model

NEW YORK--Twitter executive Jack Dorsey says he's looking forward to the day when the world stops talking so much about the company he co-founded.

"I think Twitter's a success for us when people stop talking about it, when we stop doing these panels and people just use it as a utility, use it like electricity," said Dorsey, who was on a "Future of Media" panel here Wednesday as part of Internet Week New York. "It fades into the background, something that's just a part of communication. We put it on the same … Read more

In May, every major browser--Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera--gained market share against Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which dropped nearly 1 percentage point, according to data from Net Applications. No other browser, however, has taken as big a share as Mozilla's Firefox browser, which now claims 22.51 percent of the global browser market, and tops 48 percent in Europe.

The secret to Mozilla Firefox's success? Money, according to Chairman Mitchell Baker at last week's D7: All Things Digital Conference. Or, rather, the way Mozilla makes it, as the conference report suggests:

Mozilla can't be successful with a … Read more

By just about any measure, Red Hat dominates its open-source competition and holds its own with big proprietary peers like Oracle and Microsoft, as this Wolfram Alpha analysis suggests. Though far smaller than Oracle and Microsoft, it continues to outpace rivals in year-to-date returns on its stock, among other things.

But where does Red Hat go from here? Or, more pertinently, where does it grow from here?

Red Hat's open-source business model has proved financially sound, but it's unclear that it applies beyond complex infrastructure software like operating systems and application servers. Red Hat's own CTO, Brian … Read more

Early free-software advocates like Richard Stallman raged against the copyright-toting software capitalists, yearning for a brighter day of peace, love, and (GNU) Linux. In 1998, afraid that this quasi-hippie ideal might scare away the business world from embracing free software, Eric Raymond and a few others came up with the term "open source," broadening the tent well beyond free-software radicals.

Today that tent is broad enough to include everyone from Stallman (still fighting the same fight he always has) to Microsoft, with the poignancy of the term "open source" coming to lose some of its fire, … Read more

One of the most common questions I get from those exploring cloud computing for the first time is "what is the difference between cloud computing and virtualization?" It is an excellent question, as most IT departments are currently exploring the ways in which virtualization enables automation and provisioning agility. Given the fact that cloud is often touted for providing similar benefits, it can be confusing to understand why the two terms aren't equivalent.

My response to that question requires a bit of explanation, so let's step through the differences between the two concepts.

Virtualization is a … Read more

As the Internet dismantles one business after another, it's surprising how fungible the responses to the Web have become.

Reading a recent Economist description of the changing newspaper business, for example, I was surprised by how much its transformation mirrors the software business. The Economist suggests a change to the economics of news businesses:

(T)he plight of the news business does not presage the end of news. As large branches of the industry wither, new shoots are rising. The result is a business that is smaller and less profitable, but also more efficient and innovative.

This is almost … Read more

We've already seen them previewed with the rest of Acer's upcoming lineup back in April, but the official release of the next generation of Aspire One Netbooks is finally here. Most notable is the inclusion of a new, bigger 11.6-inch model, the Aspire One AO751h; also new is a revamped 10.1-inch system, the Aspire One AOD250. (Confidential to Acer: we're available as product naming consultants for the low, low price of free).

Both new Netbooks are thinner than Acer's previous models, and the 11-inch AO751h has a full-size keyboard, along with a 16:9 … Read more

I logged into Slashdot this morning and saw this note:

This strikes me as an excellent balance between the different kinds of contributions to a service. I didn't mind the ads before on Slashdot, but I can imagine some would happily buy their way out of the ads. If I did mind the ads, however, I'd far prefer to contribute my way out of seeing them, rather than paying my way to this same end.

There's a potential lesson in this for others, including Twitter in its ongoing business model evolution. Cash is not the only value … Read more

"The horror! The horror!" gasped Joseph Conrad's Kurtz as he lay dying in the Congo. Who knew he was a Twitter user?

After all, Kurtz's bleak pronouncement sounds suspiciously like the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth that accompany any changes that Twitter makes to its widely used service, most recently the decision to hide replies your friends send to their friends, unless you're following those same friends. Twitter suggests the change was made based on usage patterns, feedback, and the desire to hide otherwise "confusing" noise.

The furious response has been withering, … Read more