tecosystems

What Would the Operating System Look Like if It Were Designed Today? The Chrome OS Q&A

2009-07-08T14:59:28-07:00

“I think the real question is (that) if you were going to design an OS today, what would it look like? The OS that we’re using today is kind of in the model of a ’70s or ’80s vintage workstation. It was designed for a LAN, it’s got this great display, and a mouse, and all this stuff, but it’s not inherently designed for the Internet. The Internet is this resource in the back end that you can design things to take advantage of. You can use it to synchronize stuff, and communicate stuff amongst these devices at the edge.

A student today or a web startup, they don’t actually start at the desktop. They start at the web, they start building web solutions, and immediately deploy that to a browser. So from that perspective, what programming models can I give these folks that they can extend that functionality out to the edge? In the cases where they want mobility, where they want a rich dynamic experience as a piece of their solution, how can I make it incremental for them to extend those things, as opposed to learning the desktop world from scratch?” – Ray Ozzie, 3/10/2008, in an interview with Om Malik

Of the two things I’ve consistently said about Google since, oh, 2004 or so, one is still true: Google is still authoring aggressively operating system independent services. Today’s announcement of a desktop operating system based on Chrome notwithstanding.

What is less obvious is whether or not Google’s to date successful approach of not trying to out-Microsoft Microsoft is still in play, or whether they’re finally succumbing to the blinding temptation to own, well, everything. While I could build and defend either case, the Department of Justice is almost certainly going to concern itself increasingly with the latter scenario.

More immediately, the pending Chrome OS is in many respects the realization of a decades old vision, as Rafe reminds us. Known by a variety of names, the most common appelation of Network Computer would be easy to apply to a Chrome OS equipped node. It’s not quite a network computer, of course, in that the netbooks that will be the Chrome OS’s first hardware platform typically have at least some on board disk space. But the basic elements are there; a hardware platform and operating system pairing that is optimized to do one thing superbly – access network services.

As much as Oracle and Sun’s – isn’t that quite the coincidence, incidentally – vision for network computers failed, it appears in hindsight to be a classic case of being early to market. Remember what the world was like in 1996? No cellular data networks? Hell, the wifi patents were still in the filing process that point. And I won’t even get into what the web looked like back then; fortunately the crimes I myself committed against it are lost behind a prescient robots.txt file.

Even with more ubiquitous connectivity and an accelerating web, however, the outlook for – and implications of – the Chrome OS depend on a number of variables. To explore these, let’s turn to our old friend the Q&A.

Q: Before we begin, do you have anything to disclose?
A: A variety of companies that are involved in this discussion are RedMonk clients, from Adobe, IBM, Microsoft and Sun to Canonical and Red Hat. Google is not a RedMonk client; RedMonk, however, is a Google customer.

Q: Ok, for those that missed it, can you summarize the news?
A: Certainly. Last night, via their official blog, Google announced the Chrome OS, “an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks.” Essentially it marries Google’s Chrome browser to a Linux kernel to produce a basic, browser based operating system. The windowing system will reportedly be new as well, indicating that they’re eschewing traditional Linux desktop environments like GNOME and KDE in favor of a potentially from scratch approach that, like Chrome the browser, is web front and center. I’m very curious as to what they’ve got planned for the windowing system, actually.

Q: Is the project open source?
A: Not as yet, but they’ve promised that it will be. In the meantime, as has become typical with Google projects for better or for worse, they’ll work on it behind the scenes before dropping it on Google Code.

Q: Is the fact that it is – or at least will be – open source important?
A: Absolutely. For Google, because it may compel wider adoption, testing, and development, but also for open source competitors, who may – depending on the licensing – be able to borrow liberally from the project.

Q: What hardware platforms are supported?
A: At present, the goal seems to be x86 and ARM, which would offer the operating system the ability to penetrate the overwhelming majority of the netbook market, not to mention expand into laptops and desktops or smartphones.

Q: Doesn’t Google already have an operating system for smartphones in Android?
A: Indeed they do, but Chrome OS is a very different animal from Android. While some are raising legitimate questions about the intelligence and viability of maintaining either two operating systems or so many open source projects, this to me is a more logical step for Google than would be attempting to push Android onto the same platforms.

Q: Why? Why didn’t they just double down on Android on the desktop? Or, alternately, skip it in favor of Chrome OS?
A: At present, phones and desktops are materially and necessarily distinct in their relative strengths and weaknesses, and by extension, the application’s ability to leverage or minimize same. Android, which is essentially Java married to a Linux kernel, is designed expressly for handsets. The Palm Pre may yet prove that a web only model can compete effectively against the richness of the iPhone, but Android would indicate that even Google felt compelled to turn to native code in an effort to match the Apple experience.

On the other hand, what do people use netbooks for, typically? Checking email? Browsing the web? Instant messaging? Facebook? Paying bills online? Why, then, would you push the Android rock up the hill, when a simple browser based interface would more than suffice for the majority of needs? Exactly. You wouldn’t, and Google didn’t. I never believed that Android on laptops made sense, personally, because of the applications question.

Q: What’s the applications question?
A: Platform success is nearly always achieved via application volume. Platforms that attract volume tend to succeed, those that don’t, don’t. While there are a great many variables at work, application volume is typically the peformance metric.

Which always made Android a questionable choice for me. Forget the fact that a world of rich applications isn’t exactly in Google’s best interests (contrast that with the Chrome OS experience) and just ask yourself this: is it easier, as a developer, to develop for the web or for a Java-like platform in Dalvik? The answer is, of course, the former. So that was always strike one versus Android. Strike two was the fact that virtually every other competing desktop platform – Linux, Mac and Windows – would have a superior application volume from day one, and the ability to indefinitely sustain that by running Android apps themselves along with other choices.

Strike three? It’s more difficult for Google to advertise in – and thus monetize – Android rich clients than it is their own web applications, which are presumably intended to be at the heart of the Chrome OS experience.

Add it all up and Android was never a good choice for the netbook form factor; whether it remains a quality choice on the handset depends – you guessed it – on application volume.

Q: Is the idea of a browser based operating system new?
A: Not really. The GNOME crew, for example, has been discussing the possibility of an “online desktop” for a few years now, and even if it’s not what Chrome OS envisions, the concepts are similar. Microsoft, a rich client advocate if ever there was one, even has its own browser project in Gazelle that encompasses some operating system like features. Good OS has been tinkering with something very similar to Chrome OS in Cloud.

But more to the point, the netbook market itself is almost a browser based operating system. While netbooks today are more often than not shipping with a version of Windows XP, it was Linux interfaces that actually pioneered the market. And to talk to the early users of devices like the Eee, they were essentially jumped up web terminals, since few had the interest, inclination or ability to explore the application catalog for a heavily customized Linux desktop.

We know, in other words, that there’s a market. How big that market is is one interesting question. How big it could get as network delivered browser based applications get better is another.

Q: What about Gartner’s research that indicates that users are underwhelmed by SaaS applications? If the affection for network delivered application wanes, won’t that negatively impact the Chrome OS?
A: An observation: the audience here is important. Gartner reports the survey subjects as “users and prospects of SaaS solutions in 333 enterprises in the U.S. and the U.K.” Enterprises, in other words. Which are not only Gartner’s typical clients, but usually the last to know when it comes to technology. Enterprises may or may not like SaaS as an application delivery approach, but it won’t matter because an increasing percentage of their choices will be delivered that way regardless.

Besides, enterprise buyers are not the target market for netbook sales anyhow. The market, which was essentially created overnight under the noses of the big software and hardware vendors alike, is overwhelmingly consumer focused. And apart from hardware specific requirements like iPod/iPhone compatibility or gaming, their typical computer usage – Facebook, Gmail, online banking and shopping, etc – is increasingly operating system independent.

Just as Google always intended.

Eventually, just as we’ve seen with cell phones, instant messaging and webmail, netbooks may make their way back into the enterprise. But until then, they should have a healthy market in front of them, enterprise appetite or no.

Q: Speaking of iPods and such, what will the device compatibility story be?
A: Initially? Probably zero, with the exception of maybe printing, which is more seamless now, typically, on Linux than it is on Windows. No, I don’t expect Google to tackle the very difficult question of device compatibility at all in the initial releases of Chrome OS, if only because it’s a slippery slope.

This will be, I’m sure, one of the defenses that Apple and Windows employ against the potential threat of Chrome OS. And for many consumers, it will be a compelling one.

Q: Why do you think Google decided to create (yet) another Linux distribution, rather than embracing popular desktop and netbook options like Ubuntu’s?
A: Not having spoken with them, I can only speculate, but my guess is very simple: speed. Besides the relevancy of its results, what’s the defining characteristic of its search engine? Speed.

Likewise, when Google broke with Firefox via Chrome (the browser), my view was that they felt that a new, from scratch browser was the only means of competing effectively with one of the native clients’ last remaining advantages: speed. This has been largely born out in their development; while the Tracemonkey enabled Firefox 3.5 is clearly superior to its 3.0 parent, Chromium for Linux is one of the fastest applications I’ve seen, period. Browser or no. It hasn’t been enough to compel me to switch, as yet, but the emphasis on speed and quickness has paid dividends for them.

So while I have no inside information on the subject, I suspect much the same rationale was at work in the design and development of the Chrome OS. Linux, in spite of some dedicated efforts, has yet to introduce device like low latency into the desktop. Booting into a modern desktop with all of its bells and whistles means overhead. By eliminating the traditional operating system overhead in favor of a simple, high peformance browser, boot time and general performance should be improved dramatically.

And that matters. Speed is a feature.

Q: How much does it matter?
A: Enough that I briefly entertained the idea of cutting over from Ubuntu – which boots on my SSD equipped X301 in a bit over 20 seconds – to Moblin, available in under 10. I didn’t make the switch, obviously, because I wasn’t quite ready to lose my application portfolio in the process, but it matters.

And yes, that’s even in a world in which suspend works flawlessly. Consider that the feature that Apple chose to highlight in its latest iteration of the iPhone – the 3GS – was speed. If that still doesn’t convince you, think of it this way: if a consumer ever picks up, or sees someone else pick up a small computer that boots in a few seconds, that will in all likelihood be something they’ve never seen before. Sad, but true.

Q: What about the question people like Gordon Haff are asking: why would the “Google Chrome OS would have mainstream impact when desktop Linux has not?”
A: Because while the Chrome OS is Linux, it’s pretty significantly differentiated. Linux, we all need to remember, is the kernel; the things that a user will see and interact with are something else entirely.

First, there’s the speed. I’m guessing that over time Chrome OS will be pretty close to instant-on, with operational latency as impressive as that Google’s achieved in the web world. While mainstream Linux distributions have made many improvements in desktop performance the last few years, it won’t match that soon, if only because it’s handicapped by having to run more than just a browser.

But the single greatest differentiation might just be that: the browser as the interface. Absent, mostly, is the need to learn the differences of a new operating system; your interface is “just” a browser. While that imposes some significant limitations, clearly, it also dramatically lowers the barriers to entry to the product. I know a great many non-technical people that have picked up Google Chrome with with no introduction; I can’t say the same of any currently available operating system, Mac included.

Last, there’s the power of brand, which observers will discount at their own peril. Ask Apple about that sometime.

Q: So you’re bullish about the distribution?
A: Not as much as I recognize the opportunity it’s targeting. Frankly, I have mixed feelings about the distribution. While I personally would love to have a capable platform that booted in a few seconds and welcome the kind of back-to-the-basics innovation that Chrome OS represents, I’m not particularly eager to see the introduction of (yet) another distribution into an already fragmented market. Could Chrome OS be good competition for Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Moblin et al? Sure. But it could also introduce significant educational challenges as a variety of distributions with a variety of interfaces jostle for marketshare.

All of that said, I do appreciate this kind of innovation.

Q: Which kind is that?
A: The “we don’t have to do things this way just because that’s the way they’ve always been done.” Much like Wave rethinks collaboration, Chrome OS is a reconsideration of what an operating system should look like in a heavily networked environment.

I know there are those that question Google’s innovation track record, and both Chrome OS and Wave could certainly go the way of the dinosaur, but I appreciate that someone is asking these questions.

Q: Back to marketshare, do you think this was targeted at Microsoft Windows?
A: If Google’s smart, and I think generally they are, they’re not targeting a company but opportunities. And there’s no question that there is opportunity for innovation in the operating system market – significant opportunity. Consider that Google’s seemingly snarky assertion – that “the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web” – is not only true, but confirmed by none other than Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie (see the quote above).

Q: What impact do you expect this to have on the folks from Redmond’s operating system?
A: Well, at the very least I think it’s a wee bit early to be writing the obituary for the Windows operating sytem, as some are doing. Chrome OS represents a significant problem for the folks from Redmond, to be sure, but – like OS X – as long as there are applications and devices that exclusively operate on the Windows platform, they’ve got adequate insulation at least at the high ends of the market. For the short term, anyhow.

Over the longer term, of course, the transition to web applications that Chrome OS is specifically designed to leverage and accelerate represents a serious threat to Microsoft’s primary revenue sources, but that’s not news. It wasn’t even news five years ago. So while Microsoft is probably no happier about this news than Apple – or Canonical et al, for that matter – Chrome OS is not the death knell for the existing products any more than Chrome the browser killed Firefox.

If anyone is threatened by this, actually, it’s probably the Linux distributions.

Q: Why is that?
A: The various Linux distributions are less highly differentiated from Chrome OS than is Windows – or, should they decide to enter the market, Apple – ergo they will likely be the most impacted by its arrival. Customers purchasing Windows are typically doing for specific reasons; they rely on Windows compatible applications, they’re used to it, and so on. The competing Linux distributions enjoy no such visibility yet, however.

Q: Is the Chrome OS a win for HTML5?
A: Unquestionably. As Cote’s excellent back of a napkin web UI landscape demonstrates, there are a number of competing web strategies these days, most of which are some combination of open and closed, and all of which serve their particular backer’s interests.

Chrome OS is no exception there; it’s explicitly and unapologetically a web vehicle, designed to drive people towards the web and – as the plan goes – Google’s money raking advertisement scheme.

The difference is that, unlike some of the proprietary approaches, there’s nothing terribly exclusive about the Chrome OS experience. At the end of the day, their web applications designed for a browser, so any seismic shift away from native clients to the web would presumably benefit the likes of Firefox at least as much as Chrome OS.

Q: Why, as Nat Friedman asks, did they announce Chrome OS now?
A: Candidly, I have no idea. My assumption would be that they understood that in conducting conversations with OEMs that things would leak, and preferred to own the announcement themselves. But your guess is as good as mine on this one.

Q: In the wake of this announcement, does the operating system matter?
A: I’d argue yes, though it’s less so every day. The shift to online services has been so gradual it’s like the decline in your vision; you don’t notice until you wake up one day and you can’t see ten feet. Similarly, online services are more capable and more powerful by the week, and with their ascension comes a relative decline in the importance of the platform below the browser.

But the key word in that sentence is relative. Chrome OS is not likely to support your iPhone tomorrow, or your digital video camera, or flight control joystick. Nor will it match the application availability or, in all likelihood, the user experience of the better designed platforms currently succeeding in the marketplace.

My guess, though, is that that’s not the point, at least not right now.

Q: What is the point, then?
A: This is just speculation, but I’d be surprised if Google’s metrics for success looked anything like what Asa’s considering. Desktops don’t turn over as quickly as handsets, so marketshare growth is more difficult to come by, even for lower cost hardware.

Q: Will you switch?
A: I doubt it, but I have to admit that I’ll kick the tires.

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Innovation in Healthcare: Dr. Christopher Bartlett

2009-07-07T14:19:57-07:00

Since graduating college, I’ve never had a doctor. Seriously. Not for lack of insurance; from my first job post-college on I’ve never been without coverage, assuming that catastrophic plans like the one I have now count.

But while I’ve fortunately been relatively healthy in that span, that’s a bad way to go through life.

So why didn’t I have what’s, sadly, become known as a primary care physician? The aforementioned health, in part, but more because the current healthcare model simply didn’t work for me. Between not being able to pick from recommended doctors to paying exorbitant visit rates out-of-pocket due to bare bones healthcare policies, I simply worked on an as needed basis.

Which, while not cheap – a rusty nail through my foot cost me around a thousand dollars a few years ago, worked. More or less. But with the odds against it continuing to work indefinitely, I found myself in the market for an alternative. Ideally, an innovative alternative. While traditional small businesses such as coffee shops have been loathe to get creative with their business models, my hope was that the systemic failure in our healthcare approach would have driven some to adapt to the changing conditions. And so they have. They’ve adapted the model right back into the past, in fact, to the lamentably bygone era of GPs.

I found Doctor Christopher Bartlett via a flyer at my Portland gym, where he happens to work out himself. The part that caught my eye was the focus on high deductible healthcare plans; at $5,000, they don’t come much higher than mine. The model is very simple: cash-based, hourly service. In many respects, it’s much like legal or consulting businesses. The model in this case is instead applied to an industry that has become so byzantine in its regulations and procedures that it’s in danger of collapsing under its own weight.

Essentially Bartlett’s is a practice that cuts out the insurance layer. You can submit back to your provider if they accept out of network physicians, but ultimately this is a practice intentionally divorced from the traditional world of HMOs and primary care physicians. Which makes it suboptimal, clearly, if you’re an HMO participant. But for the rest of us, it really is the best of all worlds: reasonable and upfront pricing, no insurance company hassle, and outstanding quality of care.

Seriously outstanding quality, in fact. Doctor Bartlett’s webpage talks about the benefits of personalized medical care and direct access, and these have been obvious to me even on brief experience. A couple of weeks after getting a routine physical, I came down with my traditional late winter hacking bronchial cough. Contacting Doctor Bartlett via email, I received a recommended course of action a mere one hour and fifty minutes letter…in spite of the fact that he was in San Francisco at the time.

I could go on about the quality of care – his philosophy towards medicine is both progressive and open minded, and his manner is unparalleled – but the really interesting part to me is the model. Returning to the GP days of early might not sound like innovation, but compared to the reality of today’s healthcare system it can’t be anything else.

If you’re anywhere near Portland, ME, I can’t recommend Dr. Bartlett highly enough (the lawyer seconds that opinion), and if you’re not, you might want to look for a doctor like him your area. If the model works for me, it’ll pretty much work for anyone.

There are bigger questions to answer in the healthcare space, of course, but I’m leaving those in the hands of better minds than mine. Right now, I’m just happy to have found a doctor.

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links for 2009-07-02

2009-07-02T18:04:14-07:00

eMusic Q&A: Mark Everett of Eels – eMusic Spotlight

"What were you not willing to do?

Put out Beautiful Freak Volume Two and more $300,000 videos. The way that music is made now is basically for people who don't like music. It's made by focus groups. I would go insane. The only person I'm thinking about listening to a song when I'm making a song is me. I'm just trying to impress myself. If other people like it, that's great. But I'm not going to write a song to try and please a certain kind of person."

(tags: eels music commercial success recordindustry mre e)

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Open Source and the Cloud: Where’s the LAMP?

2009-07-02T17:16:34-07:00

“My challenge to everyone competing with Amazon, Google and Microsoft is to remember that you’re competing with Amazon, Google and Microsoft. These are strong technology companies, and if you’re going to compete with them, open source is the only way to do that. Otherwise, you have no leverage.” – Matt Mullenweg

Let’s accept up front that the next Amazon, Google or Microsoft is not going to be able to purchase hardware as cheaply as the last Amazon, Google and Microsoft. That’s strike one. Bandwidth is also going to be a bit more dear. Strike two. Consider the challenges of managing all of the above, and that’s strike three.

But before we call them – and count them – out, let’s consider for a moment the history of the software industry. Before the cloud, before software as a service there was this weird little trend called open source. This bizarre practice involved opening (read: giving away) your source code (read: your software) so that anyone, your competitors included, could use it. For free.

Odd as this might have seemed at the time, of course, open source allowed the small to compete with the big by leveraging rather than submitting to their weaknesses. It’s sometimes difficult to remember in this Google-obsessed age, but during Windows 95’s heyday, it was natural to conclude that Microsoft was the once and future provider of all the technology that one might reasonably require. Of course we’d once thought the same about IBM, but this was different. Microsoft was different.

My how things change. And stay the same, to be fair, as Microsoft hasn’t exactly gone the way of SGI. But anyone who’s watched the Microsoft business over the past decade or so will tell you that open source has been a disruptive influence on the firm, top to bottom. As if it wasn’t enough that monopolies like the browser and operating system markets were threatened by open source alternatives, its biggest and most terrifying competitors were building their own businesses on software they didn’t have to develop. Not that Microsoft’s been alone in feeling the corrosive disruption of free software, of course; it could and has been argued, in fact, that the biggest single reason that Sun is about to be subsumed into Oracle is the LAMP stack.

David versus Goliath, indeed.

To explore the specifics of how open source might impact the cloud, let’s indulge in a bit of Q&A.

Q: Before we begin, do you have anything to disclose?
A: Yes indeed. Folks with relevant technologies like Canonical, Cloudera, Convirture, Dell, IBM, Reductive Labs, Red Hat, Microsoft, Sun and so on are RedMonk customers, while we ourselves are customers of providers of Amazon and Google.

Q: To continue the above: could history repeat itself? Could David beat Goliath – again – in the cloud space, on the backs of free software?
A: Frankly, I doubt it.

Free software is not, by itself, enough to overcome the aforementioned economy of scale advantages enjoyed by the Amazon’s, Google’s, and Microsoft’s of the world, let alone the larger, enterprise focused systems players like HP, IBM, and Oracle (why not you too, Cisco?). But that, to me, is not the interesting question.

Q: What is the interesting question, then?
A: What we should be asking is not whether free software can replace Amazon et al, but whether or not it can power a viable cloud alternative. An alternative sufficiently viable to keep the big guys honest and prevent lockin. On the answer to that question, to me, hinges nothing less than the future of the cloud market.

Q: Why is that question so important?
A: First, there’s the aforementioned question of lockin. Neither customers nor the governments that tax them can be trusted to stave off damaging monopolies, in my opinion. History demonstrates conclusively that IT staffs, necessarily focused on the present, will happily sacrifice the future for the sake of Getting Things Done today. Equally clear is the fact that governments, when finally awakened to anticompetitive threats, generally do too little, too late. Meaning that the best hope for an open and vibrant playing field – i.e. a market of cloud providers not intent on locking you in at the first opportunity – in future is competition for the existing players.

Besides their monopoly-resistant properties, open source cloud software could play an important role in the rise of so-called private clouds – cloud infrastructures that are run on-premise. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the concept of private clouds or not, they’re coming. For compliance, privacy, uptime and a host of other reasons. Given that one can’t replicate the platforms of an Amazon, a Google or a Microsoft internally, it would seem to make public to private or vice versa transitions challenging in the extreme.

(Re)enter open source. Though some might point to interoperability and standards conversations as the most promising candidates for ensuring adequate competition in the cloud space, my experience in other standards arenas leads me to assign greater value to reference implementations of said standards. Open source implementations, more specifically, because at the end of the day the entire interoperability and standards discussion is about ensuring a level playing field. Throw in the fact that open source could potentially allow replication of the public cloud stack privately and you might yet see enterprises and governments pushing for open source.

Q: Are the benefits for open source cloud offerings strongest within the customer, then?
A: Not at all. Lost in discussion of cloud development has been the fact that the development platforms and targets are changing, and quickly. The level of interoperability that even unwieldy standards like J2EE offer is generally absent in the cloud. Platform as a service (PaaS) customers are writing applications, typically, to a completely proprietary abstraction layer, whether it’s offering by Google, Salesforce or someone else. And even Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) customers deploying to enterprise standard platforms like RHEL will find their deployments regrettably unique, be that in the way that storage is accessed or the instances themselves are managed.

As Matt points out above, then, open source is going to be the primary mechanism with which startups compete, in my view. In the two primary styles of cloud implementations, IaaS and PaaS – what I’ve previously termed instance and fabric – we’ve seen dramatically different economic opportunities. With IaaS, the opportunities for developers and vendors has typically been to abstract the infrastructure via management, clustering and provisioning type applications. These opportunities are, frankly, likely to dwindle as Amazon increasingly offers these services itself. Within PaaS ecosystems such as Google or Salesforce, there is even less opportunity, in that the fabric is responsible for many of the tasks currently being serviced by vendors operating in the IaaS ecosystem. Most cloud vendors are building on Google or Salesforce rather than around them.

In other words, it’s a competitive market, and it’s only going to get more competitive as the bigger systems players rapidly pivot and reposition their wares for use in the cloud.

So how do you compete? Realistically, unless your company letterhead reads Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle or Salesforce, you’re probably going to have a hard time convincing even medium size cloud customers to write to something other than Amazon.

Unless, of course, you can develop a credible alternative that is popular enough to assuage concerns about longer term viability. Which pretty much means you’re going the open source route, in my view. Thus it is that the combination of open source and cloud is even more important for developers than it is for customers.

Q: Are any developers seeing things in those terms?
A: Sure. Take Cloudera, who’s offering a suite of commercial services around the open source Hadoop platform. Or the folks from Reasonably Smart – recently acquired by the folks from Joyent – who offer up the code from their Git and Javascript based PaaS layer with the following explanation: “we see [open source] as the only real way to make our platform truly attractive. Other Platform-as-a-Service providers may state a desire to be open, we’ve been that way from day one.”

Elsewhere, Red Hat is throwing a virtual conference strictly on the topic of open source cloud computing.

Q: Is the cloud a natural ally for open source?
A: Not at all. One of the godfathers of the free software movement, Richard Stallman, has called cloud computing “stupidity.” Others have argued that software deployed to the cloud obsoletes open source licenses, undermining the point of the software itself, with some even going so far as to call the loophole that permits this “a cancer.”

Q: Is there evidence to support these concerns?
A: Not much that I can see, candidly. Though the thinking is sound, in practice there are a great many healthy open source projects that are primarily deployed in network settings. From Hadoop to WordPress, well managed open source projects are succeeding without resorting to the more severe restrictions of the AGPL.

Q: Besides customers like enterprises and governments, who might most benefit from an open source cloud stack?
A: In a word: hosts. Given the stark economic reality that the major provider cloud providers’s economic advantages will expand with the growth they’re currently experiencing, what are smaller providers to do? Embracing open source seems to be the clearest response. Much as smaller and medium sized hosts worldwide today run Debian, Fedora, CentOS or Ubuntu as a means of minimizing their expense, so too are tomorrow’s would be cloud providers likely to embrace open cloud stacks in an effort to remain competitive in the burgeoning cloud market.

Besides, it’s not clear how big a cloud market will be left when the big guys are finished carving it up. If you assume (as you probably should) that IBM customers are more than likely to leverage an IBM cloud, HP customers an HP cloud and so on, you’ve already lost an important portion of the Global 100. Then consider the entrenched strength of the category’s market pioneer in Amazon and the relative strengths of communities that the likes of Google and Salesforce.com can sell into, and the addressable market is dwindling rapidly.

LAMP, with its flexibility, simplicity and perhaps most importantly – lack of upfront licensing costs – fueled an explosion in the hosting services market once upon a time. It’s entirely possible that a similarly open source cloud stack could do the same, particularly since far more software is delivered via the network than when the hosting industry first expanded.

Q: What is this cloud LAMP stack going to look like?
A: What we’re going to see, what we’re beginning to see, I think, is a loose coalition or confederation of projects and vendors that will together comprise an increasingly viable top to bottom alternative to some of the cloud providers today. We’re clearly not going to see an Amazon or a Google spring forth, complete, overnight, but the fact is from management to virtualization to operating systems to cloud provisioning the open source alternatives to the current proprietary cloud stacks are more credible by the day.

Q: Which projects and vendors will be part of this “coalition?”
A: Ultimately, there will have to be a variety of participants with varying aims and interests, but they’re probably going to look a lot like the recent Eucalyptus/Ubuntu partnership. Besides Linux (all flavors) and Eucalyptus, examples of projects I would expect to see considered for various roles in an open source cloud stack would be things like ConVirt, Drizzle, Hadoop, Puppet, Reasonably Smart and so on. Which is not to mention critical enabling technologies like KVM or potential API candidates like the one GoGrid made available under a CC license.

As you can tell, it’s far too early to begin casting for the new acronym, but it’s clear to me that there are going to be options for those that wish to pursue open source cloud computing. Which should be obvious, since most of the existing clouds are built on open source.

Q: What about timeframes: what are your expectations in terms of when the open source cloud will arrive?
A: It’s far too early to tell. What I would say instead is that the clock is ticking, and that the network effects favor the incumbents, so if I were an open source provider with cloud ambitions, I’d be ramping up the partnership and alliance conversations as quickly as possible.

If you happen to be one such developer or vendor, drop us a line and we’ll do what we can to help connect you to similarly interested parties.

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A RedMonk Interview

2009-06-30T14:27:57-07:00

This was supposed to be a post about what I’d consider to be an obvious enterprise marketplace candidate, but between Firefox 3.5, Weave, and some tinkering with agree].

Not that the protocol is perfect, of course.

Q: Let’s look at the protocol some more: is it really open?
A: The answer depends in part on where you’re coming from with respect to open protocols, but the short answer is no. It is open in the sense that it’s documented, but there are two primary issues which challenge that definition. First, there’s no external participation in the direction of the protocol at this point: “The committers for the Google Wave Federation Protocol project are currently all from the Google Wave engineering staff.” The plan is for that to change, apparently, but at the current time the development cannot be considered open. Second, there are – as is all too common – undocumented aspects to the API and the protocol itself. Much of the success or failure will depend on Google’s ability to make the entire stack as transparent as possible, top to bottom.

Those criticisms notwithstanding, is it a step in the right direction? I think so.

Q: Do you think that Google Wave is open enough to encourage third parties or competing vendors to participate?
A: It’s too early to say, and there are many variables that will play a role in the adoption of lackthereof of Wave beyond the Google firewall. But I did find Zoho CEO’s Sridhar Vembu’s comments from a piece talking about Google Wave and Microsoft Silverlight interesting:

That brings us back to Google: today, it is Google which is driving web standards forward. That is why we at Zoho are firmly aligned with them, even if they are our primary competitor. We believe in an open web, there is plenty of opportunity for all of us.

While not promising anything specific, they at least indicate a willingness to work with Google on the subject, which is quite the accomplishment, considering that Google aggressively competes with Zoho.

Q: What about the claims that Google Wave means that HTTP is dead?
A: Not sure I followed them, really, given that the Wave Javascript libraries, anyway, leverage HTTP pretty heavily, and that as Joe puts it, “the extension model with Wave is events over HTTP.” It’s true that XMPP is given a leading role in Wave, but as I have for some time, I see this as purely different tools/different jobs. And even if we forget all of the above, the fact is that HTTP is so fundamentally embedded into the fabric of the internet that its place is guaranteed for years to come.

Q: Is Google Wave open source?
A: Not yet, at least. As Lars Rasmussen told Tim O’Reilly, the intent is there: “To encourage adoption of the protocol, we intend to open source the code behind Google Wave.” But that hasn’t happened quite yet, so the answer at present is no.

Q: So considering all of the above: what does Google Wave mean for established office productivity vendors like IBM and Microsoft?
A: At present? Not much. Same for the near term. Considering how much pushback enterprises have had about a mere reskinning of an existing product in Office, the idea that Google will have substantial immediate success in pushing such a radically reshaped authoring proposition on a conservative market is laughable.

Over the mid to long term, however, it represents a potentially serious competitive threat. For years one or both vendors have effectively defined the office productivity experience, from collaboration to document authoring. And while, as discussed, both have experimented with radical reconsiderations of that experience, neither has had much success driving significant change into the mainstream. If Google Wave is successful, it will mean that Google will be the vendor defining the next generation experience for millions, potentially tens of millions of users, worldwide. Next to that prospect, the threat of Google Apps is but a trifle.

We’re already seeing enterprise collaboration vendors struggle to adapt to generational shifts in the workplace, as older retirees are replaced by young, tech savvy graduates. They’ve also grappled with the increasing importance of simpler, SaaS offerings and the threats that tools from Facebook to Twitter may pose. Wave, in many respects, is a far more grave concern than any of those, so fundamentally does it target what has traditionally been the province of high cost enterprise productivity tools.

So while there’s a long way to go between here and there, and success is far from guaranteed for Google’s latest product, Wave is one to watch.

Disclosure: IBM and Microsoft are RedMonk customers, while Google and Zoho are not.

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