Dana Blankenhorn

Sometimes a Nut Finds the Squirrel

When Rep. Michele Bachmann said on the campaign trail she could bring back $2/gallon gas the reaction ranged from skepticism to derision.

But it revealed something really important about our present economy. While everyone has been focused on the debt, we've actually gone through another oil shock. I believe that's an opportunity, but opportunities take time to pursue, and in the meantime you have serious inflation.

We haven't seen this inflation reflected in prices because we've been taking it out in growth. Rising employment, falling incomes, lower investment returns (despite rising profits) they're all clear evidence of what is happening. Until we can de-link growth from oil prices, until we can make oil prices irrelevant in economic calculations, that tail will wag our dog.

Which brings me back to Bachmann.

Why They Still Don't Get Linux

Linux is turning 20 and having a party in Canada to celebrate.

It makes sense. Canadians understand Linux in ways Americans just don't, or don't want to.

Linux is shared infrastructure. Linux is not profit-oriented. Linux is not a business.

Americans are not set up to think that way. And it has gotten much worse in the 20 years since Linus Torvalds released his first code. Free enterprise has moved from being the way America worked to becoming an ideology, and finally a theology, driven by a small economic elite which, led by the oil oligarchy, is now driving the crisis in American politics.

Yet Linux is 110% American. Sure Linus Torvalds is a Finn, but he's lived in America for many years, in Portland, and he is by all accounts quite happy, raising a family, sitting in the center of a vast network of contributions both personal and corporate, directing a project he loves.

To me, that's an American success story. I don't think he could do this in Helsinki. There are too many languages in Europe, too many opposing trips-and-dramas, too much intrigue. The markets are, individually, too small to scale. The way every European open source business I know of grows is to first exhaust its home market's opportunities and then come to America.

Here's what is great about Linus Torvalds, and Linus' America.

Google is All-In

 

A year ago, at ZDNet, I was railing against Google crapware.

The Samsung “Android” phone I'd gotten from my AT&T store was filled with crapware – programs placed there by AT&T and Samsung. Some seemed to want me to pay for things I knew the phone could do for free. And I couldn't get rid of them. Still can't.

This is hurting Google's brand, I wrote. When people get an Android phone they expect that Google is standing somewhere behind it. Even if they got it from a carrier, no matter whose brand name is on it, there are brand expectations here the phone's not meeting. What I found on reading other blogs and investigating things further was that, not only was this the case, but there seemed to be little the company could do about it.

Turned out there was.

Over the last year Google has steadily taken more-and-more control over Android. They updated my software, in the background, and it's better. They imposed new conditions on OEMs and stopped talking so much about the Open Handset Alliance in favor of the Android brand. Now the main differences I note between my phone and my daughter's iPhone are that my GPS is an energy hog, and her music integrates well with her phone.

The news peg here is Google's purchase of Motorola Mobility, the shank half of the Motorola ham, for $10.5 billion, which includes a $2.5 billion “breakup fee,” money that will go to Motorola if for any reason the deal isn't consummated. 

Much of the early talk about the deal was it was about patents. Motorola has thousands of patents. But as Florian Mueller notes at his excellent blog FossPatents, Motorola is in court against Microsoft, Apple and many trolls over other patents, and Motorola's court cases are not going well.

No, this is about control. By having a real Google phone, designed by Motorola and produced under Google's direction, in the marketplace, Google sets a bar for every other Android phone maker (think Samsung and HTC). By having its own name and design out in the market, and its own name on Motorola's lawsuits, Google can also face the legal difficulties of its OEMs squarely, like the sibling whose kid brother is getting beat up and finally comes outside.

“You want a piece of me? You want a piece of The Goog? Well here I am, come and get me.”

Which they will.

A DARPANet Program for Renewables

Everyone knows about the Apollo program. They know about the race to the Moon, and they know about all the technologies spun-out from it.

The publicity pay-off won't be nearly so great from the Pentagon's latest mega-plan, the Energy Initiatives Task Force, but the financial pay-off should be much greater.

Fact is our military is more vulnerable to an oil shock than any civilian agency. It takes enormous amounts of energy to stay in a place like Afghanistan, and those supply lines can be cut rather easily. The Army has been experimenting with “solar tents” in-country for a few years, tents covered in thin-film solar panels that can run the devices needed for command-and-control. But the rest of even a small base must still be powered from outside, and those supplies must come through hostiles at great risk to life.

Rioting Against Murdochism

I've been reading a lot of commentary about the recent riots in England, and everyone is trotting out their favorite villain.

It's those kids. They're evil. They were pampered growing up, and should have been given the rod. That seems to be the mainstream viewpoint. (Yet, as you see at the right, the rioters weren't kids.)

It's pretty insane. You lead kids toward college, you take it (and their hope) away, you lose all the other jobs, or they're going to foreigners, and then you're surprised when people are angry. Really? Really.

You feed them a complete lack of values on TV all their lives, you demonstrate this lack of ethics in the daily lives of the rich and powerful every day, and then you come at young rioters with pious self-righteousness about how they're the problem and need to be put down.

It's pretty insane, if you think about it. If I were a young Englishman, undereducated and without hope, I might be getting myself a stick and hitting a CCTV camera, too.

Actually the cause of this rioting is pretty easy to see, but no one seems to be talking about it.

It's a reaction against Murdochism.

The Changing I.T. Barbell (and what it means)

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 34 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

Information Technology, or I.T., often simply IT, has generally been a balance between central resources and the user.

In the mainframe era, the user had to be right next to the central computer to get anything out of it. I am actually old enough to remember standing around in a room, while a DEC minicomputer hummed under air conditioning nearby, waiting for a print-out to tell me if my feeble program had run. (It hadn't.) In response to this "output," I had to change my "input." I had to make new punch cards, on a typewriter, after editing my program on paper. With a pencil.

Local Area Networks, and the original Internet, gave people some distance from their computers in the 1970s. The creation of a standard user interface -- a TV screen for output, a typewriter for input, floppies for storage  -- helped. By 1979 I had a neighbor who had installed a $20,000 Cromemco in her living room, connected via phone lines to $5,000 terminals at employee homes, all typing court transcripts at $1 per printed page.

The LAN era got us through the 1980s, and the Internet was really an extension of that, only with different standards. The two ends of the barbell remained the same -- a server in a room (sometimes a closet) on one end, a client on a TV with a typewriter on the other. The balance was constantly shifting, as first clients got more powerful, then servers.

By the turn of this century there were really three balance points on the barbell. There was still the TV-typewriter on one end, there was still the Internet on the other, but between there were "enterprise systems" of various sizes, ranging from managed server farms to simple servers in storage closets. All three parts of the system grew in size, complexity, and expense, for hardware, software, and services.

The last five years have seen a complete transformation of this balance.

 

Understanding Open Source and Cloud

Open source has something important in common with renewable energy. They're both inevitable, but tough for an investor to play.

The problem in both cases is there are few pure plays. There's Red Hat RHT , and most of the rest remain privately held. And is that even a pure play, or is it more of a cloud thing these days? Based on its recent price earnings multiple, I'd say the latter.

It's even worse in renewable energy. The only pure play in solar is First Solar FSLR, but their cadmium telluride technology isn't mainstream. They're sort of the Apple Computer of the space – highly proprietary and resistant to standards. In wind there's American Superconductor AMSC, but their wind play turned out to be a mistake. They bought a line from a big Chinese company and they're paying the price.

This does not mean the trends aren't inevitable. They are. It just means that the public is not invited, as investors, yet. And that's really a good thing, because public company investing requires liquidity, stability, and visibility – none of which these sectors really offer (yet).

If you want to comment give me a name or something we can hang our hat on. An "attaboy" with a throwaway email address is comment spam. I understand Blogspot is doing a good job with this, but Movable Type has yet to deliver me a good solution. So for now it's deleted as seen.

Blah Blah Blog

I'm speaking today at Blah Blah Blogs, an afternoon for the Washington digerati asking the question, “Should your organization blog, and if so how?”

The simple answer is it depends. Blogging is publishing, just like a newsletter is publishing. Who is your audience, what can you do with that audience if you have their attention, and can you turn that attention into something of value, are the key questions to ask.

The answers to these questions become the business case for your blog. Some groups have millions of members they may want to activate on an issue, or give money. Others may just have 100 decision makers they want all singing the same tune.

In all cases, don't just post a blog. You want an RSS feed. You want to announce posts on Facebook, and Twitter, and Google Plus (a tool like Tweetdeck can hit several of these services at once). You want it going out as an email, to your core list, and you can measure how well you're hitting that target based on whether the email read and how many unsubscribe. (A good email marketing service can always tell you if emails have been opened.)

The Next Great Founder

We go through eras of founders in this country. We all have our favorites, and our leaders do, too.

Some admire the leadership of Washington. He was huge in the 19^th century. Others go for the intellectual curiosity of Jefferson, and he was big when I was a kid. My dad was fond of Franklin, and there is a Franklin for every taste. My father-in-law loved the entrepreneurial Franklin, my dad preferred the old roue, and I like the inventor Franklin. We have just gone through a big John Adams vogue, which began with the love story 1776 (co-starring Abigail), continued with the David McCullough biography, and concluded with Paul Giamatti's star turn in the HBO version of it.

The next great founder will be James Madison. (Painting from life by John Vanderlyn in 1816.) Madison avoided the Revolution. He was a recent graduate of Princeton, he was sickly. (Although he lived to be 87, so it may have been hypochondria.) He was short and thin, he was quiet and shy, he was never an orator and not diplomatic.