In the past, some of that data had to be typed in, creating the risk of errors.

This is the future of software: invisibility.  The days of us sitting in front of a computer typing in data are numbered.  With the cost of data collection, storage, and analysis all plummeting, the software of the future will gather data seamlessly from your activities.  You will no longer have to tell your software what to do — it knows.  You will no longer have to put in strict relationships between data (this email is for this order) — it can figure it out.

One day, a six-year-old will ask you “Grandpa, did you really have to sit at a computer to order things online?”  What can you say?  Maybe “Yeah, but my grandpa had to shovel coal in the snow, so it wasn’t so bad.”

If this sounds like as much fun to you as it does to us, please contact us right away!  We’re really flexible and can accommodate part-time or full-time, remote or on-site.

Translation: No matter what the sales figures for Android, people just aren’t using them.  This is a far cry from the early days, when many thought that an army of Android mobile devices would slay Apple’s mighty iPhone:

Source: dailypicksandflicks.com

Most importantly, if this is true, then Google’s Android strategy has failed.

Google’s strategy with Android is very similar to those of mobile phone companies: Give away a free phone, sign you up for a contract.  In Google’s case, they gave the mobile operating system away in hopes of promoting traffic from mobile devices and then making money off that traffic through search and advertising.  They probably also wanted to make sure that that traffic isn’t “owned” by a competitor like Apple through its Safari browser on the iPhone.

Hence, if Android devices don’t generate web traffic, then Google has nothing to show for it, no matter how many phones or tablets Samsung sells.

Even worse is Amazon’s “forking” of Android by using it to create the Kindle Fire, which has been customized extensively to work with Amazon’s digital content businesses.  This is the worst of all possible scenarios for Google’s Android strategy.  From Google’s perspective, the Kindle Fire is as much as a competitor as the iPad, because all the digital content is offered through Amazon instead of Google Play, and all the web traffic is still owned by a competitor’s browser, even if it’s called Silk instead of Safari.  And it’s all made with Google’s own technology.

Android’s experience is the core dilemma of open source business models: The “Last Mile” reliance on third parties to deliver your product to end users.  In Android’s case, the manufacturers are the “Last Mile,” and by making low-quality products with Android or competing with Google, they’ve not lived up to Google’s expectations.

Google is now trying to fix it with its own mobile devices, starting with the Nexus tablets, so they can deliver the complete Android experience at their standards and steer the low end of the tablet market away from Amazon’s Kindle Fire.  Will it work?  That would depend first and foremost on how well the Google-made Android devices sell.

If the Google tablets and phones sell well, should Google still keep Android open source?   That would in turn depend on the relative strengths of Google and the other Android manufacturers.  If the Google devices raises the bar for the others, who start making better phones and tablets of their own and delivering web traffic to Google, then of course they should keep providing those other manufacturers with a free operating system.

But if Google’s Android devices are the only ones delivering the traffic, while the other manufacturers make money off the devices but deliver no traffic, or worse use Android to compete with Google, then it should become a full-fledged manufacturer like Apple.  It doesn’t mean that Google would “kill” Android, but it could make a “super-Android” which is not available to the other manufacturers.

PS Here’s something Android and iPhone users could all enjoy:

Source: ipodmin.com

Doing mail merge in Google Apps was a lot of fun!  With a little copy and paste and about 15 minutes, I had was sending emails attached with customized letters as PDF’s.  Could programming always be this easy?

I think so: Javascript is easy, fast, and flexible.  It’s great for implementing single-task automations.  It’s great for copy-paste-customize development.  If we can provide Javascript developers with a domain-friendly API that hides the complex data structures, security requirements, and special code for working with big data, I think we’d have the perfect platform for open community-developed software.

For as long as we’ve had “windowing” user interfaces, we’ve had icons which opened up to an application taking up the entire screen.  This is how Mac OS, Windows, Linux desktops like Gnome and KDE, iOS, and Android all work.

With Windows 8, however, you now have a desktop of tiles, each of which is automatically refreshing with the latest updates.  One window is showing you the latest news headlines, another is showing weather or stock market indices, while a third could be tempting you with travel photos or Facebook chatter.  (I’ll take the travel photos):

Try it for a while, and you’ll find yourself just sitting back and watch the world roll by, one tile at a time.  But you’re not just wasting time.  You’re also  witnessing something far more profound: the general technological shift from synchronous to asynchronous computing.

Making money from mobile games is particularly tricky. For one, there is a smaller screen on mobile phones and less room for advertisements. Another problem is that people using their phones or other mobile devices often are what Zynga calls “casual players” who tend to spend less money for, say, ways to advance quickly in a game, than do the more dedicated players on PCs. 

We’ve noticed the same with mobile commerce:

• The smaller screen really restricts what you can do
• Visitors using smartphones are more likely to be browsers rather than shoppers.

Q: What’s the difference between internal name and product name?

A: If your company wants to maintain an internal name for products that’s different than the standard product name, then you can put it in internalName. Otherwise you should keep them the same.

Welcome to software complexity.

When we design software, we’re making choices.  Do we add features for people who need them?  Or keep them out to make things simpler for people who don’t?  As much as we’d like to keep things simple, we must create features for users, and as we add features, we add complexity.

When it comes to business software like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM), the complexity is in the database.  To support all the features, we must create hundreds of tables with thousands of fields, even though not every user will need all the fields in all the tables.  It is simply how relational databases work.

For opentaps Framework 2, though, we’ve been experimenting with the MongoDB NoSQL database as our back end.  A NoSQL database is schema free.  What this means is that we don’t have to define the fields of a table in advance.  Instead, we use whatever fields we need as we need them.  So, for the example above, if you need an internal name, then simply add them.  If you don’t, then you don’t have to deal with it.  It simply doesn’t exist.

Try the opentaps 2 Notes demo application, and you’ll see how it works:

When you add your notes, the arbitrary fields are stored when you added them, but if the note doesn’t have any fields, nothing is stored.  Also note that the your fields are stored as they are entered, not using any of the hacks you may have used with relational databases:

For more technical details, see our wiki page on MongoDB and NoSQL.

We hope that a schema-free NoSQL database can reduce complexity by eliminating unnecessary data structures, keeping software elegant without sacrificing power.  We’ll let you know as we do more with MongoDB.

You can try the opentaps v2 Notes application at notes.opentaps.com or see a YouTube video for the new opentaps v2 user interface.  For developer documentation, please see our wiki pages about opentaps 2.

Fedex and Endicia Shipping Integration

The new opentaps OFBiz FedEx integration module provides FedEx web services integration for both opentaps and ofbiz.  Important: because the current Ship Manager Direct API will be discountinued by FedEx on May 31, 2012, you will need to get this module to continue shipping with FedEx.

opentaps Endicia integration module now supports generating USPS shipping labels from opentaps or ofbiz.  See shop.opentaps.org for this and other modules to improve the capabilities of your opentaps system.

opentaps In The Cloud now Available on Amazon EC2 m1.medium Instance Type

opentaps in the Cloud, our popular Amazon EC2 deployment option for opentaps, is now available on the Amazon m1.medium instance type.  This new instance type was introduced recently by Amazon and offers the equivalent of 2 processor cores and 3.75 GB of available RAM and can be used to host opentaps for a small organization.  To use this new instance type, subscribe to the opentaps Mini AMI and choose m1.medium on startup.

Since the early days of the PC, the software industry has operated according to a pattern described in Michael Cusumano’s classic The Business of Software: The successful software companies are the ones which gathered the largest number of users.  The best practitioners were Microsoft and, later, Google.  Both followed similar strategies: lower costs, add distribution partners, add users, and branch into related products.

Apple was the oddball.  Its dogged attempt to make hardware and software together made it look like a throwback to the age of the minicomputer.  Its quaint insistence on user experience and quality made one want to grab Steve Jobs, shake him, and yell — “Can’t you see the user base is all that matters?”

So… what happened?  Could it be that

1. Low switching costs (suggested in the GigaOM) article made it important for software companies to keep the users happy?
2. Computing has become so inexpensive that users can and will pay for a product that made them happy?
3. The emergence of consumer computing over corporate computing made the user’s happiness important?

Are software companies finally in the user-happiness business?