invercompanama.com

…Three projects, three different life stages. As a colleague put it: JBoss is a [good looking mom]. She is aging well, she’s beautiful, and the children (projects like JBoss Seam and BlackTie), are doing just fine thank-you-very-much. On the cover of every magazine, RoR is the hot new thing. It’s eighteen, it’s perky and oh, that sexy pout! The excitable fringe is just in lust. Meanwhile, Spring is getting a little longer in the tooth, and after dinner and a movie (training), there is really not much people need to stick around for (like a product subscription). So she gets a boob job (aka Covalent).

After talking with Peter Fenton about SpringSource, I think it has a long life ahead of it, “breast implants” or not. But I also think it’s important to remember something that Marc says: a lack of media coverage doesn’t translate into a lack of commercial success. In fact, sometimes it’s the exact opposite: the bigger the customers you’re signing, the less likely it is that you’re going to be able to talk about them publicly.

commentary

Oddly enough, the answer to that question (”What’s really going on with JBoss?”) is probably best answered by someone outside Red Hat: Marc Fleury. Marc isn’t shackled by the need to keep corporate secrets, though perhaps he’s a little biased.

Marc offers several data points that suggest that JBoss adoption and monetization is “going through the roof.” But he also takes on two potential aspirants to the JBoss throne: Ruby on Rails and SpringSource (I’ve sanitized Marc’s comments to suit my Puritan sensibilities):

It’s a good time to be JBoss. It’s a good time to be Red Hat. JBoss has been de-risked. It is now time to monetize it fully.

JBoss has a long and fruitful life ahead of it. JBoss is well into its monetization phase - the prime of life when it will make the most money for Red Hat. It doesn’t need to figure out the business model any more. People are happily paying for services (certification, JBoss Operations Network, support, etc.) around it.

Henry Blodget, citing an unidentified source, writes in his Silicon Valley Insider blog that Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes plans to sell or spin off AOL if the company has not turned itself around enough by mid-2008.

Viebranz came to AOL last summer when it acquired Tacoda, of which he was chief executive officer. AOL has been on a buying binge, scooping up other online ad firms including AdTech, Buy.at, Lightningcast, Quigo, Third Screen Media, and Advertising.com.

The online ad market is hot–Google on Tuesday got final approval to buy DoubleClick; Microsoft acquired Aquantive; and Yahoo bought RightMedia and Blue Lithium.

During a presentation at a Bear Stearns Media Conference in Palm Beach, Fla., on Tuesday, Bewkes said it makes sense to operate the access and advertising parts of the business separately.

Curt Viebranz, president of AOL’s Platform-A advertising unit is gone, replaced by a manager who reported to him, AOL says.

Lynda Clarizio, president of Advertising.com, was named president of Platform-A on Monday in a shakeup that sent Viebranz out the door. The company won’t say whether he was fired after being named head of Platform-A about six months ago.

These are just estimates, but it does appear Apple is at least off to an impressive start this year. NPD, which tracks retail sales only, also found evidence of notable growth for Apple’s computer business in the month of February. NPD estimated that overall
Mac shipments were up 60 percent, compared with the rest of the PC industry, which grew at a 9 percent clip.

(Credit:
Apple)

Shipments of Macs, like this new MacBook Pro, were up 60 percent in February, according to NPD.

After Monday’s forecast in which he foretold Apple moving 45 million iPhones during 2009, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster is back with another aggressive estimate.

Munster also gathered data from Dell.com, HP.com, Lenovo.com, and more and concluded that though Macs are often knocked for being outrageously expensive compared with their Windows-running counterparts, the average Apple desktop is 16 percent pricier and notebooks 9 percent more expensive.

On Tuesday, Munster released a research note in which he estimates that Apple’s U.S. consumer market share for Macs stands at 21 percent, while its worldwide share is about 10 percent. He comes to this conclusion by using numbers released by market research firm IDC, which found that Apple’s worldwide share of the PC market grew from 2.4 percent to 2.9 percent between 2006 and 2007. He notes that 70 percent of the global PC market is enterprise computing, a sandbox in which Apple doesn’t often play, so the 21 percent refers just to the consumer business in the U.S.

Right before we closed the nominations for last year’s Webware 100 awards, I wrote a post about there being too many social networks in the running. Apparently, all you genius Web 2.0 entrepreneurs skipped school that day, because for the 2008 Webware 100, we have, again, way too many social networks competing.

Of the nearly 5,000 distinct Webware 100 nominations we have, more than 1,000 are in the social network category. A few are social network subapplications that run on the Facebook platform, but really, too many are just little teeny social networks.

Now, It’s cool if you want to run a network for cartoon watchers (Nicktropolis) or for collectors (iTaggit), or sports clubs (SportaVista). But I question the need for clubs such as these to set up their own network when there’s a good general-purpose social network platform like Ning around to do the heavy lifting.

Social network sites, as a group, may also be in business trouble. While users turn a lot of pages on social sites, general advertising programs are apparently not delivering the goods.

Not to say that there’s no room for innovation and growth in this space. As I wrote from Demo 2008, while I think it’s a bit daft to launch yet another new network now, there’s room for a new kind of social network: The implicit network–one that connects you without requiring you to recruit your friends yet again.

Further reading on social networks: The Social, CNET News.com’s Caroline McCarthy’s blog; and Mashable, a superblog devoted to the topic.

Webware 100 voting starts on February 25.

Despite myriad technical difficulties we just got through recording Open Season Episode 12 with special guest Dan Lyons aka. Fake Steve Jobs.

It’s a good one and Dan is really entertaining. We talk about freetards, how he may or not have been a Microsoft shill and why Novell can’t get it right.

In the meantime check out some of the old episodes of Open Season.

Ready to pile in the
car for The Road Ahead with Microsoft and its buyout bid for Yahoo?

We’ll point out a few landmarks and potential detours to expect along the way in the coming days, weeks, and possibly months, and also take a brief glance in the rearview mirror to see where we’ve been.

Landmark 1: This weekend is the last weekend Yahoo and Microsoft will have to take advantage of a two-day stretch in which the markets are closed, before Microsoft slams up against a March 14 deadline to name its opposition slate to Yahoo’s board.

Public companies in the merger mode tend to love weekends. It gives them two days to hammer out an agreement without fear that their stock price may go in gyrations should any information leak out prematurely. Often these companies will announce their deal before the markets open on Monday. Ever hear of Merger Mondays?

Obviously, there are plenty of exceptions. SAP, based in Germany, announced its $6.8 billion acquisition of Business Objects on a Sunday in October. And Microsoft announced its plans to buy Aquantive in a $6 billion deal on a Friday in May.

Landmark 2: By March 14, Microsoft must name its dissident slate of directors to Yahoo’s board if it wants to go hostile and wage a proxy fight. Yahoo’s full 10-member board is up for re-election at the next shareholders meeting, which currently is slated to occur sometime between May 18 and July 7.

Possible detours to the nomination deadline exist, however. The most obvious is Yahoo and Microsoft finally sit down and enter formal negotiations and a deal is struck before the March 14 deadline; or Yahoo takes it upon itself to extend that deadline.

Of course, Microsoft could wimp out and ultimately chose to forgo an opposition slate, even though it has no Yahoo deal in hand. Remember the Vista upgrade program and related e-mails.

Landmark 3: A war of words typically accompanies any proxy fight, so one could expect to see the same should Microsoft move forward with its opposition slate. The gamut runs from full-page ads in the national press to oodles of press releases to investor road shows with the candidates by both parties.

For a glimpse of things that may come, history serves as a guidepost. Take a look at Oracle’s drawn out fight for PeopleSoft to billionaire investor Carl Icahn’s push to unseat Motorola’s board members.

Landmark 4: An exchange offer from Microsoft would likely be added to its proxy fight and rolled out sometime between its opposition slate being introduced and before the shareholders meeting. An exchange offer would state a per share buyout price for Yahoo and ask Yahoo investors to park their shares with Microsoft, until the stock could be tendered.

Microsoft could use an exchange offer to prove its buyout bid is “real,” and give Yahoo investors something tangible to hold onto if they elect Microsoft’s opposition slate of directors. And as more Yahoo investors sign on board with the exchange offer, expect the software giant to trot out that number, in an effort to pressure Yahoo to the negotiating table.

If a majority of Yahoo shares are exchanged, the Internet search pioneer likely would have a keen sense that its directors may not fair well in a re-election. Possible detour–Yahoo may formally engage in buyout talks with Microsoft, prior to the shareholders meeting.

Full coverage
Microsoft’s big bid for Yahoo Click here for the latest on the software giant’s attempt to buy the Net pioneer.

Landmark 5: Currently, sometime between May 18 to July 7, Yahoo is planning to hold its annual shareholders meeting, according to its SEC filing. Last year, the company held its annual shareholders meeting on June 12.

Landmark 6: Post-shareholders meeting, assuming the parties didn’t strike a deal and Microsoft’s opposition slate was elected with control on the 10-member board, the new Yahoo board could vote to accept the buyout offer and rescind the shareholder rights plan, otherwise known as a “poison pill.” Or, the new board could take a pass on formally accepting the buyout offer, but vote to rescind the pill, thereby allowing Yahoo investors to tender their shares to Microsoft.

Landmark 7: Proxy solicitors say once a dissident slate is elected, efforts to rescind the poison pill can move rapidly and, hence, so would Yahoo’s independence as a stand alone company.

Here’s a quick view of the road traveled thus far as chronicled by News.com, as well as other sites, such as Larry Dignan’s Between the Lines on ZDNet, Henry Blodget’s Silicon Alley Insider, and Kara Swisher’s BoomTown.

After making noise with the reintroduction of its Firefox add-ons directory last year, Mozilla is taking a step closer to integrating it with the upcoming beta of Firefox 3, which is set to go out to beta testers next week. Ryan Wagner over at Cybernet News writes that one of the biggest additions to the public betas of
Firefox 3 has been the newly integrated add-on directory, which made its way into the prebeta nightly builds earlier this week. Users can search through add-ons within the settings dialog without visiting Mozilla’s site. The feeds are still linked up to the add-on’s Web pages, and let you see how each add-on has been scored by the community, and get a screenshots and description to match.

In addition to the integrated add-on directory, Firefox 3 beta 3 could be getting a new coat of paint. The new version comes with updated navigation buttons up top, and a classy new star button in the address bar that lets you quickly file away a site you like, as you would a bookmark. The favoriting feature has been around since early builds of Firefox 3, and has proven to be immensely useful in third party Mozilla-based browsers, such as Flock, which features a favoriting button that’s larger than any other one on the browser (screenshot here).

I’ve had Firefox 3 beta 2 installed on my machine since late December, and it’s very stable. However, if you’re in love with your extensions, you’re bound to run into several that don’t yet work on it. I would definitely recommend giving it a spin if you want to patch that pesky memory leak, or improve the sometimes clunky download manager without having to install more extensions.

CNET Download link for Firefox 3 beta 2

Mozilla wants you to skip the directory and go search for add-ons right in Firefox.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Twitter Japan launched Tuesday night California time. The site included ads from the get-go in a bid to get users to accept ads right away. The English language version doesn’t have ads.

(Credit:
Joi Ito)

Twitter Japan launched Tuesday evening California time, and unlike the English-language version of the popular microblogging site, it will feature ads from the get-go.

In a conversation Tuesday evening, Joi Ito of Digital Garage, the Japanese company Twitter tasked with some of the Japanese localization, told me that Twitter decided to launch in Japan with ads from day one.

Digital Garage invested in Twitter as part of the localization arrangement.

“Ads are important,” Ito said. “It’s always harder to add ads later. So we’re launching with them in Japan.”

According to Ito, Twitter Japan will have Toyota as one of its first advertisers. The
car giant will have its own Twitter feed, and its ads will direct people to that feed. Users will be able to opt in for the feed.

“The idea is to get companies to have Twitter feeds,” Ito said.

In addition to being a co-founder of Digital Garage, Ito is also a venture capitalist, the current CEO of Creative Commons, and, among other things, the founder of a very influential World of Warcraft guild.

To launch with ads is an interesting choice for Twitter Japan, especially given that the English version doesn’t have them. However, there have been rumbles in recent days–denied by Twitter, that ads are coming.

And no wonder: There is no clear path for Twitter to make even a dime off its consumer English-language site. And, as Ito suggested, it is much harder to convince a user base to accept ads after the fact than from the beginning.

I was curious how kanji might affect Twitter’s traditional 140 character limit on the Japanese site, but Ito pointed out that Japanese is already a dominant language on the existing site.

He pointed me to a site that aggregates the most frequent location of Twitter posters, and, at least in the 24 hours between April 21 and April 22, there were more Tweets made from Tokyo than from any other city in the world.

In fact, according to the site, there were more than twice as many Tweets from Tokyo (28,874) as from New York (14,367) or San Francisco (14,348). Of course, if you add up all the English-language cities, Japanese is far behind English, but Ito’s point is well taken.

In the end, then, it will be interesting to see if Japanese Twitter users turn to Twitter Japan and accept the ads, or whether they’ll stay using the main Twitter site.

Irrelevant annoyance SCO got a new lease on it’s miserable life, courtesy of Stephen Norris Capital Partners (SNCP).

According to a statement from the company, SNCP already has a business plan for SCO that includes pursuing its legal claims, which in the past have named Novell, IBM and others as infringing on the company’s patents.

I can’t for the life of me figure out why anyone would want to keep that business alive–even for the legal claims. $100m would be better invested in almost anything else.

Andrew Mager posted an illustrated play-by-play of Saturday’s WordCamp, a conference devoted to the popular open-source blogging platform WordPress. According to Mager’s report, the hosted version of WordPress has 2.3 million new blogs in 12 months and 35 million posts, and more than 6.5 billion page views.

(Credit:
Andrew Mager)

Of particular interest for the WordPress crowd is BuddyPress, a set of plug-ins that brings Facebook-like features, such as friends, groups, private messaging, status updates, and extended profiles, to the blogging platform. (WordPress competitor Six Apart also recently introduced a social dimension to its Movable Type platform.)

BuddyPress is slated for 1.0 status in December 2008.

(Credit:
Andrew Mager)

As Mager reported, unlike the popular social networks, BuddyPress isn’t a closed environment: “Why do we need another social network? BuddyPress is not another “data silo” like Facebook and MySpace. It’s mission is to be more open source, handle better control of data, give people better choices, and build greater support for open standards.”

Being more open isn’t a necessarily going to move people out of Facebook, MySpace, Bebo or other semi-permeable walled gardens. However, the combination of emerging open standards, such as OpenSocial, and the growing WordPress and Six Apart communities will have an impact on embedding a social dimension into the fabric of every application.