Thursday, November 19, 2009
Google’s Chrome OS: “It Just Works”
Speaking at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans this past July, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said of Google’s forthcoming Chrome OS, “Who knows what this thing is?” Today, he found out. The operating system, a direct challenge to Microsoft Windows, was on display at a media gathering at the company’s HQ this morning, and in the words of Sundar Pichai, Google’s vice president of product management, it is intended to make computing a “delightful” experience.
Though he resigned earlier this year, former MySQL boss Mårten Mickos still has strong opinions about the open-source database outfit, which was acquired by Sun in 2008. In a letter to the European Commission Thursday, Mickos urged regulators to green-light Oracle’s takeover of Sun, arguing that to delay it will only harm competition. 
Development for Palm’s new webOS platform will begin in earnest come winter with the official opening of the company’s developer program. At a small gathering in San Francisco Monday night, Palm said its developer program will open in December and when it does, it will be a different beast entirely from rival programs by Apple, Google et al.
Approved without incident by Sun shareholders in July and the U.S. Justice Department in August, Oracle’s planned $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems seemed poised to easily pass muster with European regulators as well. Sadly for Oracle, that’s not how things have played out. Citing “serious concerns” about the deal’s effect on competition in the market for databases, the European Commission has opened an in-depth investigation into it.
“There’s No Free Lunch–or Free Linux.” That was the title of SCO CEO Darl McBride’s keynote address at the Computer Digital Expo in Las Vegas back in 2003, and it signaled the start of a long legal siege. Earlier that day, SCO announced plans to file suit against a large-scale user of Linux as part of its campaign against the open-source operating system.
September third. That’s the day the European Commission will determine whether or not to clear Oracle’s planned $5.6 billion merger with Sun. And though there would seem, on the face of things, to be no serious antitrust objections to the deal, one never knows. Questionnaires distributed by the EC suggest the agency is particularly interested in the merger’s potential impact on MySQL.
Once the plucky underdog in the browser battle, Mozilla’s Firefox is today the second most popular browser worldwide, after Internet Explorer. Since it was first released in November 2004, the browser has succeeded not just in dislodging IE from its dominant market position, but in proving that an open-source project can become a widely used consumer application. At 7:47 am PDT this morning, the browser reached its billionth download.
“We would love dearly to win one of the big guys, that really is the smartphone game, it really is a concentrated set of suppliers,” Intel CFO Stacy Smith told Bloomberg earlier this year. “We’re lurking behind every bush and showing them our product line.” Well, the ambushes to which Smith referred appear to have finally paid off: Intel has landed a deal to develop chips with Nokia. 
2009 is going to be a banner year for Google’s Android mobile operating system. Strategy Analytics estimates shipments of handsets running the OS will grow 900 percent this year as more vendors adopt it. At that rate, it will far outpace the growth of Apple’s iPhone, whose shipments the company expects to increase 79 percent in 2009.
Tough break for Google. An Illinois software developer has sued the company, along with some four dozen others, alleging that they infringed on his trademark on the word “android.” Seems Erich Specht, who runs Android Data Corporation, holds the mark on the term “Android Data.” 
With the release of the first device to support Google’s Android mobile operating system less than a day away and a second already in development at Motorola, Google is making good on a promise it made when Android debuted: to make the platform available under a progressive, developer-friendly open-source license.
In Sept. 1991, Microsoft exec Jim Allchin emailed CEO Bill Gates: “We must slow down Novell. As you said Bill, it has to be dramatic. We need to slaughter Novell before they get stronger.” And in 2001 Microsoft Chief Steve Ballmer likened Linux to “cancer.” Later that year, Gates derided open-source licensing models like the one used by Linux as “Pacman-like.”
