Utterly fantastic article in Fast Company by Farhad Manjoo about the greatest tech showdown of our time, all likely going fully thermonuclear next year. With players like Apple, Facebook, Google and Amazon in the mix, this isn’t the minor leagues. Who winds up on top here controls the innovation economy moving forward, and there are sane arguments for each as the winner. The following excerpt sums up the vast power and influence these companies have over our technological lives:

To state this as clearly as possible: The four American companies that have come to define 21st-century information technology and entertainment are on the verge of war. Over the next two years, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google will increasingly collide in the markets for mobile phones and tablets, mobile apps, social networking, and more. This competition will be intense. Each of the four has shown competitive excellence, strategic genius, and superb execution that have left the rest of the world in the dust. HP, for example, tried to take a run at Apple head-on, with its TouchPad, the product of its $1.2 billion acquisition of Palm. HP bailed out after an embarrassingly short 49-day run, and it cost CEO Léo Apotheker his job. Microsoft’s every move must be viewed as a reaction to the initiatives of these smarter, nimbler, and now, in the case of Apple, richer companies.

And:

According to Nielsen, Android now powers about 40% of smartphones; 28% run Apple’s iOS. But here’s the twist: Android could command even 70% of the smartphone business without having a meaningful impact on Apple’s finances. Why? Because Apple makes a profit on iOS devices, while Google and many Android handset makers do not. This is part of a major strategic difference between Apple and the other members of the Fab Four. Apple doesn’t need a dominant market share to win. Everyone else does.

If you asked me to list the four biggest players in the tech space, this is the list I’d jot down.  And the scary thing? I’m a customer of each.  In Google and Facebook’s case, I am the product itself.

2012 will be anything but dull.

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Paul Thurrott:

And I’d also point out that Google licenses Android for free. So by raising the price of Android by imposing licensing fees on technologies Android is in fact using, Apple, Microsoft, and others are arguably simply leveling the playing field and taking away an artificial Android advantage, forcing the OS to compete more fairly. Arguably, by “dumping” Android in the market at no cost, Google—which has unlimited cash and can afford to do such a thing — is behaving in an anticompetitive fashion. In fact, one could argue that Google is using its dominance in search advertising to unfairly gain entry into another market by giving that new product, Android, away for free. Does this remind you of any famous antitrust case?

I’ve been saying this exact same thing for weeks to anyone who will listen.

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Florian Mueller over at FOSS Patents:

Judge Alsup — the federal judge presiding over this litigation — attaches a great deal of importance to that particular document. At a recent hearing, he essentially said that a good trial lawyer would just need that document “and the Magna Carta” (arguably the origin of common law) to win this case on Oracle’s behalf and have Google found to infringe Oracle’s rights willfully. The judge told Google that “you are going to be on the losing end of this document” with “profound implications for a permanent injunction”. Let me add that a finding of willful infringement would not only make an injunction much more likely than otherwise. It can also result in a tripling of whatever damages will be awarded. […]

It’s certainly remarkable that those two emails show a consistent attitude: the Android team basically says “let’s just infringe” whenever an intellectual property issue comes up. If they did this to Oracle, what about the intellectual property of other companies like Apple, Microsoft, eBay and Skyhook?

It might not be immediately, it might not even be soon, but Google’s eventually going to be in real IP/patent trouble.

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When I tell people I do web/social media marketing work, that basically I’m a full-on web nerd, they look at me funny.  Like, “Oh, how long have you been unemployed?” funny.  After we get past that initial awkwardness, they invariably ask two things: (1) Can social media help my business? And (2) What is your computer hardware/software setup like?

For this Friday post, I will tackle both questions.

For (1): yes.

For (2), I will answer in the format of The Setup’s interviews, because I can read that stuff all day and have found some excellent software from them.  Here goes.

What hardware are you using?

In the office, I use a super-gonzo Dell Precision laptop running Windows 7 Professional connected to three 24″ monitors.  Multiple monitors are the single best thing you can add to your setup next to a jetpack to improve productivity, and I would be far, far slower without them.  If you don’t have multiple monitors but can afford them/are allowed to by your IT team, you’re cheating yourself.

At home, I use a pretty banged-up early 2008 MacBook Pro with 4 GB of RAM that’s connected to a 2002 HP 2335 LCD monitor.  I use Apple’s wired keyboard because I have to have a number pad for data crunching, and I have a filthy — disgusting, really — Logitech wireless mouse whose model number I can’t remember because it was made before the dawn of language.

I have a first-gen iPad that I use for everything except longform content creation.  It’s awesome, if a bit heavy and sharp-edged.  Still, it has replaced a laptop for 90% of my tasks when my son isn’t stealing it to play Dungeon Raid.

Right next to my iPad you’ll almost always find my iPhone 4, which I take with me everywhere.  Literally, everywhere.  Well, except the shower and the gym, but aside from those caveats, everywhere.  I’m not sure if I own it or it owns me.  I suspect the latter.

And what software?

Being a web dork means having a romantic relationship with your browser, and I am an unrepentant Chrome devotee.  It runs on both my work and home laptops.

For longform writing, I get all weird: I will use Ommwriter, WriteRoom, BBEdit, Sublime Text or even the WordPress editor.  It depends on my current propensity to get distracted.  For a pure, clean blogging on the Mac, I couldn’t live without MarsEdit.  On Windows, Windows Live Writer 2011 is pretty solid, if a bit slow (thanks .NET!).

For mail, I am a gigantic Gmail nerd.  Gmail might be the best implementation of email in the world.  And by might I mean is.  At work, I have to tolerate Outlook, which is really starting to feel like something wet, angry and smelly that crawled onto my computer from the late 1990s.  Because it is.

For keeping the soul-crushing silence at bay and the voices in my head arguing amongst themselves instead of with me, I fire up iTunes or Rdio.  Lately, a lot has been Rdio.

For keeping track of stuff, I use Notational Velocity on my Mac and SimpleNote on the web and iPhone/iPad.  I would probably keel over dead within a half hour without Dropbox.  Whenever I have a thought that doesn’t fall apart like a soggy box after a few seconds of critique, it goes into one of these apps for later curation.

For photography, I use a Nikon D90, Canon S90, or my iPhone 4 (don’t laugh — it’s the most popular camera on Flickr).  For post work, I use iPhoto, Photoshop CS5 and occasionally Acorn, which is a terrific OSX application that does, for me, 90% of what I use Photoshop for.  On my iPhone, I am a huge Instagram evangelist, along with Camera+ and Photogene.

For social media stuff, I use Tweetdeck on Windows (still wish it was a web app though) and the official Twitter client on my Mac.  I have an entire monitor devoted to Facebook, blogs and Google+ sessions running in Chrome.

What would be your dream setup?

My MacBook Pro is getting long in the tooth, and the screen does a weird flicker thing against certain gray backgrounds, so I’ve been thinking about a replacement.  I’m torn between two masters: portability and power.  The idea of a new 27″ quad-core iMac is very appealing because of the screen real estate and power, but it’s a desktop and who buys those anymore?  On the other hand, I’m waiting for Apple to stop being so jerky and release the new MacBook Airs with the Sandy Bridge architecture so maybe that will be enough power and I can nerd out in lightweight, sealed, portable style.  (That option might actually steal time from the iPad.)

Oh, and I’d like software that does what I think, no questions asked.  That’d be cool.  Also, Google search box for my brain because, yeah, it’s come to that.

Shut up about your dumb nerd stuff.  Do you have any links?

Yes, yes I do.

This man won $3.4 million — and then went back to work as a janitor.  The world needs more people like this.

Here’s a site that provides the best introductory books for myriad topics.  Tons of browsing pleasure here, folks.

Have a good weekend, everyone.

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If you’ve paid attention to our recent post in which we discussed the newly-unveiled PeopleTools 8.52 Release Value Proposition, then maybe you noticed that Oracle stated its intention to support Chrome as a browser.  This is interesting, not only because Chrome is the new browser darling of the alpha nerd set, but also because it’s pretty enterprise-unfriendly: Google releases new Chrome iterations very aggressively.   Nonetheless, Oracle seems to know there’s a ton of momentum behind it.

Here’s Mark Hoernemann on The PeopleSoft Technology Blog explaining PeopleSoft’s rationale:

Currently, we’re looking at adopting a minimum version of Chrome 10, that’s very likely to change with Google’s aggressive release schedule.   Look in My Oracle Support under Certifications when 8.52 goes GA later this year to see what the minimum version actually is.

We weren’t looking for additional browsers to add to the mix, just to see how big we can make the testing matrix, that’s for sure, so why did we make the change?  Customer input and market share were two big reasons.  As companies process external resumes and university students look to sign up for classes, more and more are looking to use Chrome.  One can find market shares all over the board depending on where you look and what you want to see.  However, the adoption rate of Chrome has been impressive any way you look at it. Wikipedia tracks multiple sources following Chrome’s adoption rates and they range anywhere from Net Applications’ 12.5% to StatCounter’s 19.4% as of May 2011.

I know a great many people who use Chrome in an enterprise environment.  Not every organization supports it, and certainly there will be application incompatibilities, but very quickly Chrome has become The Real Deal in the browser landscape.  Kudos to the PeopleSoft browser team for recognizing and supporting this.

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Google has quietly unveiled a service called What Do You Love? which is essentially a way for a user to search on a topic and have results returned categorically, by Google product, and easily-parsible.  From playing with it for about ten minutes, it seems to be a result aggregator that includes results across a wide range of Google product/services: Images, Maps, Trends, News, Groups, Translate, Mobile, Chrome, Alerts, Earth, SketchUp, Blog Search, and so on.

For example, here’s what a search for ‘PeopleSoft’ returns.

For me, this is…cute.  For now, that’s the best word I can come up with. I don’t see it ever replacing my standard Google search behavior, and I’m already a power user of Google’s services, so I pretty much know their portfolio.  For users who only see Google as a search engine, or who are just now dipping their toes in more robust web apps, this is a great showcase for Google’s results displayed across a showcase for its myriad products.

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David Linthicum, writing for InfoWorld:

The difference with that use of cloud computing compared to the Chromebook’s is that I’m not forced to be completely dependent on the cloud for these services; I can mix and match them to meet my specific needs. I don’t think I’m alone in wanting that freedom.

Thus, Chromebooks could be to laptops what Google TV was to cable TV: a great idea in concept, but not thought through as to how the device would be used in the real world by real people. The innovative nature of the Chromebook won’t get around its inherent limitations.

Such a tough call; when the iPad came out, first-blush reactions were that it was nothing more than a ‘big iPod touch.” 18 months later, anyone who still holds that opinion hasn’t used an iPad.

So when I read stuff like this, I wonder if the author has actually used one of the soon-to-be-shipping Chromebook models from Acer or Samsung.  I’m guessing not.

I understand his theoretical objection: the Chromebook is simply a cloud client.  If your network connection dies, you’re out of business.  If you’re in an area without a network connection, your machine is probably functionally worthless.  Local storage is limited, and the idea of local apps — something everyone’s familiar with — is non-existent.

As I sit here and type this, though, I am doing 90% of my work in Google Chrome.  I’m entering this text in a WordPress bookmarklet, which spawns another Chrome window.  My only open local apps are Skype and Tweetdeck.  A few times during each day, I have to make a quick jaunt into Word or Excel, but the lifting is light: I could just as easily use Google Docs.  I don’t because I’m often doing a lot of edits, and docs come to me in MS Office formats.

My quibble with the Chromebooks center around their price (as many others have noted): $349 to $469?  That ain’t cheap, especially when you can get a full-on Windows 7 laptop for very close to that price.

I think the Chromebook concept is a good one, but I wonder if the timing is right.  The price might not be.  Aside from the nerd and web monkey populations out there (among which I count myself), I imagine the initial reaction will be, “It’s just a browser?”

That’s tough sledding.  You can explain local vs. cloud storage until you’re blue in the face, but people are going to have a hard time making such a macro adjustment.  Remember the backlash against Office’s ribbon-style toolbar when it came out?  You’d think someone took away users’ most important apps and entirely changed their computer.

Which is exactly what Google is trying to do.

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So it’s been a scant two-and-a-half months since I announced an experimental format change for these Friday Linkology posts, and today I have another announcement: we’re going back to the way things were.  Meaning, I will begin every Friday post with a preamble, which likely will make little sense, that will murkily tie together some stream-of-consciousness thoughts with hyphens or colons or something – anything – that resembles literary glue to make it readable.  From there, I will link to a few things that are completely random and unassociated, and you, the reader, will get to sort it all out as the last mental gyration you need to do before the weekend.  So in a sense it will be like a random and nonsensical workout in the gym before you hit that giant BBQ over the weekend, except not like that at all.  Apologies for the lousy metaphor, but you get my drift.

So, basically, the old Friday Linkology format is the new format.  The previous format is now old and shall never be spoken of again.

What prompted this, by the way?  Nothing short of a lunch in which I was told by colleagues that the previous format wasn’t as entertaining as the original, and if I didn’t go back to the original people (meaning: they) would complain, and I would have to deal with the complaints and I really don’t have the kind of time on my hands to indulge what I know would be persistent whining, so could I please just go back to writing what they considered funny stuff before the links?  Please?  And I said okay and looked at my colleagues nervously, noticing their wild-eyed, vibrating brio was a little more wild-eyed and vibrating than normal.

And that’s how it went down.

So here are some links that I hope you’ll find interesting.  You’ll note there are fewer of them than there were under the format-that-shall-not-be-spoken-of-again, but that’s because, if you’ve read this far, I see no need in punishing you further.  That said:

Are you a bad tipper?  Careful – you might wind up on the Internet.

Women shine in the hedge fund world.  Perhaps the benefit of a different perspective?

Derek K. Miller’s last blog post before colorectal cancer took him.  Moving, strong, dignified and brave.  So, so worth the read.

And on a brighter note: Dear Sophie, an excellent ad from Google.

Have a good weekend, everyone.

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