Will Microsoft become the General Motors of software?

November 6, 2009 9:01 AM

It has near-monopoly status and nimble, disruptive competitors. We’ve seen this movie before.

By Jay R. Galbraith, president and founder, Galbraith Management Consultants

Galbraith questions Microsoft's resolve to change. Image: Galbraith Management

The more I learn about the current situation in software, the more Microsoft’s position seems to mirror General Motors’ position in the auto industry a few decades ago. Like Microsoft (MSFT) today, GM was an icon in its industry, held a quasi-monopoly, produced eye-popping profits and was often distracted by antitrust lawsuits. When a company experiences this kind of environment over a couple of decades, it eventually loses its competitiveness. Of course, Microsoft would vigorously deny any such comparison. The top executives in Redmond, Wash., claim to be on top of the trends in the industry. They are confident they can develop all the software they will need to be competitive.

My concern is not with the leadership of Microsoft; I am sure Ray Ozzie, the chief technical officer, will stay on the cutting edge of the technology. But its 15,000 to 20,000 middle managers have never been through a downturn (assuming they’ve worked only at Microsoft). And to me, you are not a real company until you have been through a downturn. Growth and high margins are very good at covering up a company’s bad habits and unresolved issues. When a downturn hits, all of the flaws come to the surface and the company purges itself of its bad practices. A  3% decline in sales in 2008 – Microsoft’s first ever – during the worst recession in decades will not wake up Microsoft. The bad habits will persist.

Microsoft’s Options

The best thing that could happen to Microsoft would be successes by Apple (AAPL) or Google (GOOG) that cause a significant loss of sales and market share. The shock would create a sense of urgency and cause the leaders to clean house. The worst thing that could happen is a success with Windows 7, which would reinforce management’s focus on the desktop. Then, as customers move away from the desktop to smartphones and other devices, market share will decline. But if share declines slowly, maybe a point or two a year, the drop will not be enough to overcome the pride that comes with high margins and high profits. Over time, the desktop mafia will experience a shift from pride to hubris. Welcome to the General Motors scenario.

I am not concerned about Microsoft developing the software. They always have. My question is whether they will develop the new business models. As computing moves away from the desktop and onto small mobile devices, the industry moves away from Microsoft’s strengths. Consumers are driving computing now, though, and customer-centricity is not a Microsoft competence. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, will have to give a lot of his famously YouTube-worthy stage performances to convert the middle managers who are currently enjoying monopoly profits.

Microsoft’s Path Ahead

Microsoft also suffers from the incumbent’s curse during a technological transition. The curse is well described in Clayton Christensen’s research. Cloud computing, in which software and other applications are housed in a central location and delivered over networks to end users, could lead to a shift away from desktop-based computing and from complicated operating systems. As Microsoft adapts to it, will it promote cloud computing or protect Windows? Will the team leading Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing business have the freedom to cannibalize the desktop? Or will it be integrated into Windows, where the desktop mafia will slow, modify and dilute the efforts to convert to a new business model?

The General Motors scenario does not have to happen. Ballmer can focus inward on transforming the desktop mafia to the new computing paradigm. Or, better yet, appoint a hands-on, change-experienced chief operating officer who can do it with him.

Galbraith is founder and president of Galbraith Management Consultants, an international consulting firm that specializes in solving strategy and organizational design challenges.

Microsoft To Offer Application Marketplace In Sharepoint 2010

Written by Alex Williams / November 6, 2009 4:00 AM / 1 Comments

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Microsoft will offer an application marketplace within Sharepoint 2010 that shall integrate with third-party applications from its partner network. No date has been set for the marketplace lauch but it will evolve from "The Gallery" a feature that provides Sharepoint 2010 users access to templates.

In an interview we did at Enterprise 2.0, Christian Finn said Microsoft will offer the marketplace for vendors who want to sell their products through the Sharepoint platform.

"We will have a route to market for vendors who want to have applications and add-ons available," Finn said.

Conceptually, Finn said, you think about a marketplace idea. Customers will navigate from the Sharepoint interface to see what web parts are available for a trial period.

Finn said that from their perspective, collaboration is mostly on-premise. Customers are starting to move to the cloud. "We are seeing early customers starting to move. When we see that bell curve adoption we will definitely be there."

But collaboration services are increasingly cloud-based. MindTouch, SocialCast, Socialtext and a host of other companies are offering best-of-breed-services.

The availability of a marketplace brings up a lot of questions about the role that partners will play with Sharepoint. But it also raises interesting competitive questions about the role of Sharepoint as a cloud-based service. It almost looks like it will be more of a Software-as-a-Servce (SaaS) than the on-premise platform it is today.

The Sharepoint application marketplace will evolve out of The Gallery, a resource within Sharepoint 2010 that serves as a central place for templates. Microsoft will initially offer their own web parts through Gallery. Eventually the service will take a different name and migrate to offering partner services.

We asked Finn what the model will look like. Will it be pay per use? How will the application marketplace be administered? Finn said most of the details are being worked out in Redmond.

The service will have IT safeguards. Finn said that IT managers will have a level of control over what applications users may integrate.

What Finn describes sounds similar to application platforms now commercially available.Salesfoce.com is the obvious example. TheirForce.com platform is a full development environment. AppExchange is the platform for building third party applications on Salesforce.com CRM.

Dazzle from Citrix also comes to mind. It is an iTunes like service that is all about making IT more consumer friendly. Employees may choose the applications that they want to purchase. The service is set up as a store front that can automatically stream the application on a virtual desktop to a Windows PC, a Mac or an iPhone.

Details are few about the application marketplace that will be offered through Sharepoint. But it does point to the increasing significance of third-party applications for the Sharepoint platform and how the service may evolve as cloud computing becomes more prevalent.

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Interesting: chart of broadband speed, penetration, and price

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by Devin Coldewey on October 28, 2009

Just an interesting visualization of the broadband situation out there. Statistics get a bad rap, probably because they’re always in spreadsheet form when they should be in an infographic. Click away for the full-size version.

App Store Stories: One man's app. Three corporations. Lyrics 2 against the world.

by Erica Sadun (RSS feed) on Oct 28th 2009 at 8:00AM

When Joris Kluivers (@kluivers on Twitter) set out to write his Lyrics app for iPhone, he never intended to personally take on Apple, Sony, and Gracenote. Kluivers, a student at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, was just trying to get his foot in the App Store door, not go toe-to-toe with three media behemoths. The story of how he ended up navigating through the corporate bulwarks to eventually successfully publish his latest release, Lyrics 2 (iTunes Link), with the blessings of all three companies, no less, makes quite the App Store saga.

The initial version of Lyrics was simple. Kluivers collaborated with Moop.me, a programming cooperative, to build his application. Published this past May, Lyrics was the first application on the App Store to allow users to find and display song lyrics. Several other similar applications followed in the weeks after.

Kluivers built the application around the LyricsWiki database. Featuring over 700,000 songs, the wiki provided easy access to a much-desired resource. It was exactly that access to a vast library of songs that caused the first of Kluiver's corporate challenges. Apple insisted on censoring his lyrics.

Read on to learn more about what happened...

As you're probably well aware, Apple carefully guards its App Store offerings. So long as Kluivers provided explicit lyrics, allowing access to songs by big-name artists like Eminem & 50 Cent [NSFW lyrics here], Apple would not approve the application. This, of course, dated back to the era before age-specific ratings were introduced to App Store.

So Kluivers complied, filtering out all explicit lyrics, and Apple gave Lyrics the green light. The application went live and users finally had access to the app. It wasn't long before those users started complaining. Many songs from artists who used non family friendly words weren't available-- just as Apple had requested.

The Easter Egg

To respond to his users, Kluivers built in an option to disable the filter, allowing full access to the wiki's lyrics data. Apple rejected the update. The profanity filter had to stay in place. After consideration, Kluivers tried to balance the user requests with Apple's demands. He moved the filter option into an Easter egg, allowing the application to disable the filter but hiding that ability from the App Store reviewers. He started letting unhappy customers know about the existence of the secret workaround.

Word about the Easter egg spread. Eventually one user mentioned it in their App Store review. Wired picked up the story, interviewing Jelle Prins of Moop.me, the cooperative that helped build the application. Prins told Wired that "it would be technically possible for Apple to discover a hidden Easter egg, but it would require intense inspection." There's a much easier way for Apple to discover Easter eggs, though: reading about them on Wired. Which they did.

Apple's developer wrangler called Kluivers, to ask him to pull his application from App Store until he could resubmit it without the filter workaround. The call came about 5 minutes too late. Kluivers had already pulled the app. But his move to do so had nothing to do with Apple reviewers or Easter eggs. It was because of Sony.

Enter Sony

Sony is a rights holder for many of the lyrics that were being used in the Lyrics application. Unknown to Kluivers, the LyricsWiki site he used was infringing Sony's copyright. His application, in turn, was using unlicensed content. Kluivers' agreement with Apple held him liable for that infingement.

The notice instructed Kluivers had to pull his app within 3 days; in actuality, he pulled his app within minutes. Kluivers was in New York City at the time of receiving that take down notice. He replied to Sony by e-mail and... was invited to discuss matters in person with a Sony licensing manager. He agreed.

Kluivers recalls, "We met in the Sony headquarters in New York City and all they could start with was, 'You guys have a big problem.'" Things went better from there. "It turned out he was a nice guy, just protecting his assets." Corporations are very protective of their copyrights. When Kluivers asked how he could legally license the lyrics, the Sony manager put him in touch with Gracenote.

Gracenote is the company when it comes to licensing music lyrics. Search online for 'Gracenote Lyrics Licensing' and you'll find story after story about deals with major companies like Radio Disney and Yahoo. An undergraduate student, Kluivers was anything but a big company, and his meeting with Gracenote bore that out. He was in no position to come up with the minimum six figures or so that Gracenote would need to provide lyrics licensing. For the moment, the Lyrics app was singing the blues.

Bringing Lyrics Back To Life

Mobile music is, in fact, a big deal. That fact is becoming more and more apparent to big companies like Gracenote. So, after a few months when Gracenote got back in touch with him, Kluivers was shocked to learn that they'd be willing to work on a basis that even a small-time developer could afford.

"At first I thought there was no deal. But they called me and said they wanted to renegotiate and thought they could offer me a better deal I might be able to afford otherwise." Realizing they were missing out on App Store opportunities, Gracenote and Kluivers managed to hammer out a deal to change the pricing model to something more realistic for small businesses. Without going into details, Kluivers said, "I was able to afford it, even as a small developer."

Kluivers had a family friend, a corporate lawyer, look through the contract before signing. Within a few months of inking his name, he had rewritten the application from scratch, and submitted it to the App Store. Lyrics 2 [iTunes link] went live in the App Store this week, taking advantage of the new Gracenote licensing and offering unfiltered access to those lyrics using Apple's new age classification of 12+.

Lyrics 2

I had a chance to test Lyrics 2 this week. Although it is still early days, the application provides instant access to the currently playing song's lyrics. The Gracenote database is not perfect -- it failed spectacularly on my search for the lyrics to the Broadway Show "The Drowsy Chaperone" -- but performed very well for most popular songs.

The US$2.99 application still has room to grow. In fact, I dumped quite a lot of feature requests on Kluivers when I chatted with him in preparation for this story. But what it does give you is excellent: proper lyrics for songs, and the comfort of knowing the rights holders are receiving their due. Simply designed and to the point, Lyrics 2 is well worth trying out, especially for those of us who like to karaoke while listening to our iPods.

It has been a long journey from the ill-fated Lyrics with its censoring issues, Easter eggs, and unlicensed data to the fully licensed Lyrics 2. Hopefully, Kluivers' story will provide an inspiration for the other small developers out there.

When I asked him if he had any specific advice for other small developers, he told me, "When you're negotiating with a big party, show them you are good at what you do." He advises bringing along sales numbers and emphasizing good design. It worked for him.

Tags: Gracenote, lyrics, Lyrics 2, Lyrics2, LyricsWiki, SONY

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HOW TO: Become an Expert in Your Industry

October 27th, 2009 | by Susan Payton

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Susan Payton is the Managing Partner of Egg Marketing & Public Relations, an internet marketing firm specializing in blogger outreach, social media, and PR. She blogs at The Marketing Eggspert Blog, and teaches marketing courses at Marketing EggSchool. Follow her on Twitter @eggmarketing.

Today it seems that no matter what industry you’re in, your competition is stronger than ever. How do you stand out and get that sale when people aren’t as loyal to brands as they used to be? How do you get their attention in an ever growing sea of noise when they’re so often swayed by price rather than quality? One answer is to become recognized as an expert in your industry, someone other people seek out for information.

The most important part to becoming known as an expert, of course, is that you know a lot about whatever it is you do. That could be construction, public relations, HR, dogs — whatever it is, in order to gain the requisite knowledge to be regarded as a thought-leader in your field likely requires years of schooling or real-world practice, or both. In addition, when your goal is to be recognized as an expert you need to always keep learning, and to constantly share that expertise. But first let’s talk about why you might want to be an expert.

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Benefits of Being an Expert

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Being an expert in your field makes you the go-to person for your industry. There are many people that I trust inherently on different subjects simply because they know their stuff, and they’re not trying to sell me anything. They just want to be helpful in their own space. These are people that I learn from, but also whom I would buy from because I trust their knowledge and expertise.

Being an expert helps you:

- Establish yourself as an industry leader
- Help others
- Become a trusted resource
- Get interviews and media coverage
- Gain access (via conference/speaking invites, etc.)
- Convert followers to sales

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Keep Up-to-Date

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Only a fool assumes he knows everything and can’t learn any more. No matter how much you know, content and ideas are changing, especially if you work in a fast-moving industry like social media. News happens, ideas shift, people try new things. It’s important for you to stay on top of the latest updates.

Though this list is by no means complete, here are some places you can turn to stay up to date on the most recent news, trends, and ideas in your industry.

Blogs & News – Blogs in your industry are a great place to find out the latest tools and news. If you’re not already reading blogs, do a web search for [your industry + blogs] (like Chiropractic Blogs, for example) to locate some blogs that cover your business niche. Find ones that you like and subscribe to them by RSS so you won’t forget to read them.

You can also use Technorati or PostRank to find blogs in your industry. PostRank can be used to weed out the best post from the blogs you follow, as well.

It’s not a bad idea to set up a Google Alert to search for news about your industry. Paying attention to news headlines is a great way to stay abreast of changes in your field.

Online Education – There’s no reason you have to enroll in college (again) to keep learning. There are a variety of online resources at which you can take free or cheap webinars or e-courses to keep the wheels churning.

If you’re looking for generic business information, the US Small Business Administration has free online courses for small business owners, for example, or if you want great advice on internet marketing, look to HubSpot. Search the web and pay attention to the blogs you read to keep abreast of opportunities for online learning.

Social Networks – Increasingly, social networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, and Delicious are where people are sharing news and information that matters to them. By following the already established experts in your niche, you’ll gain access to the information they possess, which will in turn increase your knowledge.

Conferences & Events – Every industry has conferences, trade shows, and other events, at which other experts in the industry gather to share their knowledge. Attending these meetings can help you in your quest to continually learn new information. You can find out about conferences by reading industry blogs, searching events sites like Upcoming.org, or finding local user groups on Meetup.

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Imparting Your Wisdom

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By sharing your knowledge with others, you’ll quickly become known for your expertise. This can translate into sales, job offers, gigs, or other opportunities, as you build your personal brand as an expert. Here are some ways you can share what you know.

Blogs – The easiest way to start sharing is by creating a blog. Blogs are fantastic if you’ve got a ton of information in your head and need a place to dump it. The bonus is: you can help others through that information. Blog about what you know. Share news, offer advice, give your opinion, and make yourself the go-to resource for what you do. The key to successful blogging is to consistently put out good, original, and useful content that encourages readers to engage with you and with each other.

Social Media – Social media sites are designed for experts! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a question about something, tweeted it, and gotten free advice back, later, the people who provided me with expert advice are the people I buy from when I need their services. By providing free advice on Twitter or Facebook, you will build a base of fans that both trust you and look to you for expert advice. These fans will seek you out and recommend you to others seeking advice and information — in other words, by sharing your knowledge and gaining trust, your network will grow on its own.

Among the ways you can share your expertise using social media, are creating a lens on Squidoo that is home to all the great knowledge you’ve gleaned over the years, bookmarking blog posts and articles that relate to what you do on Delicious, and sharing those links on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, or Reddit, and responding to queries on Yahoo! Answers or LinkedIn Answers.

Create Online Courses – The benefits to teaching online are many, says Mike Volpe of HubSpot. “Leveraging inbound marketing with educational content is more efficient and a lower cost per lead than outbound advertising. Our inbound marketing programs are 5-10 times more efficient lead gen and sales channels than our outbound marketing programs.”

One way to offer an online course is through recently launched, Prfessor.com, which offers software that makes it possible for anyone to host an online school where they sell (or give away for free) courses on virtually any topic.

Video – Don’t underestimate the power of video. For those who do well in front of a camera, sharing free how-to videos on sites like YouTube or Vimeo can lead to increased awareness. It also demonstrates to television producers how well you do on camera, which means online expert videos can lead to television appearances.

Speaking Up – You should already be attending industry conferences, trade shows, and user group meetings, and you should make sure to assert yourself as a knowledgeable voice in the community while at those events. Whether that means lining up formal speaking engagements — which will be easier to do the more you grow your personal brand as an expert — or just networking and sharing your expertise with other attendees, speaking up is helpful in building your expert brand.

Consulting – Offering consulting services can do two things: first, it can make you a little money, and second, it can help you establish yourself among industry insiders as someone who knows their stuff. One consulting gig can lead to many based on referrals and having a list of business owners willing to give you a recommendation can be invaluable. If you plan to offer consulting services, put information about your services on your blog and in your social profiles, and consider offering phone consultations through Ether.com.

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Build On Your Expertise

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It takes a while, but you will see a snowball effect as you build your brand as an expert. More people will come to you for advice or consulting, and more media types will reach out to you for interviews. Learn to leverage your knowledge and convert it to sales. Speaking at conferences, teaching courses or seminars — both online and off, and consulting for businesses will help you grow your personal brand.

Google's Eric Schmidt on What the Web Will Look Like in 5 Years

Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick / October 27, 2009 2:11 PM / 6 Comments

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Google CEO Eric Schmidt envisions a radically changed internet five years from now: dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time. Figuring out how to rank real-time social content is "the great challenge of the age," Schmidt said in an interview in front of thousands of CIOs and IT Directors at last week's Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009.

Garnter is the largest and most respected analyst firm in the world and much of what Schmidt said in his 45 minute interview was directed specifically at business leaders, but we've excerpted 6 minutes that we believe is of interest to anyone who's touched by the web.

Highlighted comments include:

• Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.
• Today's teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years - they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.
• Five years is a factor of ten in Moore's Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.
• Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance - and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.
• "We're starting to make signifigant money off of Youtube", content will move towards more video.
• "Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results."
• There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time.
• "We can index real-time info now - but how do we rank it?"
• It's because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that "is the great challenge of the age." Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.

There's lots more in the full 45 minutes of Schmidt's interview, including a statement that a Google OS Netbook will be here in 2010, with HTML5 local caching for offline use.

That's the roadmap, though, that's guiding much of what Google is doing today. From Chrome OS to Google Social Search.

Does that sound like a compelling vision of the future? Not discussed were distributed social networking, structured data, recommendations, presence data and other factors that could complicate Google's plans. What do you think the web will look like in five years?

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Can you trust Gartner's 'Magic Quadrant' or other analysts' reports?

By Bill Snyder

Created 2009-10-22 03:00AM

Talk about David versus Goliath. A tiny Silicon Valley software vendor is taking on mighty Gartner, one of the technology industry's largest and most influential market research and consulting companies. The battle is playing out in a San Jose federal courtroom, where ZL Technologies is asking for $132 million in damages (plus even more in a punitive judgment), saying the research outfit damaged its prospects by ranking it in the bottom segment of its closely watched Magic Quadrant report. The MQ divides technology providers into different classes, with the bottom segment essentially forming a "do not buy" recommendation.

Sure, vendors complain all the time that Gartner or IDC or Forrester and their cousins do a crummy job and unfairly diss their products. Sometimes they have a point; often they don't. There are, after all, a lot of crummy products out there. But the ZL Tech lawsuit raises issues that have bubbled under the surface of the technology industry for years. Most significant, I think, is the common practice of selling research and consulting services to the very companies whose products it evaluates. (Disclosure: IDG, which owns InfoWorld, also owns IDC, a major technology research company that competes with Gartner.)

[ IT faces another information disconnect: Its big vendors' agendas often don't match IT's [1], as InfoWorld's Eric Knorr explains. | Keep up on the day's tech news headlines with InfoWorld's Today's Headlines: Wrap Up newsletter [2]. ]

"It's naïve to think that it doesn't matter [to a research firm] if a vendor delivers a huge chunk of revenue," says ZL Tech CEO Kon Leong. What's more, he says, vendors with big marketing budgets are unfairly favored by Gartner, and that stifles innovation in the industry. "Small innovative guys are running uphill against the Gartner wind," he told me.

Is market research protected by the Constitution?
Citing the company's policy of not commenting on pending litigation, a Gartner spokesman would say only that it believes the suit has no merit. But the company makes a very detailed argument in motions filed with the court [3], most interestingly claiming protection under the First Amendment's guarantees of free speech: "Whether plaintiff's opinions about its product are correct, comprehensible, or sincere has no legal significance; what matters is that the complaint fails to state a claim because it attacks opinions expressed by Gartner."

Not surprisingly, Gartner also disputes the notion that its ratings are arbitrary and biased, saying that Magic Quadrant rankings are based on "more than 1,000 conversations. We learn from these conversations not only why a client is choosing or has chosen a specific vendor, but why it did not choose other vendors that were on its shortlist."

At least one contention raised is beyond argument: Ratings by research firms matter. In particular, the Magic Quadrant is taken very seriously by enterprise IT departments evaluating products and services, and Gartner says a vendor's ability to market is a significant factor weighted in the Magic Quadrant rankings.

Here's an excerpt from Gartner marketing materials included in ZL Tech's complaint: "A vendor that builds a strong product but is unable or unwilling to also invest in marketing and sales to capture a growing base of customers will find itself unable to invest in future development."

Is that fair to startups and innovative smaller players? I'm not sure. But buyers certainly need to believe that technology vendors have staying power. No IT department wants to be stuck with an orphan product.

ZL Tech argues that because its major rival in the mail archiving market, Symantec, has so much more marketing muscle, it is rated higher by Gartner, severely damaging its business. ZL Tech also contends that its product is far superior to Symantec's, and its revenues, currently about $10 million a year, would be much larger if Gartner's rating had not scared off potential customers.

How about full disclosure of conflicts of interest?
In our conversation, ZL Tech's Leong argued that Gartner needs to tell vendors exactly how the Magic Quadrant scores are compiled. "The tech industry would benefit if Gartner were required to disclose more data in its evaluation process and disclose component scores, so vendors know exactly where they are lacking and by how much and take corrective action."

He also stated that there should be a better appeal process for vendors. Gartner does have an in-house ombudsman to handle disagreements, but Leong argues that a Gartner employee has a built-in conflict of interest.

And most important, in my opinion, Leong argues for full disclosure of conflicts of interest. "Gartner generates its revenues from payments made by the same vendors whose products it evaluates. Similar to the new rules now being imposed on financial ratings agencies on Wall Street, Gartner should be required to disclose the revenues received from the vendors it ranks."

The media's hands may not be clean
To be fair, there's reason for readers to be skeptical of product reviews and the like in the technology press. As Galen Gruman, executive editor of InfoWorld and a longtime tech journalist and former consultant, reminded me: "Much of the enthusiast (consumer) and vertical trade press is colored by its relationships with the vendors, from the unintentional 'we're all in the same boat' soft bias to the intentional 'favor the advertisers' hard bias. And we all know that some publishers do stories based on who advertises. That hurts us all, but readers have also gotten good at detecting bias as a result."

Plus, as someone who has worked in the business and technology press for 17 years, I can tell you that big companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Intel, as well as small fry, will on occasion retaliate against publications and writers they deem too critical by cutting off access. That is meant to shape coverage by at least quieting troublesome voices -- and that's harder to detect as a reader. Given such a problem, it's easy to see why in the research context that a small company such as ZL is frustrated that it becomes invisible in customers' buying decisions when a Gartner essentially reduces its voice.

I suspect that ZL Tech will not win its lawsuit, though I could certainly be wrong about that. But much more significant than the fate of one company are the larger issues raised in the case. Considering the importance of research to the health of the IT market, the questions of conflict of interest and implicit bias deserve the light of day. Maybe this case will start that process.

I welcome your comments, tips, and suggestions. Reach me at bill.snyder@sbcglobal.net [4].

This story, "Can you trust Gartner's 'Magic Quadrant' or other analysts' reports? [5]," was originally published at InfoWorld.com [6]. Follow Bill Snyder's Tech's Bottom Line blog [7] at InfoWorld.com.

Apple aims at patenting in-OS advertising

updated 10:15 am EDT, Thu October 22, 2009

Ad-supported Mac OS a possibility?

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Apple has been exploring the possibility of embedding advertising within Mac OS X, or other platforms, a newly-published patent application reveals. Originally submitted in April of last year, the application credits CEO Steve Jobs and several other people with the invention. If implemented OS users would be presented with one or more ads, which would temporarily disable some aspect of the software before allowing people to continue on.

The ads would generally take the form of pop-up windows, appearing at predefined times, such as once an hour. Tracking data would then be collected, such as when an ad was displayed, and what response a user took. Images supplied with the application suggest options such as rating, sharing or repeating ads; OS users might also be able to temporarily delay ads, to avoid interrupting some tasks.

The purpose of burdening users with ads would be to offer an OS for free, or at least at a discount. In the latter case, users could pay to extend their time with software, or to disable ads completely. Control of ads in Mac OS X could be handled through a Menu Bar item, which might also display the amount of time remaining before the next ad appears.

Great idea, make Mac OS with in-OS advertising available for non-Apple hardware.Those that don't want to pay the so called Apple premium can enjoy Mac OS X and pay with attention vs real dollars.

BigDoor Opens Doors To Public Beta Of Website And iPhone App Monetization Tool

by Robin Wauters on October 14, 2009