Topics:
-Apache licensing and the inability to make money
-Bill Gates’ departure
-Contest: Bill Gates or Kermit the Frog

We were also joined briefly by RMS, Bill Gates, Nick Carr and others. It was an all-star event.

“We’re going to try to give you exciting choices and encourage you in ways that make sense to pick the Microsoft alternative,” he said. Asked about the browser market, Ballmer reiterated past comments that the company made a mistake in trying to tie too many products to Longhorn, a move that hurt the company in the browser area among many others.

roundup
Mixing it up with Microsoft Click here for full Mix ‘08 coverage.

Ballmer addressed a ton of other topics, some of which I’ll also try and get to here. Asked by an audience member “What about Adobe?” Ballmer replied “What about Adobe?” before going on to say that Microsoft will interoperate in some areas and compete in others, but made clear that Microsoft wants to win a greater share of developers’ attention.

He said that undoubtedly Microsoft will choose to go with Microsoft-developed services in some areas and Yahoo-developed ones in other areas, meaning that Microsoft will have open source-powered services for some time.

“The Danger acquisition is really about building up an application and service aspect on top of our Windows Mobile platform,” he said. “Danger is really a service application experience and we want to make sure we get that in market on a great set of phones.”

“We should not have two of everything,” Ballmer said. “We’ll have to sort some of that through.”

Danger’s Sidekick device uses a Java operating system, while Yahoo is known for its extensive use of open-source software to power its services.

On Danger, Ballmer said that Microsoft was attracted to the way the Sidekick gets applications and data to its users as well as the consumer interface and appeal. However, he made clear that he believed those things could be brought over to the Windows Mobile operating system and still preserved.

Speaking at the Mix ‘08 conference, Ballmer said that Microsoft would likely take on some of the open-source PHP applications that Yahoo relies on for its services, again assuming Yahoo ever starts returning Microsoft’s phone calls.

“That was a painfully long gap,” he said. “You won’t see those kinds of gaps on Windows.”
He also said that Microsoft has learned how to incubate new browser features apart from Windows releases and then bring them back into the next version of the operating system. “We’re now having to hustle as hard as we’ve had to hustle to drive browser innovation.”

“I’m sure a bunch of them will be running at high scale and in production for a long time to come,” he said.

NAND double whammy: “Gigabit production doubled in Q4 to Q1. We had a new factory come online. Bit doubling (doubling the storage capacity of the chips) hit us at the same time that prices came down,” Smith said.

Comments by CEO Paul Otellini and CFO Stacy Smith during Intel’s 2008 first-quarter earnings conference call on Tuesday cast a pall over the chipmaker’s flash business while boosting the outlook of Netbook chips.

Otellini and Smith referred to the positive outlook for “Netbooks” a number of times. Netbooks are inexpensive ultrasmall, ultralight notebooks such as the Asus Eee PC or HP Mini-Note (though the Mini-Note currently uses a Via processor). In some instances during the conference call, it was apparent that “Netbook” was a blanket term for any small computer design using the Atom processor.

First, a quick inventory of the comments made by Otellini and Smith about Intel’s NAND flash memory business. Overall Intel gross margins were affected by collapsing prices in the NAND market. Intel is currently in a joint NAND chip manufacturing partnership with Micron Technology. NAND flash is used in large-capacity storage devices which are, in most cases, interchangeable with hard disk drives. Intel said earlier this year that it is getting ready to enter the large-capacity solid state drive (SSD) market with capacities ranging up to 160GB. Intel sold off its NOR flash assets to STMicroelectronics last year.

Sale of NAND business possible?: In response to a question from an analyst about the possibility of selling off the NAND business Otellini, carefully choosing his words, said this: “There’s a lot of ideas that we have here. Talking about them publicly before they’re realized or discussed I think is inappropriate and weakens our negotiating position and our options. Really can’t comment on that prior to doing it. We had similar questions raised on NOR a year and a half ago. About what are you going to do about it. Couldn’t answer those even though we were in discussions with ST (Microelectronics) at that time.”

Netbook ramp: “I see (the Netbook) as being a contributor over the course of the year and we’re going to start to see the impact of that in the second quarter. It does look to be driving some incremental unit growth beyond what I thought when I first set my forecast for the year,” said Smith.

Eight million 45-nanometer processors: Intel has now shipped “in excess” of eight million 45nm units, according to Otellini.

Netbook drives desktop-mobile crossover: “With the intro of the low-cost notebook category (Netbook), we believe shipment crossover of desktop PCs to mobile PCs will now happen this year not next year as anticipated…Netbooks and Atom (processors) are starting to show fairly good volume projections,” Otellini said. Crossover is the point at which Intel ships more mobile processors than desktop processors. “(The Netbook is) like the early phase of the
iPod as different versions and different price points come out,” he added. The last remark referred to the many different iPod designs that eventually emerged.

Thursday’s announcement is a bit of a canard, though, because Zoho doesn’t read files from Google. Rather, if you follow these steps, you can get your Google docs in Zoho:

Log in to your Google Docs account and choose the documents that you need to export to Zoho
Click on More actions -> Save as HTML (zipped) to your desktop
In Zoho Writer, click on Import -> Import Google Docs, select the zipped file path and click Import
All the Google Docs documents in the zip file will be imported into your Zoho Writer account and will be displayed in the left panel.

(Instructions quoted verbatim from Zoho)

If you want a real, two-way link between the app suites, you might want to check out Ghost, which I covered Wednesday. But is worth noting that you can now log in to Zoho with your Google ID.

In real Zoho news, the company’s word processor does have two real new features. First, it’s gotten an equation editor. Second, you can export documents in LaTex format, useful for academics and some engineering specialties.

Reason #1: We will be skiing through July this year.

Reason #2: Shirl, my neighbor.

I found Shirl in my house when I got back from Grand Targhee. His wife called us during our drive home to inform us that our front door had been open for some time, perhaps as long as a day (she had just seen it). This is Utah, so I wasn’t overly worried about any of our stuff missing. We almost never lock our doors.

Our front door has had problems in staying closed. We must have not locked it before we left and the wind pushed it open. Well, Shirl decided to take care of it. I came back to find him taking apart our lock so he could fix it. The lock is now fixed. The door stays closed.

You can’t buy neighbors like that. (Perhaps just as good are my neighbors directly across the street – he’s a pediatrician and she’s the best cook on this planet.)

Anthony Mangieri at work at Una Pizza Napoletana.

(Credit: Lars Klove for NY Times)
If you grew up and/or spent much time on the east coast of the US you know that the pizza you get in the tri-state area is one of the greatest foods available on earth. Wired’s Joe Brown makes the joke that the only way to get good pizza here in SF is to jump on a flight to NYC, grab a cab, a pie and some aluminum foil and you are golden.

Good, even decent pizza remains my white whale here in SF. And yes, we’ve tried all of them, cheap or fancy; A16, Delfina, Giorgios, Pizzetta 211, blah, blah, blah. All are mediocre to “acceptably pizza” at best.

One of my pals from NJ is Anthony Mangieri, king of Una Pizza Napoletana on East 12th near 1st ave. I challenge you to find a more delicious pizza anywhere in the US. It’s just not going to happen. And I challenge you to find a more dedicated pizza-man than Anthony. He even taught me and the wife how to make pizza at home with flour he got us from Brooklyn. You can read more about his greatness in the NY Times.

But what Anthony offers is more of an artisan product, not a typical slice. You would think that you could get a decent slice of east coast pizza in this town (or anywhere in CA) but it just doesn’t seem possible. One theory on the development of a great pizza is the water:

“As you cook, some ingredients vaporize, and these volatilized particles can attach themselves to the walls of the baking cavity,” Tisi says. “The next time you use the oven, these bits get caught up in the convection currents and deposited on the food, which adds flavor.” Over time, he says, more particles join the mix and mingle with the savory soot from burned wood or coal — the only fuels worth using — to create a flavor that you can’t grow in a garden: gestalt, if you will.

I buy the water argument to a point–that point is where I bring up Shaka Pizza on Maui. Shaka is owned by a couple of guys from the Jersey Shore and their pizza is damn-near east coast.

In light of this posting, we’re going to go make some dough and rock out tonite. Joe Brown, from Wired, you are invited anytime.

(Credit:
CanvasPop)

You know that picture of you and your cat that features so prominently on your Facebook page? Well, play your cards right and you and Buttons could show up on the 7,400-square-foot Reuters Billboard in New York’s Times Square. Fortunately for the rest of us cynical travelers, the pic will only tower 23 stories above the city for 15 seconds.

It’s all part of a promotion by a new company called CanvasPop that lets you print any image at any size on canvas, including pics from Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket, and iPhones. CanvasPop’s first 100 customers will get to beam shots from their personal collections above New York starting next month. Then, for $40, they can get a time-stamped photograph as a memento.

Services like Artistic Photo Canvas and Canvas Press already print photos onto canvas. But CanvasPop–which just came out of beta–claims to be the only one to turn low-res images from social-media sites and phones into high-quality canvas prints.

No word on whether CanvasPop will screen images before they show up in Times Square or if you’ll be able to humiliate yourself and your friends at will.

Click through to the permalink page for the list…

As of this writing, we’ve recorded more than 840,000 unique Webware 100 product votes. That’s already more than we got last year! We think this highlights how important Web-based apps are becoming to mainstream technology users–the audience that CNET aims to serve with this site, as we currently do with Download.com and CNET.com itself.

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SAN DIEGO–A new service announced at DemoFall on Monday allows people to use voice commands to retrieve and send e-mails and text messages over their mobile phone.

The service lets people manage all their contacts, greetings, and messages into groups. Users can edit a caller’s contact info and forward messages in e-mail.

For every message, the caller’s number is automatically added to the contact list.

commentary

InfoWorld just sent me an update on attendees for the Open Source Business Conference (March 25-26, San Francisco), and it was gratifying to see five years of effort paying off. IT executives (i.e., those managing IT within enterprises) is up 300 percent over 2007 (which was up considerably over 2006 and previous years). Registered attendees have doubled over 2007, too.

We have an excellent roster of speakers, demonstrating the best in IT (PayPal, Kaplan, New York Times, etc.), the best in software (Red Hat, Microsoft, Oracle, MySQL, Alfresco, SugarCRM, Loopfuse, etc.), and the best in legal (Mark Radcliffe, Brad Smith, Heather Meeker, etc.). The best OSBC ever. Be sure to come.

This year you’ll see US Bank, Shimano, Boise Cascade, Visa, Amazon, NASA, Bank of America, The Gap, Federal Express, and hundreds more from the IT community in attendance.