All Things

Dana Blankenhorn has posted an interesting article discussing how open source software is being divvied up among top software companies (IBM, Google, Microsoft) in a way reminiscent of Japanese keiretsus. She argues that only these three seem to have the “size, scope and ambition” to play in this space, though Sun also continues to seek such a dominant position.

According to the article, in American usage “keiretsu” has become a term describing a much looser form of business association, with one large company and a number of smaller ones beholden to it in various ways. The Mozilla Foundation’s dependence on Google would be a good example, a relationship of substantial ties between independent entities.

Years ago, I was thinking open source might end up being its own “keiretsu”. Nevertheless, I guess it was inevitable that it would instead end up fragmented and mostly beholden to big companies. Blankenhorn cites the examples of IBM-Red Hat and Microsoft-Novell as other instances of such ties.

On the other hand, if these big companies do things right, open source software can advance and still end up producing a thriving ecosystem. IBM’s relationship with the Eclipse Foundation is a prime example.

It seems that key to the whole process is how a Big Co. views the software product lifecycle. If it accepts that functionality gradually will become commoditized, it will view open source as the likely end-point for most proprietary software. Such a strategy/outlook will result in the Big Co.’s typically releasing the source after some years/decades, with the intent of building still-proprietary software and services on top of it.

IBM did that with VisualAge (now Eclipse), and has also worked hard at promoting the open-source Linux operating system. On the other hand, Microsoft seems to want to milk its Windows operating system forever, which makes it hard to play well in the open-source world.

While it may seem wasteful, companies such as Apple have shown that a steady discarding of old technology can do a lot to promote innovation. I keep waiting for more companies to follow their example.

Evidence continues to mount that “creative destruction” is indeed a key process in a healthy economy. Peter Drucker argued that companies ought to continually make way for the new by killing off old products, rather than waiting for the market to do it for them. Henry Ford’s reluctance to part with the Model T, and its nearly destroying Ford in the process, is the classic case study on this.

With software, however, there’s a difference, since many software products are foundations for other systems (software or hardware), or integral to the use/retention of valuable data produced by them. For this reason, it’s not as simple a matter to remove a program from the market. Software may be used for many different purposes by different customers. Some may be able to switch quickly to new products, but others would incur great cost.

Consequently, it seems inevitable that users are eventually going to demand some kind of protection from software vendors - or else from government regulators - that a software product’s source code be made open source if the product is abandoned. At the least users would be protected, and possibly the product might see further development by others (WordPress, successor to b2, is in some respects an example of this).

More interesting, however, are the more state-of-the-art open-source projects such as Linux and Eclipse, that promise innovation and a product that is “built right” for the future in a platform-agnostic way. Knowing that a software product will be here to stay, because the source is available, seems to be such a strong draw that many of these best-of-breed projects have been able to attract top talent to contribute, often on a volunteer basis, as well as substantial support from Big Co.’s such as IBM.

For the software industry to thrive and not just reinvent the wheel, we need strong and viable foundations to build on. If these Big Co.’s are willing to kill off the revenue streams from their old software somewhat before it dries up, their code may well retain importance, or even grow in dominance as Eclipse has. This can offer a strong foundation both for services and for additional products higher up the stack.

Moreover, it will produce an overall healthier software industry ecosystem, since the underlying code will continue to be developed, increasing the value of it and everything higher up on the stack, due both to stability and to greater innovation.

I ran across a post, The Attention Crash on Steve Rubel’s blog Micro Persuasion. In it, he argues that the real danger isn’t another .com financial bubble bursting, but rather individuals hitting a wall of information overload:

“We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. The demands for our attention are becoming so great, and the problem so widespread, that it will cause people to crash and curtail these drains. Human attention does not obey Moore’s Law.”

I agree that there’s still a lot of life left in this tech deployment cycle. At the same time, I’m amazed that the media and society at large still don’t seem to be taking information overload seriously.

There’s been such an explosion of both work and leisure information, not to mention creative tools, games, etc., yet you don’t notice many people outside of the GTD blogging community talking about it. We obviously are going to need some more sophisticated tools than just raw RSS feeds, and these folks seem to be about the only people seriously exploring that. There’s so many GTD-related productivity and project management tools, that I’m having a hard time getting them all sorted out.

In other words, we need a lot of innovation in order to develop tools for handling information overload, and so we should be seeing a lot of experimentation taking place. Right now most of that is happening in the GTD community. I think we should also expect to see a variety of tools tailored to particular individual styles. That’s an area I’ve done a great deal of research in, and hope to see its application to innovative productivity tools.

Beyond GTD, Twitter is clearly generating some of the loudest buzz currently, mainly as a social networking site, where it seems to have great potential. A lot of folks have criticized it as the worst example of pointless info overload but I think Twitter, or something like it, could actually be a tremendous tool to help deal with overload, both by making inputs timely without interrupting (using the web interface, anyway) and by forcing inputs to conform to a quick summary so you can judge whether it’s worth a further look.

Of course, most folks don’t get that yet. I see tweets saying “This is great” and just a link, giving me no idea what it’s about. Others send out a half-dozen or more pointless tweets a day, clogging up my friends page. Some news sources such as the New York Times, commendably quick to get on board, nevertheless send out the same update on multiple channels. All this “noise” reduces Twitter’s usefulness, but even in just the six weeks or so that I’ve used it, I’ve already seemed to notice a certain sort of evolution going on, with many (not all) folks starting to effectively pre-screen their tweets and limit them more to ones that would actually be helpful to others.

I think eventually we’ll see people going to multiple accounts (”channels”?), one with personal info and more security, another with interesting links (as Robert Scoble has already done with his Scoble’s Link Blog), and another with updates from all one’s own blog posts, important comments, etc. The last purpose is how I’m primarily using my own Twitter account, aeroG, at present.

The main point is that Twitter, as with so much of the web, is a grand experiment being done on a huge scale, and it’s likely to evolve rapidly in the coming year or two. If Rubel is at all correct, then we should expect to be seeing a lot more of these tools coming along shortly, to help us sort out not only our increasingly complex lives and connections, but also the huge flood of information that increasingly threatens to overwhelm us, or at least to drown out the truly valuable information tidbits that these tools should help us to find and track.

Years ago, Apple ran an ad with a bunch of lemmings all following each other off a cliff. After all, why think when it’s so easy to just NOT think? Well, here we go again. This year it seems like most all the major blogging/social networking services are one by one getting blinded in the headlights of MySpace.

As if we really need more of the lowest common denominator! There’s so much opportunity for innovation in this area, yet everyone wants to be the same. I’ve complained previously on my MSN (now Live) Spaces blog about Microsoft in this regard, and now the latest casualty apparently is Facebook.

With only 10 million users after two and a half years of operation, I guess Facebook just feels like a failure next to MySpace. Never mind the fact that they own the campus network space, they would rather throw out that distinctive so they can compete head-on with everybody. Usually these sorts of commoditization strategies don’t end up being as profitable as the competitors expect (the airline industry comes to mind).

Perhaps the Facebook users will again make a big fuss. Maybe management will listen, but chances are, based on the past history of fast-growing tech companies, they won’t. Most keep determinedly going in the wrong bone-headed direction until they go right off the cliff.

Xanga, which I use for my blog AeroGo and perhaps my favorite of the bunch, is likewise feverishly adding multimedia features, to compete not only with MySpace I suppose but also Flickr and YouTube. So far these changes seem mostly positive, but if Xanga can add these features so readily, they will very likely end up as standard on all sites.

Hasn’t anybody (or at least any VCs) noticed that there are a lot of people out there who don’t like MySpace? I mean really, it’s pretty raunchy by and large. It’s as if there was a town full of nice, somewhat distinct neighborhoods, yet all the developers were racing to fill these places with trashy businesses and dumpy apartments.

So why don’t any of these sites carve out a unique identity for themselves? I think the only plausible answer is the dramatic, rapid growth of MySpace. Why have 5 or 10 million users when you can have 100 million? Of course, these users apparently are also spending a lot of time on MySpace and so, presumably, potentially a lot of dollars.

Nevertheless, it seems that money is best made on the net by tightly targeting customers, not with mass marketing, so I suspect sites that are oriented around specific topics, activities and user demographics will ultimately yield a superior return. As I’ve noted before, these social networking sites need to differentiate themselves and find niches where they can thrive, as Facebook has (even if they don’t grasp the value of this).

Let me use Facebook as an example, since it has done the best job of targeting a very large yet tightly-defined niche (high school and college campuses). College students in particular have so many things they have to (or want to) buy, that the marketing/advertising opportunities seem almost endless, both at the local and at the national or branding/name recognition level. Everyone from the local pizza restaurant to students selling used textbooks to Hollywood film studios will want to target their users.

I’m not in school so I don’t use Facebook and don’t know how good a job they’ve done of capitalizing on this opportunity, but the folks developing (and funding) these sites need to remember that traffic often, but not always, equates to sales. Ultimately, it boils down to trust. I suspect that MySpace, as many city centers did, will begin to collapse of its own weight as many head to the “suburbs” of seemingly safer sites like Xanga and others.

The planned growth ideal for urban development might in fact be a useful metaphor for these social networking sites, which may do best if they concentrate on growing at a sustainable pace with a clear demographic or interest group in mind. Users need to come to trust these sites and feel safe in them. Then they will end up spending a lot more time and money there, and for the long run.

I wrote about Ford’s selection of former Boeing Commercial Airplanes President Alan Mulally as its new CEO on my blog AeroGo. As I note there, I don’t agree with William Clay Ford’s assertion that there are many parallels between Boeing’s recent challenges and Ford’s.

In a narrow sense, maybe yes, you can say that Ford needs to renegotiate union and supplier contracts, etc., but really Ford Motor Co. has been its own worst enemy, and is much more a victim of its own ineptitude and lack of decisiveness as any external circumstances. It was only a few years ago that it was the strongest of the Big Three, and now it appears to be the weakest.

If you want to draw parallels, a much better comparison could be made between Ford and Apple Computer than Ford and Boeing. As a long-time Apple user, I can assure you that Apple has long been its own worst enemy. Even when Apple did make outstanding products at intelligent price-points, for years it would suffer severe logistical problems that cut into the potential gains. Even in recent years, I suspect continuing skepticism of Apple’s ability to ramp up production of hot products is one reason folks underestimated its iPod business for so long.

The difference with Apple now is that it finally has a clear, focussed direction for its products and the brand is healthy again. In the same way, Ford needs to make up its mind what kind of car company it is and develop clear differentiators for each of its brands, whichever ones it decides to keep.

It wasn’t too many years ago that William Clay Ford was declaring that Ford was going to be a leader pushing for better fuel economy and lower emissions. Along came a few problems, and apparently that vision was tossed, and now, with gas prices up and highly dependent on truck sales, the failure to follow through on that vision is really hurting them.

Product-driven companies like Apple and Ford must set a course and stick to it long-term, and not constantly adjust to every external up and down, whether in the market for their products or their stock. Even recently, nearly a decade into Apple’s turnaround, analysts were calling Apple’s plans for the Mac unrealistic, that they needed to focus on market share, etc. Of course, the reality of the computer business has long been that significant market share gains are made on the mistakes of one’s competitors, mistakes which are all too common, and which even Microsoft has been making of late.

In other words, stability and staying the course are far too under-rated. On the other hand, there is one crucial difference between Apple and Ford - even when things were their worst, Apple had large cash reserves, something Ford may not be able to count on. But any “quick fix” that damages the Ford brands will probably just end up making things worse.

The sad thing is, William Clay Ford’s “greener” vision for Ford may well have been on the mark, and it’s a shame they didn’t stick to it. Perhaps a return to his vision coupled with Mulally’s demonstrated management ability can turn the company around. As with Apple, there’s probably a lot more life left in the Ford, Lincoln, Volvo and Jaguar brands, at least, if they can set a clear direction and stick to it. For a few years things may not look so good, but a consistent product vision will eventually yield leading products and strongly-differentiated brands.

“It has to be about the experience, not just the rides.” - Mark Shapiro, new CEO, Six Flags Inc.

Though on a much smaller scale, it was one of those moments like the Challenger accident that jolt you, imprinting in your memory where you were and what you were doing when you heard the news. In my case, I was with my son last September, on our way to seeing the Astros play the Florida Marlins, when the report came over the radio. Six Flags Astroworld was going to be shut down and the land sold for redevelopment.

Now real estate development and redevelopment has long been, together with the energy industry, the lifeblood of the Houston economy, but this time it didn’t seem like good news. I was about 5 years old when the park first opened, and as a child I loved it. Perhaps even more than the rides, I was fascinated by the original world theme of Astroworld, where it was divided into sections resembling the American west, the Orient, the Alps, an old-style main street, etc.

Before the park became crowded with rides, there was a sizable “lagoon” that helped to divide the areas, but unlike EPCOT’s simple circular layout with a lake in the middle, the sections had been carefully designed (as at Disneyland, etc.) to hide much of the other parts and transition seamlessly so you felt more like you were immersed in a single section at a time (this was much easier before the rides got so much bigger).

In essence, the theme park design allowed a visitor (especially a small child who was likely to be overwhelmed with all the inputs) to feel like they were in a certain place in the world, and then a few minutes later to experience a whole different environment (except for the humidity). My favorite ride was an alpine sleigh ride, a mild roller-coaster type experience that went through a sizable manmade mountain which was very cold. Besides impacting even temperature and humidity, the ride gave a child a trip to the mountains, something far outside the Houston experience (Colorado has become something of a Texas colony for this reason).

After a decade or so, the world theme design began to break down. A new roller coaster was built and a large arcade area put in, which perhaps generated a lot of revenue but really didn’t fit (and was pretty tacky). Every year a new ride would be built to use as a selling point to draw people back, and so the lagoon and other open spaces were used up, and the mountain was torn out as well (I suspect the sleigh ride was a considerable maintenance hassle). The park became increasingly crowded with rides and people (since there was less open space) and over the years basically transitioned from a theme park to an amusement park.

Nevertheless, a trip to Astroworld could still be a lot of fun, and with the many fairly new rides and crowds, I think most people were surprised that it closed. As far as I could tell, there wasn’t any warning, and I wonder why city leaders (apparently) didn’t make much effort to hold on to it (to be fair, the news came just weeks after Katrina, and they certainly had their hands - and the Astrodome - full). I was glad I’d taken our large family the year before, the only time we all went together.

Well, I’m still upset that Astroworld has closed, but at least now, thanks to Business Week, I know who to blame. But maybe all will be forgiven if new Chairman Dan Snyder and new CEO Mark Shapiro (from ESPN) do what the article says they’re setting out to do. Rather than focussing just on the rides, they seem to realize the need to emphasize the experience. In other words, theme parks, not simply amusement parks.

One would think the chance to remake dozens of parks would be more exciting than running a sports network or the Washington Redskins (Snyder’s other business). Each park is its own little world, and building and exploring worlds are activities that fascinate a lot of people (see the cover story for the May 1st BW for more on that).

Considering the following three points, I can’t help but wonder if the problem with parks today is that, like Astroworld, they’ve morphed from Walt Disney’s vision of theme parks into simple amusement parks:

1. Customer experience management has become all the rage in marketing. Customers today are buying an experience, not just a product or service.
2. People are overworked and overstressed. When they get a chance to take a break, they are going to want to be in a whole different place doing something totally different than their normal routine, but without a lot of hassles.
3. Fuel and travel costs are up, and many are likely to stay closer to home on their vacations, and these breaks are tending to be shorter but more frequent. Relatively few Americans routinely take long vacations nowadays.

With all this in mind, it would seem that there would be a business opportunity for theme parks catering to folks needing a simple way to take a break and spend time with their family. I hope the folks at Six Flags actually do invest more in the experience and less on giant roller coasters.

A lot more effort needs to be put into design and creativity, and the hassles need to be ironed out and guests given things to do besides just standing in long lines for big attractions. Parks need to be fun, relaxing places for adults and places of wonder for kids.

And by the way, Messrs. Snyder and Shapiro, if you do work out a good formula for a modern theme park, it would be nice of you to try it out here in the Houston area.

IBM is once again giving away some software; after donating its VisualAge tool to Eclipse and so many other products to greatly invigorate the open source movement, this isn’t so surprising. What’s more interesting is that these donations seem to be moving higher up the value chain, as IBM will reportedly begin giving away a Universal Database Express-C version of its high-end DB2 database that will run on up to two-chip systems.

It seems to me that a sign of a healthy software ecosystem is the gradual price decline of particular packages as they grow more complex. One example would be Microsoft’s bundling of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and various other packages into Office, which doesn’t cost nearly as much as the total prices of individual packages 15 years ago, especially after adjusting for inflation. Excel itself, when introduced on the Mac, had consolidated functions previously handled by Multiplan, Chart and some other programs.

One of the common signs that a particular software ecosystem is declining is that this trend of generosity on the part of the ISV reverses, and it starts to look for ways to increase unit revenues. This is one of the reasons why I suspect that much of Microsoft’s software business isn’t as healthy as it once was, as they have at least begun to make changes in their licensing/pricing that for some customers might be viewed as an effective price increase.

Some vendors, such as Computer Associates, seem to have done fairly well by buying up aging software and gleaning what they can from the remaining user base, many of whom may prefer to stay with what they have been using for quite a few years. Though potentially an opportunity for exploitation, if managed with restraint such a business can provide a valuable service, by keeping users from languishing without vendor support.

Nevertheless, in a healthy, growing software ecosystem the price of packages should normally decline, since the user base is growing (allowing development costs to be spread over more units) while development costs should be moderating as the product matures. Actually, while the first effect is often realized, for some reason (perhaps Parkinson’s Second Law - expenditures rise to meet income) the second is more difficult to achieve.

As sales of its software rises, a successful software vendor will typically add features while keeping steady or lowering the price. Though holding the line on costs, in the real world the size of programming staffs generally seems to balloon, which gradually works to reverse the virtuous cycle of generosity. This excessive growth in programming staff is a curious outcome which I suspect results from management’s desire to speed development in response to competition, despite Fred Brooks’ showing over thirty years ago, in his classic essay “The Mythical Man-Month“, that such an approach is generally counterproductive.

Peter Drucker frequently argued (e.g. Managing for Results, Ch. 9) that one of the biggest problems in business is vendors’ unwillingness to kill off their own aging products, thereby retarding innovation and eventually causing loss of markets to more innovative upstarts. I suspect a software ecosystem requires a modified form of systematic abandonment, where products gradually decline in price and eventually are given away, either as open source or as an inducement to attract new users who may upgrade a to a vendor’s more advanced offerings.

Vendors also ought to consider still selling at a lowered price older versions and upgrades of their software (at least as long as these are supported) since this might be a good approach to segmenting the market between higher-spending customers with newer hardware and budget-conscious buyers using older hardware (and might induce additional upgrades as the cost declined).

Of course, much of the business motivation for open source comes from recognition both of the need to continue stimulating a software ecosystem to attract new users (as many are attempting to do now with Java) and that much of the revenue opportunity comes from services and other add-ons, which seem also to be a fairly effective way to segment the market.

Every industry has its own unique economics. I remember a database seminar once in which a vendor rep described how he had worked with grocers, where the prices, discounts and other factors changed constantly. Airline economics, with which I’ve been fascinated for years, is another very difficult area.

Software, too, has its own sort of economics, driven by the vendors’ desire to smooth out the revenue stream (development is steady but revenues tend to bunch around releases), the extremely low unit marginal cost, and intense competition amidst constant technological change. I’m surprised there doesn’t seem to be more active discussion of the unique economics of software, as this might help to reconcile vendors and the open source community.

Software has been the “sick man of technology” for some years now, with disappointing advancement (despite incredible gains in hardware) and recurrent schedule slips. A better understanding of the underlying economics might go a long way in producing a newly healthy software industry.

I’ve written about the Falcon 1 launch, now scheduled for Friday afternoon, on my site AeroGo. This is a potentially important milestone for commercial space.

I’ve also noted some recent developments with Blue Origin and SpaceDev, which has announced a new manned spacecraft project called Dream Chaser, based on NASA’s HL-20 lifting body design.

Friday Peter F. Drucker, often credited with founding the field of management science, died at his home.

It was perhaps ironic that Drucker died on Armistice (Veterans) Day, as he once attributed the quick start in his career to being placed early in positions that should have been given to men in the middle of their careers, except Europe in the 1930s didn’t have such men. They had most all died in the War. Gifted with the ability to see and clarify trends years ahead of others, Drucker left Hitler’s Germany in 1933 and London, for the U.S., in 1937.

Drucker was one of a handful of prescient Austrians of the 20th century, able to see past the blur of rapid technological change and political upheaval to discern more fundamental social issues and the need for moral action. Unlike Ludwig von Mises‘ analysis of macroeconomics or F.A. Hayek’s work in sociology, Drucker ostensibly focussed on management of profit and non-profit organizations (including government), and managing oneself. Nevertheless, his insights into social trends were some of his most valuable contributions.

Drucker’s own preference was for French economist J.B. Say, who supposedly coined the term “entrepreneur” around 1800. Innovation and “knowledge work”, a term Drucker himself originated, were always important topics in his writings, including his valuable Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Drucker frequently emphasized the need for receptivity to the unexpected market and for disciplined abandonment of yesterday’s successes. In this he seemed to parallel the thought of yet another Austrian, famed economist of innovation Joseph Schumpeter, with his similar concept of “creative destruction” as the driver of growth in an economy.

Regarding Drucker’s impact on my own life, I first discovered his works as a sophomore engineering student, while volunteering with an organization known as the World Space Foundation. WSF was trying a new, non-profit approach to space exploration, and garnered some attention for its work on developing a solar sail spacecraft, though its greatest contribution was likely in the area of Earth-crossing asteroid research.

At this time NASA was really in a funk concerning lunar exploration, which had completely dried up (and would remain so for another dozen years, until the military’s Clementine spacecraft and, after a long history of determined development, Lunar Prospector). I was intrigued with the possibility that maybe we could do a lot with even modest funds in a non-profit context.

Having already concluded some time previously that innovative organizational forms might play an enabling role in space development, over the next couple of years I developed an appreciation for management science and for Drucker’s works in particular. Drucker’s thought-provoking books have always proved fascinating, even if not so easy to apply directly, and were an engrossing introduction to the study of management.

Eventually I concluded that a non-profit organization would have a difficult time maintaining enough control to pursue a long-term research program, but that for-profit enterprises might do this effectively, though much discovery and innovation in the areas of organizational and individual function was still needed. This area of research, in fact, has been my primary focus for the past 18 years.

Perhaps Drucker’s best-loved book is The Effective Executive, originally published in 1966. Drucker described it as a real-world treatment of the subject, and argued that effectiveness was a set of practices that must be learned - and practiced - starting with the executive’s managing of his time, not the work itself. Newt Gingrich, after capturing the House of Representatives for the Republican Party and becoming Speaker, credited the book with guiding his success, which led to a new surge in its popularity.

One of Drucker’s strengths was his ability to see that management, as a discipline, transcended particular organizational forms. He was equally interested in improving effectiveness in both the profit and non-profit sectors, and his latest brief but valuable work, published this year, was Managing Oneself.

It is in the profit realm, however, that Drucker’s comments are sometimes most difficult to unravel. His discussion (Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, Ch. 6) of the role of business, and of profit in particular, is thought-provoking yet seemingly incomplete. Similarly, some of the concepts brought out early in Managing for Results beg to be pursued at a conceptual level rather than with the detailed analysis of product contributions that follows.

As with any great researcher, Drucker was as adept at asking the right questions as answering them. I continue to find his works profitable reading, however that may be defined!

I wrote about justifying R&D investment on my sites AeroGo and RealCurrents, and how an understanding of the techniques of targeting and scaling of R&D investment is more important than merely raising funding.

I’ve written about the Chinese and Indian space programs on my sites AeroGo and RealCurrents.

One of the things I’ve thought about doing with All Things is adding a list of various things I want to learn about. Actually, it would have to be limited only to top priority things, since there’s always a million things that I’d like to learn about, if only I had the time.

Two things that would be near the top of such a list would be the X-Plane flight simulator, which I do have but rarely can find the time to use, and the Eclipse software development tools framework, which I keep deferring downloading and installing, waiting until I’m ready to start so I get the latest version, since it keeps getting better and better.

As the title indicates, this post is about Eclipse, not X-Plane, though my reasons for wanting to learn them share some similarities. Both packages take a broad view, with an architecture that is intentionally very extendible, allowing the toolset to be used in a lot of different ways. Both continue to rapidly improve, and both seem to already perhaps be the best toolset available.

While X-Plane is limited to flight simulation, it allows a lot of manipulation of aircraft, flight dynamics, etc., to where it’s becoming possible to do serious engineering with the package. Hopefully it will continue to grow in scope and capability.

With Eclipse, scope is perhaps the key word to use in describing it. As I understand it, its newly-redesigned plug-in architecture and general design make it suitable for use with most any language, potentially, and all kinds of add-on tools.

It’s starting to look like, outside the Microsoft .NET/Visual Studio ecosystem, that most all software development tools vendors are either moving to Eclipse or risking marginalization. Borland, long viewed as one of the best tool vendors, is now embracing Eclipse. Others such as Sun and JetBrains still seem to be holding out, but I wonder why.

I can’t help but think Eclipse might be the best opportunity to come along in software in a long time (and a potential threat to Microsoft). Rather than fighting, tools vendors should realize it’s what customers want. It’s certainly very interesting to me, the kind of person who needs more structure than the average programmer type, but doesn’t want to be limited by just a few choices. Now, if I can just find some time to learn Eclipse!

Software giant Microsoft is a subject I’ve wanted to write about for some time, but since it seems like everyone is quick to voice an opinion about them, usually either harsh criticism or fawning adoration, I’ve been reluctant to do so. Nevertheless, it does seem like we may be reaching a turning point in public perception of the company, so maybe this is a good time to contribute to the discussion.

What’s been lacking is a balanced view of Microsoft. People outside the tech industry often hold them up as a paragon of American innovation and a poster child of capitalism. Most folks inside the industry seem to scowl at the incredible naivete of such a perception of Microsoft, maintaining that it is actually an 800-pound gorilla fast-follower and a monopolist. While I tend to agree more with the second view, these arguments have become well-worn and not very useful.

My perspective is that of a long-term Microsoft customer, but non-Windows user. I’ve been watching Microsoft ever since I bought Level II Basic for my TRS-80 Model I in 1980. Way back then, I noticed there was a certain professionalism about that product, and the assembler software I bought soon after, that impressed me. It was certainly untypical for the time.

Because of that professionalism, I was not at all surprised Microsoft thrived in following years; in those early years it seemed they were succeeding from having a superior product. In the mid 80s, it seems to me their success started to stem as much from taking advantage of other companies’ missteps, which were many as these grew and often went out of control, typically by trying to do a major rewrite of their software that seemed to never ship.

Microsoft has always been adept at acquiring good software from the outside, and its purchase of the Excel package in the mid 80s was probably one of their best moves. If I remember correctly, it was offered on the Mac by late 1985, long before it took over the DOS market (Lotus never did well on the Mac), and I have used it ever since.

Having made the jump to Mac in Spring 1984, I am well aware of how Apple squandered its early advantage in operating systems. Today, however, the situation is very different. Apple is executing well and has a coherent, forward-looking strategy, whereas Microsoft seems rooted in the past, unable to move beyond its Windows franchise and embrace change from the outside world.

Peter Drucker has often commented on how companies need to kill off the past before they have to, in order to preserve their position in the market for the future. I can’t help but wonder if this is the point Microsoft has reached regarding Windows. Apple spent years trying to build a great operating system from the ground up and finally threw in the towel, bought NeXT and moved to Unix.

I wonder if Microsoft is really not doing that much better. Maybe they should embrace Linux or Unix or something rather than fight it. In any case, Windows is their past, not their future, and their recent enhanced emphasis on MSN as a platform is a long-overdue step away from Windows and toward the internet.

By making everything revolve around Windows, they are stifling product development. They need to gradually wean themselves off their Windows monopoly and put more resources into Office, which despite new competition could have a bright future, Visio, and many of their other productivity packages, as well as MSN and various internet opportunities.

Perhaps one of the greatest threats long-term to Microsoft is the Eclipse tools platform, which continues to rapidly gain momentum. If the theory holds that whoever attracts developers ultimately gets users, then Eclipse’s growth relative to Microsoft’s Visual Studio toolset could have a long-term impact.

In general, while Microsoft prides itself on the billions it spends each year on research and development, I suspect years from now it will be regarded as a case study on how not to do R&D investment. It’s not at all obvious that they have gotten much for their billions. For years they have been touting natural language and usability testing, for example, but there seems to be little to show for it in the first area and still a lot of frustrations at times in the second.

One concept Microsoft needs to embrace is the realization that usability ultimately revolves around proper interoperation with other vendor’s tools, both on the device and the web. Microsoft’s strategy of relying on lock-in at the expense (often deliberate, it would seem) of interoperability has worn out its usefulness as more and more innovation comes from outside the Windows platform. As technology and life in general continues to get more complex, user expectations for interop, security, and other types of stability will continue to increase.

Ultimately, what Microsoft needs to do is to grow up. Gates and Ballmer have long touted the need to be “paranoid” in order to survive in the tech industry. This may have worked when Microsoft was small and IBM was the giant, but now that Microsoft is dominant, the idea of a paranoid 800-pound gorilla doesn’t bode well for the industry as a whole or for the users.

Like a teenager, Microsoft shows much promise in an industry that is entering a new era of innovation, but it must mature and come to grips with its own limitations. It can’t be everything to everyone and must learn to coexist with other independent players who aren’t chained to Windows, such as Google and Adobe/Macromedia. Microsoft must conscientiously incorporate standards from the outside and adjust its business model to one that acknowledges users may want to use its products in a mixed environment with those of other vendors.

The pace of change in the software business is speeding up again and Microsoft will be left behind unless it embraces the change, rather than trying to control it.

I’ve held off mentioning this until I had several posts on it, but I’ve recently started a Xanga blog, AeroGo, that may be helpful to anyone interested in the aerospace field, especially high school and college folks.

I’m going to use the site to give out information about the aerospace field that could help those trying to make educational and/or career choices. It will be very practical, tell-it-like-it-is stuff, what may be hard to discover for those not already in the field. My aim is to give readers exposure to a lot of stuff they might not hear about otherwise, but could benefit from knowing.

I picked Xanga because it has a pretty well-developed blogring setup that allows me to connect with a number of different aerospace interest groups in that community. Of course, if you know someone who might be interested, I’d appreciate your pointing them to my site.

Today I discussed some of the new crop of space companies that may give NASA a real run for their money, and eventually move commercial space into manned spaceflight.

“Robert Moog, the creator of the electronic music synthesizer that bears his name … died on Sunday at his home in Asheville, N.C.” Moog invented practical monophonic and (later) polyphonic analog synthesizers, using keyboards and other controllers. The New York Times has a good article on him.

Back in the 1970s, when synthesizers were developing rapidly, though still horribly expensive, there seemed to be a lot of people tinkering with the technology. Digital technology was still a ways off. There was a company in Oklahoma, I think, called PAIA Electronics, which offered kits you built yourself, which was the only way I could afford any of that. I built a simple monophonic kit they had, called the Gnome, I believe, as well as a small organ to play it. The synthesizer sounded pretty good, really, at home, but I had so much trouble with it whenever we took it somewhere else that I finally set it aside.

My point really is that there was a lot of innovation in instruments at that time, and I was really expecting all sorts of new musical instruments to emerge during the 1980s, as digital supplanted analog. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell (though I’m not really at all active in music nowadays), the hobbyist sort of hardware experimentation really declined once digital arrived, just as Heathkit-type electronic kit building did.

I really believe that there are still a lot of neat musical instruments, especially controllers, based on synthesizer technology that are yet to be invented. I was working on a controller design myself before I started college, and still haven’t seen anything like it yet.

I wonder if we’ll see another era of widespread hobbyist electronic innovation again, like the 1970s. Perhaps O’Reilly’s new Make: publication may be a precursor of that.

Back in the 1980s, I came up with a fascinating technical concept, very advanced. I spent some time pursuing it but came to two conclusions. First was the painful realization that I’m not really a hardware person. I am fairly good with machines and electronics, but I can’t work in the speedy and adept manner that a true hardware person does in building something.

The second conclusion was that it didn’t really matter for the time being, because virtually none of the technologies needed to build it were ready. Many were starting to be developed, but some were completely obscure.

Even today it’s hardly certain that the concept would work, even in principle. Nevertheless, I have noticed a curious trend over the past two decades. One by one various of the technologies needed have popped onto the radar screen and become available, or at least in steady development. Yet there’s still been a key ingredient missing, an appropriately dense power source.

There are several possibilities already apparent, but none appeals to me as much as sonofusion, the claimed attaining of a fusion reaction from extreme pressures reached by cavitating/collapsing bubbles stimulated by ultrasound. The initial experiments, done by Rusi Taleyarkhan and a team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, were reported in 2002. The methodology was soon questioned and little has been reported until recently.

Now an experiment done at Purdue by Yiban Xu and Adam Butt appears to provide further support of the possibility of sonofusion. The researchers also claim to have made progress in understanding how the required pressures could be produced by cavitation.

Obviously, much work likely remains just to confirm that fusion may actually be occurring, let alone to make practical use of it. Nevertheless, the prospect of a tabletop fusion reactor would excite any aerospace engineer.

As an engineer, I have been trained to be skeptical of technology, yet as an entrepreneur, I know that sometimes good surprises do happen, and that it pays to be positioned to take advantage of them. The payoff on sonofusion, should it prove to be real, would still be quite a ways off. Nevertheless, I continue to be amazed and delighted at how the pieces of a complex puzzle seem to be steadily falling into place.