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Source:Valleywag

“Extraordinary. Incredible. Tremendous. Amazing. Unprecedented. Extraordinary (again). Great. Revolutionary. Great. Extraordinary (yes, again). Unbelievable.” All these words Steve Jobs used to describe the ultra-thin MacBook Air during yesterday’s Macworld keynote. And all without any apparent regard to how that makes laptops which aren’t so thin as the MacBook Air feel. Instead, it takes this brave video from YouTube auteur Kevin Nalts to expose the truth.

Source:Valleywag

Oracle has acquired BEA for $8.5 billion. Sun has acquired MySQL for $1 billion. These events are not coincidence. Oracle, which already makes a database, wants to add BEA’s software on top of that database. Sun, which makes application servers and other software which connects to databases, wants to slip MySQL in underneath that layer. It all adds up to what geeks and software salesmen call a “stack,” or a complete package of interconnecting programs.

The irony is that BEA rose to prominence on the notion that its application server would make things simpler for database buyers. Buy any database you’d like, and BEA’s application server would connect to it. Likewise, MySQL grew as a cheaper, open-source alternative to databases from IBM and Oracle.

A database here, an application server there, a bit of open-source software on top of that all sounds nice in theory. It proved in practice to be a headache for the influential tech buyers at large corporations. One salesperson calling on them, one phone number to dial when things went wrong, it turns out, is what they really wanted.

The consolidation was inevitable, if perhaps a bit sad. The goal of the stack game is to make sure that your software is the layer on top — the one that matters to programmers, the one applications are designed for. BEA and MySQL both had grand ambitions in that regard. Those are now coming to an end. Sun and Oracle will no doubt make grand statements about how compatible their software is, how well their children play with others. Ignore those. The history of IT tells us those promises are false.

Source:Valleywag

Remember the comparisons between Amazon’s Kindle and the iPod? Don’t try them on Apple CEO Steve Jobs. The Kindle was a bad idea, Jobs told the New York Times after yesterday’s Macworld keynote. “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.” Mmhmm, Mr. Jobs. And whose fault is that?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 5:02 pm and is filed under amazon.com, apple, ipod, steve jobs, Jeff Bezos, kindle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.