In this week's EIC Squared podcast, ZDNet's Larry Dignan and I discuss the latest news from SAP, Sun Microsystems, Advanced Micro Devices, and Microhoo. At SAP's Sapphire conference this week, company executives explained the delayed rollout of the new on-demand enterprise suite, Business ByDesign. SAP CEO Henning Kagermann said that the total cost of ownership (TCO) equation on Business ByDesign and the upgrade procedures weren't good enough:
"We know we can have TCO, but need NetWeaver enhancements. There's a very close link between the TCO of Business ByDesign and NetWeaver. The TCO is not so much hardware; There are too many processing steps in our hosting. We can continue to do manual steps when first upgrade Business ByDesign from 1.0 to 1.1, but it's not predictable in way where every client got it at once and in the same way."
Larry remarks on AMD's lack of transparency about its chip fabrication plans and product roadmap, and I recap my visit to JavaOne, where I met rocker Neil Young and interviewed Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz about his plans for JavaFX and cloud computing. Schwartz has a good plan, but getting developers on board will take some heavy lifting.
We also debate whether Microsoft is open to a union with Yahoo after the parting of ways.
- Bookmark:
- Digg
- Del.icio.us
Based on comments by Chairman Bill Gates and CTO Craig Mundie in the last few days, you might think Microsoft has not lost its lust for Yahoo. With no alternatives in sight, Yahoo may be rethinking its terms and conditions for becoming part of Microsoft. In this video, I outline the latest moves and nuances of the Microhoo affair.
- Bookmark:
- Digg
- Del.icio.us
Check out the responses in this video:
Justin Smith at Inside Facebook has the scoop on Facebook's new profile page design, which will give users more granular controls and application developers some new tricks.
In late May developers will get access to the new code, and users the new interface a few weeks later.
The new Facebook profile will have five tabs: Feed, Info, Wall, Photo, and Boxes. The Boxes can be moved to the main profile area.
(Credit: Inside Facebook)SAN FRANCISCO--While an interview with Neil Young has been my big highlight of JavaOne, I also managed to hook up with Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz for a video interview. We talked about Project Hydrazine, a new cloud computing initiative with services similar to what Google and Amazon.com offer. We also discussed JavaFX, Sun's competitor to Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight, and Project Insight, which is designed to gather instrumented user action data via JavaFX and provide it to developers.
JavaFX, which includes a runtime, scripting, and a media framework, could have a hard time competing with Adobe and Silverlight, which means attracting developers to the platform could be a challenge. But Sun has a powerful platform accelerant--85 percent of cell phones, 91 percent of desktops, and 100 percent of all Blu-ray Disc players run Java and can be automatically updated to run JavaFX.
Project Hydrazine is slated to deliver immersive, creative experiences in the cloud via services. Rich Green, executive vice president of software at Sun, told me that a storage service, similar to Amazon's S3, would be available later this year. The company is also working on tools to make it easier for developers, as well as consumers, to mash up applications.
Sun CTO Robert Brewin described the emergent Project Hydrazine as a combination of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Microsoft Live Mesh and Google Analytics.
Green also said that e-mail, calendaring, and messaging services would be available as cloud services this year. While Sun isn't ... Read more
- Bookmark:
- Digg
- Del.icio.us
Editor's note: News.com's Dan Farber reported Young's keynote speech and a follow-up Q&A live from JavaOne.
SAN FRANCISCO--At JavaOne here, Neil Young showed off his multimedia project that chronicles his music career and uses Java to do so.
Neil Young and Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz
(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET News.com)Young said he tried to do the project on DVD, but users couldn't watch the high-resolution video and listen to the music at the same time. With Java and Blu-ray, the content can be updated and offer the best viewing and listening experience, as well as great navigation and design. "Storage is the only limit," Young said, and recommended the Sony's PlayStation 3 as the best way to view his project.
Users will be able to download any archival materials, which are automatically assigned to their place in a chronological time line, Young said.
In a meeting with a few press members following the JavaOne keynote, Young talked about the Archive project, which goes back to the late 1980s. The first stage, he said, was collecting the materials.
"I am kind of a pack rat," he said, adding that over the years he's accumulated a lot of unreleased material. "I only give the record company what I want people to hear at the time. So I have a lot of unreleased material. Putting it all together tells a much different story than just what has been produced (for public consumption)."... Read more
- Topics:
- Entertainment,
- Sun
- Tags:
- Sun,
- Java,
- JavaOne,
- JavaFX,
- Neil Young
- Bookmark:
- Digg
- Del.icio.us
James Gosling, the so-called father of Java, catapults T-shirts toward the JavaOne audience.
(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET News.com)SAN FRANCISCO--Following a flurry of T-shirts catapulted by Java creator James Gosling and a hot dance troop performance, 75 hours of JavaOne got under way here this week. Sun Microsystems' software chief, Rich Green, took the stage to talk about consumers, people he sees as driving change.
"Information is crossing the moat, escaping the castle," he said. "The private information network is gone." Enterprises have to recognize that the enterprise moat barriers are coming down, he added, with consumers driving innovation.
Rich Green, Sun's software chief, emphasizes consumer innovation on the JavaOne stage.
(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET News.com)As part of Sun's effort to enable consumers to innovate, Green introduced JavaFX, a rich Internet application environment set to compete with Adobe Systems' AIR and Microsoft's Silverlight.
He showed a JavaFX application with Flickr and Twitter feeds running in Facebook within the browser, and then he dragged it out of the browser--to the desktop. The same application also was shown running on a Java-enabled phone via JavaFX Mobile.
Unfortunately, the application, using the new Java Update 10 browser plug-in, kept crashing. "It's the size of the pipes in Moscone Center," Green complained. "This is the Moscone terror moment."
Sun is hoping to tap into 2.2 billion mobile devices and the vast majority of desktop PCs that are Java-enabled. JavaFX was shown running on Google's ... Read more
Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang talked to a few press outlets Monday, opening the door to further negotiations if Microsoft is willing to show him the money, or what he considers the appropriate price.
Microsoft's final bid was $33 and Yahoo held out for $37, or something close to that number, but Ballmer decided on Saturday not to continue the courtship. With Yahoo flaunting its possible ad serving deal with Google and holding out for an 80 percent premium over the January 31 closing stock price, Yang appeared to overplay his hand.
According to Reuters, Yang said it was Microsoft who decided to cease negotiations. With shareholder lawsuits piling up in the wake of the failed deal, the stock suffering, and no other suitor in sight, Yang may now be looking for rapprochement with Ballmer.
"If they have anything new to say, we would be open...I am more than willing to listen," Yang told Reuters.
- Bookmark:
- Digg
- Del.icio.us
SAP CEO Henning Kagermann has some advice for how Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer should spend $45 to $50 billion.
"I'd encourage him to spend it on Yahoo. For Microsoft, the challenges are more on the side of the consumer space, not the enterprise space," said Kagermann.
While Ballmer walked away from Yahoo over the asking price and other issues, he might be back if Yahoo fails to show that it can gain momentum.
Kagermann was speaking at SAP's Sapphire conference in Orlando, Fla. ZDNet's Larry Dignan captured the action. Kagermann speculated that Microsoft wouldn't have made the offer if it didn't have a good handle on how to integrate the two companies.
In 2004, Microsoft and SAP were in talks to merge but nothing came of it. It could be that Kagermann hopes that Microsoft acquires Yahoo so it will be distracted with the merger and not get any ideas about trespassing on SAP's enterprise software territory.
- Tags:
- SAP,
- Microsoft,
- Yahoo,
- Henning Kagermann,
- Steve Ballmer,
- Microhoo,
- Microsoft-Yahoo acquisition
- Bookmark:
- Digg
- Del.icio.us
At SAP's Sapphire conference this week in Orlando, Fla., a question posed by one of my colleagues concerns the status of Business ByDesign, an on-demand suite of applications that has been in development for about five years.
SAP co-CEO Leo Apotheker
(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET News.com)Last week, it was announced that the product would take 12 to 18 months longer than the original target of 2010 to reach $1 billion in revenue and touch 10,000 customers in the mid-market globally.
ZDNet's Larry Dignan reports on a conversation with SAP co-CEO Leo Apotheker, who explained that Business ByDesign was delayed because the company wasn't able to achieve the planned 10-times reduction in total cost of ownership.
Larry wrote:
That's a fancy way of saying SAP hasn't figured out how to make money at its $149-per-user, per-month price point. SAP confirmed that it was delaying Business ByDesign when it reported its first-quarter earnings. "We've announced a price point, and now we're working backwards," says Apotheker.
Apotheker is looking to "labor arbitrage" (cheaper programmers offshore) and the next release of SAP's NetWeaver middleware to help bring the costs in line. He contends that the delay won't give an advantage to competitors: "No one will be able to offer an end-to-end, comprehensive business suite."
Being bigger and more comprehensive may prove to lead to unwieldy, more costly, and less agile software development. Perhaps SAP will offer some demonstrations of Business ByDesign at ... Read more
- Tags:
- SAP,
- Business ByDesign,
- Leo Apotheker,
- Sapphire 2008
- Bookmark:
- Digg
- Del.icio.us
Start Doing More with Windows Mobile
