Mixed Signals

Rupert Murdoch has said that he'll probably take his content out of Google, and hinted very strongly he and other newspaper groups are in discussion over paywalls.

Leaving aside the question of anti-trust - and whether, given Murdoch's extremely close and effective ties to governments, any regulator would be able to function at all or act fast enough to make any difference - this would seem to presage the death of the Internet and its replacement with what old media and old telecoms wanted all along, a segregated, partitioned network where access always comes at a price.

We had that before. It didn't work. Or, rather, it worked fine for established interests with the money to build their own systems or who, by accident of history, controlled the routes of access, where 'fine' meant maintaining that control and preventing open standards, open access and open innovation.

Let's say that Murdoch carries through with his threat and pulls all his content from Google, and sets up paywalls for all his properties. What will happen under the following scenarios?

1. Nobody follows him
2. Some content providers follow him
3. All content providers follow him

and a wildcard:

4. He allows Bing (for example) to crawl his sites, but excludes Google. Or Apple springs its tablet-based news-stand app store on the world with all major publishers involved: you want news, you go through Apple, Rupert's new best friend.

Here's how I see those panning out:

1. Huge competitive advantage to everyone else in attracting readers. His pitch, that readers who pay are worth far more to advertisers than readers who don't, relies on having readers who pay. The standard conversion rate for freemium services (ie, you get people in with the free stuff and sell them up) is 1 percent. And that's 1 percent of people who haven't got there via Google? Does that make sense?

2. Chaos reigns. Suddenly, the news outlets with no paywalls and plenty Google will find it very advantageous to run with stories that they read behind the paywall, even a day after - unless the paywalled sites decide they do want Google and just publish a day late online. The opportunity here for a new face (again, think Apple) to step in with a free service tuned to the new landscape is high, and dangerous to the incumbents.

3. Google loses all its news. Everyone has to decide what to pay for - you can't afford the Times and the Telegraph, let alone Salon and the NYT and Boing Boing - and you can bet the paywalls are set to get a year's sub out of you. The news and information landscape takes a 25 year trip back in time... where, you may remember, a new technology called the Internet was waiting in the wings. The Internet has not actually gone away.

There would be no better market for a new operation to start from a clean slate - a billion plus people ready and able to consume content that they've come to expect, and peeved that they've lost it.

4. Stand by for the biggest lawsuit you've ever seen. Unless Murdoch, Apple and co get into bed with Comcast, Verizon and other major internet providers around the world to break net neutrality, in which case stand by for the biggest lawsuit you'll ever see.

2010 will be very interesting. Anything Murdoch does is going to be a huge gamble, beyond anything he's done before - and he'll do anything to appear confident that it'll work.

We'll see.

A programmer was talking in a tech support forum about some GMail problem he had that was linked to YouTube. "I haven't tried it in Chrome", he said. "That's a little too much Google for me."

That comment has a certain force. I was reminded of it when I watched Eric Schmidt give a bravura performance at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009.

It started well, with some subtle but cutting digs at his Gartner interlocutor: when asked his prediction of non-advertising Google revenue three years time to compare with Gartner's projected nine percent, he said "We don't do that calculation. It's what finance people do, and it's not very interesting." Laughter.

But there wasn't much laughter during the next 45 minutes, as he elucidated a frighteningly coherent view of how the future was going to go Google's way - and not just bits of the future, the whole lot. From enterprise to consumer, from cloud to mobile, everything was included.

We might, if we're good, be left some vertical market stuff - Google only likes dealing with things that a few hundred million people can use - but that's because the big G can't be bothered. Everything was in the mix; Wave, ChromeOS, Chrome, Google Apps, HTML 5, GMail - oh, was GMail high on the list - Android, even YouTube. Cross-enterprise searching, anyone, where you find out what's going on inside your circle of trust? Employee monitoring? Seamless cloud apps on all platforms? Security that works without firewalls?

One of his predictions was that by next year, there will be netbooks running cloud services within the enterprise that will be good enough to replace the run-of-the-mill enterprise PC "but at a fifth the cost", because cheap hardware was that good. It all joined up. It all made sense.

I digested that prediction while reflecting on the fact that I was watching Schmidt in high resolution via YouTube within Chrome under Linux, on a machine that was simultaneously running all my social networking, chat and other clients, all my home entertainment requirements, all my editing and content creation faffery... and the only part of it that was Microsoft was the copy of XP I run under VirtualBox in order to get to my corporate email. That's only because Microsoft chose to cripple Outlook Web Access when it's not running under IE. Guess how that makes me feel.

(Ah yes, Outlook. Exchange. Schmidt talked on stage about the revelation he'd had about calendaring being at the heart of enterprise: when I use Exchange's calendaring, the revelation I get is that I hope to the highest powers in the cosmos that someone fixes it soon.)

I had a Google Doc open for a project I'm sharing with five pals. I had Google Maps open. I had an Android phone snoozing by the side of the keyboard. In short, I had too much Google in my life. And when ChromeOS comes along and makes my netbook work better (and it will), the amount of non-Googleage will shrink still further, because Google works and is nice to use and I am weak in the face of working code that's nice to use. The fact that everything Schmidt was saying was patently coming true in front of my eyes didn't help.

Now, imagine Ballmer trying to put on an equivalent 45 minute performance where he seamlessly merges the Microsoft vision for mobile (can you even tell me what that is?), cloud (ditto), netbooks (ditto), security (ditto). And how much? Those MS calculations that running free services and software cost more than proprietary solutions - well, they're hard to swallow when you're paying for everything yourself.

Just to put the seal on it, Schmidt mentioned how many Google salesmen were going into the enterprise pushing GMail - priced not for free, because they found that enterprise was happy to pay for service, when they got it. And when the sales pitch didn't work because things were missing, they went back to the Googleplex and fixed them, or worked around them, or found reasons why those missing things didn't need to be there at all. Then they went back, and tried again.

So when I read that Los Angeles City Council is moving from Groupwise to GMail and Google Apps - at a cost of $7.25 million, paid for partially by a legal settlement Microsoft had to make for overcharging - and think that this is the sort of deal Microsoft should be winning, I wonder what Ballmer makes of Schmidt's grand plan, and whether I will hear any cogent response this year, or next year when the ChromeOS netbooks are in the fray, or the year after that when the migration from Exchange becomes too big to ignore.

When, in short, will Microsoft get scared enough to do something that might make a difference? Because after 45 minutes of Schmidt's world domination plan, I was plenty scared myself.

And I like Google.

Microsoft has announced the integration of Windows 7, Azure and Silverlight tools into the open source Eclipse development platform. The joint project with Canadian company Tasktop Technologies and French company Soyatec was unveiled at the Eclipse Summit Europe in Ludwigsburg, Germany today, with Tasktop Technologies handling integration of Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 and Soyatec providing Azure and Silverlight plugins.

The new Eclipse functionality will integrate Windows 7 features such as Jump Lists for Eclipse and extend the Eclipse Standard Widget Toolkit to include things like taskbar progress bars and search widget integration. Eclipse will also take on aspects of the Windows 7 look and feel.

The enhancements to the Eclipse IDE will be available under the Eclipse Public License for early access the first quarter of 2010, intended for general release with Eclipse Helios in June 2010. Microsoft is providing funding and architectural guidance for the project, the company said.

The Azure plugin, available now adds a storage explorer and a variety of development and deployment tools for PHP applications in Windows Azure. bundling the existing Windows Azure SDK for PHP into the Eclipse PHP project. Likewise, the Eclipse Silverlight plug-in is available now — this includes Macintosh support as well as REST, SOAP, JSON and other assistance.

Last night, just 48 hours after I'd installed it, I had my very first Windows 7 Blue Screen Of Death.

It may not have been the complete BSOD package, but the machine was thoroughly dead and the screen was blue: there was what may have been intended to be the traditional mystic hexadecimal runes of disaster on the screen, but they'd been scrambled into a cryptographic stew of white pixels. And it was making a most peculiar noise.

Just before this, I had been watching Carry On Spying on DVD - reaching the point where Kenneth Williams (in a fez) and Charles Hawtrey (as Beau Geste) were about to rush in on Barbara Windsor and Bernard Cribbins (both in belly-dancing outfits, both at imminent risk of violation from Eric Pohlmann, aka The Fat Man) in an Algerian bordello. A classic moment in British film, and Kenneth Williams was giving it his flared-nose hyper-camp all.

The exact point of silicon disaster hit as he was issuing a nasal vowel so elongated and swooping it fell from the sky like a roll of toilet paper thrown from the Kop. The screen blinked and went blue: the sound system locked into a death spasm, repeating 200 milliseconds of the audio ad infinitum. The death knell of Windows 7, I can report, sounds like this:

"OooOooOooOooOooOooOooOooOoo..."

I enjoyed the moment, then reset the computer. The laptop, a by now rather venerable Sony Vaio, recovered at length: I replayed the scene, but all was well.

I think it's safe to blame Windows 7. The laptop had previously been running Vista for a couple of years - I try and use whatever MS' latest OS is daily, even though I hadn't warmed to Vista after all that time - and I'd performed an in-place upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate. (That took around four hours, but as I had the luck or foresight to kick that off on a Saturday morning before retiring back to bed for a long lie, I was as refreshed as the computer once it had completed.)

I was using the same application for DVD playback as I had for many DVDs before; there were no hardware changes or configuration fiddling beyond what had come in on the Windows 7 installation. I'd certainly never experienced a failure like that under Vista; although I had had a couple of catastrophic crashes, they happened when I was running beta software or messing around with peculiar hardware.

And so, pace Talbot Rothwell and the Pinewood posse, I fear we have to conclude that the longest running farce on the small screen has got some acts left to go before conclusion.

AirMagnet, the wireless LAN infrastructure monitoring company bought earlier this year by Fluke, has announced today a version of its monitoring system specifically designed for 802.11n. The new version of AirMagnet Enterprise is designed to check security, throughput and configuration for enterprise access points, and has 40 new alarms to alert staff if the system spots a security threat or other problem. It also has various levels of expert system which diagnose what's gone wrong and suggest fixes, as well as optimising installations.

All this can work in conjunction with the company's own monitoring hardware, access-point like boxes which can be powered using standard PoE. The cost for a standard installation starts at around $10,000 (£6100)

The company told us that 802.11n is beginning to find favour with corporates now that the standard has been finalised, although it tends to go into new build sites rather than as an upgrade, or places such as hospitals where untethered high speed access has real benefits.

It also sells its monitoring systems to some customers who have a strict no-wireless policy, just to make sure nobody's breaking the rules.