For those of you who don’t read Tim Bray on a semi-regular basis, well, why not? His Ongoing blog is one of my favorites.

He’s always a good read, and he is currently in the midst of a series of essays that is designed to give a key as to Which new technologies will make it, and which will fail?.

Basically, he first takes 7 successful technologies (such as SQL/RDBMS and Java) and 7 pretty much failures (SGML, AI). Then, he sets up a list of possible success predictors one could use to judge potential of technology (management buy-in, buzz generators) and see how winners and losers would be ranked – in retrospect – by each of these criteria. In other words, can you establish some success predictors to help you see what technologies will flourish and which will fail??

It’s interesting; through about five of the success predictors currently, there is really no good indicator discovered.

Bray notes that he is ranking these technologies on his own, and the seven winners and losers are – again – his picks, and many not be a good representative sample and so on.

But he’s been in the biz for years (he’s co-author of the XML spec, joined a W3C committee at the request of Tim Berners-Lee), so you can quibble with some choices, rant about some rankings and so on, but – overall – it seems (to me) fairly balanced.

And this is just an exercise, not necessarily a road map for future tech.

But it’s interesting. Right now, there is no way to tell if a product will be the next PointCast or the next iPod…

That’s both not surprising and unsettling.

Imagine how the VCs must feel.

OK, Microsoft, nearly everyone’s favorite technology whipping boy, has been getting some bad press (too numerous to settle on any one or two), bad news (IBM to go Linux for desktops; OSS databases gaining) and the random bad lawsuit.

Microsoft is feeling the heat from Linux and other OSS, in particular. Not only are Asian countries uniting behind a Linux flavor, but MS has lost Austin, Texas and Israel as MS Office clients.

It seems that every day there is a story that trumpets a MS loss at the hands of either Linux or some other OSS product (noteably, OpenOffice).

You can tell that it’s hurting MS, because it commissioned a study that it is now saying that Windows is cheaper and faster than Linux. OK…

Well, let’s take a step back: The so-called facts (MS paid for study; it’s slanted in their favor, as well) in the study really aren’t that important. What’s important is that MS needed to make the study in the first place and then publish same to much fanfare.

This means Linux is and issue for MS.

Telling.

So, while MS stock is still up and doesn’t look poised to dive, it’s getting hit with some pretty heavy punches. And the company’s current ace in the hole – Longhorn, the latest “bet the company” product (an OS) is a ways off. Gartner just published a report that Information Week sums up as the following:

That’s not good news for MS. Two to four years? How many Internet Years is that? A zillion?

But we are talking about MS. Linux may hurt MS; OSS may actually pull MS off its monopoly pedestal.

But it won’t kill MS – and if MS did die, that would not be a good thing for tech overall.

Why?

Because MS still matters:

• MS makes great tools: It’s like I get paid for saying this. But it’s true – they do. Visual Studio, MS SQL Server (a user-friendly face to essentially a Sybase DB core), MS Office with its tight integration. Outlook – the scourge of many anti-Billies – is a killer app. Over the years, I’ve read many articles by tech folk who hate MS but admit that they won’t switch off Windows until they can get an Outlook clone. (With Apple and Ximian, this is now possible). Outlook is a tool. The standard others copy (without the security holes, agreed).
• MS has $$$ in the bank: Never underestimate deep pockets. It buried Netscape, eclipsed Apple’s Quicktime and RealNetworks audio/video (yep, one of the lawsuits), has done battle with Nintendo and Sony in the game box war, and has a reputation for buying what it cannot kill…and then killing it, if that suits the suits.
• MS has been amazingly wrong before and recovered: Remember the whole MS damn near missing the Internet fiasco? Bill Gates turned around a big-ass company in short time to address a company-demise threat. He or his henchmen could well do the same against the new nemesis: OSS.
• MS has a bunch of smart people: For every Ballmer jumping around like a Ritalin-deprived monkey, there are a hundred pretty much normal folks looking at stuff and making smart decisions. Yes, they are normal folks. Just smarter than normal, in different ways as needed for their job. For example, take Robert Scoble, the Longhorn evangelist. He’s promoting the hell out of Longhorn, and putting a good face on MS (putting a face/name on MS) with his Scobleizer Weblog. I don’t know if he’s a smart guy, a good programmer, a good businessman…but everyone reads him. Free publicity, and he freely dings MS and touts its strengths. Even if he is a schmuck, this is smart. Be it Gates/Ballmer/Scoble/someone else, somebody has made this happen and/or realized a good thing when it happened. Smart stuff.
• MS is starting to “get it”: Witness Robert Scoble, above. Embrace a tool that works and make it work to your advantage. While I personally believe Scoble believes what he writes and all that, it doesn’t matter: It’s a brilliant move, and generates lots of (overall) friendly buzz for MS.
• MS is everywhere and integrated: I guess this is two points (installed base and integration), but – to me – they are tightly…integrated. MS everywhere: Today, this is a given. Get over it. This leads to the integration issue: At the simplest level, would you install Word and Lotus 123 instead of Word and Excel? Uh, no. The integration is powerful; the bundling (even if illegal) is great. And if you are an all-MS shop, life (in some ways) is easier: Same help desks, same behavior in apps, knowledge that if you have MS backend and MS frontend all should be relatively OK…that’s the stuff that keeps CEO sleeping soundly every night. Damn the cost; just don’t give me any surprises! (Such as, “uh, the free OSS product we want to use doesn’t support [pick feature] in [pick application]”. With MS, the integration points are spelled out and there is little (OK – less) guessing.
• MSCE: Yeah, certification can be a good thing and all that, but … whatever. However, if you hire a MSCE, this droid will be able to do roughly 75% of the stuff you need on your all-MS system (front and back ends). Not the same for OSS. Sure, I can do a LAMP app. So, I need to know: Linux, Apache, mySQL (or Postgres) and PHP and/or Perl. These are FOUR different items. The MS solution – Windows Server vX.x, IIS, SQL Server, ASP – are all integrated. Same types of tools (learn one, can figger out the others) and tight hooks. Like it or not, the concept is compelling. One dude can handle this; folks who are mySQL savvy don’t necessarily grok Postgres, for example. Same type of tool (DB), but different in many ways. MS owns integration, for the most part. Again, CEOs can sleep.
• TCO: For those unclear, TCO = total cost of ownership. While Linux and other OSS tools are generally considered to have a low TCO – because they are either free or very low cost – there are the other intangibles (support needed, support available, admin skillsets etc). Depending on your politics, TCO for MS can be lower or higher than for OSS. Let’s leave that as that – the issue is that the damn bean counters want hard numbers, and MS has them. OSS doesn’t (because, for one reason, the OSS replacement for MS is a bunch of apps etc, not one company’s unified offerings). While OSS may well have a lower TCO, well…prove it: That’s what CEOs will say. They want the guarantee that what they sign off on is what the cost will be. Sure, MS is frickin’ expensive, but it’s understood what you’ll get, what’ll take to maintain it and so on. With OSS, you get low, low upfront costs…but…ah, the “but…” Who knows if you’ll need to use expensive middleware to connect with an old Exhange server, or hire an OSS admin on top of your NT admins and so on. That’s the crap the suits hate – the “surprise!” costs. They’d rather pay up the nose up front and be able to budget this. This is huge, and why OSS gets put aside by management types. It doesn’t work the way they want – and they are the ones paying for it, so…guess who often wins?
• Personnel: This is related to the preceding point. For companies looking to move to OSS from a MS environment, understand that it’ll not be a MS-today, MS-Free-tomorrow situation. There will either be a (potentially lengthy) migration period or an expected perpetual dual-environment situation. Usually, MS personnel (NT admins, say) are not qualified to handle the OSS needs. So, as part of the transition/melding, personnel have to be added or retrained. In either case, this is expensive. People are way more expensive than hardware/software. This is just a reality. If you save $XX on OSS but have to hire another body to help support it, well, you just spent way over $XX in all likelihood. This is part of the TCO equation many overlook. There is also the personnel friction factor – the NT types won’t like this new-fangled stuff (as OSS folks wouldn’t like being forced to coexist with/maintain MS ware.) You’re going to ostracize or lose some employees. Again, this is expensive. Bean counters hate this…

After a fairly mild December, January has come in with a vengance here in the Chicago area.

A dump of ~ 8 inches of snow Sunday, and today bitter cold: Wind chills currently at about -30.

The house is making all its contracting wood noises, and some are damn loud.

Is it summer yet??

As noted by Dan Gillmor, today is the 20th Anniversary of the founding of GNU (Gnu’s Not Unix).

Dan pretty much sums up my thoughts on all this:

• GNU’s founder – Richard M. Stallman (RMS) – is not to everyone’s taste.
• RMS’ message – software wants to be free – is even a little hard for Linux kernel coders to take.
• Agree with RMS or not, the world would be much poorer without the benefits we’ve all reaped thanks to the founding of GNU, the start of the free/open-source software movement. Linux, Postgres, PHP, Apache…

Happy B-Day, indeed.

The thought struck me about a year ago – and then I promptly filed it in my mental recycle bin – but I have ressurected some thoughts about the next killer app: A tool that can do for photos what tools such as Word, Perl & Python do for text strings.

Think about it – Google has a nice image search, but it is incredibly weak. All picutures searched are really text searches: Looking at the image name, a description (where available) or the page context where the image is embedded.

Image search has not progressed beyond associated text searches (and, therefore, storage and/or organization of same is done by associated text means).

What I’m envsioning – and, no I’ve no idea of how to do this – is a tool that can catalog/identify a picture by its contents: It will be able to determine that a photo/graphic is an image of a vase, even if the image is on a page devoted to auto parts and is named doggie.jpg.

The implications for such a tool are enormous, not the least of which are the following:

• Image searches can be supplemented by textural tools – as today – but the primary search should be of the image itself. So a search for “vase” will find the doggie.jpg image.
• This means that images can be cataloged in some manner, and stored with this image-specific information. With this type of information – much like text information in a database – an image can, for example, resided anywhere on a user’s hard drive but be part of a “Family Pictures” album, which contains pictures from all over the hard drive. The organization will handled by the image metadata (potentially databased) and not by the system file stucture (i.e., no /my_pictures/family_pictures)
• This metadata will allow many-to-many relationships between images/grouping heirarchies. For example, there is no need to have a copy of the “mydog.jpg” for it to be included in two galleries (mypets and family_pictures, for example). While this can be handled with a database and some logic today – by assigning this image to two different buckets – the metadata will create the associations seamlessly.
• As the software improves, it can be made to learn, much like a Baysian spam filter. It could learn that I don’t want non-jpg images in certain galleries and so on.

OK, even beyond the tough-nut-to-crack of how to figure out what an image is by the image itself there are other obstacles.

• Text is text – the only weirdness is different alphabets. With Unicode, some overhead but doable. But there is no single Unicode for images: A jpeg is a vastly different beast than a vector graphic. And what of 2-D image vs. a 3-D one?
• If you treat an animated GIF or Flash graphic as a single graphic (do you? good question), we’ve added another dimension to the image: time. Again, how to capture and represent that?
• Following from above, MPEG, MOV and so on are essentially images with a time element. Will these be included in the tools to analyze graphics?
• How is a picture analyzed to get it’s data and metadata? Is the image’s text or binary code analyzed, or is the image somehow scanned to get its properties?
• How does this handle ASCII text? While a vestige of the text-only Web/Internet, it’s art that it actually text. And it makes no sense as text; how about as a text-based graphic?
• Will there emerge some standard representational container for image? I.e., an image is cataloged by color depth, type, image subject, dimensions (2-4) and so on? Probably, but this will probably only emerge after a couple of methods of gathering and storing the data have been in use for some time, and will lead to some sort of standards war, like the one DVD read/write format issues.
• What will the atomicity of the data be? For example, a picture of a football player. Will the data be able to see just the football player (potentially the location), or will it also recognize and store that this image has two arm, two legs, a football, and the jersey number “6”? These would be powerful filters, but tough to do, I assume.

I know little about processing of images – even the basics – so I could be barking up a dangerous tree, or I could be wishing for something that already, in some form, exists.

I know stenography is a well-studied field, and I would expect that a lot of what I’m seeing to be related to work in this field. However – again – I know little about it, so I may be preaching to the choir.

I guess that I’m just getting better and better at search/text manipulation and all that, and I’m getting to better understand what it possible and (currently) is not. This all just lights up my mental bulb, saying that the next avenue to work on in a similar manner is non-text data: graphics.

Just wait ’till it comes. It’ll rock your world.

And you read it here first….

There was an interesting article in IT Manager’s Journal published yesterday, talking about MS’s Longhorn and Linux/OSS.

While there are many quotable quotations in this article – for example, the author speculates that Longhorn will never ship – here is the paragraph that got me thinking:

It was interesting to contemplate this stripped-to-the-basics message. While things were different in the past (sorta), today’s Microsoft has only its monopoly to thank for its past (war chest) and present success (continued large sales due to upgrades and so on).

However, this article missed a couple of key points:

• For Microsoft, Windows/Longhorn is a means, not an end: MS makes profits by tying highly profitable products such as Office, Visual Studio, SQL & Exchange Servers to the OS. These products are the end. So while the battlefield may be OS – Window/Longhorn vs. Linux, for example – the spoils of the war, for MS, are the apps that sit on top of the OS.
• MS makes great tools: While the company is known for its embrace and destroy tactics, the few products it has actually done itself are best described as tools: Visual Studio, SQL Server (really a nice suite of tools on top of Sybase code) and so on.

So what exactly does this mean for this article and for MS vs. OSS in general?

It means that MS has some wiggle room. MS could leverage its tools skills to enter the OSS market in a way that’s completely separate from their current proprietary offerings. So it could be spun as an expansion, not a concession.

An example I see as a prime MS target is the Postgres database. This is a database that is far superior to the far more popular mySQL database; Postgres is really on par with Oracle in terms of functionality and ANSI/ACID compliance and so on than mySQL, that’s for sure.

The new UnitedLinux distribution is supposed to come with Postgres as the default database, not mySQL (mainly because of the licenses under which each is distrubuted – actually, the mySQL developer tools are the issue, I think).

Now, currently mySQL has many more and far superior tools than Postgres – so here’s a wide open market for MS to come in, build a low-cost proprietary tool as an “Enterprise Manager” for Postgres. As long as MS doesn’t…well, act like MS and get their undies in a knot over licensing agreements (cost per seat, single-user license blah blah), they could shortly own the lower-end (non-Oracle/DB2) *nix market, without having to touch the actual database code. Obviously, if they were smart they would do an IBM and fund and support the Postgres movement…

And this would not really cut into their basic offerings – yes, some would abandon SQL Server and do Linux/Postgres instead, but right now the market is starting to shift, why not be there to establish a beachhead? Hell, I’d pay $100 for a good, solid Postgres front end (hint: Should be versions for Linux and Windoze; client may differ from server OS).

It’s an interesting thought, and a way for MS to test the OSS waters without really admitting that they are getting cold feet on Windows/Longhorn.

And this would benefit MS in two other ways, if done correctly:

• Would make MS a little more friendly to the OSS community (though many would consider this a threat, as well). If done correctly, MS could keep the tool proprietary (but low cost), but have MS developers dedicated to help Postgres efforts (a la RedHat/IBM with Linux). It would be in MS’s best interest, as well.
• Would give this area of MS a good look at OSS, and any learning experience is a good thing. Might help them in other areas, as well.

Will this happen? I doubt it, but I still think this would be a brilliant move.

And dammit, I want a good Postgres tool! Command line is fine, but sometimes it’s nice to have an IDE.