But I think there’s minimal value in the incremental changes that are there.”
Microsoft executives have said Windows 8 would take many months to catch on with consumers and especially with businesses that generate the majority of the company’s profits.
doesn’t have plans to migrate to Windows 8 until either the performance of Windows 7 deteriorates, or if a licensing deal with Microsoft were to make cost a nonissue.
Windows 8 “will not be a driver for increased adoption” of PCs
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP claims Moonshot servers are more open than AMD’s Seamicro servers
Touts the number of silicon vendors
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2260925/hp-claims-moonshot-servers-are-more-open-than-amds-seamicro-servers
BLADE SERVER VENDOR HP has said that its Moonshot servers are more open than AMD’s Seamicro servers that kicked off the microserver market in 2010.
AMD’s Seamicro servers make use of both Intel Atom and AMD Opteron chips
Chalmers continued by saying that HP’s Moonshot is a more open system because customers can choose from multiple chip vendors. He said, “We came at this with a very different point view, we have engineered [Moonshot] to be a much more open platform, so multiple types of silicon, multiple partners involved, multiple people contributing to the [intellectual property], to what we think will be much richer, much more effective solution.”
Given that AMD is working on ARM server chips, it isn’t a stretch to think that its Seamicro division will have access to both x86 chips and ARM chips in the near future.
Tomi says:
The Real Reason No One’s Buying PCs Anymore: They’ve Gotten Too Good
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/04/12/why_pc_sales_are_declining_old_pcs_still_work_just_fine.html
PC sales suffered their steepest decline in history last quarter, plummeting 14 percent worldwide, according to a report from market research firm IDC.
Why is this happening? There are two prevailing theories.
One is that it’s Microsoft’s fault.
The second theory for PCs’ sales decline is that, in short, the PC is dead.
It’s certainly true that people are increasingly spending money on new tablets and smartphones rather than new computers. But reports of the PC’s demise are grossly exaggerated. If the PC is dead, what am I typing this on? If the PC is dead, what are office-workers all over the world sitting in front of all day while they work?
The reason people aren’t buying new PCs isn’t that they don’t need a PC. It’s that, for the most part, they’re getting along just fine with the one they already have.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel Tries to Secure Its Footing Beyond PCs
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/15/technology/intel-tries-to-find-a-foothold-beyond-pcs.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
For the last several months, Andy Bryant, the chairman of Intel, has been trying to put steel in the backs of the company’s employees. At meetings, he tells them that Intel must fundamentally change even though the computer chip maker still has what it takes to succeed in engineering and manufacturing.
unofficial motto, “Only the paranoid survive.” Intel now finds itself faced with a fundamental question: Can the paranoid also evolve?
PC sales are now collapsing, as users are relying more on mobile phones and tablets that rarely contain Intel chips.
Intel’s other mainstay business, chips for computer servers, is also changing. Cloud computing is creating huge demand for basic servers, but its simpler and cheaper designs may drive down prices and profit margins and offer openings to new competitors.
Intel is also scrambling to find a new leader.
“In this new world, with smartphones and tablets, and cloud computing, things are moving around fast,” said Hector Ruiz, the former chief executive of Advanced Micro Devices, Intel’s top competitor in making PC chips. “Intel has the talent, engineering, and resources, but they are their own worst enemy.”
The idea that Intel put the squeeze on its customers has been around Silicon Valley for years, but has never been proved. With Intel controlling 80 percent of the PC market at times, and PC makers facing low profit margins, any supply interruption from Intel could be disastrous.
Even Microsoft has been moving away from its longtime partner as it tries to adapt to the new, post-PC world.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Where No Search Engine Has Gone Before
Google has a single towering obsession: It wants to build the Star Trek computer.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/04/google_has_a_single_towering_obsession_it_wants_to_build_the_star_trek_computer.single.html
I first came across Google’s interest in Star Trek back in the summer of 2010.
Since then, though, Star Trek has popped up again and again in my interviews with Googlers.
After all, Google is very likely the nerdiest large company on earth; of course its employees like Star Trek.
So I went to Google to interview some of the people who are working on its search engine. And what I heard floored me. “The Star Trek computer is not just a metaphor that we use to explain to others what we’re building,” Singhal told me. “It is the ideal that we’re aiming to build—the ideal version done realistically.” He added that the search team does refer to Star Trek internally when they’re discussing how to improve the search engine. “It comes up often,” Singhal said. “For instance, we might say, ‘Captain Kirk never pulled out a keyboard to ask a question.’ So in that way it becomes one of the design principles—we see that because the Star Trek computer actively relies on speech, if we want to do that we need to work to push the barrier of speech recognition and machine understanding.”
Google’s transformation into the Star Trek computer will take years. But it has already made huge leaps toward building such a machine.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Gigabyte introduces Brix mini PC to rival Raspberry Pi
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2261252/gigabyte-introduces-brix-mini-pc-to-rival-raspberry-pi
TAIWANESE ELECTRONICS FIRM Gigabyte previewed a mini PC called Brix that could see the firm take on the Raspberry Pi at a “tech tour” event in London last night.
Boasting what the firm claims is “the same power as a tower PC”, the mini computer boasts a choice of Intel Celeron or Core processors as powerful as the Core i7 chip for “low to high power”.
lack of pricing confirmation from Gigabyte. It is very likely it will be more expensive, due to its higher specifications.
Tomi Engdahl says:
USB group shows off a 100W bidirectional power delivery prototype
Will be able to use a USB charger to power your laptop
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2261049/usb-group-shows-off-a-100w-bidirectional-power-delivery-prototype
BEIJING: THE USB IMPLEMENTERS FORUM (USB-IF) is showing off a prototype USB cable system at the Technology Showcase at IDF Beijing that can deliver up to 100W of power.
the laptop is a fairly old Dell laptop that runs Windows Vista and supports USB 2.0 at 480Mbit/s, while the monitor is new and supports Superspeed USB 3.0 at 5Gbit/s.
The prototype USB cable between the two units delivers both power from the laptop to the monitor and the video stream, which looks quite good considering the speed limit of 480Mbit/s.
Tomi Engdahl says:
What the Tablet-Laptop Hybrid Means for Web Developers
http://www.webmonkey.com/2013/04/what-the-tablet-laptop-hybrid-means-for-web-developers/
The advent of hybrid laptops that double as tablets or offer some sort of touch input has greatly complicated the life of web developers.
A big part of developing for today’s myriad screens is knowing when to adjust the interface, based not just on screen size, but other details like input device. Fingers are far less precise than a mouse, which means bigger buttons, form fields and other input areas.
But with hybrid devices like touch screen Windows 8 laptops or dockable Android tablets with keyboards, how do you know whether the user is browsing with a mouse or a finger?
Over on the Mozilla Hacks blog Patrick Lauke tackles that question in an article on detecting touch-capable devices. Lauke covers the relatively simple case of touch-only, like iOS devices, before diving into the far more complex problem of hybrid devices.
Lauke’s answer? If developing for the web hasn’t already taught you this lesson, perhaps hybrid devices will — learn to live with uncertainty and accept that you can’t control everything.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IT Spending on (Slight) Rise, Mobile Tops the List
http://www.cio.com/article/731439/IT_Spending_on_Slight_Rise_Mobile_Tops_the_List
Forty-eight percent of the CIOs surveyed expect to increase spending this year, up slightly from this time last year. Mobile, business intelligence, and cloud infrastructure and services are the most cited categories.
Forty-eight percent of CIOs surveyed expect to spend more this year, up slightly from the 46 percent who planned to spend more at this time last year. The average increase expected is 5.9 percent (up from 4.4 percent a year ago).
mobile spending tops the list with 59 percent of respondents reporting that they plan to increase spending in that area.
Tomi Engdahl says:
7 Tips to Help Projects Managers Track Their Tech Teams
http://www.cio.com/article/731584/7_Tips_to_Help_Projects_Managers_Track_Their_Tech_Teams?page=1&taxonomyId=3198
IT executives and project managers provide practical advice on how you can best monitor your team and head off potential problems.
1. Define what needs to get done by whom by when upfront.
2. Use tools that allow team members to share documents and files.
3. Meet with your team on a regular basis.
4. Take notes and follow up.
5. Ask people how they are doing and if they need help-but don’t be a micromanager.
6. Use videoconferencing and IM to keep in contact with remote employees.
7. Consider a bring-your-own-device-friendly policy.
“BYOD-friendly policies allow employees to connect with their managers anytime, anyplace, including from home, where increasing amounts of work are being done,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Internet Archive Is Now the Largest Collection of Historical Software Online
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/04/15/0222245/the-internet-archive-is-now-the-largest-collection-of-historical-software-online
“The Internet Archive now claims to hold the largest collection of software in the world.”
The Internet Archive is now the Largest collection of Historical Software
http://paritynews.com/web-news/item/974-the-internet-archive-is-now-the-largest-collection-of-historical-software
The Internet Archive, which is known for its archives of books, websites can now boast of being the largest collection of software in the online world.
The expansion at the Internet Archive has come through collaboration with other independent archives like that Disk Drives collection, the FTP site boneyard, Shareware CD Archive, and the TOSEC archive. The archive doesn’t hold just the software – it also holds documentation as well.
“There is now a fully-accessible, worldwide-reachable, massive-bandwidth and completely unrestricted collection of computer history up right now, in these collections I’ve just mentioned”, notes Scott.
Tomi Engdahl says:
DDR4 memory is spreading more slowly than expected
Experts believe that the DDR3 memory will be used for longer than anticipated. This means on the one hand, the low power consumption and more efficient DDR4 technology penetration will have to wait any longer than anticipated.
DDR4 predecessor to spend 20-40 percent less power and is about twice as effective.
“Consumers do not really have a lust on DDR4,” said the memory analyst at IHS iSuppli, Mike Howard News Service Idgns for.
The research firm IC Insights forecasts that the DDR4 DDR3 override the earliest in 2016. The company estimates that this year, at the end of DDR4 memory can be found in less than four per cent to devices.
Dram market is dominated by Samsung, Hynix and Micron.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/ddr4+yleistyy+luultua+hitaammin/a894519?s=r&wtm=tietoviikko/-16042013&
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel Releases New OpenCL Implementation for GNU/Linux
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/13/04/16/014233/intel-releases-new-opencl-implementation-for-gnulinux
“Intel has released its first version of Beignet, an open-source OpenCL run-time and LLVM back-end for Linux that uses LLVM/Clang and is compatible with Ivy Bridge processors”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Linux Foundation takes over Xen, enlists Amazon in war to rule the cloud
Xen virtualization gains support from Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, and more.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/linux-foundation-takes-over-xen-enlists-amazon-in-war-to-rule-the-cloud/
The Linux Foundation has taken control of the open source Xen virtualization platform and enlisted a dozen industry giants in a quest to be the leading software for building cloud networks.
The 10-year-old Xen hypervisor was formerly a community project sponsored by Citrix, much as the Fedora operating system is a community project sponsored by Red Hat.
Amazon is perhaps the most significant name on that list in regard to Xen. The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is likely the most widely used public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud, and it is built on Xen virtualization. Rackspace’s public cloud also uses Xen.
Xen is thus a threat to VMware in its quest to evolve from a virtualization vendor into a cloud vendor. Xen is even complementary to OpenStack, the popular open source cloud infrastructure software that can be used by either private businesses or service providers to build IaaS clouds. Xen is one of several hypervisors that can be used with OpenStack.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Adobe Will Contribute To Google’s Blink Browser Engine, Believes It Will “Strengthen An Already Healthy Browser Competition”
http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/15/adobe-will-contribute-to-googles-blink-browser-engine-believes-it-will-strengthen-an-already-healthy-browser-competition/
Google’s announcement that it would fork WebKit to develop its own Blink browser engine was definitely a surprise and the repercussions of this move for the browser ecosystem as a whole are still unclear. Today, about two weeks after Google’s announcement, Vincent Hardy, Adobe’s director of engineering for the company’s Web Platform team, announced that, in addition to WebKit, Adobe also plans to contribute to Blink.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Internet Archive aggressively expands its software collection, now the largest of its kind
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/04/14/the-internet-archive-aggressively-expands-its-software-collection-now-the-largest-of-its-kind/
Because the Web was created in such a rapid and decentralized manner, the history of the Internet could have been lost completely, had it not been for organizations like the Internet Archive. For that reason, we’re big fans of the initiative — plus we can’t help being tech history geeks ourselves.
With this sentiment in mind, we were excited to find that the Internet Archive is now greatly expanding its collection of historic software.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ubuntu “Raring Ringtail” hits beta, disables Windows dual-boot tool
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/ubuntu-raring-ringtail-hits-beta-disables-windows-dual-boot-tool/
Ubuntu 13.04, scheduled for release on April 25, is now available for testing in its second and final beta release. Nicknamed “Raring Ringtail,” Ubuntu 13.04 is one of the final releases that’s just for desktops and servers. By this time next year, Canonical intends to release a single version of Ubuntu targeting all form factors, including smartphones and tablets.
Ubuntu developers decided to disable a tool that allows easy installation of Ubuntu alongside an existing Windows instance. Wubi, short for Windows-based Ubuntu Installer, lets users install Ubuntu on the same disk partition as a Windows instance. “Due to various bugs in Wubi that have not been addressed in time for this Final Beta, the Ubuntu team will not be releasing the Wubi installer with 13.04,”
Raring Ringtail is based on Linux kernel version 3.8.5 and includes both Python 2 and Python 3.3. “We eventually intend to ship only Python 3 with the Ubuntu desktop image, not Python 2,”
13.04 is the midway point in Ubuntu’s two-year release cycle. Long Term Support versions are released once every two years and are supported for five years.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Red Hat Launching Its Own Community Distro of OpenStack
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/13/04/15/2231247/red-hat-launching-its-own-community-distro-of-openstack
“Red Hat still doesn’t have a fully supported commercial version of OpenStack in the market yet”
“they are launching a brand new bleeding edge build of OpenStack that will update weekly (or faster)”
Red Hat Launches Open Source OpenStack RDO
http://www.serverwatch.com/server-news/red-hat-launches-open-source-openstack-rdo-community-distribution.html
Red Hat OpenStack RDO is being officially launched today by the Linux leader as a way to enable easier adoption of OpenStack. Red Hat is also in the process of building a commercially supported, subscription-based enterprise release of OpenStack that is set to officially debut by the summer.
“While we work on the run-up to build our subscription offering, we want to have a community offering of OpenStack that tracks really closely what’s happening upstream and gets that technology into developers’ and end users’ hands really quickly,” Brian Stevens, CTO of Red Hat, told ServerWatch.
Red Hat has been packaging OpenStack for its community Fedora Linux distribution. The new RDO distribution is an extension of that effort for a broader base of Red Hat Linux distributions.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Finland is the world’s best IT country
According to a recent study, Finland is the world’s number one country when it comes to the economy’s ability to use information technology to competitiveness and prosperity. The Global Information Technology Report, last year’s number one, Sweden, has dropped two places.
Fresh GIT in 2013 ranked the countries of the so-called Networked Readiness Index (NRI), the.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/suomi+onkin+maailman+paras+tietotekniikkamaa/a894702?s=r&wtm=tietoviikko/-16042013&
More information:
Global Information Technology
http://www.weforum.org/issues/global-information-technology
At the core of the report, the Networked Readiness Index (NRI) measures the preparedness of an economy to use ICT to boost competitiveness and well-being. In this edition, Finland (1st), Singapore (2nd) and Sweden (3rd) continue to lead the NRI, with the Netherlands (4th), Norway (5th), Switzerland (6th), the United Kingdom (7th), Denmark (8th), the United States (9th) and Taiwan, China (10th) completing the top 10.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Are you ten times more productive than basic coders, and also to get paid based on your performance? Now, the United States has begun the office manager, who will concentrate on managing customer relationships in the peak of good programmers, reported on Bloomberg Businessweek .
10X Management markets offer the service only to top talents.
The company currently represents 30 programmers, including some former employees, including Google and Apple.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kehittaja/huippukoodarit+saivat+oman+manageritoimiston/a894197?s=r&wtm=tietoviikko/-16042013&
Silicon Valley Goes Hollywood: Top Coders Can Now Get Agents
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-10/silicon-valley-goes-hollywood-top-coders-can-now-get-agents
To be a good coder in Silicon Valley is to be among the pampered elite. You get fat paychecks, people bring you free gourmet food, drivers shuttle you around town. Coders here are really treated much like talented entertainers would be down south in Hollywood. It’s a thought not lost on Altay Guvench, a coder himself who has become one of the first agents for software developers. Don’t groan. It was only a matter of time.
About a year ago, Guvench and two friends started 10X Management. The company represents freelance software programmers. It finds them jobs, negotiates their salaries, and keeps track of billing and invoices. “We deal with the necessary evils of being a freelance coder, so they don’t have to,” says Guvench.
Today, 10X Management represents about 30 people, including former Google (GOOG) and Apple (AAPL) coders. It takes the standard agent cut—15 percent—for the gigs it finds.
10X Management wants to build a reputation for having the best coders around on speed dial, so that startups in a pinch know they can depend on the company for really talented people.
Tomi Engdahl says:
First real-world usage figures suggest Chromebooks are struggling
http://www.zdnet.com/first-real-world-usage-figures-suggest-chromebooks-are-struggling-7000014102/
Summary: When the initial batch of Chromebooks hit the market nearly two years ago, some thought these low-cost devices running Google’s cloud-centric Chrome OS could be a Windows killer. NetMarketShare just started measuring Chromebook usage this month, and the first reported numbers are startlingly low.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IDC: PC market expected to continue decline for second year in a row
http://www.zdnet.com/idc-pc-market-expected-to-continue-decline-for-second-year-in-a-row-7000012111/
Summary: Tablets are still held accountable for luring consumers away from traditional desktop and laptop PCs, according to the IDC.
Bad news for the PC industry: The global PC market is expected to decline for the second year in a row, according to the International Data Corporation.
IDC predicted that PC shipments will decline by 1.3 percent in 2013. That’s less than the 3.7 percent decline in 2012, but it’s still not terribly reassuring to PC makers and supply chain partners.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Escaping PCs
http://www.asymco.com/2013/04/16/escaping-pcs/
The Windows PC market is contracting. The market data has been showing unit shipment declining for some time with the latest quarter having perhaps the steepest decline for two decades.
What remains undocumented however is how the market looks when considering economic value. A more complete picture would be to show revenues, average selling price (or revenue/unit), operating margins/unit and percent of profit capture.
The data is not beyond reach however.
Apple’s margins for the Mac.
This yield an operating margin of 18.9%.
If this estimate is considered then the operating profits from PC operations imply that Apple generates more profit than all the top 5 PC vendors combined.
Assuming further that “other” vendors have the same profitability ratio as the top 5 combined yields a figure of 45% “profit capture of PC market” for Apple. This is not as good as its performance in the phone market, where Apple has about 72%, but it’s not bad.
The real problem for the PC vendors is not that they have such low margins–they’ve had low margins for decades. It’s that the volumes which “made up for” low margins are disappearing.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Red Hat pushes open source cloud with OpenStack distro
http://www.zdnet.com/red-hat-pushes-open-source-cloud-with-openstack-distro-7000014071/
Linux software giant Red Hat has launched a community-led distribution of the OpenStack open source cloud platform.
“OpenStack represents an ideal example of community-powered innovation in the cloud,” said Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens in a statement on Monday.
“As open source projects mature, one of the key factors in their wider adoption becomes packaging. With its RDO distribution, Red Hat is clearly looking to streamline the implementation process for OpenStack thus widening the project’s market,” said Stephen O’Grady, principal analyst at RedMonk.
Tomi Engdahl says:
When open-source eats itself, we win
Lessons of the Nginx v Apache slug fest
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/06/open_and_shut/
For years the headlines have been about open source cannibalising proprietary software. But what happens when open source starts to cannibalise itself?
In some markets, open source rules the roost.
But web servers? That’s a market that Apache won ages ago, with no open-source competition to speak of.
That is, until recently.
In the past few years, a lesser-known web server, Nginx (pronounced “Engine-X”), has quietly taken market share, to the point that it now owns 12.64 per cent of the global web server market, and 12.77 per cent of the world’s most heavily trafficked websites
Once an open-source project gains traction, it has tended to continue to gain share. Like Linux.
But Apache has been on the wane, losing 100 million hostnames since June 2012, and not because of any resurgence from Microsoft IIS. Apache still claims 55.47 per cent of all active sites, but Nginx is on the rise.
Today, Nginx offers fewer features than Apache, but its performance is significantly higher.
Over time, it adds functionality and continues to improve performance until, like Linux in the server and mobile operating system markets, it dominates.
In web servers, open source is eating itself. We all benefit. Let’s hope it happens in every market.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Social networking on desktops may have peaked in 2012, Experian finds
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57579922-93/social-networking-on-desktops-may-have-peaked-in-2012-experian-finds/
There has been a noticeable drop-off in time spent with desktop social services in the U.S., the U.K., and Australia, according to Experian.
Perhaps there is such a thing as too much Facebook.
In 2012, U.S. consumers on personal computers spent about 27 percent of their Internet time with social networking sites and forums, or 16 minutes for every hour, according to data from Experian Marketing Services.
Though that’s an alarming finding for some, the figure, which doesn’t reflect mobile browsing, is actually down 3 percentage points from the previous year. In 2011, social networking in the U.S. peaked at 30 percent of all time spent online
U.S. consumers are not alone in their adjusted ways.
In the age of social apps, Experian’s findings seem a bit perplexing
Tomi says:
Data centers can’t save Intel’s first quarter
But they might save 2013 if Atom and Xeon chips take off
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/17/intel_q1_2013_server_drilldown/
The “Sandy Bridge” Xeon E5 replacement ramp for servers is nearly a year old now and clearly hit its stride in the first quarter for Intel, which turned in some pretty sad figures for its PC chip and chipset business.
The problem in servers as Intel looks ahead to the rest of 2013 is that the company has let the cat out of the bag about its future Atom and Xeon server chip plans and now everyone knows when to expect “Ivy Bridge” Xeon E5 and E7 processors.
That will probably means some customers will pause their purchases where they can and therefore Intel’s server OEM partners will be hesitant to buy up scads of Sandy Bridge chips.
While revenues were up year-on-year, operating income was for the Data Center and Connected Systems Group was not, and this is perhaps more of an issue.
It looks like Intel is having to do more wheeling and dealing to boost the top line and it is eating into the middle line for the Data Center group and probably its bottom line, too.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Verizon Terremark backs Xen-CloudStack combo for clouds
Can you hear me now, VMware ESXi and vCloud?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/16/verizon_terremark_backs_xen_cloudstack/
Hot on the heels of the open source Xen hypervisor being moved over to the Linux Foundation as an official collaborative project, Citrix Systems, which has controlled the Xen community as well as the open source CloudStack cloud controller that is one of the viable alternatives to OpenStack, has scored the Terremark cloud subsidiary of telco giant Verizon as an enthusiastic backer of both Xen and CloudStack.
The news about Xen and CloudStack comes right smack dab in the middle of the OpenStack Summit, which is going on in Portland, Oregon this week, and that is no doubt not an accident.
Citrix bought Cloud.com, which had created its own cloud control freak, back in July 2011, and opened up the code a month later. The company joined the OpenStack community, but decided after OpenStack was not making a strong enough commitment to supporting the APIs of Amazon Web Services to go its own way and donate CloudStack to the Apache community.
One way of looking at it is that Citrix has let go of both Xen and CloudStack sufficiently that a company like Verizon Terremark can feel comfortable not only supporting open source projects, but supporting these two in particular when momentum is clearly shifting towards OpenStack and KVM in a lot of ways
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel Is Buying Mashery To Get Deeper Inside The Data Center
http://readwrite.com/2013/04/17/intel-acquires-mashery
Intel, the chip giant, is buying Mashery, a seven-year-old company in San Francisco that specializes in linking together Web-based software and services, a company spokesperson confirmed to ReadWrite.
Big Implications For Intel’s Core Business
The implications of the deal are huge: it signals Intel’s recognition that the central processing unit is no longer a silicon chip. It is the network.
The same techniques that connect consumer apps, it turns out, also work well within large businesses. Comcast, for example, uses Mashery’s API management service to allow programmers to access internal systems. That’s a far more sensible way to create internal software than the alternative, which involves doing a lot of one-off integrations at considerable time and expense.
Intel is in the midst of a shift away from just selling chips to selling software and services. This change, while little-noticed, has been long in the making. Intel bought McAfee for $7.7 billion in 2010, putting it into the security-software business. In 2005, Intel bought a smaller company, Sarvega, which specialized in XML gateways
Intel first partnered with Mashery in November of 2012, pairing Mashery’s API-management tools with its own security offerings.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google tells Microsoft IE shops: We can help you with those ‘legacy apps’
Offers Explorer users Chrome migration extension with long lists
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/17/google_legacy_browser_support/
Google is chucking Chrome at businesses whose applications are hardwired to Internet Explorer – and coupled its offer with a snub to Redmond, claiming its once-proud browser has become “legacy”.
The Chocolate Factory today released the Chrome Legacy Browser Support extension that – with additional fiddling courtesy of your IT bods – lets you open applications to work with what it calls “legacy” browsers.
Google’s extension relies on an exception list that is compiled and maintained by the business’s IT dept. It’s a list of sites that Chrome will recognise as only being able to work with so-called legacy browsers – it will hand these over to IE when needed.
“Legacy browser support lets IT admins of organisations embrace the modern web,” Mistry said.
A plug in for IE, called Internet Exploder Legacy Browser add-on, was also released by Google that enables navigation back to Chrome once you’re in IE on your IE-specific app. It means you don’t stay stuck on IE after you’ve been re-directed by the exception list.
niarnoldo4 says:
nice post.added to my bookmarks cheers!
Tomi Engdahl says:
Fact 4: When marketing say ‘agile’ it’s not what IT understands
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/special/2258319/fact-4-when-marketing-say-agile-its-not-what-it-understands-sponsored-content
The software developer understands ‘agile’ as a group of methodologies based on iterative and incremental development, marketing understands ‘agile’ as quick to market, both teams need to work together to make mobile app development work for the business
Tomi Engdahl says:
CIOs Sound Off on a Role in Flux
http://www.cio.com/article/731851/CIOs_Sound_Off_on_a_Role_in_Flux?page=1&taxonomyId=3172
“You need anthropological skills,” says Ralph Loura, vice president and CIO at The Clorox Company. “My marketing IT team comes out of the Jane Goodall school. They go out and observe marketing in the wild, understand what they’re really trying to accomplish, and then come back with ideas on how to help.”
This is a far cry from the good old days when an IT leader just needed to be good technologist. It used to be easy: ask users for requirements, take notes, do a waterfall-style project, deliver something at the end, and then do post-live fixes. You would nail it 80 to 90 percent of the time, Loura says.
If you didn’t like the job, you could jump to another industry. It didn’t really matter what your company did because the CIO’s role was pretty much removed from the business.
CIOs still need to be top-shelf integrators, marrying pre-built solutions, cloud-based models, on-premise models to solve today’s issues. This time, though, there’s a business twist to integration efforts.
“Understanding what technology can do and explaining how that can help your business is probably the biggest part of the role,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Wall Street Journal is reporting that International Business Machines Corp. is in advanced discussions with Lenovo Group to sell part its computer server business (x86 servers), said people familiar with the matter.
Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2013/04/18/ibm-in-talks-with-lenovo-on-server-business/?mod=WSJ_qtoverview_wsjlatest
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft profits increase to over $6 billion in Q3 2013 despite flat Windows revenue
http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/18/4239972/microsoft-q3-2013-financials-windows-revenue-flat-cfo-peter-klein
It’s worth noting that, despite the healthy profit increase this quarter, it’ll need stronger results from the Windows division to keep growing moving forward. Revenues for its business division grew 5 percent to $6.1 billion, while the entertainment and devices division grew 33 percent to $2.2 billion (year-over-year, after adjustments).
Tomi Engdahl says:
Java 8 release date slips again, now planned for 2014
Oracle engineers too busy battling vulns to add features
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/18/java8_pushed_back_to_2014/
Oracle has redoubled its efforts to address the recent spate of vulnerabilities related to Java running in web browsers, but the renewed focus on security has had an unfortunate side effect – namely, that Java 8 will no longer ship by its planned September 2013 release date.
“Maintaining the security of the Java Platform always takes priority over developing new features, and so these efforts have inevitably taken engineers away from working on Java 8,” Reinhold wrote in a blog post on Thursday.
“Maintaining the security of the Java Platform always takes priority over developing new features, and so these efforts have inevitably taken engineers away from working on Java 8,” Reinhold wrote in a blog post on Thursday.
Under the new plan – assuming the rest of the Java development community accepts Reinhold’s proposal – Java 8 will be declared feature-complete next month and will enter beta testing in September, with a final release scheduled for mid-March 2014.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Linux in 2013: ‘Freakishly awesome’ – and who needs a fork?
Features, performance, security, stability: pick, er, four
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/17/state_of_linux_2013/
“This incredible platform is now more than just an operating system. Linux is really now becoming a fundamental part of society – one of the greatest shared technology resources known to man,” Zemlin said.
“We used to have a lot of fights about CPU scheduling some years ago, when we were trying to figure out how you pick which process to run next,” Corbet explained. “We pretty well solved that problem. You can always do better, but we don’t argue about that anymore … Instead of which process you run, it’s more a question of where do you run it.”
How you answer the question of which processes to run where depends largely on what problem you’re trying to solve.
For example, for some kinds of workloads, the NUMA (non-uniform memory access) problem is all-important. This is particularly true of distributed application clusters.
Still other developers see power consumption as the primary concern. Here the scheduler might be able to help by switching off CPU cores that aren’t strictly needed, for example. Instead of running four cores at half utilisation, the scheduler could power down two cores and run the remaining two flat-out, saving considerable energy – given a few code changes, that is.
“This code is the embodiment of heuristics that have taken years and years to develop – a bunch of ways of managing the system that we know work well across a very wide range of workloads,” Corbet said. “As soon as you start to perturb those heuristics, you run a very real risk of creating performance regressions on workloads that you can’t even possibly know about.”
It can be especially problematic when code that causes regressions actually makes it into the kernel, Corbet explained, because it might be years before enterprise Linux distributors start shipping that version of the code to their customers. By that time, kernel development will have already moved on, and any performance regressions will be very difficult to fix.
Tomi Engdahl says:
JBoss is juicy, but Vert.x could bring sexy back to Red Hat
Linux shop man on app servers, business and keeping devs interested
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/08/red_hat_legacy_maker/
Seven years after Red Hat snatched JBoss out from under Larry Ellison’s nose, the enterprise Linux distributor is continuing to squeeze the juice from the open-source application server.
Red Hat spent $350m buying JBoss in 2006 and today it forms the technology backbone and the brand-name basis of Red Hat’s enterprise middleware suite.
The bread-and-butter business is JBoss as a replacement for IBM’s WebSphere and Oracle’s WebLogic – particularly WebLogic
But its money-spinner is slowly becoming a problem for the Linux-slinger too, because while business is booming, it’s booming in market that’s not growing
What’s Red Hat got on that scale today? IBM-style solutions are Red Hat’s middleware mantra, targeting the Business Process Management (BPM) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) consultants and experts.
The Linux shop does have something – it’s called Vert.x, but there’s a problem.
Vert.x is hailed by some as the next evolution of the application sever; it’s a modular and multi-language framework that runs on a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). While some are making the JVM multilingual, Vert.x goes further: it lets you mix and match programming languages in a single application, so you can code in Java, JavaScript, Groovy, Ruby and Python.
Vert.x could also eclipse the industry’s most recent best hope, Node.js – which allows JavaScript to be used end to end, both on the server and on the client. But’s server-side Javascript can also be a real challenge when it comes to scaling. The polyglot Vert.x, meanwhile, is intriguing devs, and its ranking rise in Google searches reflects the growing interest.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Java 8 release date slips again, now planned for 2014
Oracle engineers too busy battling vulns to add features
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/18/java8_pushed_back_to_2014/
Oracle has redoubled its efforts to address the recent spate of vulnerabilities related to Java running in web browsers, but the renewed focus on security has had an unfortunate side effect – namely, that Java 8 will no longer ship by its planned September 2013 release date.
“Maintaining the security of the Java Platform always takes priority over developing new features, and so these efforts have inevitably taken engineers away from working on Java 8,” Reinhold wrote in a blog post on Thursday.
“Maintaining the security of the Java Platform always takes priority over developing new features, and so these efforts have inevitably taken engineers away from working on Java 8,” Reinhold wrote in a blog post on Thursday.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Lost laptops cost companies $50k apiece
Encryption no match for corporate accounting
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/23/ponemon_intel_lost_laptop_study/
A single lost or stolen laptop costs a business an average of nearly $50,000. At least, that’s the word from an Intel-sponsored study by the Ponemon Institute.
Value of missing kit was mathmagically calculated by factoring laptop replacement, data breach cost, loss of productivity, investigation cost, and other variables.
The value of a lost lappy to a firm cost an average of $49,246, according to Ponemon. Minimum damage calculated in the survey was about $1,200, and the maximum reported value was just short of a cool $1m.
Loss of a laptop used by mid-level managers and directors would cost a company about $60,000 on average, according to the study, while the CEO’s machine isn’t even worth half that.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft’s Surface strategy is doing what it was supposed to do
http://www.citeworld.com/business/21749/microsofts-surface-strategy-doing-exactly-what-it-was-supposed-do
Yesterday Microsoft reported flat Windows revenue from the year before, despite an unprecedented drop in PC sales — IDC put the drop at 14%, and outgoing Microsoft CFO Peter Klein suggested during the company’s earnings call that the drop was in the “12-13-14″ percent range.
“Non-OEM revenue grew 40% this quarter, driven by sales of Surface and continued double digit growth in volume licensing.”
Surface sells for a much higher average price than the OEM version of Windows — it retails for anywhere between $499 (for the lower-powered Surface RT) and $999 (for the highest-end Pro version), and that’s not including the keyboard/cover.
In other words, Microsoft has successfully convinced enough consumers to buy hardware, and enough companies to “subscribe” to Windows upgrades, that it made up for a horrible quarter of new PC sales.
These year-to-year trends will likely continue through the year. And as the Windows XP deadline approaches in April 2014, at least some businesses with really old XP computers — which can’t be upgraded in place to Windows 7 or 8 — will buy new ones, which could slow the PC market’s decline. Many of these companies will probably subscribe the Enterprise edition of Windows 8 to get the additional features, too.
Nice escape!
Tomi Engdahl says:
Fed up with database speed? Meet Big Blue’s BLU-eyed boy
El Reg drills into 10TB/s acceleration tech
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/22/ibm_blu_acceleration_analysis/
Like other system vendors with their own software stacks, IBM is trying to boost the processing speed of its database software so it can take on larger and larger data munching jobs.
The company launched its BLU Acceleration feature for several of its databases a few weeks ago as part of a broader big data blitzkrieg, saying that it could do analytics and process reports on the order to 8 to 25 times faster than plain vanilla DB2. IBM was a little short on the details about how this turbocharger for databases works at the time
The feature is in tech preview and is only available for DB2 10.5 database and its TimeSeries extensions for the Informix database
Like other IT vendors, IBM wants companies to think that every bit of data that they generate or collect from their systems or buy from third parties in the course of running their business is valuable, and the reason is simple.
This sells storage arrays, and if you can make CEOs think this data is potentially valuable, then they will fork out the money to keep it inside of various kinds of data warehouses or Hadoop clusters for data at rest or in InfoSphere Streams systems for data and telemetry in motion.
There is big money in them there big data hills, and with server virtualization pulling the rug out from underneath the server business in the past decade, hindering revenue growth
So what exactly is BLU Acceleration? Well, it is a lot of different things.
First, BLU implements a new runtime that is embedded inside of the DB2 database and a new table type that is used by that runtime.
The BLU tables orient data in columns instead of the classic row structured table used in relational databases, and this data is encoded in such a manner
The BLU Acceleration feature has a memory paging architecture so that an entire database table does not have to reside in main memory to be processed, but the goal is to use the columnar format to allow the database to be compressed enough so it can reside in main memory and be much more quickly searched.
BLU Acceleration also knows about multiple core processors and the SIMD engines and vector coprocessors on chips, and it can take advantage of the cores and coprocessors to compress and search data.
The freaky thing about BLU Acceleration is that it does not have database indexes. You don’t have to do aggregates on the tables, you don’t have to tune your queries or the database, and you don’t have to make any changes to SQL or database schemes.
“You just load the data and query it,” as Vincent put it.
The reason that you don’t need a database index is that data is compressed so a BLU table can, generally speaking, reside in memory. Vincent said that 80 percent of the data warehouses in the world had 10TB of capacity, so if you can use the Actionable Compression feature of BLU and get a 10X compression ratio, then you can fit the typical data warehouse in a 1TB memory footprint.
Once you have compressed the data so it all fits into main memory, you take advantage of the fact that you have organized the data in columnar format instead of row format.
The result is that you can query a 10TB table in a second or less. And, IBM has something to sell against Oracle’s Exadata and Teradata’s appliances, which both have columnar data stores and other features to goose performance
Tomi Engdahl says:
jQuery 2.0 kicks old Internet Explorer versions to the curb
Leaner, faster code base for ‘the modern web
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/19/jquery_2_drops_old_ie_support/
Popular JavaScript library jQuery has reached version 2.0, and as expected, the new release drops support for older versions of Internet Explorer, including IE 6, 7, and 8.
“jQuery 2.0 is intended for the modern web; we’ve got jQuery 1.x to handle older browsers and fully expect to support it for several more years,” the project’s Dave Methvin said in release notes posted to the jQuery Foundation website on Thursday.
By some counts, jQuery is now used on more than 50 per cent of all websites, making it much more popular than competing frameworks such as Dojo, MooTools, Prototype, or the YUI Library.
Web developers who still need to support IE 6, 7, or 8 should continue to use the 1.x branch of jQuery, which is still being maintained. That branch is currently on version 1.9 and will be upgraded to 1.10 within a few months.
The jQuery 2.0 library is API-compatible with jQuery 1.9
Tomi Engdahl says:
64-bit x86 Computing Reaches 10th Anniversary
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/04/22/2158224/64-bit-x86-computing-reaches-10th-anniversary
“10 years ago AMD released its first Opteron processor, the first 64-bit x86 processor.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft’s Blue: What will developers do?
http://www.zdnet.com/microsofts-blue-what-will-developers-do-7000014354/
Summary: If Microsoft brings back the Start Button and adds a boot-to-desktop option with Windows Blue, should Windows developers still be counting on Metro as their future?
One of Microsoft’s goals with Windows 8, sources have said all along, was to try to convince the developer community that it is/was still worth writing “killer apps” for Windows. But if Blue, a k a Windows 8.1, allows users to opt to boot straight to the Desktop and avoid the Metro Start Screen as much as possible, doesn’t this undermine the message that Metro is the future? What’s the reason Windows devs should bother putting their eggs in the Windows 8/WinRT — rather than the tried-and-true Win32 — basket?
Right now, we don’t know exactly how the Start Button, if and when it returns to Windows 8 with Blue, will work.
So far, there hasn’t been a leak of “Visual Studio Blue,” but this is believed to be coming this year. The VS Blue release supposedly will support Microsoft’s work to bring more into alignment the app platforms for Windows Phone and Windows 8, from what I’ve heard from my sources.
Development for both Windows RT and Windows Phone can be done in Visual Studio. Windows Store/Metro apps are distributed via the Windows Store in Windows, while Windows Phone apps are distributed via the Windows Phone Store.
With Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, Microsoft took steps toward bringing these two different app platforms closer together. Developers can write Windows 8/Windows Phone 8 apps that share a lot of code. But they also can end up writing apps that can’t be ported at all across the two platforms. (If a phone dev writes an app using XAML plus the .Net API set, it can mean a huge rewrite is needed to bring that app to Windows 8, one of my contacts told me.) And they still need to submit their apps to two different stores with different approval procedures and rules.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why developers are leaving the Facebook platform
http://andrewchen.co/2013/04/22/why-developers-are-leaving-the-facebook-platform/#
Attitudes towards the Facebook platform have changed
Last month, I even heard one prominent VC even went so far as to say:
If your audience comes primarily from Facebook, that’s just uninvestable.
That’s a big shift from just 3-4 years ago when everyone was building Facebook apps and deeply integrating it into their products.
The summary of the reasons why developers have increasingly left the Facebook platform for other platforms:
Lack of virality
Higher ad rates
Constant retooling
Competition
The feed is finite
Mobile platforms are the new sexy opportunities
Constant retooling
I’ve heard the joke that the “Developer Love” email is scariest email you can get from Facebook, because it’s the one that tells you that your app needs to be substantially updated for a new set of APIs. Facebook has an amazing engineering culture driven by “Move fast and break things” but that means some of those things are often their developer partners’ apps. And you need to move as fast as Facebook to keep up.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Eric Schmidt: Google Glass not coming to you until 2014
http://www.dvice.com/2013-4-22/eric-schmidt-google-glass-not-coming-you-until-2014
Every move that Google has made regarding its wearable Glass computer has been closely scrutinized, particularly the staggered, picky rollouts of the device, most recently with Glass Explorer applicants. We were generally led to believe that the device would be made available to the masses later this year, but new comments from Google’s chairman indicate otherwise.
So, according to Schmidt, rather than being made available to consumers later this year as promised, most of us probably won’t get a chance to use the device until sometime in the spring of 2014.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Apple Has an Identity Crisis
Is It a Hardware Company or a Software Firm?
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424127887323551004578439162453339122-lMyQjAxMTAzMDIwMjEyNDIyWj.html
Apple Inc. is facing an identity crisis on Wall Street.
Much of the investor nervousness is rooted in how Wall Street is treating and valuing the Cupertino, Calif., company as a traditional hardware maker. One camp of analysts and some investors said there is strong evidence that Apple should be viewed in a different light: as a software-hardware hybrid.
The distinction matters. If it continues to be seen as a hardware business, Apple’s streak—driven by products like the iPhone and iPad—could run out quickly as smartphones and tablets get commoditized and consumer tastes change. It is a lesson learned by companies like BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion Ltd., whose tech hardware was quickly eclipsed by products from Apple itself.
If Apple is classified as a software-hardware hybrid, the company could be valued more like Internet and software makers that have recurring revenue streams and that often trade at higher price-to-earnings ratios than hardware firms.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Strategy Analytics: Apple Maintains 48 Percent Share of Global Branded Tablet Shipments in Q1 2013
http://www.bloomberg.com/article/2013-04-23/aA1hEsTXf7fs.html
“Global branded tablet shipments reached an all-time high of 40.6 million units in Q1 2013, surging 117 percent from 18.7 million in Q1 2012. Demand for tablets among consumer, business and education users remains strong.”
19.5 million mixed iPads worldwide maintaining market leadership with
48 percent share during the first quarter of 2013.
Android captured a record 43 percent share of global branded tablet shipments in Q1 2013
“When we add White-Box^1 tablets into the mix, Android market
share of the total tablet market increases significantly to 52% and iOS slips to 41%, as the bulk of the White-Box tablets are Android low budget models aimed at a different market to the branded tablets.”
Microsoft captured a niche 7.5 percent global tablet share in Q1 2013.