Its preview side categories, recent searches, etc. have been done before by other search engines including Yahoo, Ask, Google, etc. A lot of Bing’s approach seems to be various ways of presenting search refinements, again not new (alltheweb.com the past days of teoma, and others). Its powerset stuff inside I suppose is important–helps Bing against some of the others (hakia.com) out there, but in the end I don’t seem to get better results than Google gives me and I still find Google’s interface preferable.

In practice Bing doesn’t appear to live up to its release claims of helping me make decisions. I don’t see much to justify Microsoft calling Bing a decision engine, so that must have been more marketing hubris than anything.

If the game is going change perhaps that will come from more interesting experiments like Wolfram|Alpha or an alternate company. Then again, Google continues to innovate and change the search game better than its challengers do.

I thought, after the speech from the throne that that opportunity had passed. But Harper’s Conservatives pushed ahead with an economic “update” that was both wrong-headed and strangely partisan (at a time when that should be the last thing he was playing at) this in-turn activated the other three parties to form a coalition, somewhat like I’d imagined. Actually I imagined the coalition would have involved different groups (I originally thought the Green party was going to play a bigger role). Also it’s not clear whether the coalition that is taking place is the product of Dion’s strategizing. It could possibly be closer to Layton’s.

Anyway, Harper and his Conservatives can yell all they want that this is “undemocratic” or that the Conservatives were the ones Canadians elected but they’re wrong. The Conservatives were elected as a minority meaning they were supposed to work with the other parties. They didn’t. Instead the other parties, which together compose a much much greater percentage of who Canadians voted for, have come to an agreement to work together, and the’ve done so exactly as proscribed by Canadian Parliamentary rules. I think this is great. Here’s an easy page to read to understand the process. http://www.parl.gc.ca/information/library/idb/forsey/parl_gov_02-e.asp

Just in case, for some reason that site goes out of order or mysteriously gets changed, or you just can’t get to it, I made a PDF as an exact copy of the page, you can download it to read, study, and comment on here: Parliamentary Government

In the meantime, I’ve started a new project (conmem.ca) that a friend tells me, makes me seem like a crank and he’s probably right. I’m going use that blog as a public memory of the Conservatives’ deads. Eventually, I’ll expand the scope so that it’s more of a public conservation of memory of other issues, but right now the conservatives’ scandalous approaches to governing provide sufficient fodder. I’ve only posted two examples on that blog so far, though I have many others ferretted away, which I’ll publish in December. This month I’m a little too occupied with Nanowrimo.

As for this blog, come December (again), I ought to have some new little essays about ready to post about “intellectual property” issues.

We were brainstorming article topics, some research projects, etc. at TEC the other day, when my colleague, David Clark, came up with the bright idea of guiding a fictional start-up, with its growing pains, through its ERP selection project.

He just posted the first installment on The TEC Blog.

The thing I like about this (and the reason I’m writing this post) is that it’s an interactive serial. Everyone reading the post can vote and comment on the direction that the company, TurtleSpice, should take to procede with its selection project.

Dave is keeping track of the votes and comments. He’ll publish the next step in the series based on how our readers vote. Of course, it’ll all be cross-referenced according to TEC’s regular guidance for software selection best practices.

Should be a fun experiment see how people would like to steer this.

What I think makes Berlind’s point so interesting is the following observation

“Looking around at the many startups that springing up all over the world, that trend to either build-on or be an open source company isn’t slowing down. It’s speeding up which means that, going forward, the only choice for closed-sourced companies to respond to disruption (or create it) may be to acquire open source companies.”

And if that’s the case, the result is that over time these proprietary companies will become open source companies. It feels a little like that stat about human cells regenerating entirely every seven years–you’re a whole new person. Will this continue as the case for the software industry?

That is the perception one usually gets from reading news about Oracle’s moves. It is the perception selected from sound bites and media clips of Larry Ellison’s talks. Oracle conquers and dominates, it positions itself to have the appearance of shrewd aggression. It’s employees have commented on that feeling pervading their work environment. That has brought Oracle success in a proprietary software market. Can that approach carry it into the FOSS world?

Blankenthorn essentially is pointing out how Oracle will have to undergo some real change to be an accepted part of the FOSS community. What if Oracle chose not to care? Would it be able to pull off its support model successfully? That remains to be seen. Quickly combing through other companies in mind, I cannot recall any that have been successful delivering and supporting FOSS solutions and that did not somehow strive to be members in good-standing within the FOSS community. So when Oracle has initial customers on board with this initiative will it be able to continue and follow through down the road?

Maybe the conqueror will be changed by that which it has conquered.

I recently read a well-put example of an open source support process from a Sun blogger. In the example, Tim Quinn discusses how a Sun customer went to an open source community for help with his problem and when a clear solution wasn’t forthcoming, opened the issue from the basis of a formal support agreement he had with Sun. That enabled Sun to put its resources into the issue and solve the customer’s problem. So even though there was community help readily available, there was another layer of paid support that the customer could rely to solve his problem.

When one looks at the different companies providing support services, one can see definite similarities. I’m saying that a hallmark of open source software companies is providing support services. What is becoming more interesting is the way in which these services will differ as different industries grow their own open source ecosystems. I expect the services will start appearing with unique characteristics and a comparison of these among industries may perpetuate changes across open source support providers. A Computer World article on open source health care applications makes an interesting point that I think speaks to the support issue. According to the article:

“With open-source technologies, development and adoption go hand in hand. The robust and growing HIT offerings did not emerge from vendors marketing to health care providers, but from HIT teams serving the providers themselves. Therefore, adoption has been organic, based on community ‘pull’ and not on commercial ‘push’.”

It is talking about the way in which open source applications have been adopted by health care providers. What I find interesting is that the development of the applications is driven by what those in the traditional customer role require while maintaining the distinction of a provider. What will those providers (like WebReach or Uversa) be doing down the road? They know there is a solid group requiring exactly what has been developed. Surely they will continue development but they’re also going to need to support all this development output. It looks like the “community pull” is generating more professional support services and thus I’d think those may mimic the pull model of development.

I saw a lot the topics about innovation versus invention a few years ago. Now all I see in IT and especially IT business-related articles is the notion of innovation. For some time people were lamenting the industry’s apparent all-out focus on invention. When instead what people were calling for as the true path to business success was more innovation. Then it seemed there was a media round saying, no really all these successful tech companies are actually innovating, not inventing, let’s not confuse the two. Then countries started getting labeled as having cultures of innovation as opposed to invention. Do a few searches, you’ll see the topics I’m referring to. And that brings me back to the idea that everyone’s concerned with innovating now.

The Wall Street Journal’s recent article on the Right Way For Firms to Be Creative featured an interview with Nick Carr covering what was promoted as his somewhat unorthodox ideas about the innovation trend (though I’d take issue with that, they don’t seem to be very controversial). While he seems to declare the value of innovation, he warns that American companies are too in love with the idea, stating “…that innovation isn’t free, that innovation actually is quite expensive and quite risky.” Carr continues to offer some interesting examples though they’re quite similar (way to innovate, Carr ;-)) to those put forward by Bill Buxton in his piece on design innovation and invention (PDF).

On the difference between innovating and inventing Buxton stated that “Too often the obsession is with ‘inventing’ something totally unique, rather than extracting value from the creative understanding of what is already known.” Or in other words grasping what has been introduced already and building, improving, extending that. I see why innovating then appeals so much to business, especially in tech fields. For one thing, by simply changing or improving on the existing, companies have a more solid base for selling their products or services, they’re introducing something that may already have a level of familiarity to the target audience, and they get a jumpstart on the product/service since they’re not beginning from scratch. (And I might add, innovation is clearly built in to the Free and open source paradigm as FOSS licenses explicitely encourage innovative activities–this is a topic I’d like to explore further.) Note however that Carr raises an issue with companies obsessing on innovation as well,

“They lose sight of the fact that innovation isn’t free, that innovation actually is quite expensive and quite risky… You want to make sure that you innovate in those few areas where innovation can really pay off and create a competitive advantage and not innovate in other areas where it won’t pay off.”

There is great incentive for companies to innovate as opposed to invent. Maybe the initial invention represents a risky value proposition so innovation is seen as a safer bet; it can stand on the shoulders of known successes, or at least, the known. However as Carr points out in the quote above, problems exist with innovation, which I think sound equally applicable to invention. I’d like to refer back to Buxton, who states that “…success in capitalizing upon design and innovation is primarily a cultural thing, and shaping corporate culture is an executive responsibility.” So strategic innovatation must be the phrase of the day–considering the risks involved.

Look, if there are similar risks to innovation and invention can’t we say that both require the same sort of corporate stewardship to be beneficial in business? I think that all-too-often discussions of innovation and invention pit the one against the other. Using a “versus” analysis strategy as the crux of the questioning or exploration of this issue, leads us down a looping and self-destructive path. In other words, why try to say one is better than the other?

Without invention, won’t our platforms for innovation disappear? We need both, the real issue should be to understand how and when and where to devote energy to each. I’d like to see more thought about the interplay between invention and innovation and the creative, developmental, and business strategies for harnessing that interplay–I believe that would be a far more useful discussion.

With the variety of companies present at these shows not all of them should be expected to be pure-Linux or FOSS shops. A lot are providing a particular sort of software that happens to support Linux among other OSes, so it’s not entirely surprising that they’d be running OSes other than Linux. Still, at a Linux show, they ought to put their best feet forward. Anyhow, this time there were quite a few presenters showing slides with OpenOffice running on Linux. As I spied attendees typing away on their laptops, I saw that a lot were also running Linux. The predominant distro appeared to be a version of SUSE. Does the SUSE dominance portend something in the future of Linux-based business desktops?

As an aside, Linspire tried pumping the exhibition center full of its pheromones and jumped everyone in site, thrusting shiny boxed copies of its distro (with free manuals and other goodies). Always curious, I accepted. Linspire has no aspirations to the enterprise market, focusing solely on the home user, which makes them a bit of an anomaly among major Linux distros. Even other easy desktop distros like Ubuntu, Mandriva, and Xandros seem to have a few enterprise aims.

The Creative Commons had some great promotional items (and a well-done bit of DVD propaganda). My donation got me a snappy shirt that would either please Campbell’s soup or Andy Warhol–it’s hard to say which would have been more impressed. I was also instructed to take not one pin, but whole handfuls of pins until blood gushed from my palms. The trick now will be distributing them, maybe I’ll place them on the seats of some Metro cars.

And what about the enterprise apps? It would be nice to see more variety in the way of FOSS enterprise applications at LinuxWorld Expos (IT management, security, and development-related apps feel dominant, although as Linux gains home users, I wonder how the show will change to cover their interests?) A few of the enterprise app high-points included OpenBravo, which is an interesting new open source ERP system. I’ll have more on them (via TEC) in a bit. CentricCRM was visible and trying to show how it could be more appropriate for a large enterprise than its popular open source sister, SugarCRM. Finally, I’d like to mention Adaptive Planning, which although it has been in business for some time using an ASP model, just released its business performance management software under an open source license several days before the show. Adaptive Planning now is offering an on-line service as well as an on-site implementation with several different commercial options.

As a last note, in attending a presentation by Ingres’s CTO and strategy VP, Dave Dargo, he made a point about something like up to 80% of most IT organizations’ budgets go toward maintenance. If I understood him correctly, I think he was making a point about how the many existing proprietary vendors aren’t really interested much in new innovations with their customers in-mind, rather there is a lot of incentive to focus on all the clients spending money on old projects. I reflected on some of the recent acquisition press, and maybe I’m slow to have this really sink in, maybe it’s been quite obvious, but if this is the case then it puts a certain perspective on the motivation behind the Oracles, the Infors, etc. gobbling up so many competing companies. Does it matter so much whether they can offer a better solution for the customers of these gobbled-up companies? If they can integrate the wide range of systems? Is it mostly just important to them to milk a larger stable of maintenance customers?

Not that I’d do that.

Virtualization seems to be quite the theme these days. The last LinuxWorld I went to was in Toronto and it was a very different experience. The Toronto show seemed a bit lackluster in comparison… however it felt more personal and had one of the most interesting keynotes I’ve ever attended. Namely the fascinating explanation of National Geographic and IBM’s genographic mapping project (can’t wait to participate). Of course that was rather loosely related. SF LinuxWorld and virtualization… After listening to several talks I don’t think I see quite what makes this such a hot topic… some cost savings in CPU licenses, etc. what else though?

There was a very interesting panel discussion on legal FUD with Eben Moglen, Christine Martino, and Stuart Cohen. It was a good combination especially when it came to the GPL v3 issues. The commentary was more multi-faceted and less extreme sounding then it’s sometimes portrayed in popular media articles. In particular it wasn’t as though HP came up heavily in contradiction to the draft content… much more in the spirit of recognizing the collaborative work-in-progress nature. In addition none of the parties seemed to feel this draft process was causing any problems with the development community–noting FOSS dev was continuing just as rapidly as ever. Moglen noted that it was all going according to schedule and he expected things to stay on course for completion in 2007 as originally intended. Why has there been so much media fuss acting as though the drafting is moving too slowly? Maybe that signifies a lack of background research and too many people repeating one another.

Another interesting bit were the database situations… EnterpriseDB winning best DB (nice for them and PostgreSQL) but also the presence of Ingres. Ingres now indepedant (mostly) from CA is an open source database to watch. They have thousands of customers and a long solid history to back them but at the moment they’re pretty much a CA-only solution. So it will be interesting to see how their new-found visibility and open source licensing will help them expand beyond CA’s shadow and get supported by some of the other major enterprise solutions. When I talk to open source enterprise vendors I’m still only hearing support for the major proprietary datbases and PostgreSQL or MySQL.

Finally, before I wrap this up, I’ll note that this is my first post from my new Sharp Zaurus c3200, which arrived just before the show. It’s a great little Linux device! I’ll say more about it later and I’ll have another post on LinuxWorld SF noticings.

The company I work for, TEC (which has blogging on its horizon too), is in the process of developing a new decision support knowledge base addressing health care information management systems. I’ve been working on its structure today and noticed the analyst used an interesting acronym, ADL, which stands for the “activity of daily living”. I can’t help but wonder why the world needs such an acronym, can’t I just, err, live? It reminds of an article I saw linked in a blog yesterday (unfortunately I’ve forgotten which blog now), discussing a new wave of corporate buzzwords.

In any case, I’m sure ADL is an important technical term to the HCIMS industry (in a short bit I’ll probably know why). For the time being, I think I’ll just note that blogging has become a part of my ADL.