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This site is no longer maintained.
My current weblog.
Thursday, September 05, 2002Ray Ozzie responds directly to Joel's remarks in a long and well written piece that offers a lot of insights in Groove's strategy. A mustread for everyone who is interested in Groove. [Jeroen Bekkers]
I've concluded that Groove is greedy. It's not because of Applications vs. Platforms, or that the client costs money. I see Groove as a P2P Service. The value is almost entirely in the service, not the platform and client. The clients cost money because services that look just like software are very hard to sell.
I think that Groove is greedy because the total cost of deploying Groove for a large number of seats is astronomical. Imagine that you've got the Groove religion. You want to Groove-enable all of your enterprise applications and roll them out to 2000 employees in a half-dozen locations. Groove only lets you use their service for free for up to 100 seats. With over 300 employees in each office, likely to be Grooving mostly amongst themselves, you'll need an Enterprise Relay Server at each location to reduce bandwidth utilization. Having some Enterprise Management Servers seems like a requirement, otherwise your employees could install any Groove applications that they want. And you'll certainly need a few Enterprise Integration Servers to connect Groove clients to non-Groove applications.
Those server programs cost $9995 to $19995 each, plus CALs. Much of the functionality they provide is free or low-cost on other platforms, but even if Groove made them free tomorrow, Groove Workspace is still more expensive than Notes or Exchange clients/CALs. In this example the price gap is more than enough to buy the Notes or Exchange server software and hardware. And Groove doesn't do email.
There are compelling uses of Groove. Groove is ideal for small working groups that are distributed, and the ability to form ad-hoc working groups is pure genius. Unfortunately, the emphasis is on small. The tipping point where Groove becomes more expensive than traditional collaboration solutions seems extremely low.
InfoWorld: BlackBerry attracting third party improvements. Nextel plans to offer a "slightly redesigned" Blackberry with Direct Connect. Brief mention of Boost Mobile, a SoFL company offering pre-paid Nextel service.
I don't care much for Nextel's service because indoor reception is terrible, and Direct Connect is often more annoying than useful in business settings. On the plus side, they have a web interface for managing your phone contacts. Why haven't other manufacturers and carriers emulated that?
PPCW: Improve the Battery Life of your HP Jornada 928 WDA. Closing the cover only turns off the backlight, not the PDA.
PPCW: How to dial SIM card entries with PPC PE. Smells like an opportunity for a third-party to build a better dialer.
PPCW: Peter Aloisson Diamante T68. Lots of gold bits, 849 diamonds, $28,000.
Where is Sendo?
This article suggests that Sendo will price their Smartphone device to be cheaper than O2's XDA, with an anticipated price of around $460 with contract. The article goes to report that the Smartphone won't be released until first quarter 2003, which would be later than the targetted September/October ship date. [PocketPCHow2 Log]
Same old story. I have serious doubts that Sendo will ever ship anything, and I'm still wondering what carriers they expect to offer $600 subsidies. Maybe that's what is really holding back Microsoft's Smartphone platform...
infoSync: Smartphone 2002 gets J2ME support. Microsoft isn't smoking crack, the support comes via Insignia. No bundling deals announced.
PPCW: Revolve Design releases iPAQ Docking solution incl. Keyboard.
The RoadWriter is a "Vehicle Mounted Touch-Type Keyboard/Charging Solution", available for several Palm OS devices and the full iPaq range. It has two pass-thru serial ports for connecting to other peripherals (like a GPS), and a switch to select between them and the keyboard. An add-on cellular phone holder is available.
Not cheap, not too expensive either. Part of me wonders who buys these things.
infoSync: Screen shots of Zaurus SL-A300.
JDM-only at the moment. Runs the same OS as the SL-5500, loses the keyboard, uses a 200MHz XScale. From the screenshots it is notable that the "Home" application has been beefed up with better file management and larger icons. Otherwise the interface still sucks. Sharp should invest a little money to create some Qtopia themes with properly sized UI widgets.
infoSync: Bluetooth will succeed.
Oliver Thylmann theorizes that Bluetooth will succeed because Apple supports it, basing his opinion on what Apple has done for Firewire and Digital Photography. I'm not so sure that Firewire is a raging success, particularly if you exclude Macintosh storage applications -- Apple forced Mac users into Firewire by limiting internal expansion options and eliminating SCSI ports. Digital photography certainly owes little to Apple. Way back in 1994, Apple was a leader with the Kodak-designed QuickTake 100. Today, iPhoto is a response to the continued popularity of digital photography, not a catalyst for it's success.
iMovie might be an example of Apple following and catalyzing simultaneously, and the iPod for Windows may seriously push Firewire for PC users, but I digress.
Back to Bluetooth... I have doubts that Bluetooth will "succeed" on the desktop. The most mainstream application of Bluetooth on the deskop is to synchronize phone numbers with a cellular phone. Yawn. Connecting desktops to PDAs, wireless keyboards and mice... these are niche applications. Bluetooth is too slow to replace USB in most other desktop applications.
The good news is that Bluetooth doesn't need the desktop. Many applications of Bluetooth revolve around cellular phones, and most are more compelling and mainstream than synchronizing phone numbers. The bad news is that there are still few Bluetooth-enabled cellular phones on the market. In the US we have the Ericsson T68, and that's it. Motorola's 280i is MIA, Nokia's Bluetooth models have yet to cross the pond, and Ericsson has largely given up on America.
CNET: Maxtor buffs up DiamondMax drives. Flagship model is 160GB, two platters, 7200RPM. Yawn.
What I find interesting is that all of the drive manufacturers are limiting their ATA product lines to dual-platter designs. WD is the exception, using three platters for their flagship 200GB model. Way back when the IBM's 75GXP line was king (mid-Y2K), their flagship 75GB model was a 5-platter monster.
Update 9/11/02: Wes had also noted the trend of fewer platters, and Maxtor later announced a four-platter 5400RPM model.
