12.14.06
Posted in Google, IBM, Intellectual Monopoly, Patents, Search at 1:32 pm by Shane Coyle
I am still working on Stafford Masie’s talk at the CITI conference, I hope to have that fully transcribed perhaps later tonight and then there is a lot to discuss, believe me. If you haven’t grabbed the audio and had a listen yourself, it’s worth an hour (Links to OGG and MP3 in this story).
In the meantime, it is an unwritten rule, no blog can go for a full month without running a Google story. So, just in under the deadline…
Google Patent Search
Google has a new feature, in Beta (what else?), called Google Patent Search. I have honestly been playing with it for much of a day now, not getting much writing done as a result. It is a fascinating tool, complete with drawings and all, very interesting and could have some use in the effort to address "legitimate questions about patent quality".
IBM, Yahoo! go After Google
IBM and Yahoo! are teaming up to undercut Google in the enterprise, with a software solution that may put real pressure on Google’s Mini.
Google currently charges $9,000 for a specialized search appliance – a piece of hardware called Google Mini – that can index up to 300,000 documents. The IBM-Yahoo offering undermines the market viability of the Google box in its current form, or at least at its current price, and also poses a threat to the efforts of corporate search specialists like Autonomy to expand into the small-business market.
It also provides another small bit of evidence that, in an age of cheap computing, hardware wants to be software and software wants to be free.
Isn’t that a great way to put it?
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Posted in Deals, Finance, FUD, Marketing, Novell, Windows at 1:31 am by Shane Coyle
Emmett Dulaney wonders, what is in it for Novell?. “Their last chance at survival as a company has been to become the Microsoft alternative as opposed to the Microsoft complement they once were.”
First of all, Novell should know the feeling of Microsoft’s embrace better than anyone, as he reminds us:
The bigger issue I have, though, is the whole concept of including support for Novell products in Windows. A little over a decade ago, Microsoft included NetWare support in Windows by reverse-engineering the IPX/SPX protocol, calling it NWLink, and including it with every version of Windows that shipped. That move marked the beginning of the end for NetWare –no longer did you need to license the proprietary IPX/SPX protocol to talk to the network, you already had it. While this looked like Microsoft’s bridge to interoperability at the time, it also opened the door to building entire networks without using anything from Novell — once you didn’t need it for the desktop, you learned that NT could be the server and Windows could do it all.
Tom Yager the other day postulated that Novell was the party of advantage in the deal, but apart from the fact that Novell’s sworn enemy is now their biggest reseller (Dulaney likens it to Ford paying GM to do their advertising), what does Novell really expect to gain?
But what’s in it for Novell? Are they so desperate that they need Microsoft to promise to deliver 70,000 coupons a year for them to names they are too lazy to acquire on their own? Have they reached a point with SUSE Linux that they are frustrated with the slow adoption rate and have no idea what else to do with the product? Are they clutching at straws, reaching for a lifeline, or seeing something that I am missing completely?
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Posted in Action, Law, OSDL at 12:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
We recently mentioned an E-mail which suggested that Stuart Cohen’s departure from OSDL was related to Novell. There is a now a more formal statement from InformationWeek.
Cohen angered members of the open source community last month by endorsing Novell’s agreement with Microsoft to work on interoperability between Novell’s Suse Linux and Windows. Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer’s subsequent comments that Linux most likely contains Windows code didn’t help.
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