tnl.net

No Changes in Mobile

June 24, 2008

Today’s announce­ment by Nokia that it would acquire all of Sym­bian rep­re­sents an impor­tant move in the upcom­ing bat­tle for next gen­er­a­tion mobile devices (to call them phone seems unfair as they tend to do more than just make calls). In this entry, I’ll take a quick look at how the dif­fer­ent play­ers are cur­rently approaching […]

Standards as social contracts

June 7, 2006

Look­ing at the efforts Dave Winer is under­tak­ing in terms of get­ting OPML to become yet another stan­dard, I’ve been think­ing about how for­mats get adopted. The key insight I came up with is that stan­dards are actu­ally a form of social con­tract and increas­ingly, data for­mats is fol­low­ing the same path. Look­ing at the his­tory In order […]

On the WordPress move

May 29, 2006

After many years of using my own blog soft­ware, some­thing I had writ­ten myself and tended to over the years, I finally threw the towel in and decided to upgrade. Here are a few things that I learned in the process. Mak­ing the Deci­sion The first, and prob­a­bly tough­est, part of this migra­tion was to actu­ally make the jump. […]

Microsoft Does Linux

April 4, 2006

I had to check the date on the arti­cle when I saw the announce­ment that Microsoft was going to pro­vide some level of sup­port for Linux. How­ever, this is not an April Fool’s Day joke; it’s the real thing and has seri­ous impli­ca­tions. In order to under­stand the impact, one has to under­stand how Microsoft used […]

Apple moves to Intel

June 6, 2005

So we can finally put an end to the rumors and start look­ing at the impact: Apple, in a move that has been rumored for a long time, has announced that it would start using Intel proces­sors begin­ning in 2006. The 5-years out­look The inter­est­ing thing is the tim­ing of the move, a bit over 10 years from the […]

DRM is not binary

January 21, 2005

Much of the dis­cus­sion over Dig­i­tal Rights Man­age­ment has focused on the extremes, offer­ing only and all or noth­ing approach. How­ever, my own recent expe­ri­ence is that there is much more gran­u­lar­ity to DRM than most peo­ple in the space want you to think. Fresh­ness vs. Con­ve­nience vs. Value When watch­ing movies, I have sev­eral options. I can Go […]

2005 Predictions

January 3, 2005

Another year, another round of pre­dic­tions. As is now becom­ing cus­tom­ary on TNL.net, it’s time to project out the future year. As always, I’ll revisit those pre­dic­tions at the end of the year. Voice Over IP VoIP expe­ri­enced tremen­dous growth in 2004 but it was just the begin­ning. This year, much more will hap­pen in that space. Cable […]

Why Apple should consider Wintel

November 19, 2004

Last week, two major events showed the decreas­ing power of the Oper­at­ing Sys­tem: the first one was the release of Fire­fox and the sec­ond was the release of Kon­fab­u­la­tor on the Win­dows plat­form. All this got me think­ing about how we relate to our oper­at­ing sys­tems and in par­tic­u­lar, about how I relate to the operating […]

Blurring the line: Google Desktop

October 14, 2004

Today, Google unveiled a new appli­ca­tion that allows you to search your desk­top, blur­ring the lines between desk­tops and the web. This is yet another exam­ple of what I call hybrid com­put­ing, the new class of soft­ware that can be aug­mented through web use. It also has stag­ger­ing impli­ca­tions for a lot of play­ers. Microsoft Of course, everyone […]

Modular by Design — Software

August 14, 2004

So far, we’ve talked about the impact of a mod­u­lar approach on exist­ing busi­ness mod­els out­side of the soft­ware indus­try. Today, we delve in on the indus­try most asso­ci­ated with mod­u­lar design: soft­ware. Cer­tain soft­ware com­pa­nies have been suf­fer­ing from the advance of mod­u­lar­ity in soft­ware design. The main one, to date, has been Microsoft with […]