Links for January 27th through January 29th

A little something extra…

I somehow forgot to post the link yesterday, oops!

There’s been a lot of follow-on from the Oracle+Sun event earlier this week. Stephen has a nice Q&A up on it now, and you may recall my quick analysis on the topic.

A reporter asked me what the most significant part of the whole shindig was for middleware, SOA, and that slice of IT. Here’s what I said:

Oracle’s desire to sell integrated stacks is huge for middleware. In its most generalized form, “middleware” exists to deal with integrating together heterogeneous systems and much of the “pain” of dealing with it comes from working through, around, and with problems at the “edges” of architectures, that cross project or vendor lines of control. While a fully integrated offering may address those problems by eliminating those edges, the trade off is limited choice of technology – that could be good, bad, or meaningless depending on the development team’s needs. The big question going forward will be if Oracle will continue to encourage the heterogeneous architectural philosophy that Java has had for a long time, or go more with the philosophy that Java became a reaction to: Microsoft.

The Links

• Apple iPad vs Windows Tablet vs Google Chrome OS
  I'm shocked – SHOCKED – to learn that the iPad is a closed system!
• Open identity expert flies the Microsoft coop
  "Hardt referred to the past 12 months as the 'Year of Darkness.'" Yow!
• An Open Letter to the City of Austin
  Dude wants to rally people to get City of Austin to do more open data. Sure, sounds super.
• Wireless growth helping Verizon slog through rough economy
  I love this BigCo revenue numbers. I mean, I can't really comprehend that much money, so it just starts to get funny after awhile. "The carrier's overall earnings in 2009 dropped to $10.3 billion, a 17% decrease from the $12.6 billion it posted in 2008. This decline in earnings was most severe in the fourth quarter of 2009, as the company's $1.1 billion income marked a whopping 62% drop from the $2.9 billion net income the company posted in the fourth quarter of 2008. Revenue rose 10.7% to $107.8 billion." Compare to AT&T's $12.6 billion for mobile in Q4. Yow!
• Augmented reality: Pure hype or Next Big Thing in mobile?
• Report: Oracle plans to hire more employees than it cuts from Sun | Hardware – InfoWorld
• Compuware taps Gomez for performance management | Applications – InfoWorld
  For $10,000 a month you can have web transaction and behind-the-firewall application performance monitoring.
• Danes ditch Microsoft, take ODF road – at last
• On the iPad
  Quote of the week, on the iPad: "it’s a device that does little to enable creativity" More: "This is why I say that the iPad is a cynical thing: Apple can’t – or won’t – conceive of a future for personal computing that is both elegant and open, usable and free."
• Apple's iPad — a broken link? (Adobe Flash Platform Blog)
• Twitter / Nigel Fortlage: @monkchips that's why I am …
  "that's why I am dealing with #Redmonk, wicked smart team :-)"
• Microsoft's Future: Crystal Clear
• VMware Expands VMware vCloud Developer Ecosystem with Open-Source Java and Python SDKs for VMware vCloud API
• MonitoringForge.org Reaches 2,000 Registrants and More Than 2,000 Projects in its First Four Months
  This seems to be going along well.
• ManageEngine Adds Mobile Interface to ServiceDesk Plus, ITIL-Ready Help Desk, Asset Management, Software Suite
• AT&T Revenue Down Slightly But Profits Up On Mobile, Broadband Growth | mocoNews
  "Hi, call me T. I just made $30.9 billion dollars last quarter." And $12.6 of that was mobile.
• BSkyB wins damages in court battle with EDS
• Howard Zinn's lesson to us all | Victoria Brittain
  Back when you couldn't txt for a cause of just use the Facebook Causes app.
• #jboye09 8 Key Trends in Web Content Management Architecture and Standards
  Nice summary. Also: this is the kind of thing that drives Jaron Lanier crazy.
• Open Source vs. One Throat
  Arely responds to the "one throat to choke" theory.
• Don't expect an Amazon EC2 competitor from Oracle

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.