karmadc.com

But these claims are simply inconsistent with the facts. Amazon’s Kindle, according to various published
reports, is selling very well, as are Kindle books. Citigroup estimates that Amazon will sell 380,000 Kindles this year, 150,000 in the fourth quarter alone.

Since then, I’ve been to 15 more Worldcons, including in Denver. (I’ve been pretty lucky–the Worldcon has been held in my home state six times.) I’ve also been to four North American Science Fiction Conventions (NASFiCs), which are held in the United States when the Worldcon is overseas.

This year, it seemed that there was a panel on issues related to e-books and electronic publishing in virtually every time slot. I went to several of these sessions. It seems to me that there’s a serious conflict between the preferences of some professionals and the way the e-book market is actually developing.

I think the disconnect in this case lies with the philosophical positions some people have taken against DRM, positions that generally date back to well before commercial electronic publishing was well established. Now that electronic publishing–with DRM–is achieving significant success and user acceptance, these people need to rethink their positions.

There were some other interesting topics addressed in Worldcon panels this year, and if I have time, I’ll write about them here–but I have to get caught up on Siggraph 2008 from last week, and the Intel Developer Forum is this week. Busy, busy.

That said, Baen Books continues to offer DRM-free e-books through its WebScription Ebooks service, and completely free books through the Baen Free Library.

(Incidentally, I need to write another blog post about the Reader. Sony has recently released some updates for the PRS-505 that make it much better for reading PDFs and add support for Adobe’s Digital Editions service.)

Earlier this month, I traveled to Denver for Denvention 3, the 66th World Science Fiction Convention. I first attended Worldcon in 1977, when it happened to take place in Miami, where I was living at the time.

Anecdotally, I can report that the Kindle owners I know (and others I ran into at the Worldcon) are happy with the gizmo and regularly buy books in electronic form rather than buying paper copies.

Baen’s a smallish publisher, and what it’s doing here isn’t necessarily transferable to the major publishing houses, but it’s good to see someone offering an alternative to Amazon’s Kindle Store and Sony’s eBook Store.

Also, the furor over DRM on music downloads seems to be dying down, and Apple’s sales of music, TV shows, and movies through the iTunes Store continue to grow rapidly.

A good fraction of the attendees at a Worldcon are San Francisco-based professionals–writers, agents, editors, publishers, artists, and others. Along with some of the more well-known fans, they participate in panel discussions on a variety of topics. These panels are my favorite part of the Worldcon.

I’m having the same experience myself. I’d be happier if I could read Kindle books on my
iPhone 3G or my
Mac, or if I could print individual pages or copy text into an e-mail, but I figure that I get 99 percent of the potential enjoyment from just reading a book. At least with fiction; I still regard the Kindle and the Sony Reader as marginal for much nonfiction and completely inadequate for textbooks.

Obviously, DRM is commercially practical and acceptable to many consumers.

Several panelists in two of the panel sessions, for example, strongly asserted that digital rights management (DRM) for e-books is ineffective, commercially impractical, and unacceptable to most users.

What is new in the deal is that Oracle finally gets its wish to own MySQL. In 2007 Oracle offered as much as $850 million for MySQL, the third of its offers for the open-source database company.

Updated at 10:48 AM PDT with links to interesting commentary:

It does, however, potentially give Oracle an antitrust problem in MySQL, as ZDNet’s Dana Blankenhorn posits. MySQL’s market share in the enterprise database market is negligible, but its share of the exploding Web database market is dominant and exploding.

“I believe this is the first step down a different path,” Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz said in an e-mail to Sun employees, except that it’s not, as Gordon Haff points out in a post on CNET.

commentary

This time, Oracle effectively got MySQL for free, as the valuation for Sun almost certainly wasn’t raised much by its MySQL asset, acquired in 2008 by Sun for $1 billion.

Ultimately, however, this acquisition is not about MySQL. At least, not yet.

It’s about hardware/software systems, primarily, and to the extent that software is involved, it’s about Java, as called out by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. Over time, the MySQL component will become increasingly important, but for now this Sun acquisition gives Oracle exceptional control over integrated solutions for its customers, as well as a software portfolio with massive potential.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

With Monday’s announcement that Oracle is acquiring Sun for $7.4 billion, however, Oracle is signaling its own “iPod moment,” seeking to compete with Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and others in integrated hardware/software systems.

Back in the early days of computing, there was no such thing as a “software vendor.” Companies like IBM sold hardware/software integrated solutions and, really, software was developed simply to sell the value of the hardware.

While I don’t expect the U.S. Justice Department or Federal Trade Commission to launch an antitrust action against Oracle relative to MySQL, it’s important to note that this acquisition makes Oracle the clear behemoth in databases, past (enterprise) and future (Web).

It’s a bold move, and not for the faint of heart. But then, no one would ever accuse Oracle of being faint-hearted.

Importantly, Oracle’s new “systems” approach gives it the ability to digest a host of open-source projects like MySQL that might otherwise struggle to make money, and monetize them heavily by burying them in hardware “systems.” It’s a smart move driven by a company that knows that open source as a religion faded, and that open source as a key driver of innovative IT is just beginning.

Larry Augustin runs the numbers on the acquisition and comes up with Java + MySQL for $0.00. Good analysis.
The VAR Guy works through whether this could really be about hardware.
Glyn Moody rightly points out that the acquisition turns Oracle into an open-source company…albeit a somewhat ambiguous one.
Larry Dignan at ZDNet takes a different slant, arguing “MySQL is toast” since Oracle won’t let MySQL mess with its database margins.

What Oracle will not want, however, is for its customers to get MySQL for free.

The industry just changed. Oracle raised the stakes of the game. The new ante to get into the game is integrated hardware/software systems, and as IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle increasingly demonstrate, open-source software plays an increasingly important role in feeding these systems.

Create a letterhead on the fly by adding pertinent text and a generic image to the header of a new template.

The steps for creating a quick-and-dirty letterhead in Word 2003 are about the same as those for doing so in Word 2007.

Now use your mouse to drag the image to the position you prefer in the header. You can use the controls along the image’s edge to resize it manually, or drag the little green circle at the top to rotate the picture. When you’re happy with the image’s size and position, click Close on the Header and Footer toolbar in Word 2003, or click anywhere outside the header in Word 2007 to see how your letterhead will look.

At the same time, you may have occasion to create a one-off letterhead for a special event or side project that doesn’t require anything fancy, and that you don’t want to spend a lot of time or money to generate. Microsoft Word lets you fashion such a letterhead in just a few minutes. Keep in mind that this is a quick-and-dirty way to give your documents a unique appearance, and no substitute for a stationer’s wares.

Use the options in the Format Picture dialog box to add a drop shadow to the image, resize it, or make other changes. When the image looks the way you like it, click the Layout tab in Word 2003 and choose a wrapping style other than the default “In line with text.” Click OK in Word 2003, or Close in Word 2007.

If you’re running a business, there’s no substitute for professionally created stationery with your company’s logo and other information in the letterhead. You need to communicate to your clients and customers that your organization is legitimate, and a knockoff letterhead with a generic graphic is a dead giveaway of a low-budget operation.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

When you want to create a document using your custom letterhead, click File > New in Word 2003, or choose the Office button and click New in Word 2007. Choose “On my computer” under Templates in the New Documents pane of Word 2003, select it from the list that appears under the General tab of the Templates dialog box, and click OK. In Word 2007, select your letterhead template under Recently Used Templates, or if it’s not listed there, click “New from existing” in the top-left pane, navigate to the template you just created, and click Open.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

In Word 2007, click Insert > Header > Blank, and in Word 2003, click View > Header and Footer. In both versions, enter your preferred letterhead text (organization name, address, phone, e-mail, etc.), and then click Insert > Picture (> From File in Word 2003). Navigate to and select the image you want to embed in the letterhead. (If you’re using a large image, open and resize the picture in Paint or another image editor before you add it to your letterhead, or choose one of the appropriately sized clip-art images built into Windows.) Right-click the image and choose Format Picture.

Tomorrow: troubleshoot problems with Windows Update.

The no-muss, no-fuss letterhead template
Start by opening a new blank document in Word and saving it as a template, using the .dot extension for Word 2003, or the .dotx extension for Word 2007. Give the new template a unique name, such as “quickletterhead1.dotx”, and save it in your templates folder so it will be available when you create another document from a template.

Time Warner’s CEO said Tuesday a Yahoo-AOL deal should not be ruled out, according to a report in MarketWatch.

Ever heard the saying, “fish or cut bait”?

For Yahoo, in the past two days, its fishing expedition for potential suitors to rival Microsoft’s megabillion-dollar buyout bid, has left it with one dead deal in the form of News Corp., a live one with AOL, and one on the hook with Microsoft.

“Would something added to AOL, or AOL added to something else, make it stronger and more valuable? We can’t rule it out and we wouldn’t. It’s our obligation to make sure AOL gets into whatever configuration that makes it the strongest and most valuable,” said Bewkes, according to a Webcast of his luncheon speech.

Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes told investors at the Bear Stearns Media Conference that his company would consider an acquisition that could create a stronger AOL for the media giant, according to the report.

That said, however, Bewkes also noted a Microsoft-Yahoo deal could benefit AOL by validating the benefits of an advertising network, aka AOL’s Platform A, according to the report. Bewkes also said that a Microsoft-Yahoo deal could also result in more competition for AOL.

But then I covered the first dot-com bust. I always think the glass is half empty.

We interrupt this scheduled lashing of Yahoo to ask a question about the company that’s been putting a whuppin’ on Jerry Yang & Co. over the last few years: Are you OK?

Today’s nearly 5 percent drop brings the search king’s share price down from its 52-week high of $747.24 in November all the way to $464.19 at the end of trading Tuesday.That’s just one more tidbit of bad news from Google’s 52-week low, $437 per share, back in March 2007.

Google declined to comment on the report.

Google shares dropped 4.57 percent Tuesday largely on new ComScore numbers that show flat year-over-year growth in U.S. paid-click performance in January. It’s an abrupt turn from the 25 percent year-over-year growth Google produced in the fourth quarter and the consistent growth Google has shown since, well, since there’s been a Google. Regardless of what you think of ComScore’s oft-controversial methods, this isn’t good. As Henry Blodget aptly put it in Silicon Alley Insider, “Even if ComScore is only half right, this is a disaster.”

Sure, it could be that Google’s dominance of the ad market is waning. That would certainly be the glass-is-half-full scenario. But the more likely scenario is that Google is a bellwether for the rest of the online ad market, that everyone will struggle as the economy heads south, and that we’re on the cusp of plenty more bad news.

Google, it would seem, can’t defy gravity or a bad economy more than any other company. For some, the ComScore numbers offer a fine opportunity to gloat. Others, and bless the optimists, aren’t terribly worried just yet. But for most companies relying on advertising for their revenues (and who doesn’t these days?), Google’s bad news provides plenty of reason to fret.

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Before I begin, I have to admit that I’m going to be biased by the hardware I’m using…in a positive way. Before switching to the
Mac, I was a hardcore IBM ThinkPad devotee. This is my first experience with the post-IBM ThinkPad, and it’s an impressive piece of hardware. Equally important for this review, it seems to work flawlessly with Ubuntu.

I finally decided to put my OS where my mouth is. Or, at least, where my typing fingers are. I’m typing this from a Lenovo X61 ThinkPad…running Ubuntu 7.10. I’m going to spend the next week or so reporting on the experience, including some first-person accounts from the lady who has cut my hair for the past 21 years, Valerie, and my grandma, whom I’ve noted before has been locked out of the Linux experience.

Interestingly, everything on the keyboard works with Ubuntu. Everything. Lenovo doesn’t officially support Ubuntu on this hardware but you wouldn’t know it from the experience. All of the specialty keys work and when I told Ubuntu to tell the system to put the X61 to sleep when I closed the lid, it did so without asking me, “Why?”

In the Bible King Agrippa tells Paul, “You almost persuade me to become a Christian.” Let’s just say I’m “almost persuaded to become an Ubuntu user.” We’ll see how the rest of the week goes.

Well, today we’re going to see just how much substance there is to my prior contention.

(Credit:
Lenovo)

This is an exceptional piece of hardware, and surprisingly affordable (around $1,000 for the model Lenovo loaned me). It’s super small yet has a full-sized, spacious keyboard. I could see myself using this. The keyboard isn’t quite as responsive as a MacBook Pro keyboard, but it feels solid, responsive, and makes a satisfying “click-clack-click” when I type.

With Windows turning annoying since Microsoft left Windows 2000 (the last version that I really liked), for me there are only two choices left: Mac OS X or Linux. If my experience with Ubuntu on Lenovo’s X61 ThinkPad continues to go as well as it has until now, I might even say it’s a drag race between Mac OS X and Ubuntu. Ubuntu doesn’t make a fetish of itself. It’s just there. It’s letting the applications do the talking without getting in the way.

Until the day when all software is open source, there are the many days when it’s not.

…I was absolutely delighted with the way Agostino Russo and Evan Dandrea steered the Windows-native installer for Ubuntu into 8.04 LTS. What I think is really classy about it is the way it uses the Windows Boot Manager sensibly to offer you the Ubuntu option. If I was a Windows user who was intrigued but nervous about Linux, this would be a really great way to get a taste of it, at low risk. Being able to install and uninstall a Linux OS as if it were a Windows app is a brilliant innovation.

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Indeed. Most of the open-source software I use (I mean, besides Google and its ilk) is desktop software that runs on the proprietary
Mac OS X operating system. Windows and OS X are the secret Trojan Horses of open-source software. As more and more great software is written to run on these platforms (as well as Linux, of course), a greater number of people will encounter open source and will embrace it, not because it’s open source, but rather because it works.

Mark Shuttleworth points to an excellent way to let Ubuntu Linux newbies give it a try without leaving the comfort of their Windows machines:

Software maker Six Apart has made a “significant” acquisition, according to sources cited by TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington.

It’s anyone’s guess which company Six Apart, which recently sold its LiveJournal unit and launched a Facebook application, may have picked up. Arrington’s
iPod Shuffle bait (that’s the prize he says goes to the first accurate blog response) has attracted more than 200 comments so far.

While the purchase may not be large in size, it possibly will mark a strategic shift for the company behind popular blogging platforms TypePad, Movable Type, and Vox, Arrington said, adding that an official announcement about the buy is due in the next few days.

The Samsung certification was actually a 2005 product that–to my knowledge–has never been commercially released. The ADB products are set-top boxes and media centers that appear to be intended for cable companies to license to consumers. To me, the ADB products seem counterintuitive to the whole idea of the Tru2way model–I thought the idea here was for Tru2way to provide a framework that would allow for the release of TVs and DVRs that consumers could buy at Best Buy or Circuit City, and hook up as easily as a standard DVD player.

A follow-up post on the IP Democracy post that purports to be from CableLabs says that the company is “confident in the technology and are on track to introduce this software platform and services at retail later this year in select markets.” While they may technically hit that milestone with products like the ADB boxes, I think the real test will be whether or not we can buy Tru2way TVs–from Panasonic, Samsung, Sony, or any other company. And at this point, I still wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t see those products until sometime in 2009. But I hope I’m wrong.

CableLabs’ Tru2way got a big boost last month when Sony signed on with a pledge to design and deliver TVs that incorporate the standard, bolstering an already impressive list of backers. The Web was flooded with optimistic reports of a post-cable box Valhalla where you could simply buy a Tru2way TV, screw in your coaxial cable, and have plug-and-play access to your 1,000-channel universe. Before those miracle TVs hit the market, however, they need to be certified by CableLabs–and there are rumors that the initial trials aren’t going well. According to IP Democracy, the initial certification tests for Panasonic Tru2way TVs were unsuccessful–to say the least. The post cites “folks close to Tru2way” as calling the Panasonic tests a “‘disaster of spectacular proportions’” that resulted in “‘dozens and dozens’ of bugs.”

Update: Subsequent to the publication of this story, Panasonic has released a more detailed statement on the status of its Tru2way TVs.

So, what’s it all mean? The nondenials from Panasonic and CableLabs make me think that the substance of the IP Democracy report is true: the initial wave of Tru2way TVs aren’t ready for prime time. But that’s to be expected from a new technology that hasn’t yet been released to the public (thus the whole point of certification testing–the bugs get extinguished before the products reach the public.)

In an attempt to verify those dire–but anonymous–quotes, we contacted Panasonic and CableLabs for their responses. Panasonic gave us a quick “no comment,” but CableLabs provided a [somewhat] more detailed retort:

IP Democracy via Gizmolovers

(Credit: CableLabs)

Certification test results are not published by CableLabs. While we cannot address speculation made in the media about specific tests results, it is important to understand that it is common for devices to require multiple test runs before achieving CableLabs certification. Manufacturers generally account for such timing in their product plans. CableLabs conducts multiple test waves throughout the year in order to accommodate additional testing. Panasonic has entered an upcoming certification wave, which provides ample time for products to reach the marketplace to meet the company’s rollout schedule. Other tru2way products, including products from Samsung and ADB have already been Certified by CableLabs.

Shrewd on Google’s part, and insightful on Carr’s for figuring it out. It’s also cause for concern for those of us in businesses that have far less wiggle room for failure. Most companies can’t afford to fail more than once, if that. Google can afford to fail again and again and again, making it a fierce competitor, indeed.

In a recent post on Google (”The Omnigoogle”), Carr explains more clearly than I’ve ever seen why Google does what it does (invests in satellites, free Wi-Fi, open-source software, etc.), and why failure is all part of the plan.

Because the marginal cost of producing and distributing a new copy of a purely digital product is close to zero, Google not only has the desire to give away informational products; it has the economic leeway to actually do it. Those two facts–the vast breadth of Google’s complements, and the company’s ability to push the price of those complements toward zero–are what really set the company apart from other firms.

Google faces far less risk in product development than the usual business does. It routinely introduces half-finished products and services as online “betas” because it knows that, even if the offerings fail to win a big share of the market, they will still tend to produce attractive returns by generating advertising revenue and producing valuable data on customer behavior. For most companies, a failed launch of a new product is very costly. For Google, in general, it’s not. Failure is cheap.

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From Android to Froogle, Google’s products regularly fail to make a prolonged impact on the industry. At the same time, however, news that Google is launching a product in one’s market is sure to turn venture capitalists frigid on investment, just as Microsoft’s attention to a market does. Google, then, has extraordinary power to fail and yet still cause competitors to fail.

Powerful…and scary.

Indeed, it wasn’t Carr’s comparison of why Google is much like Microsoft (Google controls the online economy, while Microsoft controls the desktop economy) that I found most interesting, but rather his explanation of why Google can fail so routinely in its product launches…and have that failure feed into its top-line revenue:

Writer Nicholas Carr has done it again.