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The downside of all this ad hoc-ism is that it can lead to tools that can’t really grow or that don’t have other characteristics–such as reliability–that become more important as usage transitions from casual to business-critical. (See twitter.) But that genuine caveat aside, the IT industry is in a qualitatively different place than it once was. The enterprise architects still have a job to do. But no small part of that job is now integrating with tools that users and departments have brought in on their own.

Lots of software still gets purchased and developed that way of course. However, the truly striking story of the past decade is how so many of the tools and other software that we take for granted today are essentially bottoms-up phenomena. They largely came in the back door and made their way into what’s often called the "Shadow IT" of organizations. Official IT didn’t make this software ubiquitous and mainstream. For the most part, it was already ubiquitous and mainstream by the time IT departments got around to blessing it.

However, the trend goes well beyond open source. Consider the following two examples.

Even the red-hot virtualization trend is an example of bottoms-up. One of the reasons that virtualization was able to really break out was that it lent itself to small, local IT optimizations with immediate payback. You could install VMware on just one or two servers and see an immediate benefit. You didn’t need to rototill your data center management and change any number of business processes.

Linux (and, more broadly, open source in general) is perhaps the canonical example of this trend. In some respects, Linux adoption just mimicked past adoption patterns for distributed computing in general–from Windows NT servers to PCs and even Unix in the early days. However, open source licenses make backdoor sourcing one big quantum step easier. Indeed, the basic idea that open source licensing helps to build a developer and user base that can then be monetized when the software goes into production underpins a lot of the thinking around business models associated with open source.

Especially as workforces get more distributed, tools such as Novell Teaming + Conferencing and Lotus Domino have moved beyond e-mail and calendaring to encompass a much broader set of formal and informal interactions within a company. Cisco CEO John Chambers has said that "collaboration" is the one word that describes where his company and the entire technology industry is headed.

However, beyond e-mail and calendaring, it’s been instant messaging that’s probably been the tool with the biggest impact, rather than something bigger and more architected. And IM came in from the consumer space, often informally. Indeed, many organizations still just use freebie IM from AOL or Yahoo or Google rather than some enterprise version.

Time was when most enterprise software came in the front door as part of a formal, signed-off-at-the-highest levels procurement process. Or it got written in-house as part of an equally formal, multi-year development plan. Or some combination of the two. You didn’t expect that expensive packaged software you bought to just work out of the box did you?

Today, the next phase of virtualization–which goes by terms like Dynamic IT–is indeed a broader concept requiring a more deliberate and phased approach. But it got its start at the small scale (which distinguishes it from many of the virtualization management solutions being touted today that are only truly useful at data center scale).

Carphone Warehouse’s 2,400 U.S. and European stores will be included in the new joint venture. Also included in the deal are Carphone Warehouse’s Web, insurance, and airtime reselling businesses. But the company will retain full ownership of its traditional landline phone business in the U.K. and France.

Best Buy, the largest consumer electronics retailer in the U.S., is getting into the European cell phone market by taking a stake in retailer Carphone Warehouse.

Best Buy, which operates 900 stores across the U.S., will pay $2.1 billion for half interest in Carphone Warehouse, the largest cell phone retailer in Europe.

The companies have already worked together on developing Best Buy Mobile, a joint venture launched in 2006 with retail stores focused on selling mobile phones. Best Buy Mobile now has 200 mobile outlets, mostly in existing Best Buy stores.

Best Buy and Carphone Warehouse have also collaborated on bringing the Geek Squad, a 24-hour computer support team, to Europe.

Despite some early problems managing the flood of developers seeking access to the
iPhone software development kit, Apple reported 100,000 developers have downloaded the kit as of Sunday.

If you haven’t downloaded a copy of the SDK yet, here’s where you can find it. The beta version of the SDK is free to download, but if you want to release applications based on the SDK you’ll have to join Apple’s iPhone Developer Program for $99 a year.

(Credit:
Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)

Several would-be iPhone developers reported problems actually getting a copy of the SDK in their hands during the first day or so it became available. Over the weekend, Apple sent registered developers an e-mail acknowledging, “You may have recently experienced difficulty gaining access to, or
downloading the iPhone SDK.” But that traffic jam seems to have cleared itself up as the initial frenzy died down.

Apple formally released the iPhone SDK after an event at its Cupertino, Calif., headquarters last Thursday. The SDK will allow third-party developers to create games, business software, and other types of applications for the iPhone with Apple’s official blessing.

Apple recorded over 100,000 downloads of the iPhone SDK by developers hoping to build applications like EA's Spore.

In Wednesday’s press release, Apple included quotes from a number of third-party developers that give a pretty clear signal of what types of applications are already in development.

Intuit (TurboTax), Namco Networks (Pac-Man and Galaga), NetSuite (ERP/CRM software), and Six Apart (blogging software) are a few of the companies whose PR departments graciously worked up executive quotes for Apple’s announcement. During the event, AOL, Sega, EA, Epocrates, and Salesforce.com showed off preliminary versions of their iPhone applications.

Although Microsoft’s announcement and the Commission’s fine come within days of each other, one source said the two were not related. Microsoft’s announcement last week addressed how the software maker would apply the Court of First Instance’s ruling to the rest of its business, according to the source.

Last month, the Commission announced it was initiating a formal investigation into Microsoft, focusing on potential antitrust violations regarding bundling of its products with its dominant operating system.

In addition to the two fines for failure to comply, Microsoft was originally hit with a 497 million euro levy by the Commission for having abused its dominant market position at the time of that order. (The 497 million euros originally was worth $613 million. Today it converts to $752 million.)

Neelie Kroes

too much
too little
just right

News.com Poll Money matters
The EU’s $1.35 billion fine for Microsoft is:

The fine specifically addresses sanctions over the pricing structure Microsoft had set for licensing of its interoperability protocols and patents.

In July 2006, the Commission fined Microsoft 280.5 million euros, or $424 million, for failing to comply with the other two parts of its sanctions related to providing complete and accurate interoperability protocol information to rivals. The original decision from 2004 was upheld by the European Court of First Instance last fall.

On October 22, 2007, Microsoft began providing a license that gives access to the interoperability information for a flat fee of 10,000 euros and an optional worldwide patent license for a reduced royalty of 0.4 percent of licensees’ product revenues, the Commission said.

This post was updated several times, most recently at 7:40 a.m. PST, with additional reporting provided by CNET News.com’s Dawn Kawamoto.

According to the EU’s ruling, Microsoft initially had demanded a royalty rate of 3.87 percent of a licensee’s product revenues for a patent license and a rate of 2.98 percent for a license giving access to the secret interoperability information. In May 2007, following complaints by the Commission, Microsoft reduced its royalty rates to 0.7 percent for a patent license and 0.5 percent for an information license within the EU. Worldwide rates remained unchanged.

Browser maker Opera Software had initiated a complaint to the Commission, alleging that Microsoft was violating antitrust laws by tying its Internet Explorer browser to its Windows operating system. Opera highlighted concerns that Microsoft was adding new proprietary technologies into its browser that diminished interoperability with open Internet standards.

ECIS, which comprises Microsoft rivals Oracle, RealNetworks, Sun Microsystems, IBM, and others, further characterized Redmond as preferring to pay antitrust fines rather than allowing “merit-based competition” to occur in the marketplace.

In its new order, the Commission specifically said that Microsoft had charged “unreasonable prices for access to interface documentation for work group servers.”

The view from the competition
Microsoft’s competitors and adversaries wasted no time in weighing in.

The newest fine, announced Wednesday, is the largest ever imposed by the EU upon a single company. In total, the European regulators have fined Microsoft roughly $2.5 billion in the long-running antitrust dispute.

As part of its investigation, the Commission said it would also look into a complaint by ECIS. That complaint alleges that Microsoft refused to disclose interoperability information for a broad range of its products, including its Office suite, server-related products, and .Net framework.

“We always knew the possibility of a fine (over the licensing fee structure) was…there, but no one knew when it would come or how big it would be,” said a source familiar with Microsoft’s thinking. “Now the other boot has dropped.”

European Union regulators on Wednesday fined Microsoft a record 899 million euros, or $1.35 billion, for failing to comply with sanctions.

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(Credit:
European Community)

The ruling comes just one week after Microsoft announced a broad interoperability strategy, which included a pledge to not sue open-source developers.

“As we demonstrated last week with our new interoperability principles and specific actions to increase the openness of our products, we are focusing on steps that will improve things for the future,” Microsoft said in a statement.

“Commissioner Kroes is to be commended for her perseverance over the last three years in the face of Microsoft’s foot dragging and appeals to the Court of First Instance,” Thomas Vinje, ECIS legal counsel, said in a statement.

“Microsoft was the first company in 50 years of EU competition policy that the Commission has had to fine for failure to comply with an antitrust decision. I hope that today’s decision closes a dark chapter in Microsoft’s record of noncompliance with the Commission’s March 2004 decision,” EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said in a statement.

The European Committee for Interoperable Systems applauded the Commission’s move.

The pricing issue is the last of three parts of the European Commission’s historic March 2004 antitrust order, which called for the software giant to provide complete and accurate interoperability information to rivals so their software could work with the Windows operating system, as well as to license the information “under reasonable and nondiscriminatory” terms.

The motion-sensing Nintendo Wii remote isn’t a particularly new concept. We’ve see academic work in data gloves of various types going back to the 1990s. What’s different is that the
Wii is mass market. Volumes mean not only lower cost, but an incentive for software makers to write games and other applications that support and use the device in interesting ways. Because it corresponds to the physical world, hand movement seems a natural fit with many tasks and manipulations. As a result, I expect that we’ll see descendants of the Wii in increasingly widespread use.

The one clear counter-example is the emergence of “thumbing” (as opposed to typing). But this is really more about making compromises in service of the form factor of handheld devices than it is a genuine innovation–however commonplace it has become.

Of course, we still use keyboards of a fairly standard design as our primary mechanism to feed words into a computer and mice are well-ensconced as the navigational tool of choice. Over in the gaming world, it’s the familiar two-handed game controller that predominates. In fact, I sense that one sees fewer joysticks, steering wheels, various oddball keyboards, and trackballs than one saw in the past. This probably reflects that “productivity” PCs are shifting toward notebooks on the one hand and that gaming is moving toward consoles on the other.

Then there’s always voice recognition. It’s getting better. But that could be a statement for just about any year. And general-purpose voice recognition remains a niche. You won’t catch me betting on it (although I suspect its time will come–someday).

These aren’t the only possibilities. Six-degrees-of-freedom controllers have long been used in 3D engineering programs but they’ve been priced for the CAD professional. Logitech has come out with the affordable (about $55) 3Dconnexion SpaceNavigator PE (Personal Edition) 3D Navigation Device version that makes a great Google Earth companion. If 3D virtual worlds ever take off in a big way, devices such as these would be a natural and obvious fit.

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Another big trend we’re seeing is multitouch. As CNET News.com’s Tom Krazit notes, it’s Apple that has pushed this technology into the mainstream–starting with the
iPhone in the handheld arena and the MacBook Air in the notebook space. (On the notebook, it’s the touchpad rather than the whole screen that is multitouch and it’s less of a big deal as a result.) I’ve been arguing for a while that being able to draw a “napkin drawing” or a “whiteboard sketch” is one of the things that’s largely missing today when we work and collaborate remotely. The combination of multitouch and writeable LCDs at affordable price points, and supported by software, would be a genuine step forward.

However, we may be starting to see some genuine change.

We put stuff into computers (and, for that matter, get stuff out) in pretty much the same way we have for a good couple of decades.

Today Red Hat announced that it has broken server performance records with its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 on an IBM System x 3950 M2 running Intel X7460 Xeon processors. Apparently you can have your cake and eat it, too, at least in the open-source world:

Proprietary software may well be the ultimate, anti-Faustian bargain: sell one’s soul (IT independence) and get rubbish in return. With open source and Red Hat, CIOs spend less but get more, and they don’t have to sign a deal with Mephistopheles to get it. In troubled financial times, CIOs should have to justify installing anything other than Linux.

Again, it would be impressive enough to have delivered such market-beating performance, but to provide superior performance at a 20 percent discount…? That’s truly noteworthy.

In its latest 1M tpmC benchmark, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 outperformed all other operating systems on price performance in the 1M+ range. The Red Hat-based benchmark system delivered 1,200,632 transactions per minute and improved the price performance to $1.99, delivering a 20 percent savings in comparison to competitors. The single system proves its capability to handle substantial transactional workloads with its ability to process over 20,000 transactions per second.

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Once upon a time CIOs bought into open source solely to achieve dramatic cost savings. Today, Red Hat gave them another reason: superior performance.

It’s also not fair. All those proprietary Unix and Windows vendors have spent good money “creating” and hoarding their IP, only to have some open-source upstart beat them in performance and cost. At some point customers are going to wake up and wonder why they’re dumping unnecessary cash into proprietary products that cost too much and deliver too little.

They did not mean that, and they did not say that.

These absurd lies have been refuted repeatedly over the years, but they were conclusively shredded by the clear and comprehensive analysis of the Court’s opinion, written by Justice Antonin Scalia.

The original case addressed only the right of an individual to possess and carry a firearm within the home for purposes of self-defense. Our Federal appeals courts, including the Supreme Court, have a tradition of addressing only the issues raised in the cases they consider. Accordingly, the Supreme Court dealt only with this specific right.

In its ruling on the case District of Columbia v. Heller, our Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment to the US Constitution means what it plainly says: the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right.

Based on his analysis of contemporary documents, Justice Scalia shows that this is how the framers intended the Amendment to be read. Dividing the Amendment into a “prefatory clause” and an “operative clause,” Scalia states the obvious truth:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

…A prefatory clause does not limit or expand the scope of the operative clause.

But since this case represents this Court’s first in-depth examination of the Second Amendment, one should not expect it to clarify the entire field…

But the Second Amendment is broader in nature; it protects freedoms that are much more politically significant. Scalia predicts that these other freedoms may become the subject of future rulings by the Court:

In discussing the “operative clause,” the heart of the Amendment, Scalia goes right for the knockout punch: everywhere else in the Bill of Rights that rights of “the people” are described, they are clearly and unambiguously defined as individual rights.

Scalia goes on from there to demolish all the other significant arguments of the gun grabbers, and his decision is well worth reading, especially for those who don’t understand that the intent of the Amendment is no longer up for discussion in this country. This is not the kind of decision that could rationally be reversed later; the evidence and analysis Scalia presents is irrefutable.

The Supreme Court of the United States

The amendment is simple:

Thursday was a great day for all of us in the United States of America.

I hope that the Court is given the opportunity to examine the other purposes of the Second Amendment, and the sooner, the better.

Opponents of gun rights– whether they believe that the people should be disarmed completely, or simply left without the means to resist government oppression– have long maintained that the Second Amendment gives Americans only a collective right to belong to a government-controlled militia, and that other purposes of gun ownership, such as self-defense and hunting, have no Constitutional protection.

In its decision (available here, along with the dissenting opinions), the Court rejected decades of mendacious propaganda from anti-gun activists, including those who infest the city government in the District of Columbia, where this case originated.

The militia is referenced to define a political purpose for the amendment: ensuring that effective militias may be raised from among the people when they are needed to defend our country or its individual states. In constitutional amendments, like anywhere else, giving one reason for a decision doesn’t imply the rejection of all other possible reasons.

Our would-be oppressors in DC and elsewhere have asserted that the first half of the amendment, in mentioning the militia, has the effect of constraining the second half. But of course if the framers wished to say that, they had only to say “…the right of the Militia to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Scalia even went to the trouble of refuting the dissenting opinions put forth by Justices John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer.

This comes in addition to a more engineered factor, the bus-only lane on highways. People bending rules both help and hurt bus travel speeds in Wang’s post. Above, they prevent bus drivers from being punished for illegal expediency. But meanwhile, as Wang notes, lots of private cars violate the bus only lane. The bright side is that the bus lane still remains fast enough to increase efficiency.

Shanghai blogger Wang Jianshuo points out a less-than-expected reason why riding the bus is faster than driving on his commute: ad hoc protest against traffic enforcement:

Bus drivers don’t follow the traffic rule as strictly as other
car drivers. They just drive wildly, and policemen tend not to care about them. Why? I saw some cases when the policeman stops the bus, and the whole bunch of people on the bus surrounded the policeman and protest to ask the policeman release the driver.

For those needing more than just the basics, ProPay will unveil the eAuction Pro account later this year for eBay Silver power sellers and higher who not only sell goods on eBay, but also need specialized services for processing credit card transactions in other areas.

For eBay Silver power sellers and higher, ProPay unveiled its eAuction account, which will be available once ProPay goes live on eBay. It will carry a $24 annual fee or a $2 monthly charge, but the company is offering a $24 credit for sellers who process $3,000 or more with ProPay during their first six months using the service. The plan will carry transaction fees, but ProPay wouldn’t reveal those figures. It would only say that the fees will be comparable to those charged by “other services.”

The information was released Tuesday, ahead of ProPay’s launch as an alternative payment option on the auction site later this month.

ProPay was quick to point out that it doesn’t want to be considered a full-fledged PayPal competitor and instead wants to position itself as a company that caters to power sellers who plan to accept credit cards. That may be a good idea considering that sellers will be required to pay monthly fees on top of transaction costs–something most PayPal users aren’t required to do.

As eBay announced in August, it will soon take only electronic payments. Part of that plan includes bringing on an additional electronic payment service to compete with eBay subsidiary PayPal and thus ease concerns over eBay’s total control over payment processing. Aside from accepting credit cards, eBay’s solution involves giving sellers the option of using ProPay’s service.

The eAuction Pro Account will offer all the features available in the standard eAuction account and add an online virtual terminal, touch-tone phone processing, e-mail invoicing, and a secure card reader that will immediately send the cardholder’s information over an encrypted connection to ProPay’s virtual terminal to verify funds. According to ProPay, the fee for the Pro account will be $240 annually, and the transaction fees will be identical to those charged in the standard account.

ProPay, a company that specializes in credit card processing and electronic payment services for businesses, has announced prices for eBay users.

The consortium, which launched in September with Google, Apple, Sun Microsystems and a collection of universities, noted Microsoft is coming aboard as a founding sponsor.

What’s next? Given its past troubles with its passport authentication efforts, is the next stop for Microsoft the Liberty Alliance Project?

“Microsoft joining the Kerberos Consortium is significant,” Stephen Buckley, consortium executive director, said in a statement. “They represent a vast number of users of Kerberos. It is an important step forward towards our common ambition to create a universal authentication platform for the world’s computer networks.”

Kerberos aims to offer consumers the same single sign-on authentication and authorization system that corporate America has been using to allow employees to access network services with one log-on. Kerberos is an offshoot of MIT’s Project Athena, which was developed back in the 1980s.

Microsoft uses the Kerberos network authentication protocol in such products as its Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003,
Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008. And Kerberos also serves as the main authentication tool in Microsoft’s Active Directory.

The MIT Kerberos Consortium, a security authentication and authorization group, announced Monday that Microsoft has joined its shindig.