Microsoft May Lose Some Fair-Weather Friends

I read the news of the release of Microsoft Security Essentials with some amusement.

One reason for my amusement is the notion that an operating system should require a separate product to ensure its security instead of having security built into its design.

The other reason is the anticipation of the impact this will have on that group of parasites in the Windows ecosystem. I'm talking about the makers of anti-virus software.

For a long time now, these companies have been less-than-honest players in the industry, revelling in the fact that the inherent vulnerabilities in Windows have given them a steady income stream and acting like they have the best interests of the customer at heart, when in fact they have always fought true advances in computer security that would have put them out of business.

The FUD from these players against Linux has been astounding. A common refrain is that "Linux is only secure because no one uses it. When its profile rises, hackers and malware writers will turn their attention to it." Really? How come IIS used to attract a disproportionate share of web server attacks in spite of Open Source Apache having twice its market share at the time? Surely it's badly-designed systems that invite attack.

These folk even try and sell anti-virus software for Linux! This would certainly fool people who don't realise that Linux itself is the best anti-virus software you can install on your computer. I haven't been hit by malware since 1997, when I first installed Slackware Linux on my PC.

So what will Microsoft's announcement of free anti-virus protection do to the likes of McAfee and Symantec? While users will probably be going, "It's about time," I can imagine a very different reaction at these companies.

I'm not shedding any tears, though.

Will Windows Become a Drain on Microsoft?

A friend just pointed me to the latest blog posting of Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Titled "Will the Java Platform Create the World's Largest App Store?", the post reveals a side of the Java platform I hadn't much thought about. I suspect not many people are aware of the revenue model that the Java runtime has created for Sun. Google and Yahoo! (I reckon they're the companies Schwartz refers to) obviously find it worthwhile to pay Sun for the opportunity to reach out to the billion users of the Java runtime.

Three observations I can make immediately:

1. Microsoft ironically did Sun a favour by trying to corrupt Java in the mid-nineties. This caused Sun to bypass Microsoft and go direct to the user's computer. That's what has now resulted in the happy situation of Sun being able to negotiate effectively with the search giants without having to cut Microsoft in on the deal.

2. Oracle probably has a financial reason to buy Sun after all :-).

3. I can now understand another motivation for Google to innovate Android. With Android, Google can be in the position that Sun now occupies as gatekeeper to a billion users' eyeballs. Like Sun cut Microsoft out of the negotiation, Google can cut Sun out with a simpler licensing deal (for the Java VM) and lock onto a growing revenue stream instead. But they may have to share their profits with the owners of the hardware platform.

This line of thinking leads me to a conclusion that is very bad news for Microsoft. If I was an executive at Nokia, I would be talking to Google about getting a share of the ad revenues that Google will surely get through widespread penetration of Android. Armed with a likely deal of that nature, I would then approach Microsoft to work out something similar. Microsoft will probably be in for a shock. Rather than be able to charge hardware vendors for the privilege of licensing Windows, they would be asked to pay rents to those vendors (and their telco partners) for the privilege of reaching millions of customer eyeballs. If Microsoft doesn't play ball, the phone vendors can simply switch to Android. It's not like the PC platform where users have been dog-trained to demand Windows. Even a zero-licence fee Windows won't be good enough in the mobile device market.

I read an article recently that speculated Microsoft was cutting Windows licence fees to the bone to make it viable on Netbooks, and the article then went on to say it was no wonder Microsoft was shedding staff. Now, if OEMs start expecting Microsoft to pay for them to use Windows, the job losses at Redmond will only mount.

All because of a little operating system called Linux, and an open platform called Java (that together go to make up the base platform for Android).

It's wonderful what a bit of competition will do.

Intel's Turn at Monopoly

It's about time. I've been wondering where all the competition watchdogs have been the last few years. Surely the recent dominance of Intel-based computers over AMD wasn't due to product superiority!

At last, the European Union has woken up and taken Intel to task for abusing its monopoly. And how! 1 billion Euros should hurt even a company raking in monopoly profits.

I hope that with increasing regulatory oversight, prices of hardware and software will fall even lower.

Microsoft had better take note, because there's surely a similar level of monopoly arm-twisting going on in the Netbook market. At price points like $300, there's no way a Windows Netbook can be cheaper than a Linux-based one when taking into account OS licence fees. In a competitive market, OEMs would be scrambling to shave off every possible dollar from the price of their offerings. Yet, it's very rare to find a Linux-based Netbook even today. Surely it's not the lack of user-friendliness of Linux. Check out Ubuntu today. Surely it's not the lack of applications for Linux. Take the most popular application, the office suite. Linux comes bundled with OpenOffice. You have to pay extra for MS-Office. How do Windows-based Netbooks even sell? How? How??

I'm waiting for the new US administration to follow the EU in returning to a tough stand against monopolies.

When the playing field is level and fair, I believe we will soon see $50 Netbooks running either Intel or AMD chips. And Microsoft will go bankrupt.

AMQP Lurches Towards Completion

I really mean the word "lurches" that I used in the title of this post. I've been following the AMQP specification since the 0.8 version, and there have been more dramatic twists and turns in this than in an old Perry Mason novel. (In the latest twist, they seem to have dropped the very concept of an Exchange, a mainstay of previous versions).

I don't believe the latest version of the spec is available (I would dearly love to have a read), but the working group met recently in San Diego, and the materials presented are here.

My overall reactions are these:

1. We really do need an industry-standard messaging protocol to match the capabilities of proprietary products like IBM's MQ and TIBCO's EMS. These two vendors have built their hugely profitable businesses at the expense of customers who have nowhere else to go. The commoditisation that has lowered prices in other areas of distributed computing (TCP/IP for networking, HTTP for web, SMTP for email, etc.) has simply not occurred in enterprise messaging. AMQP aims to rectify that. All I can say is, "It's about time".

2. I note with amusement that Microsoft has joined the AMQP bandwagon. Nothing like a lack of market share to elicit good behaviour from Microsoft ;-)

3. As I said, I don't have access to the latest spec, but I know that an intermediate version had dropped support for streaming communications and file transfer. If these are still not part of the spec, I believe that's a huge mistake. An enterprise messaging protocol must natively support these significant aspects of distributed computing, otherwise the protocol as a whole will fail to pass muster in spite of its excellence in other areas.

4. I don't know what the AMQP Working Group is thinking, but I believe that the main competition for AMQP is not IBM and TIBCO but HTTP and REST. Whenever I talk to REST afficionados about AMQP, the response is a big ho-hum. "What can AMQP do that we can't already do with HTTP?" is the response. Asynchronous notification? Just use XMPP for that. Security? SSL is good enough. And so on. The AMQP Working Group should co-opt a particular breed of REST expert - one who understands the value of resource-orientation without being wedded to HTTP. I believe that if we can define an application protocol on top of the transport protocol that AMQP is (by usefully constraining it with special verbs, headers and status codes), we will have a more capable architectural style than REST, one which includes native support for event notification, end-to-end security, reliable message delivery, transactions, file transfer, streaming communications and process coordination. Rohit Khare's ARRESTED style can become a reality.

Is anyone listening?

Google Chrome - The Promise

I'm excited about Google Chrome, the newest browser on the block, even though I haven't used it yet.

How come? Well, I use Linux at home, and Google hasn't seen fit to release a Linux version of Chrome yet...

Still, I am excited.

But do we really need yet another browser? Well yes, I think Chrome is important for at least a couple of reasons.

1. It's high time Netscape's original vision of the browser as an application platform was realised. Our current generation of browsers is architecturally hobbled. Chrome implements the behind-the-scenes improvements required for a browser that has ambitions of being a true application platform. See this tech-friendly explanation of what these improvements are.

2. It's high time Microsoft's browser market share received another blow. For those who think Microsoft has begun to play nice in the web standards space, think again. They're up to their old dirty tricks once more. Anyone whose employer has deployed Sharepoint will know what I mean. There are heaps of Sharepoint features that don't work in Firefox. You're forced to use IE if you have Sharepoint. We learn once again that it's dangerous to give Microsoft control of both ends of the Web. Apache is slipping. And Firefox isn't enough. I hope Chrome provides enough buzz to draw users away from IE.

For all the coolness of Chrome, there are still important features missing. The obvious one for me is E4X support. How can an application platform not have native support for XML manipulation? We live in a SOA world, don't we? We have to deal with business logic in the form of services, right? So what's with the lack of XML support? I certainly hope this is a temporary issue, because I believe the application platform of the future must support SOFEA, and without XML support, it's just not going to cut it.

Of course, these are early days, so the glass is really half-full. Good on ya, Google!

DRM is Well and Truly Dead

The death sentence on DRM was pronounced more than 6 months ago when EMI and Apple joined hands to break the music industry's cartel and drop DRM from the products they sold. Now the beast is well and truly dead. The last (and the dirtiest) of the big four music labels (Sony) has finally joined EMI, Warner and Universal in dropping support for DRM.

Yesss!!!

And as I wondered in April last year, where does this leave Microsoft? Vista runs like a dog compared to XP partly on account of DRM and the other anti-user "security" features it's bloated with. Well, now that DRM is a waste of time, why bother upgrading to Vista (even if you did like handcuffs)? These handcuffs don't even work!

I was very worried at a certain point in time that the intellectual property pendulum had swung so far to the right that some music industry executives even had the nerve to say in public that people skipping ads on TV were "stealing". The cartel is still dangerous, but the death of DRM has surely hurt them.

It gives me great pleasure to see the world slowly but surely changing for the better.

John Howard - gone. DRM - gone. George W Bush - going. Microsoft ...