Autumn cleaning

Although I don't want to use this blog as a personal diary, I found I had to share this particular event with the outside world nonetheless. As mentioned in my personal profile, I am quite a bit of a business magazine addict. Ever since graduation from London Business School in July 1998, I subscribe to both BusinessWeek and The Economist. "So what", you might say, "big deal!". It is not so much, however, that I subscribe to these magazines, but that I held on to every single issue since August 1998!! In these thousands of pages, you could read all about the internet hype, the Millenium, the bursting of the internet bubble, 9/11, the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, Enron, the bombings in London, the rise of India and China and much, much more.

But now I have decided to throw them out. But before I did so, I took a few photos, which you find below. How's that for autumn cleaning?!

Synkronized

Yes, I know the title of this post is misspelled and should read 'Synchronized' instead, but being the creative person I am (...) I just had to include this subtle reference to Jamiroquai's 1999 album by the same name. This post is not about music, however. In my previous post I mentioned that Parallels Desktop for Mac allows me to run alternative operating systems like suse 10.1 and Windows XP in parallel with Mac OSX, without having to reboot. Furthermore, Parallels Tools enable folder and file sharing between Mac OSX and Windows XP. Something Parallels doesn't support is the sharing of bookmarks, cookies, saved passwords and browse history among browsers in different virtual machines. For a true Transparent OS to materialize, however, such synchronization would be required. Enter Google Browser Sync.

This extension for the Firefox browser allows you to synchronize your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers (or virtual machines, for that matter). It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions. Instead of having to export and import bookmarks from one computer to another yourself and maintaining synchronization manually, this extension does all this for you, automatically. But the real benefits come from sharing cookies and passwords and having a single browse history across computers or virtual machines. It is easy to continue a session that you started on another computer, while looking up the URL of that site you visited yesterday while working from your desktop is now possible as well.

Although Google will most likely have developed this extension with sharing across physical computers in mind, its use across multiple virtual machines is illustrative of the kind of synchronization mechanisms needed to turn the Transparent OS into a reality.

Transparent OS

In my previous post, I wrote about the network becoming the computer and the reduced relevance of a computer's OS as more and more applications move online, thus enabled by AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). But although these developments indeed make it less relevant which OS you are running on your computer, it is a given that every computer still needs one. Did I just say 'one'? If current developments around virtualization are any indication, many of us will soon not have just one but multiple OSs running alongside each other, enabling us to work with our favorite applications without having to worry whether or not our system operates under the right OS, i.e. Windows XP, Mac OSX or Linux. This end-state, whereby it is transparent to the user which OS underlies a particular application, I have come to call the 'transparent OS'. Although the industry still has a long road to travel before this state is reached, several developments point in this direction.



As the proud owner of a MacBook Pro with Intel Core Duo processor, I recently installed Parallels Desktop for Mac (RC2). This virtualization software allows me to run Windows XP and Suse Linux 10.1 alongside Mac OSX, without the need to reboot as is required by Apple's own BootCamp. Furthermore, Parallels Tools enables, amongst other things, clipboard synchronization and shared folders between host and guest OSs. This makes that I can use each OS for tasks that it is best suited for; Suse Linux 10.1 for the geeky stuff, Windows XP for the mainstream stuff and Mac OSX for the 'insanely great' stuff! In all honesty, I first and foremost work under Mac OSX but especially in situations where no support for Mac OSX is available (yet), the power (and potential) of the virtualization concept in a consumer context comes to the fore. In the post 'DRM = DRaMa', I mentioned the fact that my ISP provides IP television services, which work with Windows Media Player only. This meant that whenever I wanted use this service, I had to boot up my Dell laptop from work, even if I was working on another, non-Windows computer at the same time. Now, I can work on whatever I need to do on my MacBook Pro, watching some IP TV via Windows Media Player under Windows XP in a separate window on my Mac OSX desktop at the same time. That's progress, don't you think? ;-)

Maybe this example has not yet really convinced you of the validity of my claim that the 'transparent OS' is upon us. In that case, listen to this. It is rumored that Apple may actually incorporate the Windows API in the next version of its own operating system, Mac OSX 10.5. This would mean that users, who are hesitant to upgrade to Vista (Microsoft's own new OS, now due out in 2007) but are looking for a stable and virus-free OS, can buy themselves an Apple computer while still being able to run all their (expensive) Windows XP applications. As said, all this is based on rumors, but if it turns out to be true it sure brings the 'transparent OS' a step closer! So, watch this space!

The Network Is The Computer, Finally

For years, Sun has been proclaiming that "the network is the computer". With the Sun Grid (www.network.com) becoming available in the U.S., this message is no longer pretentious or overblown. Every American with a big computing job and a Paypal account can now buying an hour of computing power for just $1.00. For the time being (?), Sun has to restrict access to U.S. citizens only, as the FBI (or NSA) fear that when such computing power is made available to the wrong people (read: spammers, terrorists,...) it could be turned into a weapon of some sort...

With this first commercial grid becoming available, I believe we get a peek of what the future will look like. Instead of having to invest in powerful hardware themselves, both scientists and start-ups can rely on grids. With massive computing power being available to all at low costs, more and more companies will get involved in data mining, searching for patterns in click streams, purchase behaviors, etc. In his article 'Competing on Analytics' in the January 2006 issue of Harvard Business Review, Thomas H. Davenport already showed how a new breed of competitor like Amazon, Harrah's and Capital One is dominating rivals by amassing and analyzing mountains of data. BusinessWeek, in turn, ran a feature on the increased applicatbility of mathematics, including statistics, in business. One of the world's largest consumer goods companies, Unilever, actually started to experiment with grids a couple of years ago, recognizing their potential value early on.

But apart from computing power, more and more applications are being transferred to the network. AJAX, which stands for 'Asynchronous Javascript and XML', enables a new type of web applications, which already begin to compete with client-based applications like Word and Outlook. So, it will not just be ASP-like offerings like salesforce.com that replace client-side applications, but also innovative services like AJAXwrite, AJAXsketch and Zimbra, which challenge traditional desktop apps like Word, PowerPoint and Outlook.

Hence, with broadband, both wired and wireless, becoming near-ubiquitious, the network may indeed become the computer. At the same time, Scott McNealy is to be considered a true visionary, foreseeing this trend as long as 10 years ago!

Office Perils

Last year, in a post on July 30, title The Power of Open Put To The Test, I mentioned a test I was planning to see how open source productivity tools held up in a consulting environment, where colleagues and clients rely on Microsoft's Office suite. Outcome of this test, which focused primarily on OpenOffice 2.0's compatibility with MS Office, is that while functionality-wise OpenOffice (OO) appears to match MS Office fully, some things still go astray with respect to the conversion of document formats. For example, while the quality of import and export filters in Impress has made a giant leap when compared to previous versions of OO, layouts may still get mixed up a bit when PowerPoint documents are imported.

Another barrier to full-fledged adoption of OO by professionals like me is the lack of support for macros in Excel. Programmed in Microsoft's proprietary Visual Basic it is understandable that OO does not support them, but it also makes that I will never have the required 100% guarantee that Excel models produced by colleagues or clients will function in Calc as intended. And although I strongly discourage colleagues to use macros in the first place - Keep it simple, stupid! (KISS) - it sometimes proves too tempting to resist. Hence, it still is a bridge too far for consultants to rely solely on open source productivity tools for their day-to-day work, especially as most of their clients are likely to use MS Office.

Given these issues, the use of Linux-based laptops by professionals is somewhat problematic as well. While Microsoft does offer Office for Mac, the release of a Linux version of Office is highly unlikely. A more practical work-around would be running MS Office under Wine, a Windows emulator for Linux. However, the fact that Wine is still working towards version 1.0 (currently at version 0.9.8), full compatibility and stability cannot be guaranteed yet. Or you could buy CodeWeavers' CrossOver Office, which allows you to run a broad range of Windows applications under Linux. Finally, one could simply wait until open source projects like OO fully support the Microsoft Office Open XML format, whose specifications were released some time ago. But be warned: you may have to wait forever!

Drucker Revisited

In an earlier post, commenting on the death of Peter F. Drucker, I mentioned that the next book I would read would be one of Drucker's. Although I slipped in some other books first (Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class and The Flight of the Creative Class), I finished Drucker's The Practice of Management from 1954 about two weeks ago. I can now understand why Drucker is often called 'the Guru of Gurus'. Although his language is sometimes somewhat dated (or just typical 50s), he writes about management in a clear and concise way, discussing topics which are still being debated by management writers today. According to Drucker, management is made up of three things, namely managing a business, managing managers and managing worker and work. The work of the manager himself consists of five basic operations:

• Setting objectives
• Organizing
• Motivating and communicating
• Measuring
• Developing people

The Practice of Management is the book in which Drucker introduced Management by Objectives (MBO), which is very much the front runner of Kaplan and Norton's Balanced Scorecard. In essence a tool to establish alignment and implement strategy, it touches upon business architecture, the subject of my own book, as well, although indirectly. In conclusion I can say that I enjoyed reading my first Drucker book and believe that some more will follow in the future.

Google, Don't Be Evil!

Yesterday, Google announced its Google Video Store, which will sell thousands of downloads, including recent television broadcasts of popular CBS shows and professional basketball games, as well as vintage episodes from series that went off the air decades ago. The video providers have the option of offering content on a download-to-own or download-to-rent basis. In contrast to iTunes, Google Video will allow content owners to set their own prices.

Although this is exciting news, I am also a bit worried by this announcement. Google will use its own flavor of DRM (Google DRM) to protect this video content, if its owner desires to do so. This makes that these videos can only be viewed using Google's proprietary viewer and cannot be transferred to any mobile device like Apple's iPod Video. That in itself may be acceptable, but not the fact that Google only supports the Microsoft platform.

Google also announced its Google Pack, a one-stop software package that helps you discover, install, and maintain a wide range of essential PC programs. It contains several Google applications such as Google Earth, Google Picasa, Google ScreenSaver and Google Desktop, as well as several third party applications like the Firefox browser, Norton AntiVirus software and Adobe's Acrobat Reader. But again, the Google Pack is only available for Windows XP users. And although the FAQs of the individual Google applications mention that they might consider Mac support in the future, nothing is said about Linux.

This kind of bugs me, especially because Google is known for running its thousands of servers under Linux and making valuable contributions to the Open Source community. But if even Google chooses to support only the dominant platform, others are unlikely to act differently. As argued in my previous post, such behavior will seriously limit the success of the Linux Desktop. So, for what it is worth I would like to call upon Google to live up to its motto 'Don't be evil' and bring its applications and services to other major platforms (Mac and Linux) as soon as possible, thus enabling true competition at the platform level.

Postscript [12/1/06]: Today, Google released a Mac version of Google Earth, so it may indeed live up to its promise to consider Mac support for its applications in the future.