Will a Google Tablet be the iPad competitor or Netbook? Maybe both - targeting Apple and Microsoft with one device

There is lots of news on Google's Tablet with Verizon.

Verizon, Google Developing iPad Rival

By NIRAJ SHETH

Verizon Wireless is working with Google Inc. on a tablet computer, the carrier's chief executive, Lowell McAdam, said Tuesday, as the company endeavors to catch up with iPad host AT&TInc. in devices that connect to wireless networks.

The work is part of a deepening relationship between the largest U.S. wireless carrier by subscribers and Google, which has carved out a space in mobile devices with its Android operating system. Verizon Wireless last year heavily promoted the Motorola Droid, which runs Google's software.

"What do we think the next big wave of opportunities are?" Mr. McAdam said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. "We're working on tablets together, for example. We're looking at all the things Google has in its archives that we could put on a tablet to make it a great experience."

These devices are all part of using less energy in consuming devices connected to data centers.

I am amazed the number of people who think they can get an iPad and leave their laptop at home.  Google realizes this opportunity to create the always connected laptop replacement. 

The device may not be perfect, but no laptop is either.  What trade-offs will Google and Verizon make in the device?

Once, someone gets the right device category defined watch the growth of data centers continue as hyper-connected laptop replacements fuel new usage scenarios which play into Google's hands.

Read more

What is behind the Adobe vs. Apple feud?

I have been meaning to write this post, and news just got hotter with the latest news that Adobe is preparing to sue Apple.

Adobe vs. Apple is going to get uglier

You think things are bad now between Apple and Adobe? Just wait until the lawsuit.

207 comments | 36I like it!
Tags: Adobe, Apple, developer, flash, ipad, iPhone, iPod

April 12, 2010, 05:36 PM —

Usually I write about security here, but Apple's iron-bound determination to keep Adobe Flash out of any iWhatever device is about to blow up in Apple's face. Sources close to Adobe tell me that Adobe will be suing Apple within a few weeks.

It was bad enough when Apple said, in effect, that Adobe Flash wasn't good enough to be allowed on the iPad. But the final straw was when Apple changed its iPhone SDK (software development kit) license so that developers may not submit programs to Apple that use cross-platform compilers.

Below is more information, but I want to put my thoughts up here on what is behind the Adobe vs. Apple feud.  Apple's business is built on a closed system approach to its hardware and software.  Adobe's approach is cross platform technologies.  Adobe's history of postscript, type 1 fonts, Acrobat, and Mac/Win app development have targeted customers who need to work across different systems.  Postscript and Type 1 fonts worked because you could use the same postscript on Mac/Windows desktops, then on your high end printers.  This Adobe strategy also made it so their IP was owned by them to sell to others who wanted to be compatible with Apple printers and hardware, eventually bringing an end to the Apple LaserWriter as Apple couldn't compete.

Building on the success of the original LaserWriter, Apple developed many further models. Later LaserWriters offered faster printing, higher resolutions, Ethernet connectivity, and eventually color output. To compete, many other laser printer manufacturers licensed Adobe PostScript for inclusion into their own models. Eventually the standardization on Ethernet for connectivity and the ubiquity of PostScript undermined the unique position of Apple’s printers: Macintosh computers functioned equally well with any Postscript printer. After the LaserWriter 8500, Apple discontinued the LaserWriter product line.

Steve Jobs has learned this lesson well, and knows what happens if he lets Adobe's cross platform technologies into Apple products.  Steve's made his decision.  Adobe Flash will not ship on the iPhone as he can see what happened with postscript.  In addition, Steve has provided technical reasons why Adobe Flash is not appropriate for the iPhone, but if he really wanted Flash he couldn't he work with Adobe to address the technical issues?

Steve jobs has slammed Flash.

by Erica Ogg

Jobs iPad Flash

Jobs using the iPad, sans any support for Adobe Flash.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has reportedly continued his campaign against Adobe's Flash video technology, this time at a meeting with The Wall Street Journal, according to a report in Valleywag.

People who were at a recent meeting Jobs had with some of the paper's executives told the Gawker-owned sitethat Jobs dismissed Flash as "a CPU hog," full of "security holes," and "old technology" and would therefore not be including the technology on the iPad, or presumably, the iPhone. (Adobe did recently promise to make theMac version of its browser plug-in faster.)

It's not the first time we've heard this. At an Apple shareholder meeting two years ago Jobs explained why Flash wouldn't be on the iPhone any time soon. He told those present that the full-blown PC Flash version "performs too slow to be useful" on the iPhone, and that the mobile version--Flash Lite--"is not capable of being used with the Web."

The following reminds of the frustration at Apple and Microsoft when we cussed about Adobe Type Manager (ATM) crashing the OS. (I worked on both the Mac and Windows OS while at Apple and Microsoft.)

More recently, word leaked out from Apple's employee-only meeting after the iPad introduction that Jobs had slammed Flash. According to a report on Wired, he responded to an employee question that "whenever a Mac crashes, more often than not, it's because of Flash," and that "no one will be using Flash. The world is moving to HTML5."

The little piece of irony is Google believes HTML5 is key to mobile growth as well.

This is starting to feel like a feud similar to the Hatfields vs. McCoys.  Although a more modern term is a smackdown.


Steve Jobs hates Adobe Flash: iPhone 4.0 SDK lockdown smackdown

9 comments

Ouch. Looks like writing apps in Flash is verboten, according to the latest iPhone OS 4.0 SDK legal language. CS5 and other cross-compilers could be dead in the water. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers uncover more proof that Steve Jobs hates Adobe.

By Richi Jennings. April 9, 2010.
(AAPL) (ADBE)

He's back: your humble blogwatcher selected these bloggy morsels for your enjoyment. Not to mention Michelle Obama's biggest fear...
Cade Metz has met the enemy, and it's Adobe, apparently:

Apple's new SDK for the iPhone ... will likely prevent ... Adobe's upcoming Flash ... development suite from converting Flash scripts into native Jesus Phone apps. ... Apple's iPhone SDK has always said that "applications may only use Documented APIs." ... But Steve Jobs and company have now tacked on a few additional sentences.
...
It would appear that Steve Jobs has landed another blow against ... Adobe. ... Steve Jobs has already barred untranslated Flash from the iPhone and the iPad, calling it "buggy," littered with security holes, and a "CPU hog."more

John Gruber is widely credited with breaking the news:

My reading of this new language is that cross-compilers ... are prohibited. This also bans apps compiled using MonoTouch. ... The folks at Appcelerator realize ... that they might be out of bounds withTitanium. Ansca’s Corona SDK ... strikes me as out of bounds.
...
The language in the agreement doesn’t leave much wiggle room for Flash. ... Wonder what Adobe does now? ... They’re pretty much royally ****ed..more

Hank Williams calls it an "insane restraint of trade":

3.3.1 not only bans cross platform tools, it bans everything that is written in other languages and are ported to C. This, obviously, includes libraries. ... [It's] an insidious concept and strikes at the core of product development and of computer science in general. Everything is built on other stuff. ... This language is fundamentally unreasonable.
...
Some may say my interpretation is too pedantic. But the point is that in order for Apple to limit people in the way that they want to ... they are inflicting collateral damage. ... There is a reasonable risk that not only is 3.3.1 restraint of trade, but that the entire ... App Store concept ... is found to be restraint of trade. ... Adobe, and/or class action lawyers start your engines!
Read more

Nokia acquires MetaCarta, continues investment in geolocation services beyond Navteq

GigaOm's Om Malik has a post with Nokia's CEO on the future of the Mobile industry.

Nokia’s CEO on the Challenges & Promise of the New Mobile Industry

By Om Malik Apr. 8, 2010, 10:50am PDT 11 Comments

IMPORTANT POINTS
Expand

Nokia Chairman, CEO and President Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo has the second-toughest job in the mobile industry — that of turning the decades-old, set-in-its-ways, $58-billion-a-year mobile handset maker into a services-driven, Internet-oriented monster that not only catches up to but surpasses new upstart rivals Apple and Google. The good news is that unlike Palm CEO Jon Rubenstein (who has the toughest mobile gig), he doesn’t have to worry about running out of money anytime soon.

Part of the interview is the hot top of location services.

Location Gives the Internet Relevance

One of the things that gets Kallasvuo excited is location — or more specifically, location-based services. “Location is not an app, instead it adds a whole new dimension (and value) to the Internet,” he said, explaining why his company has made huge investments in location, including its $8 billion purchase of mapping company Navteq. Nokia earlier this year released a new Ovi Maps application that allows it to compete in markets such as India, Brazil and Russia, places where Google and Apple haven’t made inroads just yet.

“Putting location elements into different type of services is a big opportunity which makes the Internet more exciting,” Kallasvuo said. (I’ve written about Nokia’s location-oriented strategy in the past.) Location, along with different types of sensors and augmented reality, will open the mobile world up to different possibilities, he said.

For 2 weeks thanks to a friend who works on geolocation solutions,  I've known Nokia was acquiring MetaCarta.

MetaCarta Inc. is the leading provider of geographic intelligence solutions. MetaCarta’s unique technology combines geographic search and geographic tagging capabilities so users can find content about a place by viewing results on a map. MetaCarta’s products make data and unstructured content "location-aware" and geographically relevant. These innovative solutions make it possible for customers to discover, visualize, and act on important location-based information and news.

And, yesterday the press release went out on MetaCarta's website. And Nokia's. So, now I can reference public sources on the acquisition.

Nokia acquires MetaCarta Inc.

Espoo, Finland – Nokia announced today that it has acquired MetaCarta Inc. MetaCarta, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a privately owned company which employs over 30 people and has expertise in geographic intelligence solutions. MetaCarta’s technology will be used in the area of local search in Location and other service.

Who is MetaCarta?  Here are what IT analysts say.

Dave Sonnen, Consultant, Spatial Information Management Research
Sue Feldman, Research Vice President, Content Technologies

Relevant Research

 

Whit Andrews, Vice President Research / Analyst
Jeff Vining, Vice President Research / Analyst
Allen Weiner, Managing VP

Relevant Research

Mike Boland, Senior Analyst

Relevant Research

Here are some of the companies who worked with MetaCarta and awards they have won.

  • Technology Partners: ArdentMC, Clickability, EMC/Documentum, Enterprise Search Solutions (ESS), ESRI, Google, Microsoft, MITRE, Northrop Grumman, OpenText, Raytheon, and SAIC
  • Awards: IndustryWeek Technologies of the Year, KMWorld 100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management, and 2-time KMWorld Trend-Setting Products, Red Herring Top 100 Private Companies, Red Herring Top Innovator

If you believe the media, Nokia is irrelevant in the battle between Apple, Google, and RIM.

Apple's iPhone OS 4 may have more than 100 new features, but it established three big targets for Apple: Microsoft, Google and RIM. To some extent, it also showed that Apple considers Palm and Nokia to be irrelevant.

But, I would guess this view exists because media users are mostly iPhone users, then RIM and Android.  With Nokia almost no market share with the US media reporters.  Note: I have a Nokia E71 I can use when I want a high quality phone, and thanks to OVI Maps April 6 release I can get free OVI maps for the phone.

After listening to your overwhelmingly positive feedback and feeling your love for your favourite mobile phone, we have now created a custom version that works on Nokia E71 and Nokia E66.

However, because of technical constraints, it isn’t possible to offer premium content such as Michelin and Lonely Planet guides on these devices.

I wouldn't count out Nokia the way most media does.  Om Malik doesn't.

If there was one point Nokia’s big boss wanted to make before we ended our conversation, it was that the Nokia in 2010 is going to be a lot different from the Nokia of the past. The company has its work cut out for it. The good news, if you can call it that, is that its CEO knows what to do. Acceptance is the first step toward recovery. And for me that’s a good start. I look forward to falling in love with Nokia all over again.

It will be interesting to see Nokia's new phones in 2010.

I am sure we'll here about big data center plans from Nokia to support its growth in services.

Read more

Apple will need to stop designing state-of-the-art hardware and start designing insanely great data centers, says David Siegel

David Siegel has a book called Pull, The Power of the Semantic Web to transform business.

The Problem

On the Web today, we see millions of web sites, each of which presents web pages and documents. These are simply electronic versions of the old paper-based ways of doing things: writing checks, filing taxes, looking at menus, catalog pages, magazines, etc. When you search for something on Google, you get a list of web sites that may or may not have what you’re looking for, based on keywords found in the text. You have to look at each one and decide whether it answers your question. Google doesn’t know where the information or answers are; it just knows which pages have which keywords and who links to them.

Our information infrastructure isn’t scaling up very well at all. The average person now sees over 1,000,000 words and consumes 34 gigabytes of information every day. Mike Bergman estimates white-collar workers spend 25% of their time looking for the documents and information they need to do their work. One billion people are online now, and 4 billion have mobile phones. Exhaustion of IPv4 addresses (limit is 4 billion) is predicted for sometime in 2011. By 2030, there will be a minimum of 50 billion devices connected via internet and phone networks. Our information infrastructure is built to haul electronic versions of 19th century documents for humans to read, and it’s keeping us from using information effectively.

The solution to our information problem is the semantic web and the pull paradigm.

One section that jumped out is "The Computerless Computer Company" where he makes the statement.

Apple will need to stop designing state-of-the-art hardware and start designing insanely great data centers.

David is a big Apple supporter working on the Tekton typeface and has a blog post on why he should lead Apple.

The irony of I just realized is David's vision actually describes Google's plans.

The huge strength Google has vs. Apple is its advertising system gives them a huge advantage of the "Pull" from consumers.  Apple is a push company.

Google has insanely great data centers.

Read more

GreenPeace targets Cloud Data Centers environmental impact and use of coal power

I blogged back in July 2009 asking what would be Greenpeace's target for environmental impact of data centers, speculating Apple, Google, Microsoft as a possible target.  Well Greenpeace uses the Apple brand recognition and the iPad announcement to create awareness.

The announcement of Apple’s iPad has been much
anticipated by a world with an ever-increasing appetite for
mobile computing devices as a way to connect, interact,
learn and work. As rumours circulated – first about its
existence and then about its capabilities - the iPad
received more media attention than any other gadget in
recent memory. Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs
finally showcased his company’s latest creation before a
rapt audience in San Francisco. From their smart phones
and netbooks, the crowd feverishly blogged and tweeted
real time updates out to a curious world.

Greenpeace report cover: Cloud Computing and Climate Change
Whether you actually want an iPad or not, there is no
doubt that it is a harbinger of things to come. The iPad
relies upon cloud-based computing to stream video,
download music and books, and fetch email. Already,
millions access the ‘cloud’ to make use of online social
networks, watch streaming video, check email and create
documents, and store thousands of digital photos online
on popular web-hosted sites like Flickr and Picasa.


The term cloud, or cloud computing, used as a metaphor
for the internet, is based on an infrastructure and business
model whereby - rather than being stored on your own
device - data, entertainment, news and other products
and services are delivered to your device, in real time,
from the internet. The creation of the cloud has been a
boon both to the companies hosting it and to consumers
who now need nothing but a personal computer and
internet access to fulfill most of their computing needs.

image

Greenpeace has been making noise about Facebook's data center, and now has started the public awareness in this pdf.

image

I know of some companies that have a sigh of relief they are not on the Greenpeace list.

image

Some of you have noticed I made a change last week to the blog title and now have Green (low carbon) data center.

image_thumb[1][1]

Green is such an overloaded term it made sense to clarify a focus on discussing low carbon as a goal of a green data center.  Note the following in the Greenpeace pdf.


More cloud-computing companies are pursuing design and siting
strategies that can reduce the energy consumption of their data
centres, primarily as a cost containment measure. For most
companies, the environmental benefits of green data design are
generally of secondary concern.

Cloud computing infographic
Facebook’s decision to build its own highly-efficient data centre in
Oregon that will be substantially powered by coal-fired electricity clearly
underscores the relative priority for many cloud companies. Increasing
Key trends that will impact the environmental footprint of the cloud
the energy efficiency of its servers and reducing the energy footprint
of the infrastructure of data centres are clearly to be commended, but
efficiency by itself is not green if you are simply working to maximise
output from the cheapest and dirtiest energy source available. The US
EPA will soon be expanding its EnergyStar rating system to apply to
data centres, but similarly does not factor in the fuel source being used
to power the data centre in its rating criteria. Unfortunately, as our
collective demand for computing resources increases, even the most
efficiently built data centres with the highest utilisation rates serve only
to mitigate, rather than eliminate, harmful emissions.

Some people thought the hype about Facebook's coal power was a fad.  No it is a trend and the start of evaluating the carbon impact of data centers.

image

Here is a sampling of other media coverage.

Coal Fuels Much Of Internet "Cloud", Says Greenpeace

New York Times - Peter Henderson - ‎5 hours ago‎

By REUTERS SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The 'cloud' of data which is becoming the heart of the Internet is creating an all too real cloud of pollution as ...

Greenpeace issues warning about data centre power

BBC News - ‎7 hours ago‎

Greenpeace is calling on technology giants like Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook to power their data centres with renewable energy sources. ...

Data clouds called out for dirty energy

Marketplace (blog) - ‎5 hours ago‎

Environmental activities are concerned about server farms' use of dirty energy to keep sites like Google and Facebook running. ...

Greenpeace: Cloud Contributes to Climate Change

Data Center Knowledge - Rich Miller - ‎5 hours ago‎

The environmental group Greenpeace says data center builders must become part of the solution to the climate change challenge, rather than part of the ...

Cloud computing 'fuels climate change'

PCR-online.biz - Nicky Trup - ‎8 hours ago‎

The growth of cloud computing could cause a huge increase in greenhouse gas emissions, Greenpeace has warned. ...

2020: Cloud Computing GHG Emissions To Triple

Basil & Spice - ‎9 hours ago‎

San Francisco, United States — As IT industry analysts label 2010 the “Year of the Cloud”, a new report by Greenpeace shows how the launch of quintessential ...

Greenpeace criticises coal-fuelled internet cloud

TechRadar UK - Adam Hartley - ‎10 hours ago‎

Eco-campaigners at Greenpeace have criticised the idea of an internet 'cloud' - with data centres built by the likes of Facebook, Apple, ...

The iPad, internet, and climate change links in the spotlight

Greenpeace USA - ‎13 hours ago‎

International — On the eve of the launch of the iPad, our latest report warns that the growth of internet computing could come with a huge jump in ...

Read more