Latest News from Yakov Fain

From ASCII-Art to Steve Jobs

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:03:00 EDT

Many years ago, while applying for a college, I've selected Applied Math as my major. I made this decision after seeing a computer printout on the wall of the admission office. This was an ASCII representation of cartoon characters.
After college, I've started working as a computer programmer in a data center that was processing payroll on mainframes. During the third shift, when no bosses were around, we were printing images of Mona Liza that were manually created by some geeks from ASCII characters.

I was able to find a similar image at http://ripsaw.cac.psu.edu/~mloewen/Oldtech/ASCII/Mona.jpg

These days anyone could do it using so-called ascii-art generator programs, and you can find lots of them by following this link.

But no matter how far technology goes, there's always a place for creativity. Today, I ran into an amazing image of Steve Jobs made out of the images of Apple's paraphernalia. This is a creation of the Flikr user tsevis. Here's the URL. To really appreciate this piece of art, select the original size on top. My hat off to you, tsevis!

Podcast: Load Testing Flex Applications

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:30:00 EDT

One might think that a school district software is an easy case when it comes to performance and scalability. Now think of the end of a marking period when everyone is working with progress reports? From this interview you can learn how Neoload, one of the popular stress testing software was used to identify the bottlenecks of this Flex-based RIA.

IntelliJ IDEA: A little too late

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:42:00 EDT

Great Java IDE IntelliJ IDEA is available for free in the Community Edition flavor. This is good news, but IMO, it's a little too late.

I've recorded the episode #14 of my No BS IT podcast where I explain my point of view: http://nobsit.libsyn.com/ .

Russia Hates Apple Big Time

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:50:00 EDT

I never liked online forums where comments to the original posts could be rated (+ or - 1) by other readers. But today, I changed my mind. These negative ratings can tell you a lot. There is a Web site www.habrahabr.ru popular among software developers in Russia. Today, someone posted an information about newly released hardware by Apple. You'd say, "No biggies. Apple has a steady and growing group of followers and often releases well designed hardware"

Podcast: an interview to the RIARevolution

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 23:15:00 EDT

The online publication RIARevolution.com covers everything related to development of rich Internet applications has published an interview with me as a part of the audio podcast Speak Rich. You can download it as an mp3 file or just listen to it at the following Web page: http://bit.ly/2kwOzT

In this interview we are talking about recent Adobe MAX 2009, using Flash for developing application for iPhone, upcoming Flex 4 framework, open source Clear Toolkit framework, the new book on Enterprise development with Flex and more.

The other episodes of Speak Rich podcast are featuring the following well known software engineers:

Chet Haase, a member of the Adobe Flex SDK team
Stuart Stern, creator of a testing framework Flex Monkey
John Resig, creator of the famous JavaScript library and toolkit — jQuery

You can subscribe to this podcast at http://riarevolution.com/category/speak-rich/

Imagine There's No iPhone

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 06:00:00 EDT

The ultimate goal of any software vendor is...to make sure that their software runs on iPhone. The time will come when entire J2EE stack with EJB will run on iPhone. Singing... You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.

Imagine there's no iPhone
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there's no iPhone
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no iPhones
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope Flash Player'll join us
And the world will live as one

Sorry, John :)

Thoughts on running advanced training in developing countries

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:44:00 EDT

During the last several months, we ran advanced 2-day Adobe Flex training in New York, Boston, Toronto, and London. The next destinations are Moscow, Russia and Kiev, Ukraine. But this is a different world and I'd like to share with you some of my thoughts on the subject.

This is our first attempt to run advanced training in the countries that are mainly considered as the source of the software developers for the USA and Western Europe. You might ask, “What difference does it make? A training is a training.” Actually there is a big difference for several reasons.

I've heard from some of the developers that employers in theses countries might not be interested in paying for advanced training classes. Many of them are mainly interested in offering their employees an introductory training whenever the new technology becomes in demand (not to be confused with "becomes popular", i.e. ROR is popular among developers, but not overly demanded by the enterprises) so they can put their software developers on billing. But if a person is already billable, sending him/her to an advance training would increase marketability of this developer in the domestic market, which may not be exactly what managers of the offshore IT shops want.

US employers understand this too, but they are willing to take this risk realizing that their own firm would benefit from people with advanced skills, who are not immediately start looking for new jobs after attending such training. The mentality is different in countries-outsourcers. A large portion of offshore developers considers software development as a way to make a quick buck rather than a long term career. Hence, sell your skills today as if there may be no tomorrow.

Last year, I was presenting at a large conference for software developers in Bangalore, India. One of my presentation was not technical, but on what does it take to be a professional enterprise software developer.

After this presentation, a guy stopped by asking for a career advice. He’s an experienced programmer but was asking what’s the best way to switch from developing software to project management. I went,  “Do you like programming?” “Yes, I really do” “So why do you want to switch?” “I am 35 years old, and when relatives ask me what do I do at work, and since I’m not a manager yet, they think that I’m underachiever”.

I can’t imagine that in the USA a person would want to become a manager just to please family members and neighbors. After that conversation I started asking other Indian developers if the story of that guy was an exception or the rule? They confirmed, “If there are no people working for you – it’s not considered a successful career”.
After having lots of communications with developers from Eastern Europe, I see that being a software developer is respected, but still, making a quick buck no matter what is an ultimate goal there.

In the Western countries, it’s normal for individuals to pay for training, which is not the case in the developing countries. They enroll into classes when their employers pay for it. While Moscow is considered one of the most expensive cities in the world, we’ve set priced the training there at 50% of what we’ve charged in London. Different culture.

For us, this Moscow-Kiev training is not a money making project – we’ll be happy to cover expenses. We are mainly interested in getting more connections in that part of the world that, hopefully, may turn into something more tangible. I really hope that people will enroll into our classes, and I’ll have chance to visit Moscow, and Kiev, where I’m originally from.

If you are an employer operating in Eastern Europe and you do run projects that require software developers with advanced Flex skills, consider sending them to one of our master classes in December. The registration links are listed below:

Moscow: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/458588651

Kiev: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/459726053

Podcast. Attending Adobe Max 2009. Part 4

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:50:00 EDT

This podcast is about the closing day of Adobe MAX 2009: http://nobsit.libsyn.com/
How I understand the iPhone/Flash situation
Good read about AIR 2.0
The Adobe MAX 2009 videos for developers are published the next day!

Podcast. Attending Adobe Max 2009. Part 3.

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 13:25:00 EDT

I'm continuing covering Adobe MAX 2009 in Los Angeles. This podcast is about the day 2 at the conference: http://nobsit.libsyn.com/

Podcast: Attending Adobe MAX 2009. Part 2.

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 10:32:00 EDT

Published a new episode of my No BS IT podcast covering Adobe MAX, Monday, Oct 5 2009: http://nobsit.libsyn.com/.
Features of Flash Player 10.1: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/features.html

Stay tuned.

Podcast: Visiting Adobe MAX 2009. Part 1.

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 09:48:00 EDT

Published the next podcast covering my participation in the conference Adobe Max 2009: http://nobsit.libsyn.com/

Started while driving to the airport and finished in LA. How I spend my first day in LA, and the first major software announcement at Adobe MAX 2009: http://flex.sys-con.com/node/1130905

Till tomorrow...

Adobe MAX 2009. First major release: LiveCycle Enterprise Suite 2

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:01:00 EDT

Today, Adobe announced a major release of LiveCycle® Enterprise Suite 2 (ES2), an SOA architecture for automation of document processing, RIA, and process management. It’s an enterprise platform for SOA that brings together various technologies and tools including LiveCycle Data Services, Flex, Flash, Adobe Acrobat and more to deliver user centric applications.

Podcast: Visiting Adobe MAX 2009. Part 0.

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 19:52:00 EDT

This is the first in a mini series covering my participation in a great event called Adobe MAX 2009 that will take place in Los Angeles, CA on October 4-7, 2009: http://nobsit.libsyn.com/ .

Stay tuned.

How to Attend Adobe MAX Conference for Cheap

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 18:00:00 EDT

Three years ago, I was calculating the cost of attending JavaOne conference. Thanks to the crisis, the conferences got cheaper, but arestill not affordable for many software developers. I’d like to offer you a legal way to get more than 80% off the registration price at Adobe MAX that will take place next week in Los Angeles. But you have to move fast! It’s easy: 1. Today: enroll into a cheapest class in your local community college to get a student ID. 2. Tomorrow: register for Adobe Max for $199 at the following Web page: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/edu/max2009/. 3. Sunday: arrive to LA.

How to attend Adobe MAX conference for cheap

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:30:00 EDT

I’d like to offer you a legal way to get more than 80% off the registration price at Adobe MAX that will take place next week in Los Angeles. But you have to move fast!

A conversation with a CS professor who doesn't want his son to be a programmer

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:30:00 EDT

Published a podcast: "A conversation with a CS professor who doesn't want his son to be a programmer": http://nobsit.libsyn.com/

Thinking of Flex in London

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 11:30:00 EDT

I try to go easy on frameworks in the classroom, because there could be lots of non-technical reasons for adopting this or that framework. I also know that people who created frameworks are seasoned developers with their vision of how things should be done. No disrespect here. But if they have their vision and are not afraid to promote, I am entitled to have mine, don’t I?

Russia "Will" Develop a New Web Browser

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 13:30:00 EDT

Russia "will" develop a new Web browser for federal employees. The news was published on infonews.ru. The project is funded by the Ministry of Defense and FSB (formerly KGB). According to infonews, "several million rubles will be spent on creation of Russian Web browser". They are planning to use Mozilla's Firefox as the base. The official version is that they are not happy that popular browsers are sending to Google search engine statistics on the user's visits of the Web sites. If this information is true, this is how you should read it: a group of people figured out how to get funding and split it between them. In a year or so the project will quietly fail, but Russia will have a couple of more millionaires.

My Top Seven Wishes From Adobe MAX 2009

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 15:00:00 EDT

In ten days I’ll be sitting at the general session at Adobe MAX 09 in LA. People from Adobe will come up on stage one after another delivering the latest news on the products we all use daily. Here’s my short wish list of the news I’d like to hear. I’m sure people who are using Creative Studio 4 see some room for improvement too, but this is not my cup of tea and I can’t come up with additional items for my wish list that would please the graphic and Web designers. But if my seven wishes become a reality, I’ll openly admit that Flash platform is a killer.

Podcast: How I was developing a Web site in India

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:00:00 EDT

In this podcast I'll share with you my experience of hiring an offshore $13p/h freelancer to develop a simple Web site for personal use: http://nobsit.libsyn.com .

Flash Platform Services for Distribution

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 08:15:00 EDT

Today, Adobe made a very interesting announcement - Adobe Flash Platform Services for Distribution is available to the public. To put it simple, it’s a new way of distributing, promoting, and measuring the usage of your applications on the Web.

Podcast: Cultural Differences in Outsourcing

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 13:52:00 EDT

We talked about specifics in dealing with East European and Indian offshore developers.

Podcast on cultural differences in outsourcing

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:58:00 EDT

Published a new podcast with Shashank Tiwari "Cultural differences in outsourcing" http://nobsit.libsyn.com/

We talked about specifics in dealing with East European and Indian offshore developers. In the end, we happily agreed that American enterprise managers are the ones to blame for failures of outsourced projects. Yey!

The world is a pyramid

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 10:30:00 EDT

In the beginning, the world was flat. At least people thought so. If you don’t believe me, check Wikipedia, which efing knows everything: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth

Eventually, some educated people got a gut feeling that the world was round or as they say it in Wikipedea, the Earth was Spherical http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round_earth. Nobody trusted their feelings and some sailors of Columbus’ crew even were afraid of falling over the edge of Earth.

Then some luxury cruise lines started selling world cruises, when the cruise ship would sail from the port of call A to the West, and several months later all these retired filthy-rich people would return back to the same port, but from the East. This was, kinda, proof that the world is spherical.

About the same time, a young kid asked his daddy, the software programmer,

“Daddy, how come, every day Sun wakes up in the East, then goes to bed in the West, but next morning it somehow wakes up in the East again”

Daddy gave a correct answer,

“Son, if it works, don’t touch it”

But people really believed that the world is spherical until Thomas Friedman, the journalist from New York Times went to India and became very impressed after visiting Infosys, a large IT offshore firm in India. They showed him “a global conference center – ground zero of the Indian outsourcing industry’ It was a cavernous wood-paneled room that looked like a tiered classroom from an Ivy-League law school. On one end was a massive wall-size screen and overhead there were cameras in the ceiling for teleconferencing”.

This made Mr. Friedman to believe that it does not matter where you are, you can work on a global project without leaving your country. He published book “The world is flat” trying to hurt the business of cruise lines and American software development industry. Since this book became a New York Time’s bestseller, it’s safely to assume that a large portion of the world’s population started to believe (again!) that the Earth was flat.

Then I thought to myself, “If Mr. Friedman was able to pull this off, I can do it too”.

Here’s my theory (Hey, Google, make sure that the world knows that I was the first who said this). Ready?

“The Earth (a.k.a. World) is a pyramid”

Even Wikipedia doesn’t know about it just yet. They know some facts, but couldn’t put 2 and 2 together. Now, let me explain what I mean. I’m sure you’ve heard about Ponzi pyramid scheme: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme, which was widely popularized by Mr. Bernie Madoff, a resident of New York City. Many people didn’t like the way Mr. Madoff did it though, and he was called a criminal by the media.

As per Wikipedia, “A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to separate investors from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors, rather than from any actual profit earned. The Ponzi scheme usually offers returns that other investments cannot guarantee in order to entice new investors, in the form of short-term returns that are either abnormally high or unusually consistent.”

But if you think about it, the entire world operates on the same scheme. The USA takes an advantage of the special treatment that the dollar enjoys. Today’s USA is a huge goods and job market for the rest of the world. America operates on the assumption that a stream of new investments will continuously flow into the American economy. This means that us, Americans, can enjoy this world order until one of two things happens:

1. The situation is the rest of the world will change and all other countries will create self-sufficient economies.

2. Another pyramid(s), where America won’t be on top, will arise. In this case the wide stream of foreign investment of goods, services, and money will have to split into two smaller ones.

Unfortunately, today’s American society, which I’m a part of, is slowly but surely is turning into that ship from the Wall-E movie., and if any of these events will happen, the USA will realize that today’s crisis was not even a recession.

Have I proven to you that the world is a pyramid?

Enterprise Flex: Debunking Urban Myths

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 08:45:00 EDT

I got an email from an enterprise architect considering Adobe Flex as a platform for Web application development in their organization. This email contained a well prepared list of questions/remarks/concerns that many of enterprise Web architects may face. That’s why I decided to publish my short answers to these questions. I didn’t change the wording of the questions/ statements.

Flex User Groups and Conflict of Interest

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 10:30:00 EDT

First of all, to add a little more credibility to what I’m about to write, let me just say that I’m running Princeton Java Users Group (JUG) for years and have a pretty good idea of how organization of the meetings and sponsorship work in such gatherings. Java community is huge, well established and has a loyal following of leaders and enthusiasts that are willing to spend some of their evenings meeting with their peers and attending presentations by either well known or by no so famous yet presenters.

Started a new podcast: No BS IT

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 14:47:00 EDT

I started a new podcast where I'll be talking about life in IT, enterprise software development, startups, offshoring, loking for a job, passing the interview, changing employers, pros and cons of being a consultant vs an employee, et al.

I won’t bore you with technical details of this or that technology, but this is going to be an open conversation about life of an enterprise developer in the USA. I'll try to keep it 100% BS-less... if this is possible.

Here's the URL: http://nobsit.podbean.com/

You can subscribe to the feed to automatically receive fresh MP3 files as they get published.

Adobe's Serious Move Towards Model-Driven Development

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 14:45:00 EDT

When a couple of months back I told a fellow Flex developer that I’ll be speaking at CFUnited, conference he shrugged, “Why ColdFusion?” Little did he know that CFUnited is branded as a ColdFusion, Flex and AIR conference. And this was true – there were lots of quality presentations on Flex and AIR here...

Know Your Flex Proxy

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 08:00:00 EDT

Flex framework includes a pretty useful object that deserves more attention: mx.util.ObjectProxy. You can wrap your object (i.e. Person) into this proxy which will obediently report on all changes that are happening to this instance of a person. If you subclass ObjectProxy, you can even add a new behavior to the wrapped object without touching a single line of its code.

Twitter Is Down and I Can't Broadcast This Message!

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 19:30:00 EDT

In general, creating of such a simple Yes/no site can save lots of money to the vendors of any other commercial software. Say, your firm runs an e-commerce Web site GreatOnlineStore.com. When your server is down, the phone lines of your customer support get swamped (and you pay for all these 800 numbers!). Frustrated customer keep banging your server getting errors back...What a mess.... You could have avoided this by running a simple Web site IsGreatOnlineStoreDown.com, which would put the minds of frustrated customers at ease - people can survive for an our without your GreatOnlineStore, but what's most important, this red Yes will give them a feeling that everything is under control. They know what's going on!

Twitter is down

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 12:04:00 EDT

During the last half an hour Twitter is down. It's hit by a denial of service attack.

And when Twitter is down, there is no way to quickly say to the entire world that Twitter's down.

Actually, to put it properly, there is no way to broadcast (push) this message.

But the good news is the some nice fellow create a very simple and cute Web page that answers ( in three characters or less) just one question, "Is Twitter down?", which at this very moment shows a large red

Yes

In general, creating such a simple Yes/No site can save lots of money to the vendors of any other commercial software. Say, your firm runs an e-commerce Web site GreatOnlineStore.com. When your server is down, the phone lines of your customer support get swamped (and you pay for all these 800 numbers!). Frustrated customer keep banging your server getting 404 back...What a mess....

You could have avoided this by running a simple Web site IsGreatOnlineStoreDown.com, which would put the minds of frustrated customers at ease - people can survive for an hour without your GreatOnlineStore, but what's most important, this red Yes will give them a feeling that everything is under control. They know what's going on!

Think about it. I'm not kidding.

A Singleton that Flex Developers must know about

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:38:00 EDT

Don’t create new singletons – just use what you already have.

Each real-world software developer knows at least one design pattern – Singleton. Flex has some specifics in implementing Singletons due to lack of private constructors in ActionScript, but the goal of this little writeup is not to show you how to implement Singleton, but rather to discourage you from doing this because each Flex application already has a singleton – just use it.

I’ve recorded an eight-minute video that will shows how you can use the Application object as your one and only singleton when needed. See if you can answer the question that I asked at the end of the video.

This is one of many tricks and techniques that consultants from Farata Systems use while working on enterprise Flex projects, and we’ll continue to share them with you in the form of such mini demos as well as in one of our public seminars like the one on August 7 in New York City or on September 24-25 in London, UK.

A Singleton That Flex Developers Must Know About

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:30:00 EDT

Flex Performance: Develop Each Flex Application As a Portal

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 21:30:00 EDT

In this brief article I’d like to talk about one of the most important aspects of RIA in general and written in Flex in particular – the initial download process. You'll also see a screencast showing how designing each Flex application as a portal can make your RIA more modular and responsive.

Develop each Flex application as a portal

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 20:17:00 EDT

In this brief article I’d like to talk about one of the most important aspects of RIA in general and written in Flex in particular – the initial download process. You application is considered fast for one of two reasons:
1. Well, it is fast
2. It’s perceived to be fast

Today I’ll cover one of the approaches that we at Farata Systems successfully use in literally every enterprise project - designing any Flex application as a portal. There is one exception: Hello World type applications that don’t have any custom styling. Such simple applications can live in a single swf.

Any serious application is technically a portal that consists of a small and light shell application that appears very fast on the user’s machines and downloads (in a smart way) the RSLs that will be needed for the modules lazy loaded modules.

Needless to say that you must always deploy Flex Framework libraries as signed RSLs, which will allow shaving off a substantial amount of downloadable bytes required by your RIA. Unless you have a virgin computer that never seen Flex app, these RSLs will be stored on the user’s disk in Flash Player’s cache (don’t confuse it with the Web browser’s cache).

Now consider an application that has one light-weight main SWF and 10 modules, seven of which include charts. In other words, they rely on datavisualization.swc. During the application startup the SystemManager reads the list of RSL’s from the SWF and loads them with the help of the class of RSLListLoader.

Without going through the advantages of using the RSLs in general, I’d like to mention the fact that Adobe’s class RSLListLoader simply performs loading of all RSLs listed in the generated SystemManager for each module. This means that if the datavisualization.swc was linked in three modules, SystemManager will download it three times (this is the case when this swc was not signed and cached).

We’ve modified the RSLListLoader a little bit so it’ll avoid downloading duplicate RSLs.

One more suggestion for working with modularized applications that use BlazeDS/LCDS – do not create separate services-config.xml files for each of the module. To avoid conflicts, let them reuse one and only services-config.xml listed with the main SWF of your application. This will also allow you to properly allocate work between developers in your team – each of them can have a small test harness application and test his/her modules without the need for waiting when the other modules are ready.

In the following 7-minute screencast I’ll show you the application that has been built in such a way.

People who will attend our Enterprise Flex symposium in New York City on August 7 and Advanced Flex training in London on September will get a chance to get familiar with these techniques in greater details.

Hope to see you there.

Interviewing Java Developers With Tears in My Eyes

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 14:30:00 EDT

During the last week I had to interview five developers for a position that required the following skills: Flex, Java, Spring, and Hibernate. Most of these guys had demonstrated the 3 out of 10 level of Flex skills even though each of them claimed a practical experience on at least two projects. But this didn’t surprise me – Flex is still pretty new and there is only a small number of developers on the market who can really get Flex things done. What surprised me the most is a low level of Java skills of most of these people. They have 5-8 years of Java EE project behind their belts, but they were not Java developers. They were species that I can call Robot-Configurator. Each of them knew how to configure XML files for Spring, they knew how to hook up Spring and Hibernate and how to map a Java class to a database entity. Some of them even knew how to configure lazy loading in Hibernate even though not all understood why it’s needed.

Do You Have an SLA For Your Flex RIA?

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:00:00 EDT

A perspective client showed me a Web page from Adobe’s Connect Now. Check this page out before reading further: https://connectnow.acrobat.com/ “Yakov, I want our new application to be like that one. The page comes up really fast and it’s very responsive. Can you create our Flex application for us that will be really, really fast? “ “Yes, I can but it requires planning, and applying special modularization techniques”.

One Approach to Enterprise Adobe Flex Development

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:30:00 EDT

During the last several years our company have been involved in development of many enterprise Flex project. This article is an attempt to summarize challenges and offer solutions that we've developed, tested and successfully implemented for our customers.

Google OS - A Cynical View

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 13:15:00 EDT

I really like Google. They produce easy to use applications that work great. I use their search engine about a hundred times a day. Their applications make sense. But this announcement gave me goosebumps. If you didn’t hear that Google has announced that in 2010 consumers will have a chance to enjoy new Chrome-based OS, stop reading and do you homework first.

Google OS - a Cynical View

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 EST

If you didn’t hear that Google has announced that in 2010 consumers will have a chance to enjoy new Chrome-based OS, stop reading and do you homework first.

Done? Now we can move on, and let’s do it by the rules – positive things first, then some bile followed by a happy end.

I really like Google. They produce easy to use applications that work great. I use their search engine about a hundred times a day. Their applications make sense.

Nine months ago they released a Web browser called Chrome, and I liked it. Back than I suggested that in a year “Chrome will bite off a decent chunk of the Web browser's market ”.

I was wrong. They’ve bitten a really small piece of the browser’s pie. For lots of companies 3% of any market would be like money from home, but for Google it’s a failure. Now they say that 30M people downloaded this browser. Not too much assuming that there are like 700M computers connected to the internet worldwide. Do you math. I was one of these 30M downloaders. But I don’t use it. Still waiting for some compelling reason to abandon FireFox 3.5.

Now let’s consider a lot more complicated than a Web browser software - the OS. Wall Street commercials often include the following phrase, “Past performance is no guarantee of the future results”. But in case of the Chrome-based OS we haven’t seen even the “past performance” so only a miracle can lead to the promised “future results” a year from now.

Many people are quick to blame Microsoft Windows for anything and everything. Have you ever heard something like “MAC OS is cool. Widows is a piece of junk”? As a matter of fact, I’m typing this blog using MS Word installed on my MacBook Pro. BTW, the MAC OS version of MS Word has a lot of room for improvement, but it’s besides the point here.
But let’s not blame old and out of style Windows too fast. Keep in mind that every Windows OS had to work on a HUGE variety of hardware produced by a plethora of vendors. Their life was never as easy as Apple’s who created one computer and one OS to this computer. Feel the difference? To the best of my knowledge, Google haven’t created their own computer yet (google phone doesn’t count), but they are planning to enter a Wild West of netbook PCs. Will their OS work only on some models? When will the drivers to my Cannon printer and Fujitsu scanner work with Google OS?

What about MS Office for those stubborn millions of corporate users that don’t want to switch to Google’s online word processors and spreadsheets? The business users are pretty comfy with coding their little formulas in MS Excel. It took them YEARS to master these what-if scenarios and total/subtotal functionality in their tiny under-the-table reports they’re proud of.

For a company with 10000 employees saving $45 on each OS license translates into a substantial sum of money. But why 15+ year old Linux still didn’t make it into a consumer’s market? Agree the first 10 years Linux distributions didn’t have an intuitive GUI. But now there are several flavors of Linux with a decent UI. It’s also free and open source. A handful of geeks enjoy every minute they spend in Linux, but for those Excel users it’s a completely different universe that they don’t care about.

Sure enough, Google will come up with an intuitive UI, but that little kid will never switch to a Google OS computer if his Street Fighter won’t work there. Will Adobe rush to develop the Google OS version of Photoshop by the end of 2008? I don’t think so.

Speaking of the Google OS open source announcement that is embraced by everyone who see nothing but the word “free” in it…I read it a little differently – Google doesn’t want to commit substantial human resources for this serious undertaking and is betting on kids-enthusiasts who will contribute the new features and patches to the source control repository.

Am I’m painting the picture with unnecessary dark colors?

OK, here’s a couple of positive sprinkles.

1. I do believe that Google will be able to create installable small kernel that will include only the networking and I/O modules absolutely required to quicly start the netbook and connect to the Internet. Google OS will pull the rest of its required modules later, over the wire in the background while the user is still thinking, “Why did I open even the netbook now?” or on as-needed basis. Remember how Baron Munchhausen have used his own bootstrap to pull himself out of a lake by his own hair? If Baron Munchausen could do it, Google can do it too.

2. Google can use their super-duper advertising machine to promote their new toy. To give you a perspective, Microsoft is spending for marketing of their new search engine Bing a sum that, as Ballmer put it is "big enough that I had to gulp when I approved it. " And Bullmer doesn’t gulp seeing anything less than $1B.  If Linux had access to such marketing machine, they’d bee in a much better shape now.

Having said all that, I’ll stick to my general approach, “The more the merrier”, and I wholeheartedly wish Google to pull it off if not in 2010 then by 2012 or even by 2015.

Go Google, Go!

Google OS - a Cynical View

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 EST

If you didn’t hear that Google has announced that in 2010 consumers will have a chance to enjoy new Chrome-based OS, stop reading and do you homework first.

Done? Now we can move on, and let’s do it by the rules – positive things first, then some bile followed by a happy end.

I really like Google. They produce easy to use applications that work great. I use their search engine about a hundred times a day. Their applications make sense.

Nine months ago they released a Web browser called Chrome, and I liked it. Back than I suggested that in a year “Chrome will bite off a decent chunk of the Web browser's market ”.

OK, here’s a couple of positive sprinkles.

Go Google, Go!

Google OS - a Cynical View

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 EST

If you didn’t hear that Google has announced that in 2010 consumers will have a chance to enjoy new Chrome-based OS, stop reading and do you homework first.

Done? Now we can move on, and let’s do it by the rules – positive things first, then some bile followed by a happy end.

I really like Google. They produce easy to use applications that work great. I use their search engine about a hundred times a day. Their applications make sense.

Nine months ago they released a Web browser called Chrome, and I liked it. Back than I suggested that in a year “Chrome will bite off a decent chunk of the Web browser's market ”.

OK, here’s a couple of positive sprinkles.

Go Google, Go!

Google OS - a Cynical View

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 EST

If you didn’t hear that Google has announced that in 2010 consumers will have a chance to enjoy new Chrome-based OS, stop reading and do you homework first.

Done? Now we can move on, and let’s do it by the rules – positive things first, then some bile followed by a happy end.

I really like Google. They produce easy to use applications that work great. I use their search engine about a hundred times a day. Their applications make sense.

Nine months ago they released a Web browser called Chrome, and I liked it. Back than I suggested that in a year “Chrome will bite off a decent chunk of the Web browser's market ”.

OK, here’s a couple of positive sprinkles.

Go Google, Go!

Google OS - a Cynical View

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 EST

If you didn’t hear that Google has announced that in 2010 consumers will have a chance to enjoy new Chrome-based OS, stop reading and do you homework first.

Done? Now we can move on, and let’s do it by the rules – positive things first, then some bile followed by a happy end.

I really like Google. They produce easy to use applications that work great. I use their search engine about a hundred times a day. Their applications make sense.

Nine months ago they released a Web browser called Chrome, and I liked it. Back than I suggested that in a year “Chrome will bite off a decent chunk of the Web browser's market ”.

OK, here’s a couple of positive sprinkles.

Go Google, Go!

Google OS - a Cynical View

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 EST

If you didn’t hear that Google has announced that in 2010 consumers will have a chance to enjoy new Chrome-based OS, stop reading and do you homework first.

Done? Now we can move on, and let’s do it by the rules – positive things first, then some bile followed by a happy end.

I really like Google. They produce easy to use applications that work great. I use their search engine about a hundred times a day. Their applications make sense.

Nine months ago they released a Web browser called Chrome, and I liked it. Back than I suggested that in a year “Chrome will bite off a decent chunk of the Web browser's market ”.

OK, here’s a couple of positive sprinkles.

Go Google, Go!

Google OS - a Cynical View

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 EST

If you didn’t hear that Google has announced that in 2010 consumers will have a chance to enjoy new Chrome-based OS, stop reading and do you homework first.

Done? Now we can move on, and let’s do it by the rules – positive things first, then some bile followed by a happy end.

I really like Google. They produce easy to use applications that work great. I use their search engine about a hundred times a day. Their applications make sense.

Nine months ago they released a Web browser called Chrome, and I liked it. Back than I suggested that in a year “Chrome will bite off a decent chunk of the Web browser's market ”.

OK, here’s a couple of positive sprinkles.

Go Google, Go!

Google OS - a Cynical View

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 EST

If you didn’t hear that Google has announced that in 2010 consumers will have a chance to enjoy new Chrome-based OS, stop reading and do you homework first.

Done? Now we can move on, and let’s do it by the rules – positive things first, then some bile followed by a happy end.

I really like Google. They produce easy to use applications that work great. I use their search engine about a hundred times a day. Their applications make sense.

Nine months ago they released a Web browser called Chrome, and I liked it. Back than I suggested that in a year “Chrome will bite off a decent chunk of the Web browser's market ”.

OK, here’s a couple of positive sprinkles.

Go Google, Go!

Google OS - a Cynical View

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 EST

If you didn’t hear that Google has announced that in 2010 consumers will have a chance to enjoy new Chrome-based OS, stop reading and do you homework first.

Done? Now we can move on, and let’s do it by the rules – positive things first, then some bile followed by a happy end.

I really like Google. They produce easy to use applications that work great. I use their search engine about a hundred times a day. Their applications make sense.

Nine months ago they released a Web browser called Chrome, and I liked it. Back than I suggested that in a year “Chrome will bite off a decent chunk of the Web browser's market ”.

OK, here’s a couple of positive sprinkles.

Go Google, Go!

Google OS - a Cynical View

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 EST

If you didn’t hear that Google has announced that in 2010 consumers will have a chance to enjoy new Chrome-based OS, stop reading and do you homework first.

Done? Now we can move on, and let’s do it by the rules – positive things first, then some bile followed by a happy end.

I really like Google. They produce easy to use applications that work great. I use their search engine about a hundred times a day. Their applications make sense.

Nine months ago they released a Web browser called Chrome, and I liked it. Back than I suggested that in a year “Chrome will bite off a decent chunk of the Web browser's market ”.

OK, here’s a couple of positive sprinkles.

Go Google, Go!

Google OS - a Cynical View

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 EST

If you didn’t hear that Google has announced that in 2010 consumers will have a chance to enjoy new Chrome-based OS, stop reading and do you homework first.

Done? Now we can move on, and let’s do it by the rules – positive things first, then some bile followed by a happy end.

I really like Google. They produce easy to use applications that work great. I use their search engine about a hundred times a day. Their applications make sense.

Nine months ago they released a Web browser called Chrome, and I liked it. Back than I suggested that in a year “Chrome will bite off a decent chunk of the Web browser's market ”.

OK, here’s a couple of positive sprinkles.

Go Google, Go!