Smalltalk with James Robertson

Spotted in Engadget:

It's not official, but rumor that Blockbuster is preparing to file for bankruptcy in September is certainly believable. Expected even. According to several sources speaking to the Los Angeles Times, Blockbuster chief executive Jim Keyes along with representation from Blockbuster's senior debt holders met last week with the six major movie studios to announce the company's intention to enter a mid-September bankruptcy.

Blockbuster should have pursued its own streaming deals with the studios years ago - instead, they got clobbered vy Netflix, iTunes, Hulu (et. al.). There's a lesson there for any business that is dependent on an older business model, and is being challenged by upstarts....

This is the kind of technology merger that never seems to go well - Twitter just bought DabbleDB:

Obviously this represents a new chapter in the life of Dabble DB, both for us as a team, and for the product itself. We’d like to assure you that, for now, we will continue to provide our software and technical support to current Dabble DB customers. However, we will be disabling new account signups effective immediately.

What the disablement means is that Twitter doesn't care about DabbleDB as a business; they bought technology and staff. However, that's where I get skeptical. DabbleDB is built on Squeak/Seaside, while Twitter is built on Ruby and Scala (apparently less Rails than it used to be). I have a hard time seeing the Twitter folks adopting Squeak; the typical pattern in these acquisitions is something like this:

• Those guys have great technology; let's buy it
• Their tech isn't built the same as ours; we'll take the ideas and rewrite it
• .... years pass
• ... original technology dies, completely new project that is less based on the acquisition than you might like to think appears

From the link above, it's clear that the purchase was all about the Trendly analytics stuff - which makes any future for DabbleDB itself even more murky, IMHO. This is obviously a nice exit for the DabbleDB folks, and that's great for them.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, twitter, trendly, analytics

With the loss of key people from the MS entertainment division, I'd have to say that Sony now has a real chance to play catch up in the console space:

Robbie Bach and J Allard, founding fathers of Microsoft's Entertainment & Devices Division, are leaving the company as part of a broader restructuring that will give CEO Steve Ballmer more direct oversight of consumer businesses including Microsoft's struggling mobile unit.

Especially with Ballmer running things. He's like a one man morale destruction machine...

Technorati Tags: microsoft, sony, xbox

I'd say that this is a pretty clear sign that Oracle intends to quash a lot of Sun's old culture and make it more sales oriented - a quote from Ellison:

The underlying engineering teams are so good, but the direction they got was so astonishingly bad that even they couldn't succeed," said Ellison. "Really great blogs do not take the place of great microprocessors. Great blogs do not replace great software. Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and lots of sales.

That's a pretty hard jab at old "give it away and make it up in volume" Schwartz there. It's really too bad they had to pay that idiot off as part of the acquisition; based on his management skills, he should have been paying Oracle...

Technorati Tags: oracle, sun, ellison, schwartz

I can't figure this one out:

HP and Palm, Inc. (NASDAQ: PALM) today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which HP will purchase Palm, a provider of smartphones powered by the Palm webOS mobile operating system, at a price of $5.70 per share of Palm common stock in cash or an enterprise value of approximately $1.2 billion. The transaction has been approved by the HP and Palm boards of directors.

Why? What on earth is HP going to do with a failing phone business? Didn't they learn anything from the Compaq deal?

Technorati Tags: stupidity, palm

Now Apple is finding out about the kind of distrust their new "our languages only" policy is setting up with developers - witness the rumor that flew around the internet yesterday, ultimately ending in an email that Steve Jobs felt compelled to answer personally:

We heard a rumor last week about Apple making some big changes to the Mac OS X platform, let’s say to 10.7, in order to make it similar to iPhone OS and introduce an App Store for Mac applications that should be approved by Apple first. People started complaining about it, and I guess this would be the worst thing that could happen to a Mac developer, indeed. There are entire business built on top of the open nature of Mac OS X, and Apple just can’t change it anymore

It's a fairly absurd rumor, but - ponder the fact that it started to gain traction. That's the hole Apple has dug itself with some developers. As I've said before, it's too early to tell whether enough developers are angry enough to impact Apple... but this was an interesting data point.

Technorati Tags: apple, iPad, Mac

I'm trying to figure out how this revenue plan for Twitter took two years to come up with:

The advertising program, which Twitter calls Promoted Tweets, will show up when Twitter users search for keywords that the advertisers have bought to link to their ads. Later, Twitter plans to show promoted posts in the stream of Twitter posts, based on how relevant they might be to a particular user.

That's "AdWords for Twitter". I hope they didn't stay up late figuring it out.

Technorati Tags: twitter, ads

I wrote about the new Apple TOS stuff earlier today; since then, things have gone nuts. Greg Slepak actually got a response from Jobs, and sure enough, it looks like the policy is his idea. You can get the conversation via Mashable; it looks like Slepak's site is overwhelmed right now.

What Jobs isn't grasping is that he's pissing off a huge segment of the developer community that would happily write apps for his platform. Will that matter in the long term?

Honestly, I don't know, but going from a positive to a negative view within the larger development community can't help them. The flip side of Jobs' innate ability to bring focus seems to be an inability to climb down from ridiculous positions. It would only help him - and Apple - to do a climb down. I seriously doubt he'll do it though. Before this, his "anti-Flash" stance was just that - and it didn't bring any collateral damage to the party. What he's just done is set off a hand grenade in a crowded room, when he had been content to use a sniper rifle.

Consider a small example - the Squeak port to the iPhone. Absent this policy a number of Smalltalk developers would likely have picked that work up and created apps, "just for fun". Now? They just won't bother - or, more likely, someone will create a "Squeak for Android" package, and all of the energy will go there.

Now, that's admittedly a small set of developers in the grand scheme of things. But what about the legions of, say, Java developers? Or Ruby developers? Does Apple really want to send all of them over to Android? That's where inertia will send them. It may be enough to make Android a bigger player, it may not. What's clear to me is that it gives Google an opening - whether they can exploit that opening is something else again.

Technorati Tags: apple, adobe, flash, iPad, iPhone

The more I think about it, the more Apple's new policy for the iPhone/iPad seems like BS. Consider their rationale for limiting you to the C language family (plus Javascript); they claim it's so that their new multi-tasking layer can properly ajudicate things. As one of my colleagues on the Smalltalk IRC channel pointed out:

if you were going to require something for multitasking, it'd be more of the form - Applications must implement the threadsThatNeedToRunInBackgroundIfYouWereToSuspendMeRightNow() callback. Any that do not, will not be able to benefit from multitasking.

So no, it's not about multi-tasking per se. I don't think it's strictly about controlling the development tools, although that is very Apple-like. No, I think that Adobe's product eveangelist, Lee Brimelow, is probably right with his veiled assertions - this is a shot directly at Adobe and Flash.

Had Apple specifically banned Flash, they might have generated some kind of lawsuit. THis policy smacks of "let's ask the lawyers how to kill Flash and get away with it". Here's what I'd like to know: this really doesn't strike me as a business decision. Think about it - why does Apple care what tools you use to create iPhone/iPad apps, if they all promote the device and the store? They already control the retail end, so they can (post hoc, if necessary) yank misbehaving apps.

No, I think this is all about Jobs. He has developed a deep antipathy to Adobe, and this is the latest step in how that's coming out.

Technorati Tags: apple, iPhone, iPad, adobe, flash

Wired reports on a smart move by Amazon:

Amazon announces Kindle Apps for Tablet Computers (including Kindle for iPad), a rather polished e-reader application that both makes the Kindle itself look rather old-fashioned and explains why last week’s Mac version was so unfinished: The Amazon developers have clearly been spending all their time on this instead.

I'd say that the Kindle's rationale worked - it helped create the e-reader market. Now, Amazon can focus on selling into it, without regard to the device. To many businesses get focused on the small stuff, or points of pride. Thus far, it looks like Amazon hasn't fallen into that trap.

Technorati Tags: e-books, iPad, kindle