There was a time when I thought the Linux desktop was going to take a market share at least equal to Apple’s. Maybe even 5% or 10% of the total desktop market. I had high hopes that the One Laptop Per Child Initiative would put Linux laptops in the hands of impressionable young minds who would never have the chance to become dependent on Windows. Though that plan has fallen through the cracks. I don’t hate Microsoft Windows I just don’t have a desire to see any operating system dominate the market in such a way that the lack of competition stifles innovation and forces users into an endless upgrade cycle, offering progressively smaller incremental value.

That’s why I like Linux as a desktop platform. For many years I was an advocate for using the Linux desktop, I even wrote a Windows to Linux migration book for business users. Though the time has yet to come for the widespread Linux desktop adoption. I have speculated in the past that Novell’s SUSE Linux Desktop or Ubuntu would see traction but as of late I think that even that prediction is off base. I think the companies that will break our addiction to Windows will not be neither of them. It will be Google and Amazon. Here’s why.

Read the full story

Technorati Tags: amazon, Google, Microsoft Windows, Novell, OLPC, SUSE, Ubuntu

Is 2008 going to be the Year of the Acquisition? Activity in 2007 was on the rise but now things seem to be at full speed.

• I remember when Alta Vista and Excite! were the hot search engines, my how the world has changed.  It looks like it’s narrowing down to a two horse race with Microsoft putting the moves on Yahoo! for about $44.6 billion (Notes from SearchEngineLand). I guess it’s really on now, Google versus Microsoft in a search engine death match.
• Yahoo! acquired Zimbra last year. I wonder what that means for the "Exchange killer"?
• Amazon is acquiring Audible.com the leading provider of digital spoken word content establishing itself even further as the web’s biggest superstore.
• There were already three open source transactions in January:
• MySQL bought by Sun
• Nokia Buys Trolltech
• Covalent was Acquired by SpringSource
• In preparation Andrew Aiken and the boys from the Olliance Group are ready to help along the deals with their newly formed M&A practice. 

The question now is,"Who’s next and how much?"

Technorati Tags: , acquisition, amazon, Audible, Google, Mergers, Microsoft, MySQL, Nokia, Olliance, Sun, Trolltech, Yahoo!, Zimbra

I received an email from Barnes and Noble this week offering me 25% off my next purchase online on top of my Barnes and Noble Membership discount. I deleted tons of email this week but I was looking to pre-order Seth Godin’s Meatball Sundae so I saved the coupon so I could make the purchase this weekend.

I also I also tried to pick up a second book before I checked out. If you where a B&N marketing person you should be thrilled, your coupon hooked me. I even  increased the size of my order which would have been at full price no discount so better margins too.  I would gladly have bought both books from Barnes and Noble as long as I could use the coupon (which by the way after further research wasn’t that good of a deal). I would have happily overpaid for the book until I encountered website/coupon friction. 

You see when I went to the website and tried to place the order I was confronted with the following message:

! The Barnes & Noble Membership Number you entered is associated with another account. Please check thenumber and re-enter it. 

Well here’s what stinks I tried every email I had including the email they sent the coupon to. I wish I could have found a way to figure out what email address the number on my card was associated with. I could have called B&N but I was trying to do this while watching my beloved Pittsburgh Steelers and didn’t want to risk being stuck on hold. Plus if I wanted to order via phone I would have called them in the first place. At this point I decided to go look at Amazon and started shopping there even without a coupon.  

What’s the morale of the story? If you want to do business on the web make sure your website works. If you want to miss sales make the process awkward and ineffective and out of sync with your marketing. Ironically I was trying to buy a book on making sure your marketing was staying in sync. B&N did a good job getting my attention by sending me a relevant offer. They got me hooked and I made the effort to buy the product.

The end result:

I bought both books with free shipping and no coupon for less money at Amazon.com.

Note to B&N:

Perhaps you should pick up the book too, it’s cheaper at Amazon.com, they have one-click purchasing, free shipping, and the book will be delivered on the 27th if you are interested. 

Technorati Tags: amazon, Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, ecommerce, marketing, Meatball Sundae, Seth Godin

ComputerWorld:Zenoss: New dog masters old monitoring tricks

Good article on Zenoss, I particularly like this quote it sums up our value prop put more elegantly than we do on our own.  

Zenoss’ key strength is a unified design that collects many types of information from numerous sources and displays them in an intelligent way. While many monitoring products feel like an amalgamation of several different pieces of software that have been stapled together, Zenoss stands apart with a unified, object-based repository and a tightly integrated set of tools and reports, yet doesn’t draw itself into a corner as far as extensibility and future growth are concerned. 

Tags: Zenoss, Network Management

Apple to Unveil Faster iPhone, AT&T’s Stephenson Says (Update2)

I would be curious to see how long before the EVDO network becomes saturated,  I noticed a particular decline in my Verizon Quality of Service in the last year, hope the same doesn’t happen to AT&T.

Apple Inc. will introduce a version of the iPhone next year that can download from the Internet at a faster rate, AT&T Inc. Chief Executive Officer Randall Stephenson said. 

Tags:  Apple, iPhone, ATT

Amazon’s Kindle Makes Buying E-Books Easy, Reading Them Hard

Walt Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg isn’t enamoured with the device but gives kudos to Amazon for the eBook shopping experience. However, charging for blogs and free content isn’t going to be well received. There’s a Linux tablet play here somewhere. More on that later.

I’ve been testing the Kindle for about a week, and I love the shopping and downloading experience. But the Kindle device itself is just mediocre. While it has good readability, battery life and storage capacity, both its hardware design and its software user interface are marred by annoying flaws. It is bigger and clunkier to use than the Sony Reader, whose second version has just come out at $300.

Tags: Kindle, Amazon, ebook 

Technorati Tags: amazon, apple, kindle, Links, Zenoss