It’s been bizarre…. more work than we’ve done in some time. I’m thankful to be busy. We’re not doing much at ITWorld these days, deferring to NetworkWorld/IDG Enterprise and HP’s Input/Output.
Go here for the listing of recent updates at HP’s I/O: http://h30565.www3.hp.com/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/9
Go here for the listing of recent updates at NetworkWorld: http://www.networkworld.com/search/index.html?cx=014839440456418836424%3Amzedprvnwmy&cof=FORID%3A9&ie=UTF-8&q=henderson+test&x=0&y=0
The quick background is that I started going to CES in 1977, and have been going every year since 2002. I was in the CE business in the late 1970s. For the past dozen years, I’ve run my own research business that focuses on enterprise systems components, as well as storage and wireless devices. I also purchased my first iPad for a gift late last year. I am not a fanboi of anything. No one paid for my trip or is paying for these observations.
Before
We arrived on Jan 1, and started doing pre-show press events that started with the CES Press Preview event, which is held at the Venetian Hotel. It was a media star event, thousands of people crammed into a fairly hall exhibit hall. A lot of nascent CES focus was on 3D technology, as well as Internet media content delivery systems of various kinds. There were tablets, along with AMD, Intel, and VIA-fueled partner initiatives. Mobility in general was a strong theme as well. Verizon Wireless sponsored the press room, and in a fit of rationality, the CES organization expanded the press room into a facility at the LVCC where Verizon was a sponsor. Indeed Verizon would steal a lot of thunder by having the rumor of the iPhone finally appearing on the Verizon Wireless network. The strange spectre of Apple would haunt many parts of the show; more about that later.
Another pre-show press event, Digital Experience, was held at Caesars. Here was a lot of room, a huge press crowd, and many and diverse CE vendors. Most all of the products were consumer-focused, although a few (Absolute Software comes to mind) have enterprise components awaiting those interested. Dell and HP were prominent, as well as Lenovo. Tablets were strong, but didn’t get quite the crowds as last year. Smartphone makers were there, although numerous names were missing– especially HP’s smartphone acquisition, Palm.
The Doors Open
The registration tent, where Gibson Guitars stood for years, was more efficient than former years. In front, CES temps hawked free copies of Gary Shapiro’s book regarding the future of TV and media.
What struck me, as these books were handed out to the few that wanted them, was that Shapiro’s organization, the CEA that puts on CES, has a bit of an industrial leadership problem. Each of the CEA’s main areas are being hit hard. Rival conferences and exhibitions the world over now rival CES in many ways.
Berlin’s IFA Conference draws plentiful more people, and Hannover’s CeBIT remains the top systems show on the planet. If you like to build computers, then CompuTex is your show. But we’re talking about consumer electronics, right?
Then the big shadow over the show is Steve Job’s continuing timing of announcements made post-CES. In entertainment electronics of the top-selling segments, Apple overshadows CES, and much of what I saw in media is this year’s response to Apple’s last-year announcements. Indeed, Apple will make announcements shortly that will show the rest of the industry’s followship, not leadership. The seemingly waning interest in tablets helps to describe how thoroughly, for better and much worse, products are judged against Apple’s.
Apple doesn’t own television. Yet TV is becoming highly fragmented in several ways. The 3D TV trend is strong, and I saw many products focused towards 3D entertainment in both movie, episode, and gaming segments, but enthusiasm seems tepid. Instead “TV” is no longer “TV” as oldsters knew it.
Today, media is delivered through several segments, the hottest of which is via content-on-demand, be that content YouTube, videos, episodes, movie downloads, or premium streams. Following that are home unifying systems where a black box is used to send content from this device to that device, laptop to phone or phone to monitor, and so on. A single user interface for all devices seemed to be most presented and desired. From there, you control your device with a remote, maybe custom, or perhaps grafted onto your iPhone or iPad Touch.
Content providers and aggregators are also still trying to convince us that the tiny real estate of your mobile phone/smartphone is actually an HDTV, and you’ll want to watch expensive full length movies on your phone. Verizon has succumbed to this illusion, but they’re not alone. Verizon seems only the least-hated among domestic US wireless phone carriers. Indeed as Verizon is to announce availability of the iPhone on its network, I worry about how much bandwidth will be crunched, as it has on AT&T’s network. The growth of smartphones on any wireless network will do the same thing to bandwidth availability on that network.
I’m still reminded of The Producers. Why? Imagine 600 MBAs all wringing their hands, promising their CEOs that if they could get just 10% of the content market, their stock price would soar off the charts. One of the reason that Facebook has done as well as it has, is that it has stolen eye share away from other content. Our social nature follows the Andy Grove Law: you have two eyes and 24 hours in your day. The competition is for those eyes, in those hours. Facebook accomplishes its goal by preventing you– by your interest– from watching television, playing games, or perhaps from doing the laundry.
The Hangover
A successful wedge has been driven between seeming needs of consumers, and the need for organizations/employers to control access of these devices to organizational resources. We’re working on a review of products that examine controlling popular CE mobility devices, but the outlook is a bit dour. It’s not going to be easy to explain that one’s new iFad can’t be connected somehow to get email, or use internal web applications.
There’s the thought that VDI (virtual desktop interface) can somehow abstract user device sessions and organizational resources; there may be some truth to this. Yet no one seems to care that perhaps a quarter of computers in the US are actually controlled by a bot or other malware. One day, there’s going to be a quiet explosion, perhaps not different than the ending to the movie Fight Club.
Worse still, there is the distinct possibility of taking down financial and content delivery networks by network terrorists. Already, “Anonymous” and other network have used simple if effective techniques to barrage networks into disappearance for short periods of times. These attacks are now becoming political in nature, and are unlikely to stop. If you can’t buy, can’t sell, can’t collect, you’re in trouble. Yet there is no outcry from the CEA organizations about network safety, inherent platform safety and security standards, or what they’ll do if the Internet goes dark in regions.
Perhaps you might think I’m being paranoid. If one considers the nature and number of CE exhibitors and attendees Internet-related activities, it’s a huge volume of business that flatlines if network terrorism and theft continues. I hope they find a solution.
-Tom Henderson
January 9th, 2011
Lots of nice stuff, including a low price. Yet the price delta between a small SSD and the big fat one is huge. SSDs aren’t worth that much, despite their lack of weight and comparatively fast response. But I’m still tempted. HP? Where are you? Where is your MBA killer? Where? When?
Going to DEMO 09, I had some strange feelings. Gone are the photo-sharing websites, and the mainly consumer-ploys of prior DEMOs. Instead, it was business. Business may mean connecting the dots of social not-working into manageable mobility profiles, or it might mean an internal twitter system.
But whether social not-working or web applications, the tone and tenor was business. No more ice cream dispensing machines, or laser machines that scanned your body and cut custom jeans for you. No, this was biz. And lots of it.
I’ve seen other columnists try to tell the DEMO organization (or their readers) how to change DEMO for the better, now that long-time producer Chris Shipley is leaving, and the regime changes over to Matt Marshall, who’s the publisher of VentureBeat. I guess somehow we’re supposed to pontificate about what DEMO should be. I’m not going to do that. The event is up to them, not me. I don’t have to pay their bills or attract their audience. They do.
What I found at DEMO was interesting in that the investment community heavyweights were there, en masse. The press wasn’t there. Many notable people were missing, although a few of the regulars came with big smiles on their faces. Has TechCrunch caused a loss of interest in DEMO? I don’t think so. Instead, publishers are very scared of revenue shortages– cutting budgets– and the press in general is in deep depression….. that is, those of us left. Reporters were missing; even the bloggers weren’t there in the droves that they have been in previous years. Nonetheless, I did an interview with Chris Shipley.
Yes, the event had a smaller head count. It’s to be expected in this economy. But I liked the focus. I liked the directness. I liked the added value. I didn’t care if a presenter was from HP with a new product, or from a tiny startup with a new product. New Products is the theme, along with the trends provided by them. Microsoft could have launched Windows 7, or Apple could have launched Snow Leopard here. They’re new products, and market-makers.
Below are Tom’s Picks as to the products that I really like. No specific order is implied.
EMO Labs: Not What You Think
Were I to predict the organizations that will get the most revenue in the next ten year, it’s likely to be EMO Labs. Why? They make a flat panel sound system that fits over the screen of LCD, Plasma, TFT, and other flat panel technologies. There’s a piezo-electric transducer system in the frame surrounding the film, making the film vibrate sound, so that the sound actually appears to be coming from the speaker on the face of the screen. As it doesn’t reproduce well below 200hz, there are micro-woofers in the design (low frequency sounds here aren’t locatable and therefore the stereo effect is lost in the ear) to complete the system. What happens? No more bad speakers in HDTV and notebook designs.
EMO’s system is ready today, but will be perfected in the next several years for truly mass consumption. Given the number of possible consumers, this one is big, and the advance while not revolutionary, completes the cure to several design problems – and benefits the ear.
HP’s SkyRoom
HP showed SkyRoom (actually they were first up at the show) for high resolution web conferencing. The video conferencing market has been around for more than a decade, and there are literally dozens of choices available for conferencing and realtime document sharing, WebEx, ooVoo, Adobe, and others have varying pieces of this market. HP’s ‘serverless system is actually more appropriately compared to Skype, and has very high resolution document and video camera sharing capabilities.
Oh, and it’s free to $149, depending on whether it came with your newly purchased HP computer. It’s otherwise operating system and application agnostic. How it will work, we’ll see.
The second set of new billionaires from DEMO Fall 09 are clever bunch of people from Micello. Micello has an easily understandable value proposition: the last mile and perhaps few feet in the online mapping world— especially when that’s connected to something like Google Maps.
Drilling down to a shopping center, as was Micello’s DEMO example, doesn’t really go indoors. Imagine viewing a map of the inside of the shopping mall– repleat with store names and so on. Further the imagination to see queries about the mall, as in “mens shoes”. Perhaps tagging might also allow an online coupon to be downloaded to a personal phone or device for incentive and use. Maybe even small commercials could be attached if desired.
The imagination goes crazy. Floor plans in schools and hospitals. Emergency exit plans. Classroom maps. Hiking trails. In all, these can be tagged with outside and satellite maps to the indoor maps.
I worry for these guys that they get the right management teams to do well. It’s nice to shake hands with billionaires when they’re still broke. Micello won’t be broke for long.
WhoDoYouKnow@
is a more dangerous app, as it connects people together and allows users to rate trust. Your contact book could be searched through. It’s ugly that way. Ugly because networks of people are like ancient Rolodexes– people guard them sometimes with their lives for their relative value. It’s more difficult to keep information ‘proprietary’ with this system.
More later…..
Everyone’s regrouping.
In one corner, Microsoft may have a winner after the disaster that’s Vista. We’ve looked at Windows 7 at http://www.networkworld.com/slideshows/2009/011509-win-love-hate.html#slide1, and then again this week at http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/030209-microsoft-windows7.html?hpg1=bn. It has a chance.
But Apple’s also releasing Snow Leopard, the Intel-only update to Mac OS, shortly. Microsoft’s most feared competitor only works on Apple hardware, and that leaves HP, IBM/Lenovo, Dell, and a raft of hardware makers happy. These hardware makers have been deeply disappointed in Vista sales, and they’re occasionally turned to variations of Linux.
One variation soon to arrive will be Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. The glory of this version is all of the extra stuff Novell has written to do enterprise management of Linux desktops. If rumors and advanced features seen elsewhere are an indication, SLED (as it’s called), might be a low cost, high-feature way of beating Microsoft at their own game. Microsoft typically doesn’t like that, but Novell’s an arms-length partner of Microsoft in a number of lucrative cross-support endeavors.
And all of this might not make much difference, and here’s why. Application virtualization is becoming both stylish and is starting to meet the test of audit, security, and even availability metrics among the enterprise cognoscenti. An app for your desktop, no matter what it is, can be loaded out of the Internet as though the Internet was your local hard disk. The plumbing for this can be simple or complicated, but also entirely masked from users- and the guts live in ‘the clouds’. The clouds in this case are a rising number of Internet hosting organizations, now with a la carte offerings of varying server system hosts online. It’s getting very easy.
Even the desktop resources one uses are now becoming virtualized as well. No need for a fat hard disk and lots of processing power, when your netbook or notebook is getting the desktop and even application hosting on some way-fast machine sitting on the Internet. Accessibility goes way high. So do concerns regarding availability, security, and little things like audio and video virtualization.
Virtualized desktops tend to make operating systems somewhat irrelevant, as the one-operating-system-on-one-machine metaphor slowly starts to disintegrate. The wars are here. May the all-important users win.
After a revealing guess based on the Windows 7 beta, the press and/or other pressures brought to bear the answer to the question: how many versions of Windows 7 will there be? The answer is just six, down from 10+ of Microsoft’s failing desktop product, Vista.
Much insanity ensued after Vista’s release. The problems are well documented and are now a matter of history. Also a part of history is the fact that Vista hasn’t sold well, and customers have stayed away from it in droves. Indeed the sales of Vista to date are largely the result of OEM agreements that Microsoft has with the hardware computer community.
The lack of sales has given rise to competitive operating system sales advances, although these advances aren’t going to shake Microsoft’s market dominance– for better or worse. But what has potentially happened is something that no one planned on– a vision of the drop of perceived cost versus value in operating systems.
When people buy a computer system at retail, the cost of the operating system is hidden. It’s not broken down like HP Notebook (add $20 for Windows, $10 for Linux, and of course Mac OS is missing from the availability list). The value of Windows is somewhat known, but it’s fuzzy and vendors have made it fuzzy because of their agreements with Microsoft.
No one buys a notebook, takes it home, then makes a selection to load an operating system choice. It’s not done. A truly barebones system would require end-users to somehow purchase, download (or enable) a selected operating system. Most civilian users don’t have time for that– the size of the operating system needs to be resident on the user’s hard disk at purchase time– not as a download.
What this does is to devalue the perceived cost of the operating system. Familiarity for many user purchasers would be with Windows, and they might wonder why it was missing on their computer. Simply installing Windows on a new computer system takes a while, for reasons that are largely unclear. The state of a Windows machine under brand-new-condition has changed quite a bit when the purchased machine is ‘bundled’ with Windows. It takes less and less time to install the OEM/bundled version of Windows, but it’s still time-consuming and potentially fraught with user errors from incorrect choices. As users become more savvy, these problems are reduced, but civilian users are still subject to many potential problems with new machines. The state of such OEM products is largely outside of Microsoft’s control, yet Microsoft and the OEM vendor must support the satisfaction of the initial install of the operating system at purchase-setup time. These influence the choices we see today.
The value of a captive OEM operating system is ill-defined. It’s no wonder that establishing value for them is often only done in terms of upgrade price. Without compelling reasons to upgrade, any OS vendor won’t get upgrade revenues because value defines demand.
They’re small, they’re fun, they’re green, and they’re not supposed to be popular, but they are. Netbooks are rapidly cutting away the inflated prices of laptop/notebook computers. In fact, they’re shredding it. The value of notebook machines has hit critical mass, and the toppling of the notebook is going to happen sooner, rather than later.
Part of the rationale for buying a netbook machine is cost. Another is simplicity. Still another reason revolves around form factor– light weight and reasonable functionality. Some use Windows XP, though Vista might have worked if Microsoft had removed its bloat. I envision a world where Windows 7 has a shrunken version specifically for notebook machines. After all, Microsoft makes an SKU for everything. Linux is also unusually popular, with Ubuntu leading the pack. The initial flimsy netbooks are rapidly becoming easily solidified into devices that look like they’ll last more than a year.
Who’ll win and lose? Already HP, Lenovo, and others are building them. Apple so far, has not, deferring to its line of Macbooks as the expensive alternative. People aren’t going to buy two netbooks, and Apple risks losing out on a market where they would have otherwise seemed to have had traction. Pity, that.
Am I going to toss my Macbook Pro for one? Maybe. Fujitsu, are you listening? Time to take over a market, or at least get a beachhead on it.
We have four shiny new AMD Shanghais in the lab. We had to buy thermal paste. We’re waiting for new BIOS/firmware to get started. The HP 585 G5 in our lab blew papers across the room when we fired it up. They should supply earplugs with it…… and maybe a city block worth of solar cells, too.
Soon we’ll be testing with it to compare it to Intel’s Xeons. I wonder if it’ll be Xeoff, or Xeon, afterward.
It’s a beautiful day. Time to twiddle our thumbs and wait for updates.