The UK's Guardian has a piece on Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU Project, in which he denounces Cloud Computing...

But Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the computer operating system GNU, said that cloud computing was simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time.

"It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign," he told The Guardian.

"Somebody is saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it's very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true."

The 55-year-old New Yorker said that computer users should be keen to keep their information in their own hands, rather than hand it over to a third party.

He's not wrong.  All the issues he outlines do exist.  But I think his view on things might be a little simplistic. 

Here's the thing, Cloud Computing is smart for people who don't have a huge need for computing resources.  It's a means of cost sharing dedicated hardware, knowledgeable staff, and all the other perks of a big IT infrastructure between several other businesses.  Which in turn makes it far cheaper than the other options available.  Its an equalizer for companies that can't afford a full time IT staff or a room full of servers. 

In that respect, I disagree with Mr. Stallman.  Or more accurately, I think he's right but I think the lock-in threat is outweighed by the benefits provided to small business.

As far as large business is concerned, it makes no earthly sense at all.  If you are doing enough business to be able to afford your own infrastructure and professional staff than you'd be a fool to use cloud computing as your primary system.  Because its a one to one correlation. 

If you can afford your own professional staff and infrastructure than Amazon can't undercut you unless they are cutting corners (not saying they are or would, just speaking hypothetically).  You have the same resources available to you as they have to them plus they need to make a continuous profit on top of that.  The only advantage they might have is a discount based on scale but there's no way an initial savings could make up for their profit margin over time.

With that said, there are obviously shades of gray here.  You might need slightly more storage space, or slightly more computing resources, or whatever.  Each situation is different and a dedicated IT person can make judgements accordingly. 

The bottom line is that Cloud Computing, like anything else, is just another tool for IT infrastructure.  No more, no less.  It isn't going to completely change the industry but it shouldn't be avoided completely either.  It's just another way of doing things. 

As a brief follow-up to my last economic post I wanted to point out a few economic indicators.

Again, I'm not saying these numbers are good or that the housing crisis isn't a serious issue.  But in comparison to what they could be these numbers aren't bad either. 

• The Dow closed at 11,143 on Sep. 26 (right before the crisis began).  It now stands at 10,859.  That's a 284 point drop which is bad but hardly a catastrophe (and with a bailout in limbo I don't think Wall Street could get more nervous than it is right now)
• Unemployment is 6.1% (keep in mind that includes a permanent unemployment rate of about 4% which includes Students, Housewives, and others who aren't seeking work)
• GDP Increased 3.3% in the 2nd quarter of '08
• The Consumer Price Index declined .1% in August (a good thing, increase means growing Inflation).  That's the first decline in 2 years.
• Retail Sales fell by .3% in August 2008

Again, the issue isn't "are the numbers good?", they aren't.  But are they terrible?  Are they catastrophic?  Are they the beginning of another great depression? 

No, they aren't. 

This isn't a good situation.  No one's saying it is.  We're almost certainly headed for a recession, I don't think anyone's denying that.  There will be job losses, there will be credit crunches and none of it's going to be pleasant.

But the sky is not falling and I think everyone needs to keep that in mind.

OK, this is getting a little out of hand.  Like bad financial news has a habit of doing, this crisis is being blown into way more than it actually is.  So just to put in my (informed) 2 cents...There is not going to be another Great Depression

Lets look at the major factors that caused the Great Depression in the first place...

1.  Stock Market Crash of 1929: Newsflash folks, the stock market hasn't crashed.  The news isn't going to get much worse than it is right now and the stock market, at worst, dipped (and the truth is it has recovered from all the previous dips making the end result almost nil thus far). 

Bottom Line: Not happening so far.

2.  Bank Failures: Guess What, this isn't happening either.  At least, not in the same way.  When banks failed in the 30s that meant your money disappeared with them.  That can't happen now.  We have things like FDIC insurance to prevent it.  Beyond that fact, it's important to remember that the largest banks (BofA, Wells Fargo, etc...) aren't close to going out of business.  In fact, they're doing well enough to buy out the banks that are failing.

Bottom Line: Not happening so far

3.  The Gold Standard: This is a vast over simplification, I'll admit it, but that said it's still true that the U.S. Government can essentially print more money in a crisis.  They couldn't do that in the 30s.  In the 30s we were tied to the Gold Standard which meant the government was tied to a fixed amount of currency to work with.  The Gold Standard has since been abandon by every single modern Government for just that reason.

Bottom Line: Not happening anymore, EVER!

4.  Inflation caused by an Economic Boom: Keep in mind the 20s was a time of an economic boom which meant prices were at an all time high.  When everything crashed the prices didn't automatically snap to fit which meant an economic disaster.  We haven't been in an economic boom for over a decade at this point and were in fact already seeing the beginnings of a recession when this economic crisis came to the forefront. 

Bottom Line: Not happening.

5.  Massive Wage Decline: They didn't even have a minimum wage in the 30s (it was introduced in 1938 as a response to the depression).  That meant that wages could decline to almost nothing.  So businesses in a crunch drove wages down to essentially nothing which completely eliminated 90% of spending and sent the economy into a tailspin.  That can't happen now.

Bottom Line: Not happening

6.  Europe in Chaos: People forget that Europe was ravaged by World War I which left it economically unstable.  That in turn deprived the U.S. of it's primary trading partner while at the same time causing European countries to default on loans given to them by U.S. banks.  Not only is Europe not in economic chaos right now but the U.S. has tons more trading partners (China, Japan, etc...)

Bottom Line: Not happening.

7. The Drought of the 1930s: In the 30s there was a combination of dust storms and drought (commonly referred to as the "Dust Bowl") which put tons of farms out of business.  At a time when the U.S. Economy was largely driven by farming this had disasterous results on the economy.  It closed down farms, drove more people into poverty and made food a scare resource to boot.  But now we have technology to prevent such an event from having a dramatic effect on our farms and even if it did we massively over produce food and subsidize farms so it wouldn't drive anyone out of business.  On top of all that it also needs to be mentioned that farming is not what drives the American economy anymore either.

Bottom Line: Not happening.

So you can see this is a completely different situation and it's far from the severity of the Great Depression.  I don't doubt we're headed for a recession but that's economic reality.  Recessions happen.  But recessions are only made worse by people over reacting to them.  When you have supposed "experts" claiming this minor dip invalidates American Economic Policy for the last 25 years you know everyone has lost their heads. 

From The Register's article entitled "Adobe cites bad blood for closed Flash"

Adobe Systems' Flash has long dominated PCs and the web, but the company has been under slowly mounting pressure to open source the player's source code.

This came to a head recently when Dion Almaer, co-founder of Ajaxian.com and Google's open web advocate, delivered a talk on the state of AJAX at Google Developer Day in London. I asked Almaer why Google makes little use of Adobe Systems' Flash, YouTube aside, and he gave a forthright answer.

Flash is not "open enough," he said, explaining that the Flash player is not open source and its development is not driven by the community. Google likes the technology, he added, and its closed-source status is a matter of ongoing discussion.

I am as pro-Open Source as a person can be but this type of thing bothers me. 

When Mr. Almer says Flash "isn't open enough" I wish someone had countered with "as opposed to what?"  Certainly not AJAX (Google's tool of choice).  It's not like you can make changes to what's going on in Javascript or change the way an XMLHttpRequest is executed. 

CSS 2 was feature complete in 1998 and browsers still don't implement it right.  CSS 3 has been in development for just about ever and doesn't appear close to being done much less implemented.  I guarantee, GUARANTEE Adobe would implement features requested by Google faster than the standards group behind CSS could get it approved and implemented into all the major browsers.

So how exactly is AJAX preferable to FLASH on the "Open Scale"?

I mean, the whole benefit of open source is the ability to add things when you need them.  If Flash, closed source as it is, can implement features faster than wouldn't it be the better solution?

The problem with this, and a lot of the openness talk, is that the solution has become separated from the problem being solved.  If you focus on the actual problem (getting new features implemented in a timely manner) Adobe's Flash wins hands down.  But people have become so obsessed with the word "Open" that they've forgotten why they wanted openness in the first place.

Yesterday Scoble released a list that I found interesting...

This is my hand-picked list of the people who provide the most interesting tech blogging/tweeting/FriendFeeding. All of these point to FriendFeed. If you know someone who deserves to be on this list, please post their FriendFeed URL. Mine is: http://friendfeed.com/scobleizer

Before going on, please allow me to deflect the most obvious criticism this post may receive...

"Your just mad because you aren't on the list!"

Uh....No.  I'm a very small fish in a very large pond.  I don't expect anyone to know me and, to be honest, the few times I've run into someone who did know me from this blog is scared the ^@$@ out of me. 

So If you mention my name to Scoble and his reaction isn't to squint his eyes and ask "You mean Tom Foremski?" than I'd be a little disappointed.  What's the point of being an A-Lister if you can't ignore people like me?

That being said, on to my point...

I read about 85% of the people on Scoble's list and I can tell you for a fact that the list represents a painfully one sided view of the world.  There are maybe 5 people on there that don't agree 100% with Scoble's world view and even those 5 probably score 75% to 85% agreement.  Anyone lower than that just isn't there.

Take someone like Drama 2.0 (who I know Scoble's aware of because he's commented on his blog several times in the past).  The guy's smart and he's a decent writer.  A little rough in his delivery but no more so than someone like Dave Winer or Chris Pirillo (both on the list).  But beyond that roughness I don't see any reason for him not to be there.  The list has several people who post the same kind of editorial content like John Furrier and Fred Wilson (and all three are favorites of mine so I would know).

The only difference is the opinion stated in that content.

Now some will ask "isn't it ok to not share a link to someone you disagree with?"  Well, to be blunt, No it isn't.  At least, not if you claim to be open minded.  Being open minded means embracing ideas you don't agree with and embracing those ideas means sharing them with others so that others can make up their own minds.  It means recognizing the validity of those who oppose your world view and caring enough about those you share information with to give them every valid point. 

What makes this important isn't that I believe Scoble is close minded it's that I honestly believe he doesn't know it.

People assume that open mindedness just comes.  That its easy and will happen naturally.  But nothing could be further from the truth.   Open mindedness means sitting through content that is often times so infuriating that it makes you grit your teeth and then forcing yourself to reflect on it until you can see what the other person is saying.  It's not easy, it's not fun, but it is a necessary step to avoiding closed mindedness.  That's why this is important.

Finally, for those who would say this isn't a "tech topic" I beg to differ.  The so-called "Web 2.0" revolution is about information and  becoming smarter and wiser based on that information.  I'd argue (and I'd be right) that you can have all the information in the world and it doesn't do you a bit of good unless you're open minded enough to look at all of it fairly.

Bottom Line: If you only listen to people just like you than you might as well not be listening at all.

Addendum: OK, to a certain extent doofus points for me because Scoble does specifically say that he's pointing to FriendFeed users and (as was pointed out in an e-mail to me) Drama 2.0 doesn't have a FriendFeed account.  That said, I was just using him as an example and if I were willing to dig through my Google Reader account I know there are others (with FriendFeed accounts) that make the same point.

I don't read Don Reisinger as a general rule.  I used to but his pieces just became more and more thoughtless.  I got to the point where I simply found them agitating.  A good example of that is this quote from his post entitled "Why iPhone developers should defect to Android"

But the main problem with developing for Android is that the hardware isn't uniform. Some Android-based phones will sport touch-screens, while others will not. That makes developing applications far more difficult, considering the possibility of dealing with a wide array of hardware. But then again, who cares? Rejected iPhone app developers can still create touch-screen Android apps and for those that don't have a touch-screen Android phone, well, they're out of luck.

But perhaps the most compelling reason why developers should defect to Android is because it will finally wake up Steve Jobs and company. Right now, I don't know why Apple should even care about all these developers crying about their beloved apps. The way I see it, they need Apple; Apple doesn't need them.

But if they defect to Android and the Android market becomes a real powerhouse, the whole game will change. Suddenly, Apple will need to take notice and realize the error of its ways.

Look, I haven't really commented on the new Android phone and there's a good reason for that.  It's irrelevant. 

Sure tech pundits will talk about it ad nauseam but the reality is this: The smallest cell phone network in the U.S. is releasing a phone built by a generic phone manufacturer that costs only $20 less than an iPhone and which is, according to every review so far, inferior to the iPhone. 

Looking realistically, I honestly don't understand how anyone can think this will be relevant in the broad market.

Sure you'll hear a lot of people say "but it's open and the iPhone's not" but to that I say "who cares?"  People don't buy a phone because it's an open platform.  In fact, people don't buy a phone based on available applications period.  They buy a phone for how good a phone it is (and more and more how good the built in applications are). 

Which is the biggest point: Cell. Phone platforms live and die on actual phone sales not available applications.

So even suggesting Developers should target Android over the iPhone right now is irresponsible.  It assumes that the number of developers moving over is somehow relevant and its simply not. 

Beyond that you're suggesting developers target a market of maybe, MAYBE a million Android phones vs 14 million iPhones plus who knows how many iPod Touchs (those are estimates through the year 2008).  It's foolishness.

So I've come to the conclusion that I'm going to feel compelled to make a few more of these process based political posts.  Again, I won't comment on the candidates, their views or my political opinions.  My interest is only in the strategic decisions and the lessons we all can learn from them. 

That said, this makes such a powerful point that I just couldn't pass it up. 

Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain jolted the 2008 race Wednesday by saying he’d suspend his campaign and come to the Capitol to help pass a bill to rescue the nation’s financial sector.

He also called for a postponement of the debate with his Democratic opponent Sen. Barack Obama, set for Friday night.

First, lets look at what McCain hopes to accomplish.  For the non-cynical among you this might be hard to hear but McCain isn't actually trying to help the bailout bill.

Realistically speaking no one person is going to make that big a difference in a discussion and especially not one who is knee deep in a partisan political election.  His being at the bargaining table on this bill only makes the thing harder to pass. 

What he's trying to do is to set himself up to take credit for the bill.  The theory is that he makes a grand gesture (stopping his campaign) and rushes to Washington to presumably "help the process."  The bill then passes (because some form of it has to) and he gets credit for pushing the bailout through which would be great PR and would push him to victory in November.

The problem with that theory is that its contingent on every Democrat in congress being stupid enough to not realize what he's doing. 

Lets look at this situation realistically now.  The other people in congress aren't idiots (at least, not in regards to politics).  They all know what McCain is doing and the Democrats know they can't allow him to succeed.  They'd be handing him the election.  So by suspending his campaign McCain has basically torpedoed the bailout bill.  

It is literally a game of chicken because the Democratic majority in Congress does not want to give McCain a win and will stall for as long as it takes to prevent that from happening.

So what now happens is that they stall and this backfires on McCain.  Because with no bill passing he either has to (a) eat his words and return to campaigning or (b) not campaign for the last half of the election.  Since "(b)" isn't really an option McCain has basically set himself up for a guaranteed fall. 

The point of this post, which I feel is so important, is how badly you can screw up when you choose to underestimate your opponents.  McCain seems to think a bunch of career politicians won't realize he's playing politics and that's just stupid.  So stupid, that it very well might cost him the election and you can't screw up any worse than that. 

Addendum: To the people sending me this link, Please stop. 

It doesn't change anything.  The question I was addressing above was McCain's decision to suspend his campaign.  That decision was purely strategic.

The link indicates McCain was asked to "give political cover" to Republicans by endorsing the Bailout Bill.  That's something McCain could easily do on the campaign trail.  Endorsing the bill does not require McCain to suspend his campaign and is therefore not relevant to the strategic decision being made.

2nd Addendum: It's days like this that make it hard for me to ignore politics completely because the strategy and "one-upmanship" is so fascinating.  This morning McCain made this statement

"I'm an old Navy pilot and I know when a crisis calls for all hands on deck. I cannot carry on a campaign as though this dangerous situation had not occurred, or as though a solution were at hand, which it clearly is not."

No more than a few hours later Sen. Dodd, Democrat and head of the Senate Banking Committee, released a statement saying they'd reached an agreement on the "Fundamental Principles" of the bailout. 

That's hours before McCain got a chance to even have his meeting with the President (and is almost surely an attempt to make McCain look like an unnecessary reactionary).  Worse yet for McCain (and really suprising to me) was the quote from Bob Bennett (a Republican on the Banking Committee) who said "We focused on solving the problem rather than posturing politically."  That's a clear dig at McCain and I don't see any political strategy in it.  I think he was just annoyed at McCain for claiming their committee couldn't handle the situation (which is yet another reason why this was stupid on McCain's part)

Final Addendum: Sorry, I couldn't resist this one last update.  Apparently the bailout agreement is unraveling.  I'm sorry but this is just politics at its best.  Look at this from a political strategy angle.  The Democrats dealed so they could announce an agreement before McCain's big meeting (making his "campaign suspension" look like histrionics) and now they're pulling back after the meeting (making it look like McCain's intervention did more harm than good).  In addition to that McCain's still stalled so now he has to either skip the debate tomorrow (which everyone and their brother will now be watching) or eat his own words and resume his campaign with no bailout bill in place.  This is a disaster and McCain brought it all on himself.

For all those who think their opinion means something to Apple, I submit this...

Apple has gotten a significant amount of critical press surrounding its rejection policies in the App Store. A few high profile rejections have been widely reported and inspired at least one amusing comic.
Apparently, Apple has now started labeling their rejection letters with Non-Disclosure (NDA) warnings

Now THAT is classic Apple.  Take all the complaints and rather than respond to them, do just the opposite.  Become even more dictatorial about the whole thing. 

Here's the thing about Apple.  In a nutshell, they're control freaks.  That fact probably makes them bad people but it's exactly why they make great products. 

Apple isn't going to do what you want.  In fact, if you criticize Apple on something (see above) they may very well do just the opposite of what you want just to spite you. 

One of the facts I've come to accept in life is that most of the truly talented people in this world owe that talent more to their faults than their virtues.  Great leaders are almost always egomaniacal, great artists are almost always emotionally unstable and great product designers are almost always control freaks.  That's the way things work. 

The well-adjusted get to be well-adjusted (a reward in itself) but they rarely get to be great. 

So my advice is to accept it and move on.  Apple's contributions still far out weight the company's character flaws and that's really all that matters in the end.  The rest is just whining at the inevitable. 

On the whole SanDisk slotMusic venture I think it's a loser.  So much so I'm not even going to comment on it (see the whole Techmeme thread here if you're interested).  But what I did want to comment on is this quote I found on Mathew Ingram's blog...

You have to give SanDisk some credit for trying, I suppose. Just about everyone else — including the four major record labels — seems to have given up on the business of selling actual physical copies of music. Why? Because it’s a crappy business, that’s why.

Hmmmmmm...that's interesting.  I did not know Record Labels had completely given up on Physical CD sales.  Thank God I had someone who has no involvement in the music industry whatsoever to tell me that.

:)

Seriously though, What Mr. Ingram is no doubt referring to is the fact that (a) Digital Sales surpassed Physical Sales in the last year and (b) Physical CD Sales declined by 14% overall.  This is a common argument made by the so-called "Freetards" to suggest that music is going all digital which they believe to be a step towards the eventual adoption of music being entirely free. 

But here's the thing, those numbers are skewed.  Lets look at them for a second.  Here's a quote from Ars Technica on the numbers in question...

In both the US and Britain, digital sales saw nearly a 50 percent boost over the 2006 numbers. 844.2 million digital tracks were moved in the US and another 77 million in the UK. While this is good news in the face of physical CD sales that declined by 14 percent from 2006, the more significant issue at stake here is the decline of full album sales. With digital stores allowing customers to purchase just the tracks they want, record labels may have to be content with lowered revenues as people reject the high prices and fluff tracks found in all too many albums.

Sounds good but what they don't tell you is that they're talking Unit Sales.  In other words, Digital Sales mean 1 track while Physical Sales mean 1 CD.  If you look here you'll find the actual numbers for Physical CD sales in 2006 which was 703.9 Million Albums.  Using the Ars Technica numbers above (of a 14% decline) that puts the 2007 number at about 605.3 Million Albums in the U.S (you'll hear 511 Million but that number doesn't seem to cover the deep catalog sales). 

Now, assuming 12 tracks per Physical CD that means 7,263 Million Physical Tracks were sold vs 844.2 Million Digital Tracks.  That's close to 9 times as many Physical tracks being sold.

Now, for the record I do think Physical CD sales and album sales as a whole are due for even more drops in the future.  Music companies have gotten away with "padding" CDs with lackluster tracks for a while now and the digital market is now taking that ability away.  Obviously there will be fall out. 

But to suggest that CD sales are so bad that the labels have "given up" on them is just comical.  That, along with the Ars Technica numbers above, show just how far people are willing to entrench themselves into an obviously false version of the world in order to justify believing what they want (as opposed to what is true). 

Ted Dziuba has a post today entitled "OpenSocial, OpenID, and Google Gears: Three Technologies for history's dustbin".  I'm going to take each one of those technologies separately...

Hey, does anybody remember Google's OpenSocial? Come on, it hasn't even been a year since it was announced. OpenSocial was supposed to unify social network application developers behind one common API. Revolutionary, innovative, all that sh*t.

Well, OpenSocial was designed as a stopgap for the Facebook API and in that sense it worked.  Facebook opened up it's own API to compete which in many ways created the commoditization of the API that Google was targeting to begin with.

So OpenSocial will probably end up on the dustbin but it served it's purpose just the same.

Still nothing? Ah, okay. What about OpenID, the best damned federated authentication scheme the world has ever seen, but nobody in the world can figure out how to use?

On this I think he has a somewhat valid point.  He goes on to say that "If there's one thing all engineers love to do, it's create APIs" and I think there's some truth to that.  The problem with OpenID from the start has been that it solves a problem that users really don't seem to care about. 

Of what value is OpenID to a bunch of people who keep their password written down on a post-it stuck to their monitor? 

Beyond that OpenID takes something from the vendor that they value very much:lock-in.  Someone with an established Amazon ID is more likely to buy from Amazon than Buy.com.  But if Amazon and Buy.com both adopt OpenID than the user can just as easily purchase from either.  So why would Amazon allow users to sign up for an OpenID on their site?  They wouldn't and that's pretty much the global problem with OpenID. 

Users don't care enough to force its adoption and Vendors do care enough to block it.  Given that I have to ask how they thought they'd succeed in the first place. 

If not, surely you must have heard of Google Gears. This was the Firefox plug-in that was supposed to establish Google as a first-rate operating system vendor, even before Chrome was supposed to do the exact same thing?

Now we get to the ignorant part.

Gears (Sans the Google now) has actually been enjoying a lot of success for a platform in what is essentially an early beta stage.  The point with Gears is that it actually does solve a problem that developers have and I think that will serve it well in the future.  With all the companies that have adopted it or have announced plans to I don't see any reason to declare it dead.

Also, Gears was not just a  Firefox plug-in.  It is currently supported in IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera has even gone so far as to build support into both its desktop and mobile browser. 

Finally, Gears is being designed to converge with the (long in coming) HTML 5 spec.  Meaning that Google is actively submitting the various pieces of Gears as standards and there's every reason to believe they'll be adopted.  Making it even less likely that Gears will "disappear" in the future.