Browsers

The first is that usage of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has levelled off after a long period of decline. Microsoft says it is increasing but the numbers are too small to say that with confidence. StatCounter global stats for May to July show slight decline for IE (52.83% –> 52.37%) and FireFox (31.54%->30.88%), with Google Chrome the main beneficiary (8.81%->10.32%).

On this blog Chrome has grown from 4.2% to 12.4% in the last year. IE is still declining: 44.9% in July 09, 39.6% in June 10, and 38.2% in July 10.

My guess is that the success of Windows 7 might have brought back a few FireFox users. The interesting story though is where Chrome will be when it stops growing its share. My second guess is that it will be ahead of FireFox, though that is speculative. It is WebKit though, and I think that will be bigger than Mozilla’s Gecko thanks to adoption by Google, Apple, Adobe and others.

Mobile

Next, Google Android. Nielsen reports that it has pulled ahead of Apple iPhone in the US SmartPhone market; both are behind RIM’s Blackberry though that is in steady decline. RIM is announcing Blackberry 9800, the first on OS 6, later today; but I doubt it will disrupt Android’s growth. The developer angle is that Android is now equal to Apple’s iPad/iPhone in strategic importance, which will be a relief to Adobe – Flash runs on Android but not iPhone.

Android owners lack the satisfaction of Apple iPhone owners. 21% of them are eyeing the iPhone for their next upgrade, whereas only 6% of iPhone owners want Android next. Only 42% of Blackberry owners intend to remain loyal. It is all tending to confirm my speculation back in April that Android is the new Windows.

So in two years time, what will be the market share for RIM, Nokia Symbian/MeeGo, Windows Phone, HP Palm WebOS? It will not be easy for any of them.

eBooks

Finally, eBooks. The Kindle vs iPad vs Nook vs Sony is one story; but the bigger one is that the eBook is happening at last. David Carnoy’s recent articles on Amazon give the background. One is an interview with Amazon’s Ian Freed in which the retailer says eBook sales have tripled in the first quarter of 2010 vs that in 2009, and claims 70-80% of the market. Another looks at what Amazon didn’t say. However the market shares work out though, what matters is that screen, battery and wireless technology are now good enough, and publishers and authors willing enough, for eBooks to become mainstream, with huge implications for the media industry.

Related posts:

1. Building for multiple mobile platforms with one codebase
2. Android the new Windows?
3. Google Chrome Mac and Linux arrives – may hurt Firefox more than Safari

New WebKit-Based Browser
Kindle’s new web browser is based on WebKit to provide a better web browsing experience. Now it’s easier than ever to find the information you’re looking for right from your Kindle. Experimental web browsing is free to use over 3G or Wi-Fi.

Amazon pays for the 3G coverage which is available globally. OK, it is monochrome, but since the Kindle also has a neat little keyboard is this now a great deal for blogging, checking Google maps, and so on?

Maybe not. Here’s what the terms and conditions say:

Use of Wireless Connectivity. Your Kindle uses wireless connectivity to allow you to shop for and download Digital Content from the Kindle Store. In general, we do not charge you for this use of wireless connectivity … You may use the wireless connectivity provided by us only in connection with the Service. You may not use the wireless connectivity for any other purpose.

If you are like me you may feel there is some inconsistency between these two statements. Enough to say that from my point of view free global web browsing would be a big incentive to purchase a Kindle; but I suspect that if this is real and turns out to be a popular feature consuming significant data traffic, Amazon will soon find a way to charge for it or turn it off.

It is also interesting to see a smidgen of convergence between the Kindle and more general-purpose slate devices. I am not sure if the Kindle strictly counts as a slate since it has a keyboard, but it certainly has the slate look and feel.

Related posts:

1. First thoughts on Kindle: Amazon’s play for downloadable content
2. Long-term implications of the Kindle
3. Amazon SimpleDB: a database server for the internet

There are nearly 30 companies currently signed up to support OpenStack, including NASA, Citrix, Dell, Intel, AMD and Right Scale, but the big mover here is Rackspace, which says:

On July 19, 2010, we announced that we are opening the code on our cloud infrastructure. That’s big news for us and for the hosting industry in general. The result? Cloud technology will never look back.

The full press release is here. The initial offering is a distributed object store and a virtual machine provisioning engine.

OpenStack is not itself a cloud provider. Rather, it is offering software that lets you build a cloud, either for public or private use. Therefore, it is of immediate use only to large organisations, though for smaller users it might make sense to purchase services from an OpenStack provider since you are protected against lock-in.

The OpenStack cloud is IAAS – infrastructure as a service – offering storage and virtual machine instances. Therefore it is going up against Amazon rather than, say, Salesforce.com or Google App Engine. It is also an open source alternative to Microsoft Azure, which is also available (or will be) for both public and private clouds.

Looking at Right Scale’s comment, it seems that concern about Amazon taking over this market is a key driver behind the initiative:

From the RightScale perspective we will of course continue to support a variety of public and private clouds. We already have basic support for RackSpace’s API, which OpenStack will start out with, and we have a number of implementations under way with Eucalyptus and Cloud.com which we’re looking forward to multiply. At the same time, having many fragmented cloud efforts doesn’t really help build a compelling alternative to Amazon which keep adding incredible new features at a blazing pace. And the industry needs an alternative to Amazon, not because of some problem with AWS, but because in the long run cloud computing cannot fulfill its promise to revolutionizing the way computing is consumed if there aren’t a multitude of vendors with offerings targeting different use-cases, different needs, different budgets, different customer segments, etc. OpenStack promises to build enough momentum to create an exciting cloud offering that is as feature rich as AWS, that is implemented by a number of service providers, like RackSpace, and that enterprises can also run internally, like NASA.

For more information see the OpenStack site.

Related posts:

1. Cloud Computing survey: more fog than cloud
2. UK government’s open source commitment words not deeds says Ingres VP
3. Adobe uses Amazon platform for cloud LiveCycle ES2

According to Ballmer:

about 70 percent of our folks are doing things that are entirely cloud-based, or cloud inspired. And by a year from now that will be 90 percent

I watched the webcast, and it struck me as significant that Ballmer kicked off with a vox pop video where various passers by were asked what they thought about cloud computing. Naturally they had no idea, the implication being, I suppose, that the cloud is some new thing that most people are not yet aware of. Ballmer did not spell out why Microsoft made the video, but I suspect he was trying to reassure himself and others that his company is not too late.

I thought the vox pop was mis-conceived. Cloud computing is a technical concept. What if you did a vox pop on the graphical user interface? or concurrency? or Unix? or SQL? You would get equally baffled responses.

It was an interesting contrast with Google’s Eric Schmidt who gave a talk at last month’s Mobile World Congress that was also a big strategy talk; I posted about it here. Schmidt takes the cloud for granted. He does not treat it as the next big thing, but as something that is already here. His talk was both inspiring and chilling. It was inspiring in the sense of what is now possible – for example, that you can go into a restaurant, point your mobile at a foreign-language menu, and get back an instant translation, thanks to Google’s ability to mine its database of human activity. It was chilling with its implications for privacy and Schmidt’s seeming disregard for them.

Ballmer on the other hand is focused on how to transition a company whose business is primarily desktop operating systems and software to one that can prosper in the cloud era:

If you think about where we grew up, other than Windows, we grew up with this product called Microsoft Office. And it’s all about expressing yourself. It’s e-mail, it’s Word, it’s PowerPoint. It’s expression, and interaction, and collaboration. And so really taking Microsoft Office to the cloud, letting it run in the cloud, letting it run from the cloud, helping it let people connect and communicate, and express themselves. That’s one of the core kind of technical ambitions behind the next release of our Office product, which you’ll see coming to market this June.

Really? That’s not my impression of Office 2010. It’s the same old desktop suite, with a dollop of new features and a heavily cut-down online version called Office Web Apps. The problem is not only that Office Web Apps is designed to keep you dependent on offline Office. The problem is that the whole model is wrong. The business model is still based on the three-year upgrade cycle. The real transition comes when the Web Apps are the main version, to which we subscribe, which get constant incremental updates and have an API that lets them participate in mash-ups across the internet.

That said, there are parallels between Ballmer’s talk and that of Schmidt. Ballmer spoke of 5 dimensions:

• The cloud creates opportunities and responsibilities
• The cloud learns and helps you learn, decide and take action
• The cloud enhances your social and professional interactions
• The cloud wants smarter devices
• The cloud drives server advances

In the most general sense, those are similar themes. I can even believe that Ballmer, and by implication Microsoft, now realises the necessity of a deep transition, not just adding a few features to Office and Windows. I am not sure though that it is possible for Microsoft as we know it, which is based on Windows, Office and Partners.

Someone asks if Microsoft is just reacting to others. Ballmer says:

You know, if I take a look and say, hey, look, where am I proud of where we are relative to other guys, I’d point to Azure. I think Azure is very different than anything else on the market. I don’t think anybody else is trying to redefine the programming model. I think Amazon has done a nice job of helping you take the server-based programming model, the programming model of yesterday that is not scale agnostic, and then bringing it into the cloud. They’ve done a great job; I give them credit for that. On the other hand, what we’re trying to do with Azure is let you write a different kind of application, and I think we’re more forward-looking in our design point than on a lot of things that we’re doing, and at least right now I don’t see the other guy out there who’s doing the equivalent.

Sorry, I don’t buy this either. Azure does have distinct advantages, mainly to do with porting your existing ASP.NET application and integrating with existing Windows infrastructure. I don’t believe it is “scale agnostic”; something like Google App Engine is better in that respect. With Azure you have to think about how many virtual machines you want to purchase. Nor do I think Azure lets you write “a different kind of application.” There is too little multi-tenancy, too much of the old Windows server model remains in Azure.

Finally, I am surprised how poor Microsoft has become at articulating its message. Azure was badly presented at last year’s PDC, which Ballmer did not attend. It is not an attractive platform for small-scale developers, which makes it hard to get started.

Related posts:

1. New HP and Microsoft agreement commits $50 million less than similar 2006 deal
2. Microsoft TechEd 2010 wrap-up: cloud benefits, cloud sceptics
3. PDC day one: Windows in the cloud

Gladinet compares Google and Azure using some other criteria as well. On speed, it gave the edge to Azure but observed that it might just depend which data center was nearest. On SLA, the two seem similar.  On API, it says Azure is easier if you use Visual Studio, but not if you work with “PHP, Ruby or anything other than .NET”.

In another post, Huang has a nice summary of accessing Azure storage from C#.

It’s worth noting that Microsoft Skydrive offers a relatively generous 25GB of storage for free, but there is no way to extend this limit.  There is also no official Skydrive API, though one has been hacked unofficially. Gladinet supports Skydrive too, using either this or the unofficial WebDAV support.

I am a fan of Gladinet. There is a free starter edition, or paid-for with extra features.

Explorer integration is a big deal, since it means any application with a standard open or save dialog can access the files. Imagine for example that you need to upload a document from cloud storage to a web site. Without Explorer integration, you have to extract the file from cloud storage to your local drive, then upload it from there. The same is true of SharePoint, which is why it is unfortunate that Explorer integration is so difficult to get working.

Related posts:

1. Store any type of file in Google Apps – in effect, GDrive
2. SharePoint Explorer View hassles show benefits of cloud storage
3. Windows Azure is too expensive for small apps

Macmillan, one of the "big six" publishers, has clearly communicated to us that, regardless of our viewpoint, they are committed to switching to an agency model and charging $12.99 to $14.99 for e-book versions of bestsellers and most hardcover releases.

We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books. Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it’s reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book. We don’t believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan. And we know for sure that many independent presses and self-published authors will see this as an opportunity to provide attractively priced e-books as an alternative.

While Amazon is focusing on the higher price, what really counts here is who sets the price and how much money goes back to the publisher. It’s not clear to me why any publisher would not do the same as Macmillan, since it is to their advantage.

I am surprised Amazon gave in so easily. Its PR has has been clumsy – first, to withdraw titles from sale thus ensuring strong opposition from frustrated authors, and coming over as a bully; and second, to state so clearly, early in the battle, that “we will have to capitulate” – not language you normally hear from a major corporation.

It is evidence of Apple’s extraordinary power to disrupt markets.

If you missed the background, see yesterday’s post.

Related posts:

1. Apple’s proxy war with Amazon over ebook pricing and market
2. Penguin’s Apple love-in
3. Amazon MP3 store is much cheaper than Apple iTunes

This past Thursday I met with Amazon in Seattle. I gave them our proposal for new terms of sale for ebooks under the agency model which will become effective in early March. In addition, I told them they could stay with their old terms of sale, but that this would involve extensive and deep windowing of titles. By the time I arrived back in New York late yesterday afternoon they informed me that they were taking all our books off the Kindle site, and off Amazon. The books will continue to be available on Amazon.com through third parties.

“Windowing” means delaying availability, to allow a window of time during which a premium price is charged.

This is a fascinating spat with many implications. The immediate issue: Macmillan wants to raise ebook prices and/or get a bigger cut of Amazon’s selling price.

Macmillan is trying to dictate prices and terms:

Under the agency model, we will sell the digital editions of our books to consumers through our retailers. Our retailers will act as our agents and will take a 30% commission (the standard split today for many digital media businesses). The price will be set the price for each book individually. Our plan is to price the digital edition of most adult trade books in a price range from $14.99 to $5.99. At first release, concurrent with a hardcover, most titles will be priced between $14.99 and $12.99. E books will almost always appear day on date with the physical edition. Pricing will be dynamic over time.

Amazon is unlikely to be content with a miserly 30%. It is used to wholesale terms. Further, according to author Charlie Stross in a must-read post Amazon likes to sublicence Kindle titles, which means it pays even less; in effect just a royalty to the original publisher, “turning the traditional publishers into vestigial editing/marketing appendages.” Amazon wants to keep prices down on Kindle titles to build both the market and Kindle’s dominance.

The stakes must be high for Amazon to take such drastic action, and for Macmillan to risk its relationship with the world’s biggest bookseller. And they are. Ebooks are an increasingly important market; who knows, they may become most of the market eventually – though paper and ink is resilient.

Why has Macmillan chosen this moment to take on Amazon? Apple. The key is in this conversation between Walt Mossberg and Steve Jobs at the launch of the iPad, recorded by Kara Swisher:

In the video, Mossberg asks Jobs about the iBooks application and the price of e-books, and Jobs insists the price will be the same on Apple as on Amazon (AMZN).

“The prices will be the same,” said Jobs, before getting in a little dig at the maker of the Kindle e-reader. “Publishers are actually withholding their books from Amazon, because they’re not happy with it.”

Translation: Apple has big plans for ebooks. Part of its strategy is to win publisher support by offering better terms than the currently get from Amazon, both in terms of pricing flexibility and the size of their share. With breathtaking confidence, Jobs believes that publishers will be able to dictate better terms to Amazon on the basis of what Apple is offering, even though iPad is not yet released, and that the outcome will be price parity.

Macmillan is obediently putting that theory to the test.

So far Macmillan and Apple are winning the PR war. On the face of it, that’s surprising, since Amazon wants to keep prices down. However, withdrawing stock from sale comes over as petulant and bullying, and the move has upset authors like Stross who by the nature of their trade are highly articulate. The reading public is also sympathetic to publishers and authors, perhaps presuming that since most books make a loss, squeezing prices down will not benefit them long-term.

Bizarrely, it is almost the opposite of what happened in music, when it was Apple trying to force the labels to accept fixed pricing. There is less public sympathy for the music industry, thanks to mishandling of DRM and downloads, and a reputation for not giving artists a sufficient share.

Personally I’m cautious about accepting that any party here has the moral high ground. I am sure Apple is making all the noises publishers want to hear right now; but that is because it is a new entrant in the market. If the publishers are canny they will foster a diversity of ebook suppliers, because that is in their best interests long term.

Update: Amazon has capitulated.

Related posts:

1. Amazon gives in to Macmillan thanks to power of Apple
2. New Amazon Kindle with WebKit browser and free 3G internet
3. Long-term implications of the Kindle

Over the next couple of weeks, we are rolling out the ability for Google Apps users to easily upload and securely share any type of file internally and externally using Google Docs. You get 1 GB of storage per user, and you can upload files up to 250 MB in size…Combined with shared folders in Google Docs, the upload feature is a great way to collaborate on files with coworkers and external parties.

Additional storage is available at $0.25/GB/yr according to this post.

Is this “GDrive” – the long-rumoured generic online storage from Google? Pretty much. Note however that Microsoft’s excellent SkyDrive already offers 25 GB of unrestricted online storage for free.

Enterprise customers who use the Premier Edition of Google Apps are also getting this service, but at a higher price: additional storage is $3.50/gb (or €3.00/gb in the EU). This storage is accessible via the Google Documents List Data API, enabling developers to create applications that backup or synchronise files between Google and client devices, and is therefore more comparable to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). Amazon has no free offering but S3 is modestly priced at $0.15 per GB per month, between Google’s consumer and business pricing, though note that Amazon also charges for data transfer.

Once third-parties do their stuff to make this look like any other network folder, this looks like a handy new feature. One advantage is that you can store Microsoft Office files in their native format, rather than having to convert them to Google documents with loss of fidelity.

It may also mean less usage for a popular workaround – emailing attachments to yourself in GMail.

Update: post revised to include information on Premier Edition.

Related posts:

1. Google storage 10 times cheaper than Azure – but not as cheap as Skydrive
2. Rentokil Initial adopting Google Apps – largest deployment yet, apparently
3. Windows Azure is too expensive for small apps

Amazon RDS gives you access to the full capabilities of a familiar MySQL database. This means the code, applications, and tools you already use today with your existing MySQL databases work seamlessly with Amazon RDS. Amazon RDS automatically patches the database software and backs up your database, storing the backups for a user-defined retention period. You also benefit from the flexibility of being able to scale the compute resources or storage capacity associated with your relational database instance via a single API call. As with all Amazon Web Services, there are no up-front investments required, and you pay only for the resources you use.

The cost starts at $0.11 per hour for a small database instance (1.7GB RAM, 1 virtual core, 64-bit), increasing in stages as more power is required. The engagingly-titled “Quadruple Extra Large DB Instance” offers 68GB RMA and 8 virtual cores, at $3.10 per hour.

In addition, you pay for database storage at $0.10 per GB-month, $0.10 per 1 million I/O requests, $.10 per GB transferred in, and $0.17 per GB transferred out.

That’s a worrying collection of charges, but the usual logic applies: if you need a hefty database server for a defined period, say to cover a special event, this will work out more cost-effective than installing your own servers.

You can also install MySQL or other database servers on general-purpose Amazon EC2 instances, but this pre-built solution looks attractive.

Microsoft started its cloud database initiative with a preview of SQL Server Data Services, offering a limited database API more like Amazon SimpleDB. Then Microsoft decided to offer full SQL Server on its Azure cloud. However, Azure is still a Community Tech Preview, and during the interim period Amazon has come up with its own fully relational solution.

Related posts:

1. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud gets persistent storage
2. Cloud Computing survey: more fog than cloud
3. PDC day one: Windows in the cloud

Adobe is also announcing the ability for enterprise customers to deploy LiveCycle ES2 as fully managed production instances in the cloud, with 24×7 monitoring and support from Adobe, including product upgrades. LiveCycle ES2 preconfigured instances will be hosted in the Amazon Web Services cloud computing environment.

This is neat: Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud handles the infrastructure, but customers get fully supported hosted services from Adobe.

Maintaining a global infrastructure for high-volume cloud services is hugely expensive, which restricts it to a few very large companies. Using Amazon removes that requirement at a stroke. I wonder if Adobe also uses Amazon for Acrobat.com – hosted conferencing and document-based collaboration – or plans to do so?

Related posts:

1. Pros and cons of Adobe’s LiveCycle services in the cloud
2. OpenStack takes on Amazon with open source cloud computing
3. Amazon fails to address interoperability concerns; Flexiscale plans cloud platform