Google to preach Web 2.0 gospel to developers

Just because Google so obviously loves the idea of cloud computing, don't think the company doesn't care about what happens at the other end of the network connection, too.

As former President Bill Clinton used to say, there's a third way: Google wants to improve technology on both the server in the cloud and on the client running a Web browser. The search giant will detail its approach to at least 2,800 developers paying to attend the first Google I/O conference this week in San Francisco.

Vic Gundotra, head of developer evangelism and open-source projects at Google

(Credit: Google)

There's been a long-running tension among computing companies about where the brains of the computing operation reside. In early years, central servers did all the work and people connected through "dumb terminals" that did nothing but display text. Then the personal computer revolution took off, and companies such as Microsoft whose software ran on these "clients" prospered. Now it's the Internet era, and Google wants a little of both.

"We are going to make the cloud more accessible. And we're going to make the browser more capable," said Vic Gundotra, Google's vice president of engineering in charge of developer evangelism and open-source software.

Clouds and clients and connections, oh my

Google isn't showing its Google I/O cards beforehand, but here's my translation of Gundotra's opening keynote themes--"Client, Connectivity, and the Cloud"--into some specific projects under way at Google. For client, think Google Gears for running Web applications even when offline. For cloud, think Google App Engine, a site to house Web applications. And for connectivity, think Android, the mobile phone software package.


The Android software itself is under development at Google, with help from a number of partners in the Open Handset Alliance. To make that project successful--in particular its promise as an open foundation with a vibrant programming community--there needs to be software for Android, too.

Google has been trying to jump-start the Android developer program. It launched a developer contest that drew 1,788 submissions. I'm guessing Google will announce the winner from the top 50 finalists (and click here for a PDF of the top 50 Android apps in slideware form).

A sample Android application, AndroidGlobalTime

(Credit: Google)

More newsworthy, though, is the likelihood of a second software development kit (SDK) for Android. "We are working on those things in the next day or so," Gundotra said of the SDK last week. "Android is a big portion of how we make pervasive connectivity useful."

Google vs. Microsoft

We in the media are doubtless too susceptible to narratives that pit one company against another, but in Google's case, there really is a big rivalry with Microsoft. The search giant is trying to make into reality the fear Microsoft had in the 1990s about Netscape, that the Web browser would supplant the operating system as the way people used their computers.

Gundotra has seen it from both sides. Before joining Google in 2007, he was general manager for platform evangelism at Microsoft, the culmination of a 15-year stint at the company.

But does Google want to dominate the Web platform the way Microsoft has with the operating system platform? Emphatically not, said Gundotra, who took pains to note that the I/O in Google I/O stands for "innovation in the open."

"Today, the most interesting and dominant platform is not the closed, proprietary platforms of the past, but the open Web...It's the platform adopted by all of us because it isn't controlled by any of us," Gundotra said. "Google's motivation is to move the Internet forward as fast as we can."

That's not to say Google isn't interested in bringing home the bacon. But its Web platform work has only an indirect connection to Google's revenue and profits.

Gundotra repeated what's become a familiar refrain to me as I've asked various Google executives about how their initiatives make money: "We have an economic reason to move (the Web) forward. As it gets richer, better apps, it gets more users. More users using more apps leads to more Google searches, and that leads to more revenue for us," he said.

Android is another target aimed at Microsoft. It will become freely available open-source software--or at least 8.6 million of its 11 million lines of code will be--with the specific intent of providing an alternative to Microsoft's mobile version of Windows. Wind River Systems wants to profit from it directly by helping phone companies build it into their products, but Google thus far has voiced no such ambition.

Lighting a fire under Web 2.0


App Engine and Gears together are centerpieces of Google's attempt to bring the Web alive, and we can expect some action there at the conference, too.

But developers are likely to be disappointed in hearing about one area in which they're hungry for news: support for other programming languages besides Python in App Engine. Java, Ruby, PHP, and Perl support are the top four requests in the App Engine issue tracker, and JavaScript, C#, and ColdFusion Markup Language are in the top 25.

"You can assume from that ranking what we're working on, but not what we'll announce next week," Gundotra said. And he wouldn't offer a specific time frame. "We're actively working on it. It's difficult for us to know until development gets further along."

The company is pleased with the progress so far. It's granted App Engine access to 60,000 developers so far, said Tom Stocky, director of product management for developer products.

Gundotra promises that App Engine isn't a lock-in strategy to lure application developers irreversibly to Google's part of the cloud.

"It is hosting the same open LAMP stack people are used to," he said, referring to the combination of the Linux operating system, Apache Web server software, MySQL database software, and Perl, Python, and PHP programming languages to run Web applications themselves. "If you decide you don't want to use it, you could easily revert back to using your own data center."

Well, maybe not easily. App Engine ties into the Google-only BigTable service for housing data. But the company is working on an export ability for data, and there's an open-source implementation of BigTable, Stocky said.

Giving Gears

The company claims to be equally giving with Google Gears, an open-source project that Google released in beta version to enable richer Internet applications. Specifically, it lets browsers store data better in a local database, work offline, synchronize once they're online again, and run JavaScript more efficiently.

It's hard to find Google Gears used beyond Google Docs, Zoho's competing online office applications, and Google Reader. Gundotra is happy to declare the project a success in another way, though: its influence on version 5 of HTML. Indeed, a draft of the HTML 5 specification includes interfaces for handling database storage and offline work.


"You're right on the cusp of seeing a slew of apps come out that use the HTML 5 and Gears features that redefine what a Web app can do," Gundotra said. "We're working to drive that innovation, and also to drive that back into standards...We think we contributed to the evolution of the Web."

Microsoft: we'll keep 'chipping away' at Google

Microsoft has said that it will continue "chipping" away at Google in the market for internet search, but warned that there would be no magic bullet to increase its share overnight.

The software giant said that its 5 per cent share of the UK search market was "a long way from where it needed to be", but added that it was "in the game for the long haul" and would do "everything it could" to attract more consumers to its search product, Live Search.

The remarks - made by Chris Dobson, the acting head of Microsoft's online services group in the UK - came as the company announced a major overhaul of its search offering to incorporate a greater number of images on the results page, as well as maps and other location-based features.

There will also be a new feature called Celebrity xRank, which will chart the 'performance' of celebrities and other personalities in the news based on how many search queries they generate.


"There's certainly no 'killer app' which will mean we'll have 30 per cent share in search overnight, but it's always been Microsoft's view that you can be in the long game if the game's worth being in in the first place, and we think search most certainly is," Mr Dobson said.

"Ultimately we don't want to be a 'Me too!' product that is simply compared with Google. We want to offer next-generation search. We think we're at the beginning of the journey with search, rather than the end."

At present Microsoft, which is in the process of a $41 billion takover bid for Yahoo!, the struggling internet portal, handles only 4.2 per cent of the search queries conducted in the UK - compared with Google's 79 per cent. Search is seen as a key plank of its overall 'online services' strategy, however, as an increasing proportion of companies' advertising budgets is spent online.

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive, has said he would like online advertising to be a $10 billion business for Microsoft - but has not specified by when. In the last quarter, online services brought in about $834 million in revenue for the company - approximately 6 per cent of overall earnings.

Mr Dobson said Microsoft was now in a good position to deliver an 'end-to-end' advertising solution, which incorporated not just search advertising - the paid-for links that appear alongside search results, and banner adverts - those that appear at the top of the page, but also 'bidded display' adverts.

The latter, which are similar to banner ads in that they are usually graphical or interactive in nature, sit on other sections of a website and are auctioned off to advertisers.

As a result of the $6 billion acqusition of aQuantive, the online advertising platform, last year, Mr Dobson said, Microsoft now knew much more about the internet population at large. Users' registration data have provided details of age and gender, as well as records of the sites that they have visited.

That meant it could help advertisers target customers in ways that were not possible with older methods. "If you're an advertiser, you need to get away from thinking 'I want to sell a car so I better go to the car channel' and start thinking 'How do I find a 16-24-year-old male?'"

Display adverts would gradually come to account for a greater proportion of the overall online advertising spend, he said, as companies came to realise the value of having their brand appear on a site and weren't solely focused on getting users to click on an advert, he said. The so-called 'pay per click' approach to advertising has largely been driven by search advertising.

At present, search advertising, in which Google is the runaway leader, accounts for about half of the overall online advertising spend.

The new Microsoft Live Search platform goes live globally tomorrow.

Adobe opens up Flash, but leaves out Google and Apple

In a well timed move today Adobe announced the Open Screen Project and lifted restrictions on the use of Flash related specifications. The initiative is supported by several industry leaders including ARM, Intel, LG, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba, and Verizon. Notably absent from the list were Google and Apple, creators of the Android and iPhone platforms respectively.

While Flash players have always been free of charge and some Flash tools are open source, until now Adobe has kept tight reins on the format that the player consumes. “Previously, in order to look at the SWF specification you had to sign a licensing agreement not to use it to create competing players,” writes Adobe’s Ryan Stewart, “but in the interest of expanding the reach of the Flash Player we’re removing all of those restrictions.”

Adobe is also publishing the device porting layer APIs for their Flash player, and removing all licensing fees. With this change, any handset manufacturer (*cough* Apple *cough*) who wants Flash to run on their device can do so without paying Adobe a dime. That’s assuming, of course, a version of Flash player has been compiled for the specific processor used by the device. With ARM and Intel on board, the two major mobile architectures are covered.

The reason I say the announcement was well timed is that it came two days after comments from Mozilla warning developers not to rely on proprietary technology like Flash, and a week before the opening of Sun’s JavaOne conference in San Francisco. Java powers many of today’s mobile programs, and Java and Linux form the foundation for Google’s upcoming Android platform.

“You’re producing content for your users and there’s someone in the middle deciding whether users should see your content,” said Mozilla Europe founder Tristan Nitot at a conference Tuesday. “If Adobe or Microsoft decides to compete with you and you’re using their technology, you cannot compete.” Nitot says that HTML5-compliant browsers from a variety of vendors will provide much of what people use Flash for today such as audio and video. This is true, though people use Flash for much more than that. Increasingly, it’s being used for entire rich internet applications.

The source code for the Flash player is still closed source and proprietary, but removing restrictions on licensing and even looking at the format specifications goes a long, long way towards alleviating fears of vendor lock-in. This will give a boost to open source players like Gnash and swfdec. While it’s unlikely that the open source players will ever catch up to the performance and features in the official Adobe player, it’s nice to have the option to get the technology from multiple places in case something happens to Adobe such as, say, getting acquired by Microsoft.

The IBM-Google connection

LOS ANGELES--Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt gave a speech and chatted with IBM's CEO Sam Palmisano onstage Thursday at IBM's Business Partner Leadership Conference here. The two talked up their relationship, which primarily involves a joint research project. In October, Google and IBM announced a cloud computing initiative, based on Google's expertise in distributed, parallel computing and IBM's industrial enterprise management technologies, for public use by universities.

IBM is taking some of the learnings from the project and plans to operate a cloud that will allow partners to house their Web-based applications and sell them to customers, Palmisano said. "It is the first time we have taken something from the consumer arena and applied it to the enterprise," he said.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt joins hands with IBM CEO Sam Palmisano.

(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET News.com)

Schmidt said that over time there won't be much differentiation between consumer and enterprise architectures. The major difference is that enterprise customers will pay for software and services, with required security and other features, and consumers won't.

Schmidt gave IBM lots of credit for pioneering many of the technologies that underlie today's computing architectures. He noted that IBM, which has about 87 years on Google, has figured out that the underlying platform is a server and Web services.

"Cloud computing is the story of our lifetime," Schmidt said. "Eventually all devices will be on the network." Both IBM and Google, and a host of competitors, have the same idea, which was actually first promoted by Sun with its "the network is the computer" slogan. Google figured out how to monetize the fruits of the pages its massively parallel servers manage.

IBM wants to provide the infrastructure and support services to the planet, and Google wants to provide the world's information, and some applications, on its platform. "The two companies are great and have lots of innovation in their gene pool," Palmisano said. "There isn't a lot of overlap in the strategies." Both are committed to open standards and an open Internet, and they are both going in the same direction, he added.

Google's YouTube captures 10 hours of video every 60 seconds, and IBM might like that business if it could figure out how to make money at it. But eventually, IBM, Microsoft, Sun, Google, and other big players will look more similar in their technical architectures and business models.

Google and IBM have more in common than a shared view of the world and an academic research project. It turns out that Google outsources its accounting to IBM and that Schmidt considers IBM's sales organization important to Google's enterprise software efforts.

As more companies look for Web-based tools, mashups, and standard applications, such as word processors, Google stands to benefit. "IBM is one of the key planks of our strategy--otherwise we couldn't reach enterprise customers," Schmidt said.

While IBM isn't selling directly for Google in the enterprise, IBM's software division and business partners are integrating Google applications and widgets into custom software solutions based on IBM's development framework. The "business context" is the secret of the Google and IBM collaboration, Schmidt said. Embedding Google Gadgets in business applications, that can work on any device, is a common theme for both Google and IBM.

Currently, Salesforce.com is selling Google Apps as an integrated part of its platform. It's not far-fetched to think that Google would seek out IBM's help with its business partners to spread the Google word in the enterprise.

IBM To Launch Web-Based Application Market

IBM said it's planning to launch a global, online marketplace for software applications under a plan it's calling the Blue Business Platform.

The marketplace will feature a mix of business applications and services aimed primarily at small- and mid-sized companies, IBM announced Thursday at a conference in Los Angeles for its business partners.

IBM said it believes that the Web-based model will allow it to tap smaller companies around the world, which it says represent a $500 billion IT market that it has trouble serving profitably through traditionally sales channels.

IBM said the marketplace will offer pre-integrated products and services from IBM and independent software developers. Customers will be able to use the software they buy "on premises or in the cloud," IBM CEO Sam Palmisano said Thursday during an address.

Palmisano also revealed Thursday that IBM is working with Google to build a worldwide network of connected servers, an architecture sometimes referred to as a computing cloud, from which it plans to deliver software and services.

The online store will be organized geographically and also by industry. Customers will be able to purchase software or services in just four clicks, IBM said. The company plans to pilot the marketplace throughout 2008. It did not say when it plans to formally launch the service.

IBM on Thursday also unveiled a new server for small businesses.

The Lotus Foundations Start server includes Lotus Notes and Domino for e-mail and collaboration, as well as security, backup and recovery features. It's aimed at SMBs with little or no IT support and it can be deployed in as little as 30 minutes, according to IBM.

Microsoft's piracy problem could grow

When it comes to software piracy, Microsoft may just be aiding the enemy.



Microsoft has been counting on gains against unlicensed software to boost revenue from the Windows unit, which accounts for a huge chunk of overall profits and sales. However, one of the company's own decisions could make its antipiracy battle more difficult.


With Windows Vista, Microsoft took an extremely tough stand on piracy. Computers that were not properly activated within a short period of time went into a virtually unusable state known as "reduced functionality mode."

In the newly released Service Pack 1, however, Microsoft is softening its stance somewhat. The reduced functionality mode is gone, and in its place, a series of warnings and visual indications that a computer is not running a genuine copy of Windows.


I would argue, though, that having an unusable copy of Windows is a far greater deterrent than having one that simply labels its user a pirate. Microsoft has maintained that the new approach will be just as effective and is more palatable to customers and partners. Color me skeptical.


But, will the changes automatically lead to an uptick in overall piracy rates? That's a more complicated question.



On its face, it would seem the answer would be a clear "yes."



However, there are a couple of other factors to keep in mind. First, Windows XP is pirated far more than Vista (at least 2 to 1, according to Microsoft). Also, Microsoft did close several notable hacks to its Vista protection scheme with SP1. So while the price for piracy is arguably lower, Microsoft has closed a few loopholes that let pirates bypass the security features altogether.



Time will tell whether Microsoft's technical changes will have an impact on the broader piracy issue. Enforcement is also key, with Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell noting that a couple of legal actions can make a big difference in any given quarter, suggesting true gains (or losses) from piracy require looking at a longer time horizon.



What is clear is that piracy rates remain a critical issue for Microsoft, which needs to continue growing its Windows revenue and profits to help fund its advertising battle against Google.



Microsoft had seemed to be making major headway against piracy, surprising analysts and itself in the September quarter by gaining 5 percentage points of growth through piracy reductions. Last quarter, though, Microsoft actually saw piracy rates head upward, reversing what had been a particularly positive trend for the company.



Microsoft now expects its gains for the year to be just a percentage point or two, though it believes it can continue to see improvements next year as well.



"Piracy is a tough battle and an area where we will need to continue investing," said Colleen Healy, Microsoft's general manager of investor relations.

Yahoo’s New Social Strategy

Yahoo officials presented yesterday during a “Web 2.0” conference their plans for the site’s major makeover. The new direction searches for new advertising opportunities, as the site is going to host applications from other online services turning Yahoo into one of the biggest social hubs on the web.

Ari Balogh, Yahoo's chief technology officer, was quoted by
the Associated Press telling the crowd: "We are going to rewire the entire
experience at Yahoo to make it social in every dimension."

The plan is to allow its hundreds of millions of users to
enjoy the old services such as Web mail, instant messaging and calendar but also
include new features which contribute to the social experience, features made
popular by social networks such as MySpace and Facebook.

"It is rewiring Yahoo from the inside out, across all
of our properties, to fundamentally open up those Web services and provide a
consistent development model, a consistent deployment and consumer experience
as well," concluded Ari Balogh.

Yahoo also attempted to break into the Internet
social scene by launching in 2005 a network called “Yahoo 360.” Unfortunately
the application was recently closed due to a rather small impact in the media.

The new strategy is expected to be completed by the end of
the year and an official launch date will be presented in the weeks to come.
The move is believed to also raise the bar for the other major players such as
Google, Microsoft, MySpace and Facebook.