The adventures of Coccobill

One of the things that we all loved from the Web was that it allowed, over time, the empowerment of us.
If you want, you can become an actor; you do not need big means, you do not need PR, you do not need to be a famous star. You just behave the way you are, you just express what you think, you just irradiate out of your brain and heart.
So, after the very initial period, we saw the dawn of personal web sites which, then moved to blogs, and then to the myriad of social networking sites. And, in addition, we were finding the possibility to influence (little parts of) the outstanding economy around us, by commenting, putting “stars”, voting. Well, as much (or as little) as the current democracy gives us right, we were (thinking to be) empowered to change the world around us.
We tried to be one of the two variables in the famous Heisemberg’s principle. Our presence, our existence could affect the world around us.

I was thinking to this in these days after the launch of the iPad.
And this evening, in a newspaper, I found a very concise sentence that made me catching what was in my thoughts since a while:

Q: Can the iPad replace a computer?
A: No. An iPad is not a production tool, it is just a consultation tool

eh yes! The main goal of the iPad is to have people to consume information produced elsewhere (and delivered via iTunes, a new “controller” of what should and what should not). Yes, you have the virtual keyboard. But it is undeniable that the goal is to make the iPad a big remote controller, where I have different channels from which I can choose (140K applications).

I have an iPhone and I like its interface. Few months ago I also wrote that “The road paved by the iPhone of having dedicated applications delivered just to the point, remembers us that the new technologies for the web need to exploit the power of the devices on which they run“. Which is true, but only partially true.

I need mashups on the iPhone and the iPad. I need the possibility to express my own creativity and to mix together the information silos that are delivered to me via iTunes. But perhaps this is just what someone does not want us to have.

A couple of months ago, my son was struggling with the old laptop from his elder sister. Old laptop, running the same original Vista since 4 years…. you know what I am talking about, right? Bad, very bad perfomances. The kind of performances where you cannot event enjoy surfing the web….

The teen-ager was not so hot on the fact that his old IT daddy would try to fix something…
…but, once he asked me an opinion on something he was doing and I saw something unexpected on his laptop: “Hey, are you running Chrome?“.

“Yes, dad, it is the only way I can use this old PC“.

My son, for my great disillusion, is not at all a “tech guy”. He just uses the PC, without asking too many questions about how it really works. Internet, MSN, Facebook, Google, Wikipedia….. He just “has an hotmail mail account” (despite I have a domain name and an hosted IMAP server… in my naivety I thought he would have found cool to have an email address containing his family name after the “@”….).

As a person with a minimum of “computer culture”, I would have thought to Firefox first…. Why? because …
…Because…
…Because….
ah yes, because it is cool and it has a lot of handy exstensions (could I leave without Foxear, Scribefire, Tmmy and Session Manager ?)

Indeed, I have Chrome as well (and I wrote a long article on it and some other posts). But I do not use as my daily gateway to the Internet world.

I just use Chrome via the “Chrome Applications”. For instance I created one for BluePages so that, when I need to find the BP record for a collegue, I quickly fire the Chrome BluePages icon… et voilà, I quickly get to where I need.

So, I have Chrome and I seldomly use it. I would have never thought to get Chrome as THE ALTERNATIVE to IE !

But my son, who “just uses” the PC… well he installed Chrome and uses it everyday (by the way, at Christmas he got a brand new laptop and, guess what, he still uses Chrome even if the PC is very very fast…)

Why ?
Well, at the end because of the same reason I created my Chrome Bluepages application: speed!

I (the father, the “pseudo-geek” or the “once-the-geek”) use Firefox because I like the extensions and because I got used to it. Actually it was “cool” in 2003 when I started using it and, in reality, the only extension I could not avoid is Foxear. But, sort of “I choose Firefox because I like the container in which I play“.

I think my son does not care about the container. He cares about the content. And the quickest way to get to the content is Chrome. Full stop.

I thought to this post when I read this article : “Why Firefox is doomed“. I do not know if firefox is really “doomed”…

…but I think Firefox lost the train (or, at least, one train). It lost the possibility to establish a new pattern for accessing the web. I am not that good to validate the merit of a given technology, but I think that XUL could have become something closer to RIA and Firefox the tool that would have helped transforming the web of pages into the web of applications. Concentrating on the content more than on the container.

Couldn’t resist from posting this after having read the artcile “The 5 best, and 5 worst, features of Google Chrome OS“.
At page 2 of the article, we can read the following:

A surprising way to support Microsoft Office. If you ask a Google executive any question involving Microsoft, you’ll hear the cliche answer — that they company thinks only of users and not of its perceived competitors. But in one of the giggle-inducing moments of Thursday’s demo, Pichai, showed how Chrome OS would handle Office documents — via Microsoft Office Live, the free Web app version of Office available to Windows Live users. If a user clicks on an .xls document, Chrome launches Excel via the browser in Office Live. “Microsoft launched a killer app for Chrome OS …and is working very hard to do that,” he quipped.

Cool, isn’t it?
Outside of joking, the other thing that hit me in this article was the following point:

The application menu. As new Web applications come online tweaked for Chrome OS, Chrome OS will showcase them on a permanent tab it now calls the application menu. This will help users find new applications. Developers with new apps will find this an easier method to showcase them, too. Any Web application that runs in a standards compliant browser should work on a Chrome OS device. But Chrome OS is focused on supporting new protocols such as HTML 5, which, among other improvements, natively supports rich media.

We find a (rather not surprisingly) similarity between the two talks. They both use the browser as a trojan-horse for a way in which applications delivered over the web can be executed as native applications. In this sense, I think, the fact that Silverlight is not a browser technology and Chrome-OS is supposed to fully use HTML 5, is just a technological detail.

An article on ZDNet UK reports the following:

…Silverlight 4 will also host HTML content using a control that supports media plug-ins — so Flash will run inside Silverlight applications.
Business applications written in Silverlight will become more like ordinary applications, Guthrie said, and will now be able to print, access the Windows clipboard, and use more mouse actions, including context menus.
Access is also extended to low-level Windows features such as the Windows Communication Foundation, and Silverlight 4’s development tools
will work with the upcoming Visual Studio 2010.

Out-of-browser applications can now be installed as trusted apps that run outside the Silverlight sandbox on both Windows and Macintosh, Guthrie said, with trusted applications getting access to the local file system and external devices…

I wrote a post almost exactly one year ago, The Struggle for the Soul of the Web.

The browser is universal, but people do not only interact with web sites. People use applications!
The road paved by the iPhone of having dedicated applications delivered just to the point, remembers us that the new technologies for the web need to exploit the power of the devices on which they run.

Perhaps this is what Firefox is indeed planning, according to this article:

“The browsers that are on the horizon aren’t just incremental changes — they represent the pieces to build the next-generation Web — rich with standards-based graphics, new JavaScript libraries and full blown applications,” wrote Christopher Blizzard, an open source evangelist with Mozilla, on Mozilla’s Hacks blog.

Let’s hope it !

If what I am reading today in this article is true, it is certainly going to be something significant.
I would rollback all my criticisms to the egemonic position that Google took so far and will openly, franly and wholeheartdly applaude this move. It proves to be courageous and deserves the maximum respect!

I read the Google announcement around the new Google Chrome OS.
I immediately went back to my article Enter the “Reign of RIA 3rd”. In that article I expressed my enthusiasm for the new Google browser as I saw, in the way it was announced, the principle for something new, a platform where applications delivered over the web can be executed fast, securely and offline…Chrome becomes a container for applications delivered over the web!
I rememberI concluded that long post saying:

Chrome, which could be the last browser but, perhaps, the first element of a different kind

I think that I missed something that, now, seems so obvious. I thought to Chrome as, mainly, a new RIA platform. Something beyond the traditional browser but still in the domain of a container.
What this announcement tells us is that Google went far beyond. Chrome becomes the OS, not just a container.

And not “just a new kind of OS”, but as the official announcement says, “the web is the platform”.
Ehi, this is exactly the first principle in Tim O’Reilly famous definition of what is Web2.0 !

The border between an OS and the “web as a platform” is blurring. Not only on the Internet infrastructure. It is blurring deep right onto the desktop. The Browser becoming the Operating System and the Operating System becoming an extension of the web platform itself. So, Chrome OS may be much more revolutionary than it appears. It is not simply Google attacking Microsoft on the OS battlefield. It is extending the cloud to the border.
The new Chrome OS may become the real incarnation of that principle. The operating system for the Cloud Generation. Where Web2.0, SOA and Cloud Computing meet and could shape something, this time, very different!

I would like to continue to express my point of view around Google Chrome. First of all, I would like to say that it looks really nice! The performances are incredible but they are just the mean that Google used to reach their goal.

I saw all around very many articles and comments where the accent is always put on the fact that Chrome is the way in which Google is attacking the power of IE8.
I think that this is a partial view of what Chrome could actually represent in today’s scenario. In my opinion, Google has chosen to enter the RIA war in a very wise way.

By reading the comic book that introduces Chrome, I was hit by few things:

1. the accent is always on the the term application, as opposed to “web pages”.
   The starting point, which is consistently reinforced everywhere in the comic book, is always the fact that Google wants to address the need of supporting Applications (delivered over the web).
2. the book stresses the use that Chrome makes of Gears.
3. Chrome embeds a mode where one can associate a real “windows application” to a given “application executed over the web”.
   Even if this looks similar to what the Mozilla Prism technology did….
4. Each tab is executed in its own shell
5. Javascript is executed in its own Virtual machine

What are those things telling me? 
In my opinion they are telling that Google has decided to create a platform where applications delivered over the web can be executed fast, securely and offline. And this without changing the way in which those applications have been created so far (AJAX). (see what I just posted earlier on this subject)

Whilst Firefox and IE position themselves in the playground of general-purpose browsers, Chrome chooses to target the support of the new generation of Applications delivered over the web (ensuring, of course, a backward compatibility with the legacy of the web, i.e. the “web pages”). This is a big revolution;  Google decided to break the politeness game, where Microsoft and “the others” actually have chosen to improve the experience (of using a browser) without changing the scope (and, thus, keeping the constraints).

Of course, this was not done accidentally, or because of the simple evolution of the technology (even if, from this point of view, what I have tried since when I first downloaded Chrome is simply remarkable!).
All the toys that Google gave us in the last years actually needed something more that what a general-purpose browser was providing. More precisely: Google Gears deserved a more coherent and robust environment! Chrome becomes a container for applications delivered over the web!

In the long term, we think of Chromium as a tabbed window manager or shell for the web rather than a browser application. We avoid putting things into our UI in the same way you would hope that Apple and Microsoft would avoid putting things into the standard window frames of applications on their operating systems … The tab is our equivalent of a desktop application’s title bar; the frame containing the tabs is a convenient mechanism for managing groups of those applications. In future, there may be other tab types that do not host the normal browser toolbar. (see the User Experience Section on Chromium)

Adobe moved to AIR from Flex. Microsoft moved to Silverlight from WPF.
Google has delivered a platform for AJAX. They went beyond the browser, in a way that grants the continuity of the legacy web.

To Google, the browser has become a weak link in the cloud system – the needle’s eye through which the outputs of the company’s massive data centers usually have to pass to reach the user – and as a result the browser has to be rethought, revamped, retooled, modernized. Google can’t wait for Microsoft or Apple or the Mozilla Foundation to make the changes (the first has mixed feelings about promoting cloud apps, the second is more interested in hardware than in clouds, and the third, despite regular infusions of Google bucks, lacks resources), so Google is jump-starting the process with Chrome. (see The cloud’s Chrome lining)

Have you tried to transform Gmail into an application using Chrome? What does it tell?
Now, let’s imagine Google Documents…. and all the other tens of goodies that we were shipped regularly, in a “Beta forever” format by Google…

• It is an explicit attempt to accelerate the movement of computing off the desktop and into the cloud — where Google holds advantage.
• Google hopes to kick-start a new generation of Web-based applications that will truly make Microsoft’s worst nightmare a reality: The browser will become the equivalent of an operating system.
• The clearest expression of this comes when you drag a tab containing a Web application like Gmail to its own separate window and specify that you want an “app shortcut.” At that point, the tabs, buttons, and address bars fall away and the Web app looks pretty much like a desktop app. Welcome to the cloud era.

(see Inside Chrome: The Secret Project to Crush IE and Remake the Web)

I think that Chrome may represent the platform by which Google will establish a new way to consume the Web:

• at home, of course.
  You will use the Google (web) Applications as applications, in the way in which you are used to use Outlook Express, Word, Excel, MSN
• in the enterprise. Also !
  You do not have to look in your bookmarks to access the URL that points to your application… You just execute the applications which, accidentally, are delivered over the web but are more and more executed locally (via Gears)

To say this synthetically:

“Any desktop application that has not been implemented in the browser is now going to be implemented in the browser,” Andreessen said. (see What Netscape’s Founder Thinks About the New Google Browser )

When I was speaking about AJAX in the last few years, I remember I often quoted a sentence that said “AJAX means that Javascript now works…“.  What I see with Chrome is that “Chrome means that AJAX (and, thus, Javascript), becomes a full-fledged platform for building local applications“. See it? There is no issue here of sharing the same (j)VM because of resource consumption. The scope is more manageable (certainly less powerful) and, thus, it does not cost anything to start a new application with its own VM.

Google Chrome features a new JavaScript engine, V8, that has been designed for performance from the ground up. In particular, we wanted to remove some common bottlenecks that limit the amount and complexity of JavaScript code that can be used in Web applications. (see Google Chrome’s Need for Speed)

Yes, I am enthusiast. Strange for me when talking about Google! But it is true. I like it. I like what I see.
Some other consideration:

• Hey, Chrome is a browser that does not ask you to become your “default browser” !
  Very nice, indeed.
• Chrome may become a Bootable Browser.
  “A bootable Chrome-based platform could very well put an end to PC tune-up problems for masses of people. ” (see Is Google’s Chrome browser a Windows killer?)
• It will be interesting when the Resource Model will be published, in order to really create applications on it

I am now expecting one other step.
I am expecting that Google creates a Declarative Language for easily creating the applications that will be executed by Chrome. After all, in the comic book, they talk about the fact that the team that created the VM is actually able to create a VM for virtually any language. Right ? At runtime, one flavor or the other of the VM can be loaded if the activation cost is so cheap and if the resource consumption is so low.

I think these properties will rapidly make V8 the dominant VM for dynamic languages… the release of the V8 VM is the beginning of a whole new era for dynamic languages (Smalltalk, Ruby, Python, etc).  (see Chrome and V8)

Last, but not least:

And another thing Google did well here was in not trying to over-engineer their explanations of highly technical processes. They simplified their message down to bare essentials, and I felt enlightened after reading this document. Most technical documentation talks down to people, assuming that all the basics are already understood. Google removed some barriers to entry by explaining their new technologies in a way that almost anyone with a little technical know-how can understand. This is something almost every other open source project out there fails at. Technical documentation is far more than simply documentation…it’s an implicit invitation to take part in the experience.At the end of the day, I’m really impressed at the quality of this documentation. I actually read the entire thing, which is much more than I can say about the technical documentation for any other software I use. Who knew that I could find the difference between multiple threads and multiple processes interesting?  (see Google Chrome’s Design Comic )

One word of caution. Page 9 and Page 10 of the Google Comic Book. When they describe the way in which they test Chrome by using the massive cache they have on the internet! Unfair ! And, once again, showing the disproportionate power that Google (as a company) has on today’s Internet.

Before going on, let me explain the title of this post. Napoleon 3rd was, according to the Wikipedia article, “the first President of the French Republic and the only emperor of the Second French Empire. He holds the unusual distinction of being both the first titular president and the last monarch of France.”
Much like Chrome, which could be the last browser but, perhaps, the first element of a different kind…

Very interesting article, “The Struggle for the Soul of the Web” !
The author enforces the concept of the importance of Ajax standards (and, thus, the Open Ajax Alliance) as a mean to avoid that the web becomes the territory where proprietary solutions (see Flex and SilverLight) will flourish.

In developping his argument, on which I agree, the author makes an interesting statement:
More importantly, Flash and Silverlight work by installing a proprietary plug-in to your browser, thus opting out of the entire browser infrastructure. If you are a plug-in vendor, your incentive is to keep the browser as dumb as possible.
The worse the underlying browser is at rendering rich widgets and media, the more developers and users will want your plug-in. If you are both the vendor of a browser (say IE) as well as the proponent of a plug-in (say Silverlight), then the incentives get truly twisted.

In some way, what he says is very similar to what I have said since a while: we need a new generation of Browsers which are not constraining people from developping applications delivered through the web (see here and here and here for a summary of my opinion on this topic). In that sense, Chrome may be the start of an answer (unfortunately, I say, as it comes from Google instead than from the Open Source community…).
If we want to avoid the risk that Flex and Silverlight will dominate the Web, we need to address this kind of question, which can be summarized by what I found in this other article

We’re in a transition point between the Age of Web Apps and the Age of RIAs (in the web space, that is). And if you doubt that we’re at this transition point, or if you think that RIAs include web apps, ask yourself, does AJAX really give you “all the rich you need”?

Can AJAX really, as Jef Raskin famously stated [60], treat all user input as sacred? Is AJAX really the end all and be all of a Compelling User Experience? Or do we remember that applications used to run outside of a browser?

Of course, it is provoking. But the risk is quite present.

So, here is another bad news : Google Layoffs – 10,000 Workers Affected.
There is no doubt that the financial crisis is touching everybody.

But once again, what surprises is, according to this article, the way in which Google manages this and the way in which they managed one third of the people working there.

I am reading this article, Ballmer still searching for an answer to Google. The article explains that Microsoft “may be the only company in a position to provide ‘any real competition’ for Google in the online search business.“, that it may invest some significant amount of money in a “five-year task” :

We need to do some work to fundamentally reinvent the search business model… You don’t brute-force your way into a market. You only make great strides when you redefine the category for the user.

Well, it is not simple to understand who Goliath is in this case (because, of course, we would try to support David here). So, who is David? I personally think that promoting a real alternative to Google can only be great for all of us, the users. I would have certainly preferred that an alternative to Google would have been provided by a non-for-profit organization. I want, though, highlight two points:

1. the idea of reinventing the search business model is, IMHO, great. Let’s stop copying what others do… Let’s put the face on!
2. providing alternatives to an hegemonic system is too important.

So, here it is, the long awaited “Google Browser” (called Google Chrome, but the site should go online only tomorrow) has been unveiled in an unconventional announcement in the guise of a comic book.

For the moment, I hold any new comment. I read my old post (from last August). Let’s see if this move will actually make the battleground more free ( by removing the artificial obstacles that an evolution of the Browser technology found because of the war between IE and Firefox) or it will simply be a vehicle by which Google will transform its “presents” (GMail, GCalendar, G<something else>…) into “de-facto” standards.

The initial announcements explicitly thanks what Firefox and Apple Safari did and, more important, commits Google to open-source the innovations that are certainly present in the new Browser.

I suggest people to start reading this post from John Paczkowski, especially what he says at the end:

with its view of the Web as a Web of applications and its multi-process/multi-application design, Chrome almost seems more an operating system than a browser, doesn’t it? Funny, isn’t it. Google’s long been rumored to have been developing a browser and an OS. Who would have known they’d be the same thing ?.

Without having seen and tried yet the Google Chrome browser, I tend to agree with John on the fact that Google is probably shooting towards something that is more an RIA platform than a simple browser.

I would only ask a question. Given the “open source” nature of Firefox, why Google deployed another open-source initiative instead of joining the forces around Firefox ?

Let see when we will better understand how Google Browser is done.

Today I received on of the newsletter to which I subscribe. I read it because of an article which seemed to be very interesting “Oracle says Weblogic is its future strategic server”.
In the beginning, I liked this assertion “To many, the Oracle products seemed a mere adjunct to its data base”. Great! I like it!

The author, then, references the article Oracle re-brands BEA WebLogic as its strategic server for SOA. In this article, there is an even better quote, from Bloomberg:

“If you read between the lines, when Oracle now says ‘Oracle WebLogic Server Enterprise Edition is the application server of choice’, what they mean is that the application server they had before the BEA acquisition, to put it mildly, wasn’t the application server of choice — for just about anybody”.

The recent announcement of Microsoft’s intention to buy Yahoo! is, in my opinion, marking the end of the short, initial period during which the Internet was populated by different subjects. During these initial 15 years, the proliferation of different subjects, all fighting against everybody else to gain market share, was allowing independent producers to break in and to find niches not yet occupied by the principal subjects (which were too much busy in fighting….).

The Yahoo! acquisition will, at the end, create a de-facto oligarchy. The two actors (Microsoft and Google) will split their dominance on the world of the Internet thus, de-facto, preventing independent forms of content production to flourish.

The fault of this lays, in my opinion, on the weakness with which the Business and Political worlds accepted the enormous power of Google.

• It is very sad to see that, instead of facilitating more democracy and competition (and, thus innovation!) by forcing a split of Google or by empowering a non-profit organization for managing the “Internet Search” business, the lack of governance of this fundamental aspect of the modern world (the Internet) allowed the creation of this oligarchy.
• It is sad to see that, from now on, opposing to Google would imply choosing Microsoft!
• It will be interesting to understand which effects this new situation will have on IT departments and on the “providers of IT departments” (editors, consulting firms, outsourcing…)
  Will a more safe dominant position in the Internet area (with all the cash flow that could happen from that) change the way in which Microsoft will approach and will be approached by IT shops?

Whilst the software products are geared towards making people executing things in a more effective way and allowing people to execute things that were not possible before (I agree, this is not always something good… we would live better without some of the software creatures…), I have always thought that the goal of the technology behind the software results (i.e. the technology that allows the production of software) would be to allow the artists (i.e. the developers) to do their job in the best possible conditions.

I remember how much I loved the VMS operating system (from Digital), the powerful CASE environment that was implemented on that operating systems (ah, Language Sensitive Editor…) and the Common Language Runtime.
I also remember how easy and natural it was, a life later, to develop distributed Service Oriented applications in the Forté environment (where Service Orientation and scalability was built inside the language framework itself). The motto from Forté was “Hiding the Complexity” and, indeed believe me, they couldn’t have been chosen a better motto!

Today I have read one of the “2008 predictions articles” and I was hit by the last item:

13. The next big thing. Software development will change to a wider use of code generators. Forget about heavy frameworks, regardless of what programming language you use.  In a simple case, use some XML style sheets combined with the metadata that describes your application objects to automatically generate the code for these objects. On a larger scale, the entire application may be described using metadata and XML, and an appropriate code generator will do the job. So programming will change from writing tedious code that requires lots of coders to describing the metadata and writing custom code generators.

I know, this will remain a dream: Why steal the pleasure of fighting against the complexity of building a program that would let the author being proud of the many hours he spent in debugging it and in having a presentation that looks likee what he would have wanted ….?

 

Hiding the complexity and allowing the artist to express his creativity in addressing the solution to a problem (instead than in debugging, in challenging multithreading or fighting against the geometry manager) would be something nice to dream.

P.S.The Author has, also, some interesting observation on Java, AJAX and Flex/AIR.

So, I had been late on commenting on other attempts of the big octopus, but I cannot refrain from commenting on this.

Google officially announced a Wikipedia killer: it is called KNOL. Under the seducing title of Encouraging people to contribute knowledge, Google is, actually, directly attacking Wikipedia.

I have never been a big fans of Wikipedia, also. 
I just think Wikipedia is useful and is something that is important in the panorama of the Web; but I still think that I prefer to know who is providing me the information. As I often say, I try to teach my children not to get the free press, because behind the fact that they do not spend money for getting it, some hidden messages can be delivered. And I am using this same argument in my posts against Googlesaurus…

Now, KNOL actually proposes something that I consider interesting and, in principle, more robust and accountable than Wikipedia:

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors… We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content…

…We hope that knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line. Anyone will be free to write. For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing.

Knols will include strong community tools. People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on. Anyone will be able to rate a knol or write a review of it. Knols will also include references and links to additional information.

A way in which people will sign what they write; a system where there will be competing opinions. And where people can comment on something that has a signature. I like this!

But:

A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read. The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions. Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content…

…At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads…

…Once testing is completed, participation in knols will be completely open, and we cannot expect that all of them will be of high quality. Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge.

Ok. Once again, behind the seducing sentences of “We are very excited by the potential to substantially increase the dissemination of knowledge” or “Google will not ask for any exclusivity on any of this content and will make that content available to any other search engine“, the Googlesaurus shows its aspect and its intention: Wikipedia is out of its control and is, potentially, an incredible source of revenue! It cannot be left there as it is, like an unexploited goldmine.

And, once again, a Big Brother (Google Search Quality) will rank for you what you better read as your primary source of information.

Sorry. The idea is good, but it will turn to be another arrow that will make Google more powerful and, all of us, less free.

I think that some parts of the Internet will need some control. Leaving control to Google is not good. Leaving control to other may not also.

Let’s say NO TO GOOGLE and to its enormous ego! Internet search is too important to be left in the hands of a private company.

P.S.See the Read/WriteWeb article for more information

I have been surprised when I read this article: James Gosling (Sun) : « Java sur le poste client n’est pas à la hauteur aujourd’hui ». It is in French, so I translate the title here:

James Gosling (Sun) : « Java is not ready today for the desktop »
Strange, isn’t it ? The “father of Java” who, 15 years after, makes such a big statement!Well, the reality is different, as we all know.
Eclipse is there and it is there since sometime now. Eclipse is no more only an “open development platform”, but has become ‘a platform for building and deploying rich client applications”: it is called Eclipse RCP. Many people are developing rich Java applications for the desktop (and for the mobile market also) based on Eclipse RCP:

• Open Source applications, the most popular of which is probably the Azureus BitTorrent client
• Commercial applications also, of course !

And, not least, IBM is building the new generation of its products based on Eclipse RCP!

The Universal Managed Client for SOA, called Lotus Expeditor. A platform for building enterprise applications and enterprise mashups that bring the power of SOA towards the desktop and devices

The new Lotus Notes 8 client, which brings the possibility of building Composite Applications centered around the collaboration tools

Lotus Sametime, which provides a new frontier for Unified Collaboration and Communication

Sun may not be ready. But the world is not waiting in order to make Java evolving! And Java is bigger than a trade symbol.

Thanks to TonyBlog, and his article How difficult is to be the fastest growing internet company in the world, I discovered a long but very interesting video on Google’s dominance.
I share the video here also for the ones who want to see it from here.

I was hit by several things:

1. the “Ministry of Truth” thing that happens at the end of the video
2. the reference to the media monopoly situation that is happening in some parts of Europe (Italy, for instance) and that is scaring lot of people
3. the fact that the VPs that are interviewed do not show concern about the power they have in their hands.
   They consider that power just from a technology point of view and they came out with statements that look like the following ones (I do not quote exact words…)
   • if we were able to do what we did, everybody can do also.
   • Why would we do something evil?
   • the possibility of beinbg evil is inside every job…

No, I think that we need to come to some action before it is too late. Internet Search is too important to be left in the hands of a private monopoly: Internet Search should be property of no one. The temptation would be too big.

Few years ago, when I left Sun, I thought that the medium term scenario would involve some “fusion” between Oracle (Applications + database), BEA (middleware) and Sun (hardware).
In this way, the new entity would be able to compete against IBM and against MSFT (well MSFT+Dell or MSFT+HP, according to the situations).

I am reading these days that BEA just refused a friendly buyout offer from Oracle because the proposed price was seen as undervaluating BEA (I have issues understanding which evidence would support this statement… but this is not the point)! So, BEA is asking Oracle to make a better economical offer.  There is not opposition to Oracle’s initiative.

And this seems logical to me.
The scenario is simplifying.

So,  would next step really be Sun ?

I could not believe it when I read Jonathan Schwartz’s (Sun CEO and President) recent post about changing the trade name for Sun Microsystems from SUNW to JAVA.
I hear that most of the comments are hostile to this. Some of them loose even time in going in the semantic of associating the slowness of Java to a rapidly declining company.
There is some summary of the most interesting entries in Sam Ruby’s blog.

What I think of this story it is that it is just another example of abusing of addiction (see my post on gBrowser here).

• If Java is what Java proponents always say “an open technology”, how could it become the identifier of a private company?
  This is a great mistake in my opinions. It will benefit the ones who oppose Java, such as Microsoft…
• this move shows no respect for all the companies (and individuals) that built the success of Java.
  Java did not become widely used for anything that Sun did. Sun’s Java products are trailing everywhere and their marketshare is far from being predominant.
  The success of Java was built by the IBM and Oracle and BEA and Open Source….
• Given this, I fear (or hope) that this move could lead to a diaspora on Java, where at this point everybody will feel free to abandon the Logo and to perfect (wow…) the platform according to its own customer needs.

So, it is very sad to see someone counting on the popularity and addiction on something … to steal the attention of the community and impose himself as the gatekeeper (or keymaster… both of them were no so nice characters in Ghostbusters, right?).

Having a pony-tail does not equate to have all the rights!

I have read this morning an article speculating on the arrival of a new Browser on the market, a Browser labelled “Google” (or Gbrowser).
The few readers of my blog can immediately imagine that this is not the kind of news that I would have liked to hear. I personally do not like this invasion of things from Google which, under the cover of being “free for everybody”, tie us to a new monopoly (see my previous post “Internet Search should be property of no one“).
I state this even if I have no problem admitting that most of the technologies that Google, in its immense altruism, offers us are very cool and really innovative and really pushing for significant progress in the Web space.
The problem is not around how cool the presents from Google are… it is about the concept of “present” itself !

Anyway, in this specific case (GBrowser… yes, you can see that the domain name has already been registered by Google!) I think that, if the speculation actually reflects a reality, it may become something very significant, and perhaps not completely bad.

If really Google will put on the market its own branded Browser, I think that :

1. Google will finally admit that some “footprint” is required in order to properly run today’s internet applications (this will have consequences on AJAX as we see it today, I think)
2. Google will automatically transform what they published as “contribution” into a de-facto standard (because it will be working naturally with the new browser….)
3. Google will create a platform onto which developers will build RIA applications

Yes, in the last bullet I wrote “RIA applications“. Because, if the Browser from Google will become true, it will obviously promote the use of Google Gears and of all the other G* things that invaded the web. A couple of months ago, I wrote my first reaction to Google Gears:

“[with Google Gears] Google starts to install something else than the browser in order to keep the browser relevant”

The advent of Apollo AIR (paved by Flex) and the approaching of Vista (via Silverlight) may create serious alternatives for running applications delivered over the internet (see here and here and here for a summary of my opinion on this topic); the default mean to access to applications delivered over the net, will no more be the browser, at least when some significant experience and richness of functionality will be required.

Will Google redefine what we know today as “the browser”? Will Google remove the impedance that somehow forced the two main actors in this space (IE and Firefox) to comply (at least formally) to standards?

Again, if Google will indeed go into the Browser business, all what it gave away so far could be interpreted as a way to create “addiction“, so that people will find it normal that Google will also revolutionize the browser space. After all, Google is not perceived as the “bad boys in the block“, so it is likely that this move will find only few opposers.

Despite these considerations, though, I initially wrote that this may not be a bad outcome for the web. My readers know that I consider that the browser needs a big evolution in order to support the new challenges and the execution of applications delivered over the internet. So, this move may represent a shock that will benefit the whole community.

I wished Firefox and XUL could have become this shock!!!! Perhaps they will anyway (why wouldn’t the GBrowser be based on Firefox after all?)

Of course, this is all speculation at this moment….

For the people that start fearing about Google, I suggest reading the following article: Google goes click.
Among the others, I liked this quote:

Further proof, if any were needed, that Google
isn’t a technology company that makes money from ads, it’s an
advertising company that uses technology to lure eyeballs

I start to believe that Internet Search is too delicate a feature, is so important that it cannot be left in the hands of a monopoly.
Internet Search should be property of no one or real competition and alternatives should be promoted.

Just happened to read this little report on Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt: Google CEO: Internet’s role in freedom still expanding
I just wanted to read as I was immediately surprised by the fact that Google has something to say in that domain. My curiosity did not come without an answer .
It was interesting reading the following:

Some governments will struggle with how much free expression is too much, he said. Even in Western democracies, such as France and Germany, posting information about the Nazi Party is prohibited, Schmidt said, and other governments will struggle with what expression to allow.

Hey! It is not the first time that I see comparing apples and oranges, but I do not think that it is fair to compare revisioninsm with what happens somewhere else with the support of Google !