|
|
The World May Be Poorer Following the
Acquisition of Rational by IBM
Jacques Halé
IBM announced this week that it would acquire
software development toolmaker Rational Software in Q1 03. IBM will merge
Rational into the IBM Software Group as a new division and brand, joining
WebSphere, Lotus, Tivoli, and DB2.
For IBM, the acquisition is an important event,
reinforcing the strategic push by IBM to be a one-stop shop. In particular,
it sees the move supporting its e-business on demand strategy. Rational
started in 1980 but cornered the system and software development market in
the mid-1990s by bringing together three of the industry’s gurus: Grady Booch , Ivar Lacobson and James Rumbaugh. With these
leaders in hand, Rational was able to lead the market by creating a Unified Modeling
Language (UML) and a whole suite of interoperating methodologies from
requirement capture to component design. This made standard their particular
interpretation of Object Design, especially when it achieved the blessing of
the industry association, the Object Management Group (OMG). OMG took this
action because it brought some degree of reason and standards to the
fragmented world of software development. Most importantly, it allowed
developers to work a long way down the development route independently from
the target hardware and operating systems. For example, Rational’s eXtended
Development Environment (XDE) allows developers to work with Microsoft Visual
Studio or IBM WebSphere Studio, and to be compatible with architectures on
J2EE, .NET, Linux and other platforms.
There is reason for concern, as Rational moves out
from being an honest broker, whether it can continue to be the industry
standard. It is our sense that the reason for capturing Rational is to
support IBM’s e-business strategy. Will the various operating systems and
platforms be equally supported by the new division of IBM? History may
provide a clue if we look at what happened when Tivoli was acquired by IBM.
There were concerns and rumors everywhere that this would herald the end of
Tivoli as a multiplatform technology. In hindsight, it’s clear that this did
not happen. The product suite remains open to the whole market and is crucial
to IBM’s cross platform services capabilities. However, it does suffer from a
high price tag and the unavoidable army of Tivoli consultants. We hope that
the IT ecosystem will not be poorer, but in fact become stronger, as a result
of the specialization of one of its species.
|
|
|
Would You Like Spam with That?
By Jim Balderston
Spam was a hot topic this week, with several reports
discussing its prevalence and the degree to which it affects people’s lives.
The first report, from email filtering service MessageLabs, stated that email
threats, including both spam and viruses, are increasing at what the company
called “an alarming rate.” In fact, MessageLabs said that 30% of all email
sent in November was spam, and that by July, one-half of all email sent will
be spam. It also said that spam will be used to spread viruses, and that spam-based scams — such as the Nigerian advance cash
email scam — continue to plague victims. Meanwhile, the Pew Internet &
American Life Project released a report noting that few people feel
overwhelmed with email at work and that 71% of the people surveyed said only
a little of the work mail they receive is spam. Most of the respondents — 60%
— said they receive ten or fewer emails a day, and 78% said they send ten or
fewer emails per day. The report also said that 73% percent of poll
respondents said they spend less than an hour each day managing their email,
which includes 23% who spend less than fifteen minutes a day doing so. The
report also noted that while most workers use email on a limited basis, there
is an increasing number of “power emailers” who make up about a fifth of all
workers, with 68% of them spending more than two hours a day reading, writing,
and managing email.
Say the word “spam” to those familiar with the inner
workings of TCP/IP, HTTP and any other Internet-related acronym and you
usually elicit a strong — if not overwhelming — opinion on the merits of bulk
email and the purveyors of same. Derogatory references to spammers often
include opinions on their ancestry and personal sexual preferences. “Death to
spammers” would probably be a moderate opinion amongst such people.
Yet apparently the vast majority of people who use
email are less concerned with the unsolicited email; in fact the delete
button is — for them, anyway — a reasonable and relatively effective
anti-spam tool. These people are less likely to discuss issues surrounding
spam, such as its burden on email servers, storage systems, and IT staffs. To
many of these folks, such considerations are moot, as email is something that
appears or disappears on their computers, and their interest begins and ends
right there. IT managers, who have the task of actually ensuring that the
blissfully unaware folks who know nothing about email actually get it
regularly, and that they are not deluged by spam, may see things a bit
differently. But we also suspect that many of the email filtering companies
are following a practice well worn by their partners in security, the
anti-virus vendors, by touting the threats of spam in a way that can cause
companies — or at least executives of companies — to begin asking pointed
questions about email filtering of the IT staff. Fear sells. Finally, the gap
between the alpha geeks and the average Internet user apparently continues to
grow, as the numbers of less knowledgeable Internet users grows both in raw
numbers and as a percentage of the total user base. Vendors offering goods
and services to prospective customers must remember to not only sell to IT
and alpha geeks, but to do so in such a way that actually improves the daily
lives of the 80-percenters who make up the bulk of the workforce.
|
|
|
Microsoft Broadens Its Enterprise
Software Definition
By Myles Suer
Microsoft announced the availability of Small
Business Manager 7.0. The product adds modules for sales, payroll,
purchasing, and inventory tracking. Pricing has been set at $995 per user.
The product is from the business unit formed from the acquisition of Great
Plains and Navision.
With the product’s introduction, Microsoft moves
away from its previously announced positioning of focusing upon companies
with sales between $50 million and $1 billion. Small Business Manager 7.0 is
targeted at the market dominated by Intuit and Peachtree: North American
companies with fewer than twenty-five employees and less than $5 million in
revenue. Intuit’s QuickBooks currently has 2 million users within this market
segment; an estimated 85.5% market share.
In addition to attacking the market for client
software, Small Business Manager also goes after a market pursued by Net
Ledger. Net Ledger is the business software maker that delivers its products
in application service provider form to SMEs
desiring to graduate from Quickbooks but not ready for the IT expenses
required to support enterprise level accounting and business management
software. Although the ASP business model has to a large degree gone out of
favor, Net Ledger delivers an integrated business software suite unlike its
desktop software cousins. By doing so, Net Ledger attempts to deliver to
truly small businesses a leg up on larger companies by allowing its users to
achieve enterprise integration larger enterprises pay dearly for. Large
enterprise will have to wait for Web Services and an integrated applications
layer to become standard. We believe that for Net Ledger to succeed (ASP
considerations aside), it needs to quickly add Web Services and SCM
interfaces. What is most interesting about the Microsoft announcement is the
lack of mention of a .NET or Web Services model for this new software
division. One would have thought with Microsoft’s focus on a future of .Net
and Web Services that they would have at least provided lip service to the
level of Internet integration that has been achieved by Net Ledger.
|
|
|
Whose Law Is It, Anyway?
By Jim Balderston
The Australian high court, Victoria’s Supreme Court,
ruled this week that Dow Jones & Company will have to defend itself in
Australian court in a libel and defamation suit over content published by
Barron’s magazine and placed on the Internet from a server in New Jersey and
subsequently downloaded in Australia. The case centers on a story about
Joseph Gutnick, an Australian mining magnate who believes he was defamed by
the story and seeks to have his case heard in Australia, where libel laws are
apparently more favorable to plaintiffs than those in the United States. The
court rejected claims by Dow Jones that the case should be heard in U.S.
courts, and noted that the company was attempting to impose upon Australians
American law as it concerns Internet publications and legal protections
against libel.
While the idea of the boundary-less Internet is not
new, the many steps to resolving the impacts of this stateless medium are
still largely in their infancy. This case — not the first and certainly not
to be the last — may well settle some of the questions raised by the
borderless nature of the Internet and its ability to cross national legal
boundaries in a way that physical
information — or people — cannot. On the other hand, this case may only muddy
the waters. In either instance, it is sure to be one of many such cases that pit
the varying local statutes of physical place against a medium that has
reduced the importance of such distinctions.
Free speech, including the right to publish, has
long been a pillar of the American judicial landscape. Judges, juries, and
legislators have been remarkably reluctant over the two-plus centuries of the
U.S.’s existence to curtail such rights, and as a result libel law remains an
area in which the burden of proof lies largely with the individual who claims
to have been wronged. But this case of course represents issues far beyond
libel law. For example, nations with much stricter laws concerning
pornography, or dissent, or criticisms of religious figures might believe
that they too can drag into the dock those who publish thoughts and opinions
that locally are considered if not mainstream, certainly not inflammatory or
illegal. While we suspect that a certain amount of give and take legally may
be the end result of such legal wrangling, we also believe that the North
American dominance of the Internet — at least for the time being — may have
an impact as well. Of course, legal opinions and wrangling can flow both
ways, with not only non-U.S. law impacting behavior in the states, but U.S.
law and custom impacting Internet behavior around the world. Much evidence is
in place of the impact of American culture world wide; the Internet will no
doubt be another medium for such dissemination (or, in some people’s opinions,
pollution). Either way, the mix of culture and law will continue, with all
sides having to face the fact that the pure, clear, water of cultural
isolation is going to have to give way, whether through television, telephone,
or Internet.
|
