Android is the next MS-DOS. I am not consigning Android to the landfill of technology history.  In fact I am predicting that Android may well become the de facto personal computing architecture of the (near) future.  My prognostication are not divine nor demented, nor are they a technologist’s religious rhetorical report.  This is pure marketing led by the second most important part of the marketing mix:  the people that provide product. In this case, programmers. Repeating myself — as I am too fond of doing — people buy operating systems to run applications.  Applications achieve things and the OS exists for no other reason than to facilitate applications.  Thus platform wars are won by having a large set of applications that work well together (or at least don’t drop-kick one another into inoperability) and thus increase the likelihood that any end user will find the solution/application for which he/she/it is … Continue reading →

You would think IBM might learn from their own experience. Organizational structure is strategic by nature.  How an organization is arranged influences other strategy, such as marketing and product development, and thus a whole host of daily activities and tactical initiatives.  Who your boss is and what her objectives are determine what you will do, such as replacing her coffee with decaf in order to encourage afternoon naps and thus allow you to get some real work done. IBM almost went bankrupt due to their organizational structure, as their former president and resident cookie monster Lou Gerstner confided in his book Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? Given their early and dominant lead in mainframe computers, IBM developed an organization structure that made the mainframe the center of their universe.  Everything IBM did evolved to support sales of mainframes.  When the minicomputer revolution ignited and UNIX (the original computer virus) escaped … Continue reading →

“Linux, the original computer virus.” That line used to be said of UNIX, but no single flavor of UNIX ever spread across so many platforms and onto so many handsets.  Those handsets, the oft predicted unified communications solution, are the new OS battleground.  In a relatively short time we have seen: Google issue Android and, with partners Motorola and Verizon, shook Steve Jobs so bad he nearly busted a spleen (but I hear he can buy replacement parts easily enough) Flush from that success, Motorola decides that owning a Linux distro might be a good long-term option and buys Azingo Intel bought Wind River, the leader in embedded operating systems, and one who was grooming the embedded Linux market, including handsets, a chip target high on Intel’s priority list HP, unhappy that Apple iPads beat them to the Slate market, and seemingly unhappy with Microsoft’s offerings for slab devices, buys … Continue reading →

Listening to Hugo Chavez or Steve Jobs is becoming eerily similar. Dictators have some common but not commonly endearing traits.  They tend toward being monomaniacal, focused fiercely on their perception of order.  Anything or anyone that denies the beauty of their utopian vision challenges authority, and can later be found swinging from trees without needing to use their arms or legs. Jobs is trying to string-up Adobe, and in the end might make Apple look like Il Duce on his last day. For folks fond of the Silicon Valley geek gladiators — visionary founders who see business as war and as life — the latest rattling of cyber sabers comes from Apple and Adobe, with Apple’s insistence that Adobe Flash be banished from Jobs’ walled garden of iEverything.  Certain slurs have been sounded, including an odd instance by Jobs proclaiming that Adobe Flash was bug ridden. Jobs is obviously not … Continue reading →