standardization

You'd be hard-pressed to find standards as ubiquitous as SATA, which is used to plug hard drives into computers. But its success inside the computer chassis turns out to have been a bad predictor of its success outside.

Years ago, SATA allies created a variation of the specification called eSATA that would let people attach hard external hard drives to computers. The big advantage over USB: an eSATA drive reads and writes data just as fast as an internal drive.

Despite its branding disaster of a name--eSATA stands for External Serial AT Attachment, and AT stands for nothing in particular--eSATA achieved some measure of success. I for one am glad it exists as a way to give laptops some measure of storage expandability of desktop machines. But overall, it never built critical mass, and I believe new technologies that match its speed and exceed its breadth will consign it to obscurity among mainstream computer users.

The nearest competitive threat is the new USB 3.0 "SuperSpeed," which offers transfer speeds of 5 gigabits per second compared to the 480 megabits per second of the currently prevailing version of the multipurpose Universal Serial Bus technology.

The new USB version is just now assuming the throne after a dangerously long reign by its predecessor. The first hard drives supporting it are on the market, and soon it will become mandatory in PCs. … Read more

Is Apple becoming more concerned with strategy than technology?

That's the question (and accusation, really) leveled at Apple by the Wall Street Journal's Holman Jenkins Jr., who decries Apple's strategy as little more than "zero-sum maneuvering versus hated rivals."

He has a point. But is it valid?

Jenkins argues that Apple's decision to ship the iPad without Flash support amounts to an attempt to lock consumers into iTunes-only content:

Apple may be succumbing to the seductive temptations of "network effects," in which the all-consuming goal becomes getting its mobile devices into more … Read more

Microsoft may have an innovation problem, but it has hubris nailed.

Take, for example, John Mangelaars, a Microsoft regional vice president, in an interview with CIO magazine. Mangelaars dispenses with niceties, arguing that Google and Microsoft are the only two games in town and that the stakes are immense:

[Between Microsoft and Google it will be a] Battle of the Titans for who becomes the platform of the world.

And you thought it was just software....

In this case, Mangelaars may not be stretching the truth. There is a great deal at stake, and it really is about who serves … Read more

Correction 1:05 p.m. PST: Boy, did I get it wrong.

Writing off available information this morning--the AIM beta download site and a few news reports--I assumed the Facebook-AOL interoperability was the result of a corporate partnership. Instead, it's because Facebook actually did open up its technology, embracing rather than neglecting the approach I called for. In this case at least, the bad instant messaging network habits from the past were not carried over.

I have to say I'm impressed with Facebook's move, and not because it makes the crow I'm eating any tastier. What … Read more

BB FlashBack Standard Edition is an incredibly easy-to-use program that allows you to create video recordings of on-screen activities. The program's cool features and intuitive design make it a great choice for presentations, tutorials, and more.

The program's interface is quite well-designed, and getting started with the recording features is easy. A small (but optional) toolbar appears next to the your system tray, with buttons for Record, Stop, and Play, as well as access to a more detailed menu. When you're ready to record, just click the button, and a brief wizard appears that allows you to … Read more

Remember those crazy days of e-mail when you couldn't send messages between systems? Microsoft Mail customers could only send mail within their enterprise or to other customers of Microsoft Mail (ditto for the other systems). It wasn't until SMTP standardized things that e-mail could move between systems.

E-mail was interesting then, but it didn't really become dominant until it standardized around the SMTP messaging protocol.

Are we experiencing the same thing with Twitter?

Twitter has become hugely popular, but it remains a closed communication medium. Yes, it has opened its data stream and maintains an open API approach … Read more

Recently, I outlined my thoughts around simplifying application delivery into cloud-computing environments. At the time, I thought what was needed was a way to package applications in a universal format, whether targeted for infrastructure or platform services, Java or Ubuntu, VMs or disk drives.

The core concept was to define this format so that it combines the actual bits being delivered with the deployment logic and run-time service level parameters required to successfully make the application work in a cloud. I wasn't very clear initially about the core motivation for this proposal, but I will make them explicitly clear … Read more

Google and other companies interested in the Internet's addressing system have proposed a technology they hope will get Net users to nearby servers more quickly.

The technology in question is called the Domain Name System, which resolves alphabetical Net addresses such as CNET.com to the numeric addresses actually used to reach the appropriate server. Google's interest in DNS is so strong the company launched its own service in an effort to lower some of the delays that can result when the network equipment most proximate to a Net user doesn't have the numeric address for a … Read more

Is Google plotting to encroach upon Facebook's comfy territory? Well, it seems it's launched a sort of social-networking task force: Open-standards guru Will Norris announced on his blog Tuesday that he'll be starting a new job at Google on February 1, joining a few other prominent social-networking thinkers who have also recently made the jump to Mountain View.

"I'm happy to announce today that I've accepted a job at Google, working on the newly formed Social Web team," Norris wrote on his blog. "I will be joining fellow new hires Joseph Smarr … Read more