While at barcampAustin this year, my pal Zane Rockenbaugh (Dog Food Software) and I recorded a series of interviews with barcampAustin and SXSW attendees and friends. We dubbed it Profiles in Courage, and now they’re yours to enjoy.

Download the episode directly here, subscribe to the RedMonk Radio podcast feed to have it automatically downloaded to iTunes or other podcatcher, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

The Unfollow Quandry

In the fourth episode of Profiles in Courage, barcampAustin edition, Zane and I talk with Alex Muse of Big in Japan.

We start out talking about the new online etiquette quandary: is it polite to unfollow someone in Twitter? How do you sort out this gift economy stuff when the gift is your attention?

The Dallas Tech Scene

Being based up in Dallas, I ask Alex to profile the tech scene in the Dallas area. Alex says that he’s sort of frustrated with the tech scene in Dallas, jealous of Austin’s and, of course, the bar area. From this, Alex and some bar-bound friends started up bi-weekly happy hour events up in his parts. This kicked of Spring Stage, where the drink-together idea is spread to different tech scenes nationally. There’s some impressive outcomes from Spring Stage: Alex knows of 6 startups that have grown from it.

Here, I ask Alex to profile the technology tribes up in Dallas. He says there’s some rails guys and increasing mobile interest. Pulling back from the hotness technologies, I ask what the other, more traditional tech silos are like: for example, Sabre/Travelocity is up there, along with Match.com and about 4 other online dating sites. In the past, there was QueCat, which we all fondly remember

Dallas vs. Forth Worth

Wrapping up, I ask Alex to tell us what Dallas folks think of Fort Worth folks. From an outsider’s perspective, “DFW,” seems like one big metroplex. But, from within, Dallas is “totally different” than Fort Worth.

While we “don’t do numbers” at RedMonk, I come across a lot of interesting numbers each week. Here are some, though admittedly slimmer this week what with the 3 shows I’ve been banging around at over the past week plus:

Making Money in Open Source

At the Eclipse Open Source Strategy Summit, Paul Clenahan of Actuate said that BIRT had 6.5M+ downloads thru 2005 to Dec 2008. It had over 4M last year. In 2007, Actuate did $8M in “BIRT based revenue.” Last year, 2008, it was $15.4M [I didn’t jot down the number soon enough -Coté].

Eclipse

Under [Mike Milinkovich’s] watch, the Eclipse Foundation has grown to over 185 corporate members worldwide, over 90 open source projects, and over 1,000 Eclipse committers.

WebEx, GoToMeeting, & Friends Must Love This

Connecting to the Cloud

West admits that the current economy has slowed Clearwire’s rollout: “Our plans were to cover a lot more of the U.S. population than we have finances to do at the moment.” He added that the $3.2 billion gives Clearwire enough money to make big inroads, although the company needs to raise even more money. That means having a goal of establishing WiMax service in 80 metro areas by 2010.

One hopes their angling for those pots of Crater Cash so that we can start downloading (and uploading!) videos faster while driving through BFE.

Man, what is our problem in the US with broadband? Do Europe, Korea, and others just have better broadband because they’re geographically smaller, pay more for it, or what?

A Global Company

The Wall Street Journal reported that IBM is planning to lay off about 5,000 U.S. employees, with many of the jobs being transferred to India. It cited people familiar with the situation.

The latest round of cuts target the company’s global business-services unit, according to reports.

India has emerged as key location for IBM and other multinational services companies for the global delivery of services. IBM is estimated to have over 80,000 staff in services delivery and sales in India.

I’ve in the past made snarky comments about a “smart planet” meaning “not having to fly Yankees around the world.” Indeed.

Shrinking the Googlebot

So today we have informed Googlers that we plan to reduce the number of roles within our sales and marketing organizations by just under 200 globally. (via Rich Sharples)

SXSW Tracking

[U]sing ITDatabase (shameless plug) I did a search for the 30 day period ending March 25th so see how many articles were written about SXSW this year.

The numbers break down as follows:

• Number of articles: 328
• Number publications: 109
• Number of authors: 143

Interesting isn’t it? The data implies that more than one author per publication wrote something about SXSW.

Going a level deeper, let’s take a look at the top 10 vendors mentioned in SXSW stories:

• Twitter 122 (37.2%)
• Facebook 96 (29.3%)
• Apple 69 (21.0%)
• Google 60 (18.3%)
• Microsoft 32 (9.8%)
• Palm 22 (6.7%)
• Adobe 13 (4.0%)
• Amazon 13 (4.0%)
• Dell 12 (3.7%)
• Intel 9 (2.7%)

How much does a cloud cost, part 2

Amazon spent $56 million on servers with Rackable in 2007, but boosted that to $86 million last year…. Microsoft (MSFT) bought about $126 million in Rackable equipment in 2007, but just $35 million in 2008, according to data from Rackable’s latest 10-K filing with the SEC. Yahoo (YHOO), which accounted for a quarter of Rackable’s revenue in 2007, no longer makes the list of the company’s largest customers.

Disclosure: Eclipse, IBM, IT Database are clients.

While at barcampAustin this year, my pal Zane Rockenbaugh (Dog Food Software) and I recorded a series of interviews with barcampAustin and SXSW attendees and friends. We dubbed it Profiles in Courage, and now they’re yours to enjoy.

Download the episode directly here, subscribe to the RedMonk Radio podcast feed to have it automatically downloaded to iTunes or other podcatcher, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

The Austin Tech Scene

In the third episode of Profiles in Courage, barcampAustin edition, Zane and I talk with Mando Escamilla of Symbiot.

Him being a local, I ask him what he thinks of the Austin tech-scene. He says it seems “obsequies,” more specifically, that it’s highly fragmented and not too well connected. It seems, he goes on, that tech people are not too social with each other. Why? Perhaps because of the city is spread out, maybe because there’s no big name employers, maybe it’s another reason.

Rails Update

I then ask Mando to give us an update on the rails community. To hear him tell it, the old school rails folks have made up with the merb folks and are successfully preventing community forking.

Desktop Ajax?

From here, we get into a discussion of RIA’s, specifically about desktop RIAs. While he’s been skeptical, Mando recently started using a new Twitter app, Spaz. This gets us into a discussion of using desktop RIAs to develop Ajax applications, as opposed to using Flex or another non-HTML language. Here, I dig deeper to get Mando to tell us if he’d move to desktop application development using this model. We brain storm about what’d this look-like and how you might transition to it.

He’s still reluctant to move from web applications, but he’s starting to creek open the door a bit on the possibility. Still, he likes that Spaz is all HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but on the desktop. (See more commentary on this in a recent post of mine about RIA’s at SXSW).

Disclosure: Adobe is a client, as are Microsoft and Appceletor.

While at barcampAustin this year, my pal Zane Rockenbaugh (Dog Food Software) and I recorded a series of interviews with barcampAustin and SXSW attendees and friends. We dubbed it Profiles in Courage, and now they’re yours to enjoy.

Download the episode directly here, subscribe to the RedMonk Radio podcast feed to have it automatically downloaded to iTunes or other podcatcher, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

The Human Relational Database

In the second episode of Profiles in Courage, barcampAustin edition, Zane and I talk with Mark Cathcart, Director of Systems Engineering at Dell. I start out asking Mark about his life in the IT world, starting off, as he put, as a relational database where he shuffled punch cards to look up demographics and other info through the punch card hatch.

After this, we dip into Mark’s time at IBM working on systems, in particular a little stint he had in the hospital making “scribbly diagrams” and working on one of the earliest IBM laptops.

Chips, man

Pulling ourselves from the IBM days, Mark tells us what he’s up to at Dell. This gets us into a discussion of laptop chips, ARM processors and the trick the power button plays on you.

Getting to one of my favorite boondoggle ideas, I ask Mark what he thinks about the looming problem of multi-core programming. The core issue is getting developers to start doing multi-threaded coding as the normal course. When you cross the difficulty of caches, locks, and all that with the ease of virtualization, Mark says that there’s “no point” in worrying about it too much for the average application developer.

Mainframe Heated Curries

Next, I ask Mark to tell us about his thoughts on cloud computing. While it’s not in his current wheelhouse at Dell, he points to Dell’s Jimmy Pike. Here, Zane’s server room scotch tasting fantasies elicits a story from Mark about warming his curries in cruise-line IBM mainframes.

Pulling out another pet-topic, we discuss netbooks, which Mark doesn’t have much of an opinion of, liking larger machines. Somehow, this gets us to talking about the Office ribbon.

The Singles Car

Finally, we close out with a non-tech topic. What with the Austin commuter rail coming in, eventually, I ask Mark to tell us about the idea of “The Singles Car” in New York and if that’d work here in Austin. As Mark says, “I don’t think it needs it here in Austin. there’s enough cool places to go that you don’t need to hang out on a train to meet someone.”

Disclosure: IBM and Dell are clients.

While at barcampAustin this year, my pal Zane Rockenbaugh (Dog Food Software) and I recorded a series of interviews with barcampAustin and SXSW attendees and friends. We dubbed it Profiles in Courage, and now they’re yours to enjoy.

Download the episode directly here, subscribe to the RedMonk Radio podcast feed to have it automatically downloaded to iTunes or other podcatcher, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

Cloud Boy

Zane and I kicked off Profiles in Courage, barcampAustin edition, talking with Jesse Silver, co-founder CloudCamp and the CCIF. We jump right in and start talking about “large, New York banks” are using cloud computing. From there, we get Jesse to tell us about the history of CloudCamp. We go over the unconference format and the sponsorship options. Part of the idea of CloudCamp – as with all “camps” – is that local folks take over organizing camps regionally: so there’s CloudCamps in San Francisco, London, Atlanta, and one coming up April 24th and 25th in Austin.

Selling Cloud Standards

Tacking back to cloud computing in general, I ask Jesse how he’d reply to a common reply I get about cloud standards: I’m a (cloud) startup, and I don’t have time to worry about standards bodies. This gets us into a discussion of the current cloud standards efforts.

Get Into Software

Finally, I ask Jesse what he thinks of the software industry now, is it a good field for “The Kids” to get into, or is it tapped out? Jesse’s answer – painfully summarized – is that software is in and helps drive everything, so of course it’s good to be in.

It looks like SXSW is putting their session recordings up very quickly this year: the recording of the open source panel I was on is now up.

Neelan Choksi moderated the panel and my fellow panelists were Mark Brewer and Sara Dornsife. We started out the discussion talking about where open source is now, if it’s been “successful.” As the questions come in, the discussion moves to a more strategic one: how can my company apply (or not apply) open source?

Download it directly from SXSW, or click play above to hear it.

Thankfully – for them – each member of the RIA Triumvirate were in attendance. There’ve been budget cut-backs, hiring freezes, and other Financial Abyss freak-out tactics from each of them, but SXSW is a conference not be missed by the three with that all important three-letter strategy: RIA.

Adobe was there in force, as always including RIA Weekly co-host Ryan Stewart. Microsoft had a corner lounge with Surface and Silverlight. Sun had a comfy lounge with JavaFX and sent key JavaFX folks, even frequent RIA Weekly guest (here and here) Josh Marinacci. Last year, Silverlight was the RIA sponsor, on the backs of all the SXSW staff shirts, this year it was JavaFX. (Keep your eyes peeled here for special video editions of RIA Weekly with Ryan and Josh.)

SXSW mixes a fantastically good time hanging out with friends from near and far with a unique chance to talk with what people in the tech industry like to call “the market.” Below, I’ll give you a summary of my RIA field notes from SXSW. There’s nothing scientific about these notes, they’re (wo)man on the street quality. They come from a geographic (North American wise) and industry diverse set of people, many of who I know (or know [now] through others). Nonetheless, in the section of my trade that deals with trends and the future, anecdotes are all we have.

Adobe

Adobe, as a “creative” tools and RIA vendor rules SXSW. Not only physically – running the “Adobe Day-stage,” but in mind-share. You have to remember that SXSW is a conference catering to three types of geeks: computer, film, and music. In each of those categories, Adobe has mature, respected tools to offer. Most of the Adobe’s presence was in the Creative Suite area – there weren’t as many Flash Platform people running around as last year.

That said, from the conversations I had with folks, Adobe is still cemented as the creative tool of choice for the round-corner cool kids. That said, the interest in RIAs vs. Ajax and iPhone applications was not as clear-cut. People I spoke with were not freaking out over Flex, per say. You get the feeling, though, that is Flash existing on the iPhone, it’d be another story.

Adobe is clearly the king of the hill here. The problem in tech (with 3-5 exceptions that prove the rule) is that that means nothing. Adobe’s danger is allowing hubris to take over. They will rule the Creative Suite area for far into the future, but the RIA space is up for grabs, even though Adobe is the most mature offering. You have to remember Java here. The Java VM and language created untold billions in revenue for IBM, Oracle, SAP, and countless other companies. It was, at one point, the only game in town. Sun benefited from it for a long time, and they still derive revenue from it. But, it’s not going to save Sun on it’s own.

The point is no Java and Sun. The point is to show that a company at the center of a run-away technology can let the revenue escape from their fire-wall. Why do you think Adobe is so reluctant to open source the Flash Player? Their arguments are painfully similar to the arguments we’d hear from Sun before OpenJDK. At the end of the day, the crux of those arguments was around control. In software, control drives revenue, and in all parts of their market, loosing control is Adobe’s challenge.

Let’s color this a bit, though. I’m one of those rascally people that thinks open sourcing the Flash Player would actually benefit Adobe. I talk with countless enterprise-y developers (read: those who pay for software) who trip up on the Flash Player being closed. There’s a whole generation of developers who treat “open source” like the phrase “democracy”: it’s so grand that it means everything and nothing, but it’s a sticker you want on your laptop. Who wants to say “I develop on a closed source platform”?

Microsoft

Here, we’re at the beginning of a long road. When I asked people – purposefully very vague and broadly to see what they’d say – “what do you think of Microsoft?” they reaction I got was a long, confused look, and then a bitter-sweet answer. After that initial odd silence, I would prod the person further by asking about Silverlight, Expression, Blend, etc. The answer I got was painfully cliché: people simply didn’t like Microsoft’s aesthetic, putting it in my own gentle phrasing. Of important note is that no one mentioned open source, “evil,” or the sort of anti-Microsoft sentiment you’d expect from the open source crowd. Part of this, as one person admitted, is that price isn’t a problem is you’re willing to pirate the software. Their core concern was that Microsoft would not help them create the look they wanted.

Pushing them more, most people would admit that they felt bad for Microsoft in the realm of round-corner cool kids. They believed that Microsoft was full of super-smart & capable people, but that something was missing. In the same way that our own James Governor will never let Adobe live down the Adobe Updater (rightly so, until they fix it), the SXSW crowd would point to Word as a sort of philosophic treatise of Microsoft’s thoughts of user design and understanding of beauty. Each person I talked to would invoke Office as hairy goiter around Microsoft’s neck that kept them away. This is obviously massively too harsh, but I am here to report on perceptions, not truths.

The SXSW crowd had a sort of latent OKness to see Microsoft succeed and be, frankly, “cool.” It wasn’t like a bunch of jocks towel snapping nerds – grounded outside of high school metaphor: two groups that will never meet and exchange good for cash in the marketplace. Most round-corner kids – as is the case with myself, dear readers – are driven to make up for all those red gashes from the locker-room.

What is Microsoft’s path – if they care to – fix this? Here’s an anecdote that starts scribbling past the “dragons be here” parts of the road-map. Once they dogged on Word, I’d jokingly ask each interlocutor, “so, I take you don’t like The Ribbon?” to which I’d get more blank stares. I’d explain the new UI in Office, and they’d answer, “oh, I use a Mac.” The hearts and minds of the round-corner cool-kids rest with Apple. If Microsoft cares for those organs, the strategic onus goes to the Microsoft Mac team, plain and simple. Azure may be a path, but VisualStudio driven inroads won’t work in the short term.

“Hi, my name is JavaFX.”

The reaction to JavaFX was even still different. The question wasn’t one of style, it was one of ontology. “What is JavaFX?” people would ask. That said, once told, there was interest, esp. at the JavaFX booth where there were comfy couches and big screens with razzle-dazzle. As Josh Marinacci says in the RIA Weekly video interview we did, one person started thinking out-loud about how they’d use JavaFX to drive a “customize your snow-board” app.

Sun has the longest row to hoe here. My sense is that they could be the Wal-mart of RIA if they rigged up their OTA enough and got JavaFX rolled out not so much on new platforms, but existing ones. Don’t think being compared to Wal-mart is an insult; that kind of thinking is dumber than an Arkansas hillbilly. Hey, Cletus, ask your pal EDGAR about Wal-mart.

Sun’s pink-dot strategy is sound, but it needs some Walton Family ruthlessness to it. Sun has to go to the metaphoric Levi’s and drive them to near bankruptcy in the name of Sun’s customers. We need Vlaskic pickle jars larger, and cheaper, than any consumer would ever need and with margins so razor thin that pickle-lords have to wrap steel around their wrists.

Sounds charming, don’t it? Hell yes it does, if you’re the one buying tube socks for $2 a dozen.

The path to RIA is through Ajax

On the RIA front in general, I talked with many people about what they thought about desktop RIAs, like AIR or Appcelerator Titanium. Here, the talk got interesting.

What the SXSW folks I talked with were mildly interested in was the ability to use web development technologies on the desktop. Not many were wild about Flex, Silverlight, or JavaFX per say. Bt, they spoke positively – though provisionally so – about using those runtimes for desktop Ajax applications.

I keep hedging the adjectives describing their interest here because no one out and out said, “I want to do Ajax on the desktop!” But, often, when talking about RIA’s, they’d stumble on the idea and there’d be a narrow-eyes flash of interest in their eyes. When I tugged them down the rabbit hole, they’d get start shaking their head in bemused agreement.

I’ve spoken with people about desktop Ajax many times of late – most recently with Appcelerator CEO Jeff Haynie on RIA Weekly – and the whole notion seems like a critically missing part of each RIA vendor’s marketing strategy. Marketing, because they could all do it (some faster than others, like Adobe who ships it in AIR and has the Coldfusion army), but none of them highlight desktop Ajax s much as their own, proprietary, RIA languages. Again: they have it, they just don’t lead with it.

It seems to me that they key here is becoming the patron or, at least, number one advocate of WebKit. Round-corner kids love WebKit, hate IE, and put up with Firefox.

Apple is the current shepherd of WebKit, perception wise, but I get the feeling that one of the RIA Triumvirate – or Appcelerator, or even Curl – could swoop in like a pearly toothed GI and start stacking up the good will one Hershey bar at a time.

Disclosure: Adobe, Microsoft, Sun, and Appcelerator are clients. I get a press badge (read: free) to SXSW and all sorts of kindness from that outfit and their people.