Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen filed suit this week against a litany of Internet companies claiming they had violated patents awarded years ago to Allen’s now-defunct Interval Research. Many writers, including one passing himself off as me, claimed this made Allen a so-called “patent troll. ”

I don’t think that is the case.

Patent trolls are individuals or companies that habitually sue others over obscure patents. While the Interval patents generally are obscure, that doesn’t make them invalid. And the fact that Allen and then-partner Dave Liddle paid $100 million for the basic research behind those patents, well that hardly sounds like troll behavior.

If Paul Allen actually were a patent troll. he would have sued in South Texas, where all the whopping patent judgements are handed-down, not in Seattle.

Suing in Seattle is bad trollmanship.

What we have here is a guy who may be the 37th richest person in the world, but he used to be the second-richest. He’s pledged to give away his fortune and maybe wants more to give. In short, I don’t see a problem with these legal actions.

That doesn’t mean, however, that Allen will prevail. The odds are against him. While Interval developed upwards of 300 patents, that isn’t like the thousands of patents now controlled by Nathan Myrhvold’s company, Intellectual Ventures. Myrvold has acquired baskets of patents creating a strategic mass of IP and an associated legal team he can use to bludgeon almost any company into cross-licensing. Allen has no such depth (or power).

He’s just trying to turn lemons from lemonade.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

No, Google doesn’t intend to become a national Internet Service Provider, despite its new plan to build a number of optical networks to serve homes and businesses at up to one gigabit-per-second.  The real plan is half Xerox PARC and half Tom Sawyer.

When the Computer Science Lab at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center was organized by Bob Taylor in the early 1970s to revolutionize computer, network, and printing technology, there was a conscious decision to live 10 years in the future. The CSL would build devices that could be expected to make economic sense in 1980, not 1970.  This was a huge leap, because it meant the amount of memory in each device would be 64 times as much as made economic sense in 1970 when 1K was a lot.  Yet think of it, a 64K PC was the norm when IBM introduced that product in 1981 (base was 16K!) so the numbers were about right.  Only by embracing future limits, no matter the cost, was PARC able to achieve so much (Ethernet, Graphical User Interfaces, laser printing) in its first three years of operation.

Part of Google’s inspiration, then, for building-out a few residential and business optical networks is to do the same thing.  Because not all smart people work at Google and even more so because the smart people who do work at Google don’t generally think or operate like the rest of us, it will be very useful to see what normal folks actually do with that much bandwidth.

There will be a few surprises, I’m sure, but not many.  For the most part Google is hoping to inspire current ISPs — mainly cable companies — to follow its lead, like Tom Sawyer did when getting his friends to whitewash that fence.  Google wants to set an example for how to do local networks right and get the Obama Administration to codify that methodology through the Federal Communication Commission.  Then they want someone else to do the actual heavy lifting.

And it will probably work, not so much because Google is brilliant but because the cable TV companies are ambitious.  We’re entering an era where cable operators will have a real cost advantage over telcos in expanding residential bandwidth, thanks to DOCSIS 3.0 modems.

I’m the third DOCSIS 3.0 customer in Charleston, South Carolina and the first residential customer following two law firms.  I did it I suppose to write this column but even more so because I have some heavy video activity coming-up and thought I might need the extra bandwidth, which is substantial.  The important thing to understand about DOCSIS 3.0 technology is that it’s not a big deal, really.  It’s just channel bonding.

Where earlier cable modems had users on each subnet sharing a single analog video channel (generally channel 80), DOCSIS 3.0 devices can grab several channels and aggregate bandwidth.  Think about it, under this scenario if a cable system operator were to abandon its analog signal entirely in favor of a total IP solution that would mean a 100X increase in shareable bandwidth on each subnet — subnets that are already for the most part interconnected by fiber.  That’s 30 gigabits-per-second or more to be share in your neighborhood alone for a cost that amounts to about $300 compared to the average $1350 per customer Verizon is spending to install FiOS fiber.

Some cable companies will use DOCSIS 3.0 to take down the local phone company, which will be hard-put to compete.  And they’ll have support from the TV manufacturers as well as cable box makers.  My new 58-inch Panasonic Plasma TV has an Ethernet port on the back and all Panasonic’s competitors would like us to buy new TV’s too.  And don’t forget who is America’s largest maker of cable boxes — Cisco.  You think they don’t want IP TV? Heck, they trademarked the term.

While what Google intends to install is fiber (or so they are saying right now) the ultimate beneficiaries of this project may be more traditional cable plants running mainly thick old coax.

Google wants to nudge this along because their ultimate goal isn’t to be an ISP but to live in the data center of the ISP providing us data with ads to go with it.  They want to drop one of those shipping container server farms into the parking lot of every cable head-end in America, ultimately providing gigabits of data without having to pay anything for bandwidth.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

As we’ve all read, Google recently experienced a massive attack on its network, probably from China, and has threatened to leave the Chinese market as a result. I’ve written about that aspect before (Google taking its ball and going home) but this column is about the attack itself and Google’s internal plans for how to deal with future such problems, because of course this will happen again. I’m frankly trying to understand what Google is up to in its response to the Chinese threat — a response that doesn’t make much sense to me given the details of the attack as published.

First reports of the attack blamed a security flaw in an attached PDF file. Later reports blamed a vulnerability in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. Adobe denies the PDF vulnerability, though the company not long ago issued a security patch for that product. Microsoft confirmed the IE vulnerability. But what’s interesting to me is that I understand from inside Google that the company plans to respond to this Chinese threat by changing its log-in process for web apps to one using a secure secondary server. That’s great, but it wouldn’t have stopped the most recent attack.

Is there something here we aren’t being told?

The most popular secure secondary server access system is called SiteKey and is used by Bank of America and many other financial institutions. The way SiteKey works is you log on to your bank’s computer, for example, by first typing an account identifier which causes one server to generate a picture and another server to generate a pass phrase which together don’t identify you to the bank but rather identifies the bank to you. Trapped as it is in a hash table, nobody at the bank can even tell you what picture you chose but you know it (the pass phrase too) so you can be pretty sure the server you are logging into is the one you want and not some phishing site. If the picture and phrase are satisfactory you can then type in your real password and you are there.

I’m told that Google will soon roll-out a similar system for Google Apps.

But I can’t see how using secure secondary authentication would have had any impact at all on the recent Chinese malware incident.

So I went to a friend who manages data security for a huge defense contractor and he agreed. “Authentication helps, ” he said, “but that was the second part of the attack, the original piece was a carefully crafted PDF file that was executed by the user. No amount of authentication helps against an authorized user. Don’t get me wrong, I am a believer in strong X. 509 based authentication, just it would not have helped against a malicious attachment.”

Adobe says it wasn’t a PDF problem at all. Yet my friend, who is privy to a flow of information the rest of us are not, says Adobe may be technically incorrect in this assertion.  I don’t know for sure, nor do I think it really matters in this case.

“The IE use was a secondary effect (to download the malware using an allowed program), ” he explained. “I’m not sure what they are calling a vulnerability (it might be a feature). The initial vector was the PDF. Typically such an attack is limited in just how large a program can be in the initial attack (hidden inside the attachment).  It has to be just enough to pull the real root kit. Early ones used their own network app but most systems are now protected by personal firewalls that would disallow or alarm. Use of IE would probably avoid this (and explains why large corporations are going to gateway white lists). Bottom line: the attack requires an executable program to be running on the workstation. Once that is in place, anything can be done. ”

The best defense against this sort of attack would have been two-fold. First, strip all e-mail attachments from messages and replace them with a URL. Send one copy of the attachment to a dedicated server that can be set to paranoid. Take as much time as needed to vet the attachment including emulation to see if it is malware or not. Once complete, the URL embedded with the forwarded e-mail becomes active and the attachment can be downloaded.

Google owns Postini, which could implement just such a technique, so we should probably expect that they will do so, making Google apps more secure and therefore more attractive in the process.  In Google’s move to make itself ever more essential to the net they may well offer such a quarantine service as a standalone product, too.

The second part of this solution unfortunately died with Windows Vista — the hated User Access Control (UAC). Temporary privilege escalation with logging, which is what Vista’s UAC provided along with some user grief, is the way to go.

Remember that all the authentication in the world will not protect against a privileged user doing the wrong thing. It’s just that logging may help to determine what happened after the fact.

We have known for years how to fix this, but nobody cared.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Near the eve of Apple’s tablet announcement, I’d like to turn my 2010 predictive eye again to the mobile space where, as my title suggests, there are only three software players that matter — Apple, Google, and RIM (Blackberry).

But wait a minute, isn’t Nokia the big Kahuna in this space and aren’t they right now suing the heck out of Apple? Yes, but that’s an act of desperation, a stalling tactic intended just to slow Apple down or, possibly, send some useful license revenue from Cupertino to Finland. It doesn’t change the inevitable.

So-called “feature phones” are going away, to be replaced within two product cycles (three years, tops) entirely by smart phones driven by mobile app stores and the need for carriers to generate additional revenue. It’s not like you’ll even be able to find a feature phone to buy.

The smart phone marketplace will consolidate around three operating systems — Android, Blackberry, and OS X. Though there will be some ups and down in the market and the complete transition will take longer to complete than my usual 12-month timeline, Symbian, Windows Phone, and every other smart phone OS that isn’t from Apple, Google, or RIM, are likely to die or be reduced to insignificance.

None of these platforms expect to die, but that’s the way it is with these things. You don’t expect to lose until you’ve lost, generally.

On some level Nokia even thinks it still has a chance to win the war, but it doesn’t.

Nokia has faith in its very popular cross-platform application development environment, Qt, which it acquired in 2008 with the $153 million acquisition of Norwegian company Trolltech, father of Qt. Nokia sees Qt as its secret sauce — a potent weapon against Apple.

Qt, like any of a number of 4GLs can write once and deploy a lot of places. Where Qt is different from the other 4GLs (in the mind of Nokia at least) is that it manages to do what it does without killing app performance, probably because Qt began as a mobile product and mobile apps have to be lean and fast.

So Qt is growing up at just the time applications and OSes are growing down, thanks to OS X and the iPhone. Qt has made notable progress supporting 3D apps and a huge variety of processors, chipsets, and GPUs. They showed at CES the same apps running from the same source on a ton of different hardware platforms from handsets to desktops to set top boxes. And now Nokia has reportedly done the unthinkable, which is to rewrite Maemo, its Linux, in Qt.

Meanwhile, Apple has been rolling forward with its PA Semi strategy, the first fruit of which we’ll apparently see announced next week. I sense that Apple is headed toward a family of devices from handhelds to servers all linked to a cloud and ostensibly running the same OS. Apple is mining the ARM ecosystem for this move in addition to its own PA Semi extensions.

Nokia thinks that, through either Qt or various legal moves (or both), it can slow Apple’s mobile juggernaut. They won’t, and here’s why.

Apple hires the meanest lawyers it can find, paying extra bucks for that “kick them for good measure” attitude. I know a company that had long legal battles with both Microsoft and Apple and they said Apple’s legal team was far worse than Microsoft’s, hands down. So while Nokia’s appeal to the World Trade Organization (WTO) to punish Apple, is an act of desperation, Apple’s similar response is just the way they do these things.

This legal situation is going to get uglier and uglier but in the end it will be settled with patent cross-licensing, no monetary damages or license fees, and Nokia feeling relieved to get out of the negotiating room alive.

This will happen, I believe, because Apple doesn’t really give a damn about Qt or Nokia. They care much more about Google and Microsoft.

Nokia is going to fail in using Qt and Symbian to compete with Android or iPhone application frameworks because Nokia just doesn’t understand software. Nokia is a hardware company that does software and hardware companies aren’t fighting this new war, they just build the weapons.

Remember Apple is a software company that sells its products in an expensive hardware box.

Ultimately (more than 12 months from now) there will be a shakeout and Nokia will drop Symbian and even Maemo in favor of Google’s Android and Nokia custom apps, UI, and hardware.

Meanwhile Microsoft will cut its rumored (and incredibly expensive) iPhone search deal with Apple, then it will introduce Windows Phone 7, which will fail to gain market traction for Redmond. Microsoft will ultimately align with Apple to avoid the embarrassment of working with Google, but this alignment will be solely for mobile.

That is unless Microsoft buys RIM and then doesn’t screw it up.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

More 2010 predictions, this time for Google, which is reeling right now from cyber attacks in China and customer attacks in the U. S. where the Nexus One is getting an underwhelming response from early adopters.

Here’s word from a friend of mine — a smart phone whore — who had a Nexus One for a month and didn’t tell me until this morning. Still, his reactions are informed and represent a month of experience. “I’m not too impressed with it as a phone, ” says my friend. “It’s basically a wash. Google is screw’n it big time with the horrible plans they are dishing it out on t-Mobile and the price is ridiculous. To beat all, it’s radio is horrible, so bad that I literally gave it back and returned to a clunky G1. There is no decent smart phone out right now except the Moto Cliq unless you are lucky enough to have good AT&T coverage with an iPhone, which I don’t.”

Early Nexus One users hate the phone, hate the plans, hate the network, hate the price, but what they hate most of all is Google’s lack of customer service. Shouldn’t Google have seen this coming? Of course, but the company operates in a bubble that market realities often can’t penetrate. Eventually Google will be good at this stuff, but how long will that take? Too long?

What amazes me is the bad radio given that this is an HTC product and HTC is a very good mobile phone manufacturer. Taking a guess about what’s happening there I predict that HTC warned Google about the radio problem but there were so many IQ points jetting around the conference room at Google that nobody bothered to actually listen they were so much in love with each other. Sometimes just being smarter is not enough. In fact just being smarter is never enough, even at chess – a lesson Google will have to learn the hard way, I suppose.

Now to China where hackers or spies or who-knows-who have been attacking Google and the search giant is threatening to take its ball and go home, leaving completely the Chinese market. What sense does this make? It makes no sense to me. Google is going to have zero impact on China — zero — by abandoning that market, which Microsoft and Yahoo will gladly fill. so threatening to walk away is simply stupid.

Of course Google couches all this in terms of rejecting Chinese government censorship, which is a good thing, but we’re still left with either posturing that isn’t real or stupid-ass behavior that is real but shows this isn’t likely to be the Google Decade after all.

Here’s a better approach for Google to take. Stand in front of a bank of cameras and microphones my very impressive friend Tiffany Montague (Google’s link with NASA, keeper of the Google G-V parking spaces at Moffett Field, and internal space expert) to have her explain how Google is going to launch a satellite Internet service similar to one I described in a recent column, specifically to bring freedom of information (and advertising) to totalitarian regimes everywhere.

The technology exists, Google could finance it, and China couldn’t stop it.

This assumes, of course, that Google has some guts, which I doubt.

Otherwise, 2010 looks like a good year for Google mainly because Internet advertising will recover somewhat and Google should make some progress in phones, browsers, operating systems, apps, and the cloud in general. In those areas they are still ahead of the curve and ahead of the curve is a great place to be.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Dag nabbit I had hoped to get away without having to write a predictions column this year, but no such luck. Look for that one tomorrow. Tonight, of course, there’s Google’s Nexus One smart phone to write about. Is it an iPhone killer? Hardly. And that’s not even the point.

Google’s Nexus One is a very nice smart phone as far as I can tell. I only read what you read and I haven’t yet played with one, but a couple nice folks who were on TWiT with me this week have tried it and liked it a lot, especially the screen. Yet many of the stories I’ve read today have presented this product introduction as a seminal break between Apple and Google with one trying to kill the other. Not even close.

Apple is very happy with its iPhone sales, thanks, and those are unlikely to be hurt much, if at all, by the Nexus One. Not that the Nexus One can’t be a huge success for Google. But here are the points everyone seems to be missing: 1) there is plenty of room in the mobile market for both Apple and Google, and; 2) this product introduction really marks the ultimate decline and fall of so-called “feature phones” and the rise to dominance of smart phones. Within two years there will be no more feature phones, at least not in the U.S.

The real losers today, then, are makers of feature phones and, maybe, Microsoft, which has the most vulnerable smart phone platform in Windows Phone.

The Nexus One introduction, coming on top of the iPhone, marks the true ascendence of smart phones as an alternative platform to desktops and notebooks. No, you can’t survive on a smart phone alone, the days of one computing device per person ended long ago.

But this does mark the beginning of the smart phone shakeout, when the industry matures and inevitably drops to no more than three viably competitive smart phone platforms. So just as you have Windows, Mac, and some form of ‘nix fighting it out for desktops and notebooks, so too we’ll shortly have three major mobile platforms to choose from.

iPhone and Android will be here for the long haul with the question being which of Symbian, Palm, Windows Mobile, or Blackberry will die?

What’s your guess? My guess is that Blackberry will be the third standard, Nokia will eventually leave Symbian for Android, and Microsoft will buy Palm but then screw it up, losing its position almost entirely in the mobile client space where smart phones will soon dominate, selling up to a billion units per year.

Hey this did turn out to be a predictions column after all!

More predictions tomorrow.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Last week Google made a preemptive strike against Microsoft, revealing details of its Chrome OS months before that product reaches its near-infinite beta release.  The idea is simple: who needs a big OS if you are doing everything in a browser?  It’s a huge threat to Microsoft and Apple.  But then it struck me I’ve heard this all before, so I went back and found this video clip from my show Triumph of the Nerds, circa 1996, where Larry Ellison predicts the future, not knowing he was actually describing 2010.

The biggest news was simply that Google was finally taking Microsoft head-on. The rest of the news, at least to me, was that Microsoft should be worried, very worried.

While we’re talking about operating systems here, Google’s real target is Microsoft Office.  Redmond makes money from Windows but makes a lot more money from Office, its productivity app monopoly.  Google already has its Google Apps pitted against Office, but Brin and Page know they won’t crack Office’s hold on corporate America without addressing the Windows flaws that effectively underlie both Office and Google Apps in their current incarnations.  That’s where the Chrome OS comes in.

The Chrome OS strategy comes down to services, servers, security, and an iTunes-like app store (this latter part having been missed by nearly all the pundits).

An operating system with a user interface done through a browser is a completely practical idea and a vastly superior way to code User Interfaces than the Windows API.  It wasn’t always so, but now we have Java and Java extensions in the browser, so the UI capabilities are much better.

Remember Google makes its money differently than Microsoft, taking a few pennies here and there.  It is doubtful that either the Chrome browser or Chrome OS will ever cost users anything, but Google will make plenty from providing services and servers that run using these interfaces, with the real gold mine being that app store.

Under the Chrome OS, security is drum-tight so users can’t install unapproved software that might break the OS.  The client is small, light, secure, and easy to support. The back end can be in Google’s cloud or in one of those Google shipping container data centers dropped into the parking lot at a Fortune 500 company.  Either way Google makes money at the expense of Microsoft/IBM/Sun/Oracle.  Larry sure didn’t anticipate that part.

Google will make tons of money from its app store.  Remember that unapproved applications won’t be able to run on the Chrome OS and the best (maybe only) way to find approved apps will be through a Google store as pioneered by Apple with iTunes.  This wasn’t lost on Eric Schmidt during his days on the Apple board.  Through such an app store, Google will get a percentage of all third-party software sales — something Microsoft has never been able to do with third-party Windows apps.  The potential revenue from the app store alone is billions per year.

We know that under the Chrome OS Google Apps will be very secure.  Any tampering will trigger the download of a new and pure OS image.  But will the Chrome OS have enough performance to compete with Microsoft Office?  I think it eventually will, based, for example, on extensions like Google’s recently announced O3D API, which will allow Google Apps and approved third-party apps to grab spare GPU cycles to improve performance.

What’s left to be seen here is whether these improvements will be enough to beat Office or if Google will have to make a standalone (local PC-based) version of these apps.  Only time will tell.

The most interesting part for me will be Microsoft’s response.  This strikes at the very heart of Redmond’s business success and Microsoft will not take it lying down.  Expect thermonuclear warfare.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

I was hanging the other day with some ex-Google folks.  There are more and more of these as the search company matures and the fact that I’m running across a few is, in itself, meaningless.  But without giving away any trade secrets (which the ex-Googlers absolutely refused to do) these chance encounters have opened my eyes a bit to how things actually function inside the Googleplex.  It’s different, really different.

Google isn’t organized like any tech company I’ve ever worked in, that’s for sure.  Peer review seems to be at the heart of nearly everything.  Yes, there are executives doing whatever it is that executives do up in the Eric/Larry/Sergeysphere, but down where the bits meet the bus most decisions seem to be reached through a combination of peer review-driven concensus and literal popularity polls.

The heart of Google is code and all code there is peer reviewed TO DEATH.  The result is absolutely the cleanest code in the digital world, forced into that condition by what can be a torturous process of line-by-comment-by punctuation mark analysis sometimes over-driven by people who take their work WAY too seriously.  You know the type. Peer review wars have apparently been known to break out at Google, though rarely. Usually the pedants are accommodated and, in fact, they for the most part win.  The code is clean as a result, but the process is s-l-o-w, or so I’ve been told.

And the code had better be clean, because at Google developers outnumber testers by 50-to-1.

But peer review at Google goes way beyond looking at the code.  Hiring requires peer review.  Promotion requires peer review.  Presumably even firing requires peer review, though I didn’t have anyone actually tell me that.  All the technical workers at Google are involved in peer review activities a LOT of the time — up to 20 percent, in fact.

Which brings us to the vaunted 20 percent time Google engineers are supposed to get to work on anything they like.  Most of them apparently use that time for corporate housekeeping — for doing all that peer reviewing.  It makes sense: if you want to appear productive in your main job yet are still required to do all this work that would normally be handled by managers, when else can you do it but during time you don’t have to account for?

This may be part of the reason that the Google 20 percent time hasn’t spawned as many new products as I expected it would.

But wait, if all the developers are effectively making management decisions through a peer review process, what are the managers doing? They are going to meetings, I’m told.  The typical Google manager has 50-60 direct reports and has time for nothing but meeting after meeting.  In a typical nerds-versus-suits scenario, the ex-Google developers I spoke with had no idea exactly WHAT their managers actually did.

Someone at Google is buying companies, I’m sure, and those decisions have to take place at an upper management level where checks are written, even at Google. What I find really interesting is what happens after the products are acquired.  Who works on them and what features get changed or modified? That, too, is apparently up to the engineers.

At Google I am told developers bid for what they want to do with their time.  If there’s a big job to be done people commit to parts of it.  And the parts nobody commits to do?  They don’t get done.  Really.  So when we wonder exactly how a JotSpot, which I really liked, turns into a Google Sites, which I really don’t like, that morphology apparently comes from people changing what they want to change.

There is no marketing input.

Effectively, there is no marketing.

I am not making this up.

This approach isn’t without precedent.  I saw much the same thing during the early days at Apple where new products were entirely driven by engineering.  Engineers built whatever they wanted to build and it was up to the company then to sell it.  Google apparently operates in much the same fashion.

All of this helps explain the Google tendency to have almost eternal betas, because there are no marketing-driven deadlines… ever.  And why should there be? Given that most Google products aren’t intended to directly produce revenue, it may not matter.

This explains, too, how Google products — even those popular with their users — sometimes just fade away.  Nobody wants to continue to support it, so the product dies.

Google is not your father’s software company, that’s for sure.  The fact that it works so well (makes so much money) comes down to the realization I had that Google isn’t a software company at all.  It’s an advertising company.

Ah, now THAT makes sense.

I, Cringely readers from the Boston area who want to see if I reflect light in person can run that controlled experiment next Thursday, September 17th, when I speak to the Society for Information Management’s Boston Chapter.  Here’s the link. My topic is Consumerization of IT: Is Corporate IT about to Lose Control Again? The answer of course is “yes,” but the devil is in the details. Please attend if you can.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

This morning Google announced it was spending $106 million in stock to buy On2, a maker of audio and video compression software.  The very logical question I don’t hear being asked, though, is why would Google spend money for something it is already getting pretty much for free?  It’s to turn yet another partner into a competitor, this time Adobe Systems.

Google already uses On2 codecs in Adobe’s Flash video, which is the very heart of its YouTube video streaming service.  On2 powers YouTube’s so-called High Quality or HQ service, which due to competitive pressures on YouTube is likely to soon become YouTube’s standard codec.

It is important to remember that Flash video was not a significant competitor until it was embraced by the pre-Google YouTube.  Flash video simply wasn’t that good.  It relied on an antiquated H.263 codec that was originally intended for video conferencing and, while fast, was of not particularly good quality.  But quality didn’t matter to the early YouTube, just fast and reliable streaming connections, which a video conferencing codec could provide.

The lower quality of streaming video had the industry broadly turning away from streaming, moving to the download delivery model championed by Apple with iTunes.  Then YouTube changed everything seemingly overnight.

The important Internet video standards then were Windows Media and QuickTime with Flash video an also-ran.  But how times have changed!  In terms of total connections and streams, Flash video is now the Big Kahuna by a long shot.  And while both QuickTime and Windows Media have moved up-market a bit with their superior H.264 and VC-1 codecs, Flash isn’t far behind with On2 and H.264, itself.

But it isn’t for YouTube alone that Flash must die.  Flash is a combination of an interpreted runtime application environment AND various media containers and codecs.  Well Google has its own runtime environment now in Javascript VM to take on both Adobe’s Flash and Microsoft’s Silverlight.

Adobe and Google have been on a collision course for some time.  Adobe competes with Google Docs, for example, and now they’ll compete on video, too.  And with more than half of all Internet video already going through one Google platform or another, this is an instance where Google probably has the advantage.

With Google finally under some earnings pressure and Internet advertising flat, the company has to enter new markets with new services to gain new profit centers.  It happens all the time in maturing companies.

Just as YouTube gave Flash video its huge success, so Google is now trying to take it away.

A couple times per year the New York Times calls me up asking for an Op-Ed column on some technology topic.  I don’t know how they found me but I’ve been writing these pieces since 1995.  I think they call because I’m good at meeting tight deadlines.  Lord knows that if there was a piece I actually wanted to get in the Times (my idea, not theirs) I have no confidence that I could get them to run it.  Op-Ed at the Times — at least to me — is a sort of black box.

Here’s the column they asked for on Google’s Chrome OS: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/13/opinion/13cringely.html

The opinions expressed, as always, are ruthlessly my own.