:Google competes for the future; Microsoft, the past:

Google was born on the Web and is increasingly giving Microsoft fits by forcing the decades-old software giant to compete on Google's terms. Like open source. Like cloud computing.

Microsoft may shore up its fortunes in the short term with a successful Windows 7 launch. But in the long term, its very success with outdated "desktop" products threaten to cede the market to Google.

We'll have all of it, please

It's not really fair to Microsoft. Microsoft is a victim of its own success, needing to cater to its existing clientele with each new release, in true "Innovator's Dilemma" fashion. Hence, Microsoft continues to make a lot of money, but its last two quarters have seen traditional strengths like Windows become a drag on earnings as enterprises spend more money with Google, Red Hat, and others.

Google's lack of legacy frees it to innovate rapidly and broadly, as Genentench CIO Todd Pierce, a Google Apps customer, suggests:

The rate of innovation at Google is - well I mean, the Oracle, SAP and Microsoft product cycle is five years; Google's product cycle is five days. It's incremental. In five days you're not going to be able to cancel your Microsoft Office license, but in five years, you won't have Microsoft Office.

Microsoft, for its part, is so concerned with "backward compatibility"--"Is this product/feature compatible with our ability to continue to monetize our 1980s-style desktop monopoly?"--that it continues to struggle to embrace the Web. CNET blogger Dave Rosenberg points out that Windows 7 should have been Microsoft's launchpad to cloud computing, but isn't.There are a lot of "should have beens" for Microsoft when it comes to the Web.Meanwhile, no one is slowing down for Microsoft. Let's stick with cloud computing for a minute. VMware dominates virtualization and has a strong claim on cloud computing, though open-source rivalry from Eucalyptusand VMops threatens to challenge both VMware and Microsoft as they seek to dominate cloud computing.And then there's Google, which provides an increasingly wide array of cloud-based services to enterprises looking to untether themselves from the desktop. In an interview with CNET News, G

oogle CEO Eric Schmidt argues that "The browser can be both enterprise- and consumer-capable. The architecture is driven from the browser. That is the story of enterprise IT today."

In other words, the desktop is simply the means by which a user loads a browser. It's a gateway. The value is not in the desktop anymore. It's in the browser, which is the new desktop, in terms of real functionality delivered.

Microsoft's big opportunity to stymie the threat from Google and others is SharePoint. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has described it as Microsoft's new operating system, but it's in a recent interview with Forrester that he makes this meaningful:

In my own mind I compare (SharePoint) to the PC, the PC started off life as a spreadsheet machine, then became a programming machine, a word processing machine, (SharePoint is) a general purpose infrastructure that connects people to people and people to information....

I think SharePoint is considered a very serious development platform for rapid application development (by IT architects and developers).

SharePoint is Microsoft's best attempt to connect desktop applications like Office with centralized, cloud/cloud-like collaboration and storage. Yes, Microsoft has other initiatives like online Office, but none marries so well its legacy profit centers with future innovation. And, given that SharePoint is already a $1 billion and frenetically growing business, it has momentum that other initiatives don't.

SharePoint, then, may be Microsoft's best hope for marrying its legacy to the future of Web-based computing.

The browser can be both enterprise- and consumer-capable. The architecture is driven from the browser. That is the story of enterprise IT today.

--Google CEO Eric Schmidt

Microsoft needs something like this. It is losing in mobile, and not simply to Apple. Google's Android momentum is almost astounding, with AdMob data pegging Android smartphone penetration in the U.K. at 10 percent, as but one example.

If we assume that mobile will increasingly be the client platform of choice, then we see Google squeezing Microsoft from the top (cloud) and the bottom (client).

In both areas, open source is Google's weapon of choice, and it's one that Microsoft is going to have to figure out quickly if it wants to be a player on the Web. The Web is too big for Microsoft to control it, and the Web is overwhelmingly open source, as Lotus founder Mitch Kapor states:

The accomplishment of open source is that it is the back end of the Web, the invisible part, the part that you don't see as a user.

All of the servers, pretty much, they run Linux as the operating system; they run Apache as the basic Web server on top of which everything else is built. The main languages out of which Web applications are built - whether it's Perl or Python or PHP or any of the other languages - those are all open source languages. So the infrastructure of the Web is open source ... the Web as we know it is completely dependent on open source.

Kapor further suggests that Microsoft's war with open source is over, or should be over: open source has won. It's essential infrastructure now, and hence something that Microsoft needs to embrace, not fight. This isn't about open-source religion. It's about pragmatism. Pragmatism that Microsoft, like anyone else, can embrace.

Google is using the future (open source, cloud) to compete for the future, and its tactics threaten to hit Microsoft in its profit centers like Windows.

Microsoft, however, appears to be mired in its past. Windows 7 looks to be a serious upgrade over its Vista predecessor, but in 10 years time, will we care? Or will we have moved on, forgetting about those quaint days when we used to care about the operating system and applications like Office?

::Nokia pushes back N900 Net tablet::

Nokia has delayed the release of its N900 Internet tablet.

The N900 was previously set to arrive in October--and Nokia'spreorder site still states that. However, it is now set for release "during November," Peter Schneider, head of Maemo marketing at Nokia, said Thursday in a post. Schneider did not state the reason for the delay, but Reuters reported that the company is waiting for more feedback from developers.

N900, which costs $649, is part cell phone and part computer. It's considered a potential game-changer for Nokia, which is pushing it as "fusing the power of the computer, the Internet and the mobile phone."

The device uses Nokia's Linux-based Maemo 5 operating system to offer multitasking, Web browsing via Mozilla, a touch screen, and slide-out keyboard. It includes an ARM Cortex-A8 processor, 1GB of application memory, and 32GB of storage (expandable to 48GB with a MicroSD card). It measures 4.4 inches by 2.4 inches and features a 3.5-inch widescreen display.The device also sports a 5-megapixel camera.

::Why I choose 3G over Wi-Fi::

Say what you will about the wireless phone companies, but in a crunch their managed 3G cellular networks get the job done when Wi-Fi connections fail.

I was in Chicago at a telecom trade show this week and had to cover a Federal Communications Commission'smeeting via Webcast. Ironically, the meeting was focused on the FCC's proposal to draft new regulations to keep the Internet "open" and "free."

The video for the Webcast, which I was watching over an unprotected Wi-Fi connection, started out fine. But after only a few minutes, the picture began to break up, the buffering wheel on the media player churned wildly, and the audio stopped and started so often that I only could make sense of two or three words at a time. Sometimes the audio would start up where it had left off, but then quickly jump ahead to the live stream, cutting out entire sentences and paragraphs.

When I couldn't take it any longer, I shut down my computer, rebooted, and plugged in my Sprint 3G air card.

Almost immediately after launching the video, Chairman Julius Genachowski's face popped up on the screen clearly. But the best part was that I could hear everything he was saying. I didn't experience one hiccup, not one pause. There was no little circle turning round and round as the video buffered. It was working perfectly.

The problems I experienced were likely due to congestion on the unsecured Wi-Fi network. Even though I didn't see a lot of people connecting to the network, there was still likely a lot of traffic. Meanwhile, Sprint's 3G wireless network is more tightly managed, because the licensed spectrum is a limited resource that must be used efficiently. So even if there had been congestion, I might not have even noticed.

Sprint, which owns spectrum licenses, has more control of the traffic that is on its network than the trade show folks who put up the Wi-Fi network, which uses unlicensed spectrum. In theory, the Wi-Fi network should be at least three times faster than the cellular network. But when there is a lot of traffic on the Wi-Fi network, Web pages load slower and video gets warped and choppy.

How Net neutrality fits in
One of the issues that has been hotly debated among Net neutrality supporters and detractors is how to prevent network operators from favoring some traffic at the expense of services, while also allowing the operators to manage their networks to ensure their customers have good experiences.

As I sat watching the choppy FCC Webcast, trying to piece together what was being said, I experienced firsthand how an unmanaged, congested Wi-Fi connection, simply doesn't work, especially when it comes to video.

And if we are to believe companies, such as Cisco Systems, which makes most of the routers powering the Internet, the Net is about to become a whole lot more congested. In June, the company said that Internet traffic worldwide would grow to five times its current size between 2008 and 2013. And much of this growth will come from video. Not only is video traffic very time sensitive, but it also eats up a lot of bandwidth. The result is a double whammy for network operators.

With a recent survey of more than 20 service providers around the world, Cisco predicts that by 2013, 90 percent of all consumer IP traffic will be video. Today throughout the world, the average broadband connection, generates about 11.4GB of Internet traffic per month. Of this 11.4GB of data crossing Net monthly, 4.3GB of it is video or some other type of visual application, such as social networking or collaboration services.

What this means for network operators is that a tsunami of data traffic is coming. And even though network operators continue to add capacity to prevent congestion, they also need to better manage their networks.

Network design becoming more critical
At the Supercomm 2009 trade show this week, AT&T Chief Technology Officer John Donavan said that there must be changes in how networks are designed and managed to keep up with demand.

"The capacity we carried in 2008 will be a rounding error five years," he said. "We need to fundamentally rethink how we're carrying traffic in our networks. We have to rethink how we interoperate, how networks are constructed, how routing is done. How we move content in off-hours."

He warned that there will be consequences if operators don't act soon. "We'll end up in a dire situation a few years out if we don't collectively step up as an industry and throw Moore's Law out the window," he said.

So with more traffic on the network, operators say now is not the time to change regulation that could inhibit the way they manage their networks.

"If you have to treat all bits the same, it's hard to manage and protect the network," Tom Tauke, Verizon's chief lobbyist said. "When you're trying to make the network flow, you can't have lawyers looking over engineers' shoulders telling them what they can and can't do."

It seems that the FCC has gotten the message. In the nondiscrimination principle that was presented at its meeting this week, the document spells out that network operators cannot discriminate against particular Internet content or applications, but it allows for traffic discrimination when allowing for reasonable network management.

Of course, the FCC is only in the beginning stages of drafting the new Net regulations. And no one knows what the final wording will be. But I hope that when the official regulations are adopted, that network management is preserved unscathed. Because if it's not, we're all in trouble.

::Apple punts on lower-cost Mac Book::

By not coughing up a low-cost MacBook, as some had expected, Apple has ceded a potentially huge market to PC makers. But is this just all part of Apple's marketing genius?

$999 is as low as Apple will go.

(Credit: Apple)

The announcement Tuesday of the $999 white polycarbonate MacBook was pretty ho-hum as product refreshes go (same price, same color as before) but the implication was important: Apple is surrendering a large, emerging laptop market to Microsoft and its coterie of PC makers.

Not that it's necessarily a bad strategy. Market researcher Gartner said recently that Apple's shipments in the U.S. grew year-over-year by 6.8 percent to total 1.57 million during the third quarter, putting it right behind Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Acer. Comparatively, overall PC shipments in the U.S. grew by 3.5 percent from a year earlier.

But among those unimpressive overall PC numbers (HP's third-quarter shipments grew only 2.7 percent), was an impressive statistic for Acer: buoyed by Netbooks, Acer's shipments grew by 61.4 percent year-over-year, and it blew past Dell to become the No. 2 PC maker worldwide based on this growth.

Granted, Netbooks are a relatively low-profit segment (i.e., profit on a $400 Netbook is going to be a lot less than that on a $999 laptop). Nevertheless, they're a hot market. Intel CEO Paul Otellini has stated numerous times thatIntel was able to create a market that grew faster than either the iPhone or Nintendo Wii. Case in point:Windows 7-based Acer Netbooks are now big on the Home Shopping Network--which claims to have sold more than 5,000 in one segment on Saturday.

And that's not the only market Apple is punting on. A new category of inexpensive, thin laptops has emerged with the roll-out of Windows 7 on Thursday. Like Netbooks, these laptops are light (typically 4 pounds) and don't include an optical drive. But they are relatively powerful and full featured. The 15.6-inch Acer Aspire Timeline, for example, with a 320GB hard disk drive and dual-core Intel processor is fairly well-endowed at only $500.

Apple is not receiving a lot kudos in the mainstream business press by sticking to its $999 guns. The Wall Street Journal said that users can get roughly equivalent laptops for a lot less at Dell and HP. And other publicationshave said that Apple is not just ignoring new market realities but, in fact, ignoring the Mac lineup as a whole in favor of the iPhone.

So, do consumers lose by not getting the chance to buy a competitive low-cost Apple MacBook? The short answer to that rhetorical questions is yes--because Apple offers no alternative to, for example, a thin, light $650 HP Pavilion dm3 laptop.

But an apples-to-apples (pun not intended) comparison shows that while Apple skimps on a couple of white MacBook features, it's not an egregiously bad deal for $999. Let's do a quick side-by-side of the cheapest MacBook with a mainstream HP laptop.

• For $999, you get white polycarbonate wrapped around a 13.3-inch 1280-by-800 LED-backlit glossy widescreen display, a 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of memory, a 250GB (5400RPM) hard disk drive, an optical drive, and the standard wireless features. All in a 4.7-pound package.

• For $997, HP will sell you (online) an HP Pavilion dv3t series with a 13.3-inch 1280-by-800 LED-backlit glossy widescreen display, 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB of memory, a 500GB (5400RPM) hard disk drive, an optical drive, and the standard wireless features. Also, in 4.7-pound package.

Apple beats the HP by a hair in the processor category and loses in the memory and storage departments. If polycarbonate is, in fact, better than the plastics HP uses, then that aspect of the design would be a win for Apple.

The real win, though, is for Apple the company. It avoids the cut-throat sub-$900 laptop market and still sells--quite profitably--a lot of laptops. But will Apple be able to snub this growing market of inexpensive Windows 7 laptops indefinitely? We should know in about six months when Gartner reports first-quarter 2010 numbers.

::European laws present challenges for Google Books::

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--As Google closes in on a November 9 deadline to submit a revised settlement in the Google Books case, it continues to pull out all the stops to reassure the world it has the best of intentions.

The controversy over Google's settlement with groups representing book authors and publishers rages on, almost a year after it was first reached. After Google was sued in 2005 for digitizing books without explicit permission, it reached a proposed settlement in October 2008 that would give it unique rights to scan out-of-print yet copyright-protected books, exciting some librarians but raising the ire of many within the publishing and literary communities.

Nevertheless, Google has made painstaking attempts to engage with its enemies in the publishing world. Dan Clancy, engineering director for Google Books, has traveled the country meeting with opponents and supporters, patiently explaining Google's position and preaching the value of a publicly available archive of digital books.

On Thursday, Google hosted a group of four librarians from Europe, where Google has signed partnership agreements with five libraries to discuss the benefits of the project. The settlement is obviously a U.S. matter, but the contentious issues in the settlement do not exactly apply to Europe, because Google says it has not scanned out-of-print but copyright-protected books published in Europe.

Therefore, in Europe Google has only scanned public domain works held by its library partners and books for which it has negotiated scanning rights with rights holders. Still, the settlement process is being watched closely by European authors who have had books published in the U.S., as well as European librarians who are a little jealous over the resources their American counterparts could enjoy under the settlement.

"It's like everyone in the U.S. gets to use cell phones and I'm stuck with a landline," said Sarah Thomas, Bodley's librarian and director of Oxford University's Library Service. "It's a tremendous barrier to advancing knowledge."

Make no mistake: getting this settlement finalized is easily one of Google's highest priorities of the year. There are financial incentives--Google will host links to book stores and place ads on the search result pages--but this is also a core part of Google's mission to organize the world's information.

Even the hardiest Google opponents agree that a digital library of the scope Google is proposing will have tangible benefits for the world. This is especially true for the European libraries, which store books dating as far as the 17th century that are crumbling with the advance of age. Few people are able to see those books because of their value and the remoteness of their location, but putting them online could allow the world to read books they would have once traveled thousands of miles to see, allow researchers from around the world to study their contents, and preserve the knowledge for future generations.

But some, such as German Prime Minister Angela Merkel, are wary about a single company controlling such a library. "The German government has a clear position: copyrights have to be protected on the Internet," The Guardian quoted her as saying last week.

In any event, at the moment European libraries are on the outside when it comes to unlocking the knowledge stored in the millions of out-of-print but copyright-protected books on their shelves. Google's argument all along in the U.S. has been that it was allowed to scan those types of books under fair-use laws, which was disputed by authors and publishers in 2005 but authorization to do so is a key part of the proposed settlement.

Copyright laws vary across Europe, but the concept of fair use generally does not exist, and most books are protected by copyright for 70 to 80 years after the death of the author, the librarians said. Historical works are in the public domain, but that's just a fraction of the overall number of books stored in libraries throughout the world.

Out-of-print books will only be available as limited previews to searchers with links to stores at which they can be bought, but those books will be part of a database that is available to researchers and librarians through an institutional subscription. Researchers outside the U.S. won't have access to that database, which means U.S. libraries and universities would have an advantage.

"We ask our researchers what they want, and they say, 'we need a Google Books European settlement. We need access to books that are out of print but are still in copyright,'" said Klaus Ceynowa, deputy director general for the Bavarian State Library in Germany.

Manuela Palafox, head of digital editions at the University of Complutense of Madrid, Spain, took it a step further. "The most important thing in Europe is to review our copyright laws. We need to adapt it to the digital age."

This, of course, is part of the opposition to Google's settlement in the U.S. Instead of leaving it up to Congress to reform U.S. copyright laws to settle once and for all whether digitizing out-of print but copyright-protected books should be allowed, the settlement is granting that unique sweeping right to a single corporation, and forcing others who may want to digitize these books to cut licensing deals with an organization funded by Google and staffed by directors picked by the groups representing authors and publishers.

So while Google works feverishly on a new settlement in the U.S. ahead of a November 9th deadline, its legal battles may be just beginning. Chinese authors are reportedly gearing up to oppose Google's efforts, and its mission of organizing the world's information may be stymied if European copyright laws forbid the digitization of a huge swath of books published in the last century.

All About FOREX 3

::Forex Robot Are the Keys Behind So Many Successful Forex Trader::

No secret here, the smarter you are the more you earn. A new surprise, the more you understand about what’s going on, the more you earn. And the last one, the better your information, the more you make. If those aren’t enough good reasons to acquire one of the top priced Forex trading methods, then I just don’t know what is.

That’s exactly what a high quality Forex software trading system does for you. It makes you intelligent. And in this deal, being smart is an extremely superior thing indeed. As being intelligent is the first step in the course of becoming rich in this industry. And as we all know, there is not anyplace that can take you to that Promised Land of wealth faster than the money markets.

Sincerely, what a very strong and sophisticated currency trading system does for you is provide you a fixed flow of investment opportunities. It accomplishes this work by initially gathering vast amounts of data that is generated daily by the forex markets.

Second, it moves via this data searching for what is applicable to the investment process and what is useless. And after it has the statistics it requires, it then examines these and makes recommendations found on its preplanned mathematical algorithms.

The reason you should acquire only one of the most influential Forex trading techniques is easy. They are not all created similar, some are basically better at sniffing out leading projection than others. My preferred systems and the ones I use everyday to make my living as do hundreds of thousands of other financiers are called FAP Turbo and Forex MegaDroid.

They both have exclusive websites where you can find out much more information on every product. If you have a chance to examine them you can decide for yourself if one or the other might be of interest to you.

Never before has currency trading been this fast and easy! Grab all the secret info while there is still time at forex infinity pro review.

All About FOREX 2

::How To Master Forex Trading::

Here’s a secret that may well amaze you: There is not alot to study to learn forex trading. Better: Studying to trade Foreign Exchange like a pro can be done in your spare time…

Before Studying to trade Foreign Exchange, you ought to spend some time to familiarize yourself with what the forex market is. The forex market is 36 of the worlds currencies being traded against each other. In the region of 3 trillion US dollars is traded each day. Moreover this enormous international market is also the most accessible, because it’s open 24/7.

One of the most exciting feature of the forex market is that it’s not restricted like some markets. In fact it is one of the easiest markets on the planet where you can trade anytime, anywhere. It’s very possible to attain profound financial profits.

One of the advantages of FX trading is that you don’t need a large amount of capital in order to trade FX. A small amount of capital can be sufficient if you use leverage, a procedure that can step up your trade power and your return on investment (ROI).

Basically “leverage” means you have the capability to control a generous amount of capital using a small amount of real capital and borrowing the rest from your FX broker. The FX trading leverage can be very extreme, up to 400:1. This is a proven technique successfully implemented in their strategies by many traders.

One of the most compelling techniques for successful FX trading is to have your orders in place. And what are the most important orders? It’s simple: The stop loss order and the limit order. This very simple technique will protect you from sizeable losses and will allow you to live through bad trading trends and become successful.

The best way to make sure you are learning to trade FX like a Professional is to obviously understand the nuts and bolts of buying and selling the currency pairs. Again, this is a uncomplicated yet often overlooked strategy: You cannot buy just for the sake of trading – you have to trade only with the expectation that the currency you would like to trade is going to go up in terms of profit to you.

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All About FOREX 1

::Forex Trading Basics::

There are various areas concern along Forex trading that it is easy to understand. Where is your take off point? What do you need to search for? What products should be tapped? And most importantly, what are the guiding Rules in Forex Trading which can bring a good stream of revenue?

I suppose so many questions, so many thoughts and answers. There will be certain individuals willing to bet their lives for following their own system, whilst others will swear to a different system or a different game plan. This is simply because each person’s aspirations, situations and expertise are different. But in my past exposures, there are universal Rules for Forex Trading that should be implemented to gain success in this trade. In fact, these rules apply to almost any business venture undertaken. I have modified it slightly to be applicable to a Forex trading setting.

Before starting to trade, commit a considerable time and effort in making sure you become as knowledgeable as possible about currency trading. Do thorough research, ask questions and find things out for yourself – do not merely rely on what others articulate. Undertake correct testing of different products and systems before finally beginning to trade on live account. It should be a continuous learning process. This is possibly the most critical of all the Rules for Forex Trading.

To coin an old phrase: “Failing to plan is planning to fail”. You cannot even embark on trading if you have no plan. A plan must include a detailed outline of the trading game plan to be carried out taking into account, the lot sizes, time lines, trading hours, currency pairs traded, profit-taking exit targets, capital preservation strategy, etc.

As soon as your plan is in place, laying down a good system is your key to success. I am not aware of any successful trader without any good trading system in place. Whether a manual or automated system, ensure that the system is sound and then stick to it. This will eradicate subjective trading and provide you a proper mindset to move on.

The Rules for Forex Trading are very simple. But it is not easy to carry out and follow. Keep getting used to your system and you will ultimately gain the benefits. Regularly check your system against the rules and make appropriate changes.

Jason Myers is a professional writer and he writes mostly about day trading the forex market. He’s also interested in writing forex beginner help guides.

All About FOREX

::Forex Secrets Revealed Right Here::

Everyone would like to ‘get rich quick.’ However, not many of us have picked up on those secrets of how to get rich quick. Take note that this is not one of those little get rich quick scams. In fact, when you turn to forex trading, you are at risk of losing your money. Within this article, we are going to give you some forex secrets that you should study and learn before you even try you even put your mind into forex trading.

When we first tried out forex trading without using any secrets years ago, we failed. We just jumped right in there without even giving it a test run. Yes, we lost money and that totally scared us away. When we learned these forex secrets (we’re about to list them below), we started trading again. Yes, our chances of getting more money went higher.

First of all, if you are not able to pay your rent or any of your other bills right now, then don’t jump into the trading system. So many people have a little bit of money and they see dollar signs when they look at the system. They think it’s as easy as just putting money down and getting more back. The truth is, it goes much deeper than that. Remember, when it comes to the trade system, you could end up losing your money you put in, so always take caution.

Emotions have a tendency to run wild in humans. Can you think of any time (involving money) when there is no emotions? It seems we are always full of emotion when money is at present. Whatever you do, during your trading sessions, you should not have any emotions. Emotions involve guilt, greed, happiness, tiredness, sadness and the whole nine yards.

Do you know what gets in the way during forex trading? Those emotions! You know, greed, happiness, guilt and all of the above. Those emotions are human nature and it is hard to get away from them. However, during trading time, you need to do your best you can in order to get rid of them. When you have emotions, such as greed, you will end up losing more money that you have won. So now you know that, there are no excuses for not being succsessful at online forex trading.

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