Archive for the ‘Microsoft’ Category
Ibibo Pliggs it
Ibibo Labs has a link to one of their new products under testing, a Digg-clone running on Pligg, called Newscola. Strangely, for all of Nasper’s technology muscle, MIH had to use a freely available software to push the product out. Now, I don’t have any problems using open source or free software, but the mistake that most companies make is in rushing to the market just to launch the product, without any thought given to how it would integrate with their existing systems. Ibibo’s other services run on .Net and IIS, while Pligg is a LAMP product and there is no common login. I can forsee that at some point a poor developer will end up having to write hacks into Pligg’s authentication module to integrate the regular Ibibo login into the system or migrate the system wholesale to .Net, which is such a ridiculous waste of time.
Seeding in Word
Via Paidcontent: Mahesh Murthy backed fund, called Seedfund, has now been seeded, apparently by Google and is open now for business. If you have a business plan, please rush it to them, though from my experience most Indian start ups lack severely when it comes to having even a telescopic view of making a profit from what they do. Interestingly, the rather bland single-page website seems to have been composed in Word 2003, with the author specified in the source as Mahesh himself. The document has undergone two changes and the final update was made by a Sanjeev. I guess it would not be the best of ideas to create webpages in Microsoft Word for most tasks, unless you want to expose all such data to the public.
Google is about to die.. here we go again
Mitch Ratcliffe writes: IBM (IBM) enjoyed 30 years of dominance. Microsoft (MSFT) 14 years. That suggests that the half-life of the value of market dominance is falling by more than 50 percent in each “age” of computing. Extrapolating from that trend, if we can call it that based on only two ages of computing, Google in 2007 has a year or two of dominance left.
Part of the problem with trying to predict Google’s ‘soon-to-come’ downfall is that most critics don’t have anything back it up with other than “this is so incredulous.” I really don’t think Google’s downfall will be due to click fraud; it is a nasty problem, but even with it, the system works well enough for more people to sign up for the Adwords program and by all means it is still cheaper and better than any conventional means of advertising available these days. And as long as that status quo remains unchanged, Google will remain top of the hill.
Google’s core strength is still its computing platform that gives it a ridiculously low cost/effort barrier to run something of a massive scale. The platform is the paradigm shift that powers the Google behemoth, it will take another similar paradigm shift of usurp it and I have seen nothing of that sort from either Microsoft or Yahoo!
If nothing else, I am bored with the current state of computing and it is hard to believe that we’ve been pretty much stuck with the same concepts and paradigms for the past twenty years. I would really want to experience something totally different before I turn 60 some day. Somebody, please oblige.
The case for a Firefox Gmail client extension
With average payload sizes for the new and Ajaxified and funkalicious free email providers weighing in at upwards of 300KB, is there really a case that can be made for a mail client that can be written as a Firefox extension?
Last I checked, Gmail’s core Javascript component was around 360KB in size, Windows Live Mail was over 400KB and while I have not checked out the new Yahoo! Mail beta, I’d be surprised if it was any lighter than the other two.
I have nothing against massive Javascript files being pulled down from servers with every new browser session (Gmail does it, so does Windows Live Mail and I can’t understand why they are not ever cached), but it is highly improbable that the core is changed five times in a day, necessitating this data transfer. And what’s worse, for that additional data transfer, you don’t get anything different.
It is the same UI, the same functionality, while the only data being transferred should ideally be the message content and message counts. Mind you, I am not making the case for a full fledged email client. I am taking more about something on the lines of the Gmail mobile client that already has the UI loaded within the application, saving you from downloading the same data over and over again.
The extension angle is not a silver bullet though. I can’t ever see a Microsoft doing a Firefox extension or even a plug-in for Internet Explorer. They already Windows Live Mail Desktop, which has a terribly confusing positioning as it is. Last thing they’d want is to have a Windows Live Mail Desktop Lite. Yahoo! might not want to do it because of the money they paid to acquire the IP required to power their beta product.
That leaves us with Google, which has a history of going off the beaten track with product development and features. But an XPI road to a client is not without problems, some of which read like this:
1) Protecting Proprietary code: From what I’ve seen there is no way to encrypt the source code of an XPI. You do have closed source XPIs, but they are not the same as the code not being available. That said, all the Ajaxy interfaces use Javascript that’s not obfuscated, at least to the degree where it is not possible to dig out the source.
2) Encryption: Not really an issue. You can very comfortably pass back and forth the XML/JSON messages over an HTTPS connection.
3) User experience: This one is a bit of a killer. A lot of normal users don’t often update their XPIs. You can always write in hooks that would disable functionality after a version check that returns a true value. While for the bulky Javascript approach all users get the latest UI, whether they like it or not.
4) Tough to replicate on IE: I would love to believe that there is no business angle to this, but that’s not the case. With Firefox adoption still in the sub 30% levels, it is important to have Internet Explorer support for any product you are looking to be consumed by the masses. It sucks, most of life does, so just get used to it and move on.
Thoughts, anyone?
Is Microsoft ignoring the mainstream media server space?
Mainstream media publications may not be a high value market for Microsoft, but the segment scores very high as far as visibility and perception go. Who would really not love to have a “Powered by” label on a high volume traffic website like the New York Times, as a showpiece for their product? What you are going to read is by no means a scientific or foolproof way of coming to any conclusion. It is based on the headers that the server returns and Netcraft coming in as the fallback option when faced with the ‘unknown’ server signature.
The list is broken down into three parts. The first is a list of the websites of the top twenty newspapers in America. The second is a smaller listing of European publications. The third is a list of publications from India, because, well that’s where I come from.
The US List
USA Today
IIS5 & BigIp
The Wall Street Journal
IBM WebSphere Application Server
The New York Times
SunOne Webserver
LA Times
SunOne Webserver
The Washington Post
SunOne Webserver
Chicago Tribune
SunOne Webserver
New York Daily News
Apache
Philadelphia Inquirer
Apache & Akamai
Rocky Mountain News
Netscape Enterprise 4.1
Houston Chronicle
Apache 2.0.x + Akamai
New York Post
Apache 2.0.x
Detrori Free Press
IIS6
Dallas Morning News
Apache 2.0.x
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Apache 1.3.x & Akamai
Boston Globe
Apache 2.0.x
The Star-Ledger
Apache
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Apache 1.3.x
Arizona Republic
Apache 2.0.x
Newsday
SunOne Webserver
San Francisco Chronicle
Apache 1.3.x
Apache: 11
SunOne Webserver: 5
IIS: 2
Websphere Application Server: 1
Netscape Enterprise: 1
Oracle Application Server: 0
Java Server Pages: 0
The European List
International Herald Tribune
Apache
Le Monde
Apache & Akamai
The Jerusalem Post
Java Server Pages & Akamai
Der Spiegel
Apache 1.3.x
El Pais
Apache & Akamai
Corriere Della Sera
Apache 2.0.x
The Guardian
Apache
The Independent
Oracle-Application-Server-10g
The Sun
Apache 1.3.x
The Mirror
Apache 1.3.x
BBC News
Apache
South China Morning Post
Netscape Enterprise 3.6
Apache: 9
SunOne Webserver: 0
IIS: 0
Websphere Application Server: 0
Netscape Enterprise: 1
Oracle Application Server: 1
Java Server Pages: 1
The Indian List
NDTV
IIS5 & Akamai
Rediff
Apache 2.0.x & Akamai
Indiatimes
IIS6 & Akamai
Hindustan Times
Netscape Enterprise 6.0
The Hindu
Apache 2.2.x
CNN-IBN
Apache 2.2.x
CNBC TV18-India
Apache 2.2.x
Sify.com
Apache 2.0.x
Mumbai Mirror
IIS6
The Indian Express
Apache 2.2.x
Mid Day
IIS6
The Pioneer
IIS5
Tehelka.com
IIS4
WebDunia.com
IIS5
The Telegraph
SunOne & ASP
Malayala Manorama
IIS6 & Akamai
Business Standard
Apache 2.2.x
Apache: 7
SunOne Webserver: 1
IIS: 9
Websphere Application Server: 0
Netscape Enterprise: 1
Oracle Application Server: 0
Java Server Pages: 0
The Final Count
Apache: 27
IIS: 14
SunOne: 6
Netscape Enterprise: 3
Websphere Application Server: 1
Oracle Application Server: 1
Java Server Pages: 1
Couple of interesting observations:
- 3 out of 20 in the US use a CDN (Akamai)
- 3 out of 12 in the Europe chart use a CDN (Akamai)
- 4 out of 18 in India use a CDN (Akamai)
- Sun is impressive with its pitch in US, but non existent in Europe and India (with the exception one site which is running ASP via SunOne).
- No Apache 2.2.x in the US list
- IIS does well in India
- Netscape Enterprise is still around from version 3.6 to 6.0
- Help! Somebody out there still uses IIS4 on a live website. Line them up and shoot them!
One of the main reasons why this might not be a high value market for Microsoft is that it has become more or less the norm for media websites with huge traffic to get on the Akamai CDN these days than to scale vertically or horizontally to serve the surge in traffic. In fact, some websites on the list run on ancient five to six-year-old servers, running the origin servers for Akamai. From that point of view, Microsoft has little to gain because these guys are not buying new licenses for new CPUs or new servers.
Another interesting trend is the use of acceleration and caching devices like BigIp and Netscaler, that used to be the domain of major ecommerce operations. It is hard to predict and tune your infrastructure in a media set up. The traffic patterns are unpredictable and after a while you really don’t want to break you head over your squid clusters and nothing works as well as a well set-up acceleration device that does TCP offloading.
More to come later.
p.s: The US top-20 list has been sourced from here.
