The Coming of the Browser (object) & Mobile Wars and Convergence

The browser object camps (service and software providers) are now shifting gears. It affects the Desktop, mobile devices and Internet Services - because it is all about CONVERGENCE. Here are the main object technologies that are becoming the armory of the warring camps;

Web Object Technolgies;

• Flash - originally developed by Macromedia, bought out by Adobe
• HTML5,6,7,8,n,... - Open Standard - predecessor being HTML! 1,2,3,4
• Java - developed by Sun, which was recently bought out by Oracle
• ActiveX - developed by Microsoft to battle Java
• Silverlight - developed by Microsoft to battle Flash

Browser Technologies; (read more here)

• Internet Explorer (58.72%; Usage by version number)
• Mozilla Firefox (28.03%; Usage by version number)
• Google Chrome (5.62%)
• Safari (4.96%) 
• Opera (2.05%)
• Other (0.62%)

Mobile Technologies;

In mobile phone handsets, in Q3/2008, the following figures gives an idea of the major players and accounts for 80% of the total market - based on global device market share;

• Nokia was the world's largest manufacturer of mobile phones with 39.4%
• Samsung (17.3%)
• Sony Ericsson (8.6%)
• Motorola (8.5%)
• LG Electronics (7.7%)

Some more interesting statistics;

• There will be approximately 6 billion mobile subscribers worldwide by 2013 = massive reach.
• 29 percent of all cell phones by 2014 will be smartphones = smarter, richer mobile Web experience. This will go hand in hand with greater support for 3G and 4G = more, faster downloads of content (video, photo, docs, etc)
• About 60 percent of the world’s population is now covered by a next-generation High Speed Packet Access mobile network = broader & better access to high-speed downloads.
• Increased Mobile data consumption will provide a boost to related services' revenue that will outperform voice by 2011 have users sending and receiving more data in one month than in the whole of 2008.
• Regardless of world or regional recessions, mobile services revenue will continue to increase.
• "Brand spending" via mobile advertising will be bigger than spending on SMS marketing in 2009 and will quadruple by 2014.

Worldwide Mobile Terminal Sales to End Users in 2Q09 (Thousands of Units)

Worldwide Smartphone Sales to End Users in 2Q09 (Thousands of Units)

Check a full article by Gartner here.

As can be seen here, Nokia is still the king of the castle, but Apple is climbing steadily. Not bad for a relatively new entrant. It will be interesting to see how much ground Android gets over the next few years...

Major Desktop Technologies;

Microsoft Windows (92.77% market share) - Is the collective brand name of several software operating systems by Microsoft. Microsoft first introduced an operating environment named Windows in November 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces (GUIs). This is a nice way of not saying that they ripped off Apple, who themselves "gleamed" the technology from Palo Alto Research Institue. The most recent client version of Windows is Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 which was available at retail on October 22, 2009.

Mac OS X (5.12%) - Is a line of graphical operating systems developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc.. Mac OS X is the successor to the original Mac OS, which had been Apple's primary operating system since 1984. Unlike its predecessors, Mac OS X is a Unix-based operating system. The most recent version of Mac OS X is Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard", and the current server version is Mac OS X Server 10.6.

Linux (0.95%) - Is a family of Unix-like computer operating systems. Linux is one of the most prominent examples of free software and open source development: typically all underlying source code can be freely modified, used, and redistributed by anyone. The name "Linux" comes from the Linux kernel, started in 1991 by Linus Torvalds. The system's utilities and libraries usually come from the GNU operating system, announced in 1983 by Richard Stallman. The GNU contribution is the basis for the alternative name GNU/Linux. Known for its use in servers as part of the LAMP application stack, Linux is supported by corporations such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Novell, Oracle Corporation, Red Hat, Canonical Ltd. and Sun Microsystems. It is used as an operating system for a wide variety of computer hardware, including desktop computers, netbooks, supercomputers, video game systems, such as the PlayStation 3, several arcade games, and embedded devices such as mobile phones, portable media players, routers, and stage lighting systems. Ubuntu has become very popular and Google has recently announced a hybrid browser and OS based on it called, Chrome OS.

See more here

Web Server Technologies;

See more here;

As can be seen here, Google is gaining massive reach based on their search engine and other services, creeping upon MS which has been trounced by Apache for years.

With the above in mind, some commentary on the major players...

So, how are the various camps shifting with these new technologies and what does it mean to businesses and end-users? Let us try and give a simple overview here, using the most prominant players in the market;

Microsoft - Is moving full-throttle with the development and deployment of Silverlight. We have heard from a very sound source that MS has purposely "adjusted" Windows 7 so that Flash performs slower and Silverlight faster. For this reason alone, this particular source completely abandoned Flash for their new service and adopted Silverlight. They also wanted to ride upon the still strong PC-user market - so with this approach, MS will have Silverlight available in Internet Explorer (IE) that is pre-installed with the new releases of Windows 7,8,9,n, etc.

There is discussion going around about how necessary upgrading to Windows 7 is and whether Windows XP could be used for another couple years. They have the MS Office Suite, which is still pretty powerful, so by dropping their support and updates for XP, they basically force businesses and enterprise into a corner. This will of course urge "others" to work harder to provide alternative desktop environments or non-desktop environments, such as web-based DaaS (Desktop as a Service) and Open Office or web-based office productivity, such as that offered by Google Docs (although not full-featured yet)

MS did a reasonable job in the mobile game with their mobile Windows OS and Smartphones. We actually use this - but for one reason alone - so we can use Funambol. The smartphone performs pretty badly, crashing often, freezing, etc., but it is better than nothing, better than being locked into iPhone (which we still think is a great offering!) and others. Funambol is a really under-estimated company and technology, so we expect to see a lot more of this being used - especially with Android which Funambol can fully access. (Apple have limited the access to the iPhone' Calendar - which is a key "business" and "social adhesion" requirement). Using Funambol also means we can simply switch to an Android phone and sync our Contacts, Calendar and so on onto it in a few minutes. Sayonara dumbphone!

MS is also working flat-out on their Azure "Cloud" platform, preparing for the time when much data and activity moves to the Net and away from local office systems. Azure is of course Windows-based, so they still need to keep talking up SQL Server, .Net, Visual Basic, etc. which is a hefty job considering the extent to which MySQL, PHP, Apache and Linux have ripped their prospects apart. Apache is now the number one web server. Firefox is nearly the number one browser, replacing Internet Explorer. PHP has shredded .asp and .Net. MySQL was a nightmare for SQL Server - if Oracle and Sun hadn't driven the nails into the coffin enough, MySQL basically filled in the breathing holes.

Our ratings (0 is poor);

• Desktop: XP (8: reliable), Vista (0: dog), Windows7 (7: improvement on Vista)
• DaaS: Web Docs (3: just started), to early to say, but will surely add value to IE-based experiences
• Browser: IE (5: follows "most" standards) - still strong foothold due to PC dominance continuing. Bit quirky. We prefer Firefox.
• Mobile Phone: Windows Smartphone (5: substitute). Preferable to iPhone for complete Sync capability and access to phones. Will be replaced by Android when it becomes more available.
• Mobile Music: Zune (5). Some interesting features, but like all others in this space, got trounced by iPod.
• Tablet: (3: not much to say).  Windows 7 will be more "tabletable" - and will be up to manufacturers to get their act together to try to offer competing iPad products.
• Tabletop Tech: MS Surface (7:first-mover). An interesting move by MS - and this kind of technology surely has a market, but we can see some iDesks, iWalls, etc. coming out
• Business SaaS: (3: almost un-heard) - Too partner reliant, hard to compete against own customers and the other players at the same time.
• Consumer SaaS: Live/MSN (7: early mover) - Buying Hotmail gave MS a good start. Followed up with messenger and kind of stifled there. Missed out on the full SNS capabilities. Offering Web Docs to consumers is an interesting market access strategy.
• IaaS: Azure (5: proprietary) - Must be on MS Software, but at least they can have Harwdare Partners.
• PaaS: Azure (8: powerful) - Good opportunity for MS-friendly developers
• Cloud: Azure (6:potential) - Will be targeted in same vehemency as for the Desktop - but one thing we can is this: it provides a platform for companies to offer their own developed services on - whereas Google does everything itself.

Google - Is also moving forward full-throttle, but with HTML5 which they see as being THE future of rich-featured web-based applications. They will be putting a heap of development into this, further prodding the developer market via their various services and APIs to make sure this standard moves along at a fast enough pace to strangle both Flash and Silverlight. Read this blog for an idea of how Google plays the game to reduce Internet Explorer presence.

Google have a real tendency to "approach" nearly everything, including the mobile market, so they decided to bring out their own "open source" mobile Operating System called, Android. More than the question of what the hell is a search engine company doing making a mobile Operating System?! is the question of why the hell didn't the mobile companies do this first and how could they let Google do such a bl#%dy good job of it?! They really didn't see this coming because they were so engrossed in themselves and protecting their sacred little pieces of the mobile market with their proprietory ideas. They didn't see the bigger picture, which of course Google did - but from the other direction - expanding their dominant Internet-based services and user-base. They also had a thing for diluting iPhone, so getting the slow-burner Telcos and Mobile phone companies to follow them and release Android-based phones helps do this.

There is no doubt Google is building an extremely powerful platform. Their web technology is unsurpassed in the features, usability, cost (or lack of) and the engenuity of the features and how they all integrate with each other. They definitely have the best SaaS offering out on the market for Email, Calendar, Web-based documents and other tools. Wave promises to be a pretty powerful collaborative tool. They perfectly synchronise mobile devices - especially ones on Android! Google Voice has yet to show itself fully, but they are surely going for the VoIP market with that. Some in the VoIP market think Google will be strangled out of the VoIP market by not being given access to the the vital networks. Remember, they made their own Mobile OS just so they could have un-fettered access to mobile devices, and companies like Nokia, Softbank, Docomo, etc., have fallen for the trap already! There are ways to completely by-pass the standard networks. Build or buy your own - or develop an alternative method!

Our ratings (0 is poor);

• Desktop: Chrome OS (6: too new) - Good technology, concept and makes sense to match their services goals - but has yet to prove on taking PC market share.
• DaaS: Google Docs (10: brillian) - Tech, features, integration, synchronisation. Office suite needs to improve, but they are showing how this stuff should be done.
• Browser: Chrome (5: relevancy?) - Firefox is great, IE is MS, Chrome is Google. Is it necessary if we have Firefox?
• Mobile Phone: Android (10: Awesome) - Play of the decade - Telcos and Mobile Phone companies out there should continue to kick themselves for the next decade for letting this happen.
• Mobile Music: Android (5: Potential, but very new) - Not designed for it, but iPhone also starts to canibalise on its own iPod market, so we assume Android will also provide a substitute for this - and will surely be excellent technology.
• Tablet: Chrome OS (5: makes sense) - Requires manufacturers to get on board - same as MS. Maybe need a powerful branding campaign. Services are available for it.
• Tabletop Tech: Chrome OS (1:for potential) - Haven't heard anything from them about this.
• Business SaaS: Google Docs (10: Awesome) - Falls in-line with DaaS above
• Consumer SaaS: Gmail/Calendar (10: Awesome) - Great deal (free), great features
• IaaS: Google (10 and 0: Awesome, but closed) - Their own infrastructure.
• PaaS: Google (10: powerful) - Very intelligent API structures for all services
• Cloud: Google (10 and 0: Awesome, but closed) - Their own infrastructure.

Apple - Like Google, Apple is also betting on HTML5 for rich-featured content, but they also have the mobile device angle up their sleeves. They currently enjoy an excellent position in the mobile devices market which ranges from iPods, iPhones, iMacs and now iPads - and they are protecting what gets in there and how - thus the brilliant strategy of tightly integrating iTunes with the shopping exprience for apps and music. They also provide their own browser, called Safari, but it is not so widely used as it is mainly deployed on Apple computers - which still don't enjoy a large share of the "PC " market. Nonetheless, they will support web objects that best work with this and their Operating Systems.

They positioned themselves as the cool guys, and their products do live up to that image. Steve Jobs made some superb decisions spicing up the design of Apple Mac computers with their colourful, slick appearance. This drove them further to be cooler and slicker and from this out-grew the mysterious, "what is coming next?" phenomena that is Apple's trademark release lead-up strategy. Last week it was the iPad. Some naysayers will say it is just a larger version of the iPhone or iPod - but man, they got the SDK out quick and the developers are loving it. With mobile devices, they can't seem to go wrong in many ways, except in their "closed" approach - which time and again has proven to be the one thing that drives humans to not be closed-in. Nonetheless, they have serious mass and momentum and are going to enjoy the hell out of that for the next few years. $15 billion revenue for 1 quarter! Jobs is himself blown away by their great progress. Good on you - you deserve it.

Apple believe Flash is so buggy it makes their devices crash too often, and having one of the cleanest Operating Systems available, this is pretty likely. So, they have dropped support for Flash in iPod, iPhone and so on even going so far as to hammer Adobe for being "lazy" for not fixing the bugs. I suppose you could say lazy or stupid, if they really could have gotten themselves onto the MILLIONS of Apple devices out there by working on it a bit more. In place, they are playing the MS game of tighly controlling their MobTops (Mobile Desktops), and offer the SDK for developers to build apps for them. (Flash and normal web gear works on iPad, though). Of course, this is a convenient ruse to take focus away from the fact that Flash reduces Apple's control of content - which is key to iTunes Store and millions of $$ in revenue. “I think it’s pretty clear that Apple wants to maintain control of the content consumers see online and the content Apple offers for their devices," said Adrian Ludwig, group manager for the Flash platform product at Adobe.

Our ratings (0 is poor);

• Desktop: Mac (9: quality) - Doesn't have market share, but delivers on quality, power and features.
• DaaS: Virtual Macs (1: possibly irrelevant) - People want a Mac to take with them, although access to a virtual mac would be handy for disaster recovery or other need-to-get/use-a-mac times.
• Browser: Safari (5: possibly irrelevant) -Again, as with Chrome, do we really need another closed browser? Firefox should be sufficient.
• Mobile Phone: iPhone (8: Awesome but closed) - Best player in mobile to date (before Android)
• Mobile Music: iPod (9: Awesome but closed) - Came in and kicked some serious ass! Wake up Sony!
• Tablet: iPad (9: Awesome but closed) - It came, caused some stir, has some value - gets points for getting attention like no other in this space.
• Tabletop Tech: iDesk (0: Doesn't exist yet!)
• Business SaaS: NA
• Consumer SaaS: Mobile Me (8: Smart) - Got the users via iPod and iPhone and can channel them to their closed service. Seems like the early AOL play...can it last?
• IaaS: Own internals.
• PaaS: Devices (8: Brilliant) - They provide their own hardware and OS - which becomes the Platform that allows apps to reside on them.
• Cloud: Mobile Me (5: Apple only) - Good for the Apple-targeted services only

Oracle - This company has always been a favourite. From the early days watching Larry Ellison hammer away at Bill Gates, building a brilliant company from brilliant database technology. Oracle and Sun were to the Internet like Jimmy Hendrix was to Blues Rock. For some, the .com boom days were magical, as it was for Sun and Oracle, but things dipped and Sun didn't seem to fully recover. Oracle made a smart move getting their technology and along with it came a lot of high-grade customers, partners, followers and believers. They also recently picked up MySQL - one of the most popular "open source" databases out there. Virtual Iron was another interesting purchase, more for the management and provisioning technology platform than the virtualisation itself (XEN).

Oracle has massive farms of Oracle database-driven services running and ready to absorb their Enterprise customers. Being their private Cloud, they can offer their Enterprise customers the same level of quality, but with much better, fully integrated services with lower TCO. They will also pick up a bunch of SMBs with their portal offering and have the ability to battle with prices - when it eventually comes to that..

What does all this have to do with the browser object? Well, they got Java in their hands, for one. They also provide a business portal that offers a pretty extensive bunch of features, from CRM, ERP, SFA onwards - all driven by Oracle Database farms, on Oracle Linux, with java applets here and there. They will no doubt also shift to HTML5-Java hybrid services or just HTML5. Java is still popular for robust enterprise-level server applications, such as Open Bravo ERP, so it will be around for a bit more yet. As for mobile, they will have to play the similar cards as Google and come at the Android devices from an Enterprise and SMB service-provider angle.

Our ratings (0 is poor);

• Desktop: NA - but portal replaces some Desktop requirements
• DaaS: NA - but portal replaces some Desktop requirements
• Browser: NA
• Mobile Phone: NA - but does have some mobile apps
• Mobile Music: NA
• Tablet: NA
• Tabletop Tech: NA
• Business SaaS: Oracle Portal (9: Briliant) - High class, reliable, powerful and enterprise-level.
• Consumer SaaS: NA
• IaaS: Own internals.
• PaaS: Oracle Portal (5: Solid but limited) - Ability for some partners to integrate
• Cloud: Own internals

Salesforce.com - This company is annoying and dangerous and gets a mention here although they are basically a SaaS player (although they want to be an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) or PaaS (Platform as a Service) player). Partly because they are doing a really good job of offering an interesting service - CRM/SFA - which is one of the most important business tools - and competes with the guys above. Partly also because they can effectively deliver services to the Desktop, Internet and Mobile. They are smart in that they get partners on to build apps for their APIs and can then offer them out to Salesforce.com's customers (thus they consider themselves PaaS).

We are often surprised (or dumfounded) by companies out there, some pretty large ones also, that don't use CRM! Either their boss needs to be fired, fire himself or fire his IT guys. It is just rediculous for any company, small or large, in this day and age - 10+ years after Salesforce.com and Oracle awakened us to the value of it - to not be using some kind of CRM - and we don't mean excel reports! Not only does it bring about massive efficiencies and at the same time reveal the MANY crude innefficiencies, it also captures so much valuable data, provides so much valuable information and here is the biggest no-brainer that most don't consider - it INCREASES the value of your company! Imagine trying to sell your company and the potential buyer asks you for access to your CRM or ERP? What are you going to do? Send him 10+ years' worth of excel files? Wake up!

Related to the above, it really amazes us the number of high-tech companies that use Salesforce.com, but whose own customer-base is in fact threatened by Salesforce.com. Are they crazy? In many cases, they are offering software or platforms that similar CRM software could be deployed upon - and really need them to be advocates and supporters in terms of being fellow-end users - but they adopt Salesforce.com's platform to the detriment of their own sales. Crazy. As an example; A large virtualisation and (hosting) control panel software provider would sell more licenses if more people used SugarCRM or Openbravo upon their platform. If it was such that this hypothetical software company themselves didn't use SugarCRM, but instead used Salesforce.com, not only can they not be a real advocate of their own platform, but they send the message that they support their own customers' competition. It might make sense if Salesforce.com used their virtualisation and so on, but if that is not the case, then it is simply nonsense. This point relates to the convergence of such services upon infrastructure providers, and the effects thereafter.

Our ratings (0 is poor);

• Desktop: Some partner apps and portal replaces some Desktop requirements
• DaaS: NA - but portal replaces some Desktop requirements
• Browser: NA
• Mobile Phone: NA - but does have some mobile apps
• Mobile Music: NA
• Tablet: NA
• Tabletop Tech: NA
• Business SaaS: Salesforce.com (9: Awesome) - First-mover, very powerful, diverse - a bit expensive.
• Consumer SaaS: NA
• IaaS: Own internals.
• PaaS: Salesforce.com (5: Solid but limited) - Ability for some partners to integrate
• Cloud: Salesforce.com (5: Solid but limited) - Ability for some partners to integrate

Facebook - The SNS. The guy that made this is smart. We mention Facebook here because of the pervasive effect this has had and the "consumer" side of Internet services - and how it affects users' Internet and mobile usage and how business can leverage it. Whether it is a platform that has any legs, one can not say, but it has surely hit some nerves of the average human's need to connect and share, often with mundane, information. It has also given life and space to those that normally wouldn't or couldn't socialise in person. Smart, because it has gained mass usage (250,000,000!) in just a few years and has become profitable and employs an internal advertising model. It also acts kind of like a PaaS and allows developers to build apps upon it. It is also quite open in the sense that it allows services to access the users via the API - if the users are interested and allow it to. The brilliance of this is that they can deploy ads based on the human nature of the mass of gibberish written in there by people - not just relying on text search, as Google and other Search Engines do.

Businesses are starting to leverage Facebook by building Groups and apps that can draw users to their services and products based on natural "human tendencies". It is pretty well-monitored, with no nasty stuff going on there, so in one way, it can be seen as a pretty friendly, morally positive extension of human communication and at the same time being is a really good target market for most businesses to approach.

Our ratings (0 is poor);

• Desktop: NA
• DaaS: NA
• Browser: NA
• Mobile Phone: NA - but has some mobile apps
• Mobile Music: NA
• Tablet: NA
• Tabletop Tech: NA
• Business SaaS: NA - but provides business advertising platform
• Consumer SaaS: Facebook.com (Brilliant: 10) - Works well, meets the users needs/expectations.
• IaaS: Own internals.
• PaaS: Facebook.com (9: Easy Integration) - Very easy for anyone to build an app for - will enable greater growth and expansion from a user-space angle
• Cloud: Own internals.

In Summary, you can see that the big players up there are vying for the same thing - the global user and business market. They are employing different technologies in some cases, which then requires a few extra buttons to be pressed here and there to nudge something this way or that. Also, as mentioned at the start is that they all have in common CONVERGENCE;

Convergence of companies and technologies (M&A). For example; Google buying Gizmo, Microsoft buying Great Plains, Oracle buying Sun and MySQL, etc.

Convergence of Desktop usage upon Mobile Device usage. For example; 70% of Japanese internet users access it from their mobile telephone. Using SMS on the mobile device instead of email on the PC. Using Google Voice app on iPhone instead of Skype - or even using Skype with Fring on the Smartphone instead of Skype on the PC.

Convergence of in-house systems and Desktops to Cloud-based SaaS services. For example; Excel reports over to SugarCRM. Excel reports, Quickbooks or other PC-based accounting over to SaaS ERP such as JD Edwards, Openbravo or Salesforce.com. This can also be seen in the huge amount of growth in web server activity Google experiences - which has its own "web server" competing with Apache (all other LAMP, ASPs, SaaS, etc) and MS.

Convergence of unrelated industries upon new strategically important industries to further enable the other forms of convergence. For example; Google's entry into Mobile with Android to push out more services and not be fenced-in.

Convergence of business presence upon consumer's private space. For example, providing a secure, personal, friendly, social platform such as Facebook that allows business to creep upon it and begin to target their offerings based on the users' exact "psychology".

Convergence of operating systems. Particularly Linux upon Windows. Most notable is the convergence of Desktop upon the Web - which is predominantly Linux-based with Apache servers.

What everyone needs to ask themselves is where they fit into what areas of this massive, organic, constantly moving and shifting web of convergence...

PC Desktop -> Mac
PC Desktop -> Mobile Devices
PC Desktop -> DaaS
PC Desktop -> Web (SaaS) and Web DaaS
Infrastructure (IDC, Hardware, Virtualisation & Automation) -> Cloud/IaaS/PaaS + SaaS
Office & In-House -> Cloud & SaaS
Consumers -> Integrated Target Markets