Every now and then the way that computer systems are built changes significantly. It moved from batch systems to on-line systems with the advent of minicomputers and it changed to client server systems with the advent of PC networking. This model persisted on the Internet, as browser to web server but with a huge escalation in levels of connectivity. This model for building systems may now be about to change.

This, at least, is what Tim Negris, CEO of Equinom is arguing. Tim has produced and published a Peer Services Manifesto which claims, quite simply, that a new model for software development will emerge.

According to the manifesto “The client/server technology model, in all of its forms (including the Internet) is inappropriate for the network business model because:

1. It does not allow direct technology costs to be shared equally or proportionately between the different entities participating in a given business operation or transaction.
2. It forces the arbitrary aggregation of private information into a common database whose operator must be trusted to secure, protect, and manage it, and not to misuse it.
3. It cannot take advantage of the ever-growing processing power and storage capacity of desktop client computers.”

The term “network business model” is used by the author to refer to business activities that work through the loose association of multiple entities (people or small companies or even large ones). Interestingly enough this is the least automated set of business processes that there are – because they inter-company rather than intra-company. These are supply chain transactions of various kinds.

The manifesto maintains that “The network business model needs a different technology model for effective automation, which includes:

• Equal or proportionate direct technology cost sharing among participants
• Owner-controlled information visibility, security, privacy and use
• Distributed workload sharing across participating systems

The manifesto observes that the current technology vendors price, sell and value their products in a way that only makes sense to the world’s large corporations and that this acts as a brake on the automation of network transactions and “network” businesses.
The manifesto then goes on to describe how emerging technologies such as web services, grid computing and peer-to-peer capabilities are providing the foundation for a peer services architecture.

At first it seems that Negris and Equinom are simply jumping aboard the latest bandwagons and trying to hijack them – that is until the Manifesto proposes a “Peer Services Process Model” and a “Peer Services Data Model”. These are distinctly new ideas, to me at least. The Peer Services Process Model envisages distinct “peer processes” on a Peer grid registering what they can do with the grid’s operator and then seeking complementary services in order to carry out business processes. Peer processes can thus find and consume services and also offer services themselves.

This may sound odd until you realize that this is the way, for example, that open outcry markets work and except that it is people rather than software that makes it happen
The Peer Services Data Model envisages data being primarily private with the exception of the data that is required to be used collectively. This is decidedly unlike database as we know it, although it does accurately reflect the data privacy interests of individual (people or companies) in a shared environment.

Naturally, Equinom has an axe to grind. It was formed to build and realize a “Peer Services Architecture” and it intends to bring some form of development software to market to capitalize on the direction it believes the IT world will now inevitably take. Until we see the technology it is going to be difficult to know how this vision stands up. Equinom is promising to give its software away to some carefully selected organizations – a few selected trade associations, schools and possibly law enforcement agencies.

Negris claims that many such organizations have opportunities to build useful applications using Peer Services and so Equinom intends to seed the market. But Equinom is not an Open Source operation and for most companies the technology will have a cost.
From Equinom’s point of view the applications built using its technology are destined to be inexpensive both to deploy and to run. After all, they will be running mostly on the over configured desktop computers across broadband connections and the cost of any application will be shared amongst its multiple users.
For me the emergence of a respectable peer-to-peer software movement is a little bit of a surprise. When Napster first appeared and glowed like a shooting star there was a great deal of enthusiasm for the idea of peer-to-peer systems. But nobody stepped up to provide the peer-to-peer idea with technical respectability. This has now changed.

I used to get irritated with spam, but no more. I became accustomed to it, just like I became accustomed to the obligatory but ineffectual security checks at airports. The security checks are a hollow ritual designed to convince the voter that precautions against terrorists are being taken. But, as I indicated in a previous blog, the only effective airport security I’ve experienced is in Israel. The price you pay is that it takes forever to get through the security check.

Spam blocking is not a hollow ritual. However it can be less than perfect. The spam blocker that I use, primarily, is the native Apple mail spam blocker. It does a good job of weeding out most spam but it also ejects valid emails sometimes—the dreaded false positive. So when I’m bored during the day I flit through the junk folder and check. The most irritating quirk that Apple Mail spam blocker has is that it will often classify vendor emails with briefing PowerPoints as junk. Unfortunately, it isn’t a reliable indicator of the quality of the vendor’s technology

I have several email accounts. I guess I’m no different to anyone else in that respect. My five active accounts are: for Hurwitz, for Bloor Research, for BaroudiBloor (an old account that yields 99% spam), a personal Gmail account and a personal Mac.com account. I use a Gmail account for archive (archiving all my emails to there means that I never lose any and it also becomes a file archive via attachment). It’s also my emergency account in case my laptop gets stolen. I don’t get any spam through Gmail, but that’s because I never use the account to register for anything. It may be that Gmail has good spam blocking, but I cannot confirm it. Bloor Research uses Spam Assassin for spam blocking. It’s OK but not wonderful. No other email service I use has spam protection and I access them all from my Apple.

Is 100 percent spam blocking possible? I recently ran into an article in InfoWorld (28th May issue), which compared IronPort’s spam blocking appliance to that of Mirapoint. IronPort won this particular bake-off. It caught 93 percent of spam with only 1 false positive (in just under 10,000 emails) straight out-of-the-box. Also the false positive was a non-critical. I know IronPort reasonably well as it hired me as a speaker last year and I met with their technical people as a consequence. Blocking figures beyond 98% are possible because the spam engine learns, but actually from the productivity angle, it’s the low false positive count that matters most. Once you’ve blocked 90 percent of spam, the extra percent or two doesn’t deliver much to the user.

The spam blocking industry is doing very well, because automatic spam blocking pays for itself quite quickly. It reduces the need for disk storage and hence the cost. It cuts the workload for administrators. An incidental benefit is that it stops virus-bearing emails. It is a sub-industry that will prosper for quite a while yet—even after spam itself ceases to circulate much. This became clear from discussions with IronPort (and other vendors in this space). These vendors are not just about spam filtering, they are about message management—which for the moment means just email management. However, these vendors are well aware that in the end it’s about all messages (IM, voice, video, and anything else the world invents).

IronPort’s most recent product upgrade has been to add “compliance filters” which filter outbound email to ensure none of the content violates US regulations such as HIPAA and Graham-Leech-Bliley. Two-way filtering is just the next step in the growth of the message management market. Common message management frameworks are some way away.

Apple is beginning to look like it is going to fulfill its commercial potential. All the signs are there. The Apple stock price rose by over 200 percent in 2004 and in its final quarter its revenues rose to $3.5 billion giving it a run rate of $14 billion. The run rate may be a little misleading because the final quarter revenues were boosted by sales of 4.6 million iPods, which is a Christmas peak. Nevertheless, Apple is clearly outperforming all consumer electronics stocks by a dramatic margin – and Apple isn’t just a consumer electronics company, although its financial vitality comes primarily from that market.

Apple has achieved many things in recent years, but perhaps the most surprising is that it has defined and plays a central role in the digital music market, with the twin successes if its iTunes store and the iPod. The iPod is a phenomenon that no-one saw coming. Apple hasn’t just done a great piece of marketing and design work, it has established a very powerful brand. One that must be the envy of many. It is also generating significant revenues, and one analyst organization, Generator Solutions Ltd, is predicting that Apple’s music revenues will reach US$6 billion by 2007.

However, Apple isn’t just doing well in this fashion driven market. IDC reported 25 percent growth in its worldwide shipments of PCs (compared to 13.7 percent for the market as a whole) and the success of the iPod looks to be stimulating sales. The iPod is an invitation to use the Apple PC as a media center.

Apple’s recent announcement of the iPod Shuffle, which is a music memory stick and player aimed at the low end of the music player market and its Apple PC in a box, the Minimac, may not have set the world alight with enthusiasm – some observers were hoping for something a little more revolutionary from Steve Jobs this year, but they both make eminent sense as products. If the MiniMac proves to be a success, and it’ll be a while before we know, then Apple will have finally gained entry to the mass PC market – a market it had previously chosen to price itself out of.

The point is that Apple clearly intends to play in the mass PC market and it now has the foundation and a product with which to do that.
The differentiating features of the Mac, in case you’ve never used one, are:

1. It doesn’t crash, it’s highly secure and fairly bullet-proof against PC pests (viruses, spam, hacking etc.). This all adds up to “trouble free”.
2. It’s the definitive digital juke box.
3. It’s the premier digital photography platform
4. It is likely to become the definitive digital video platform. (it’s a little early to pronounce on this).
5. Good lap top PCs
6. Ease-of-use (in many ways superior to the competition)
7. Microsoft compatibility is good (this had always been a problem for years).
8. Good networking (happily networks with Windows PCs)

If you read this list, it clearly indicates an uncompromised consumer emphasis, but the PC market, which really ought not to mix the home with the business, has never managed to separate the two. Vendors do little to try to specialize devices for the home or the office, apart from the software that comes loaded. It therefore seems possible that, with Apple’s visible resurgence, we are going to see an uptake of Apple PCs in businesses beyond its established niches (for DTP, Photography, Video, etc.). If that happens it will be because of the first differentiator listed above: “trouble free”.

Go to www.boingboing.net and take a look at the monthly stats. They change all the time (as they are updated regularly) and when I last looked they showed 38% of visitors to the BoingBoing web site were Firefox users, 34.9% Internet Explorer users and 10% Safari users (Safari is Apple’s browser). So is this telling us that Firefox has already become the dominant browser?

Well, probably not – but it is certainly dominant among visitors to BoingBoing and there is nothing that I can detect about the site that would give a statistical twist in favour of one browser rather than another. However, other sites tell a different story.

Stats from PCWorld,com, published on June 1st, suggest that Firefox was used by just over 20 percent of visitors while IE 6.0 was used by 66 percent. This site may mitigate in favour of IE users, but that’s by no means certain.

In any event, what these sites are reflecting is which browsers are actually used, not which browsers are loaded on PCs. In all probability Firefox users surf the web more frequently than IE users and thus they get counted more. Taking myself as an example, I use Firefox on a Windows PC and a Windows laptop, but I use Safari on my Apple. However, I have IE loaded on all three machines to access those sites where only IE works (like PlaceWare, for example). So how do I figure in the stats?

Well, I can be counted as 3 machines. All have IE loaded, two have Firefox loaded and one has Safari loaded, but actually I use Safari most of the time. When I don’t use Safari, I use Firefox and I use IE once every week at most. My rough guess is that I’m 80 percent Safari, 18 percent Firefox and 2 percent IE. So, in terms of web activity, you are most likely to catch me using Safari.

Perhaps this phenomenon explains the disparity you get when you examine stats provided by market research companies. WebSideStory, for example, currently presents a quite different market picture, giving Firefox just less than 7 percent market share. Its statistics show Firefox having grown by 66 percent since December 2004 in terms of market share from around 4 percent. The company also highlights the fact that there are significant geographical differences, with Firefox having about a 22 percent share of the German market, but only 3 percent in Japan. Another company, OneStat.com, give Firefox an 8.45 percent share (figures are from March 2005). These figures may reflect the percentage of PCs that have Firefox loaded, but who knows?

All Windows PCs, and Apple PCs too, are shipped with IE loaded. IE is, in fact, fully embedded in Windows. Microsoft wasn’t actually lying when it maintained in its antitrust case that IE was an integral part of Windows. Technically it is. Indeed it would be difficult to fully remove it from Windows and foolish to try.

Consequently, unless there is a dramatic rise in the number of Linux PCs sold, IE is always going to have around 50 percent market share, even if no-one ever uses it.

So, getting back to the question, which really is the dominant browser? I suspect that, by usage, it’s still IE, but judging by the continuing enthusiasm for Firefox, it won’t remain that way for long.

The situation surrounding Open Source is getting increasingly complex; partly because of the legal issues that SCO’s apparently doomed case against IBM has raised and partly because Open Source products are seeing extensive use. There is no point in pretending that Open Source is not a major software trend that is changing the industry – it surely is. However, it is also a difficult idea for commercial organizations to get their minds around and this is limiting its take-up to some degree.

To begin with, it is important to distinguish between Linux and Open Source. Linux may be an Open Source product but it occupies a particularly key position in the software world now, which transcends the Open Source idea.

The Open Source nature of Linux is important to some of its users – particularly companies that use Linux as an embedded component in mobile devices and network appliances. They need the ability to get at and tailor the source code. However, the vast majority of Linux users do not have any intention of changing the code. They just want a standard Linux to run.

The likelihood is that Linux will become a standard platform for a wide variety of contexts – indeed it has already achieved this to some degree. What holds it up most, at the moment, is its low level market share on the desktop. It is beginning to see extensive use on thin clients and this may lead it into wider desktop usage, but there is still the problem of having two GUIs (Gnome and KDE) and that’s one too many – if it is to have a big piece of the desktop market.

In thinking about Open Source, we should set Linux aside. Linux is well supported, not only by SuSE and Red Hat, but by IBM, Hewlett-Packard and many other vendors – and this is primarily because it is a widely used server platform, not because it is Open Source.

There are issues with Open Source per se that need to be squared away for it to move forward and it is worth listing some of them for consideration:

1. Open Source quality is not guaranteed: The reality has been that some Open Source products have delivered exceptional quality in terms of design, robustness and ease of use. Apache and Zope are good examples. Open Source has proven to be a viable approach to developing software but there is no guarantee that it will deliver a specific quality of product – that depends on the core team and the organization behind it. And this is, of course, quite variable.
2. There is no Standard Open Source License: Actually there is wide variety of Open Source licenses, just as there are a wide variety of proprietary licenses. Small companies may not care too much about this, as they probably have never even read a license, but large organizations do care because they have to. No large organization can afford the risk of not knowing the license terms for the use of key software products. The Open Source license is not a commercial contract and this may mean that the user is exposed to some legal risks.
3. Open Source Does Present Some Legal Risks: The risk is not so much from source code being copied from proprietary products – because the source is open, there is a strong incentive for Open Source developers to be completely honest and (the SCO v IBM case notwithstanding) it is highly unlikely that Open Source products contain proprietary code. Actually it is much more likely that proprietary products do – but as no-one gets to see the code, the legal challenges are few. However Open Source products can, unwittingly, violate patents and the owner of the patent can legitimately sue the user of the Open Source. The lawyers go after the money rather than the source of the violation, which means targeting users, as SCO has. The legal risk is probably much higher in the US than elsewhere, as the US is more of a litigious society.
4. Legal Indemnification. This brings us to the fact that many Open Source users have a genuine requirement for legal indemnification. The need for this depends upon the level of risk. The level of risk of IPR violation with some Open Source products is close to zero, because they are simply imitating and extending commercial products in areas where no patents are filed. Many business applications are of this ilk, but some applications are not. An Open Source product like GIMP, which is an Adobe Photoshop competitor, could easily infringe one of the many photo retouching patents that exist. Thus the risk varies. So far no-one has fallen foul of this, so the risk may be negligible, but it is too early to say.
5. Vendor Support. This brings us to vendor support. The strong support among commercial vendors for some products – notably Linux and Apache, is not the general case for Open Source. There are, roughly 70,000 Open Source projects and only a handful have what one could describe as strong support from commercial vendors. Computer Associates is standing behind Zope and Plone (as well as its own Ingres). Eclipse has strong support in IBM and elsewhere. Novell owns Ximian and Sun Microsystems has a clear interest in Open Office. These are however exceptional situations rather than the rule.
6. It’s Only The License That is Free. Even in the above examples where a large commercial vendor has a deep interest in an Open Source product, the actual support you can get varies widely. Perhaps the major attraction of Open Source is that the license can cost nothing, but from then on, all other software costs apply to some degree: maintenance, software distribution, upgrade costs and patching, security, performance management, integration, training and so on. We could classify all of this with the word support. The extra costs here vary and may be trivial for some products, but for others they are not.
7. The Talented Techie Factor. Some organizations have built up small teams of technicians that can exploit Open Source products. In doing this they cover the support risk internally and can make good use of the support networks that exist for Open Source products, so they address the support issue. But this is probably not an option for small organizations and very large organizations. The smaller organization will not be able to assemble the talent required and will rarely have any desire to develop such expertise anyway. The much larger organizations could invest in such a strategy but there is a need to co-ordinate support at the corporate level and the policy is more likely to be to outsource such activity – in which case they need a good support organization to outsource this to. The dilemma for such organizations is that IT support itself is a very complex issue and they already are likely to have too many agreements with too many suppliers. Open Source can be seen as a needless complication to an already over-complex situation.
8. The Compliance Factor. Different organizations in different industries have compliance standards that they need to adhere to. We’re not talking here simply about data protection or Sarbanes-Oxley, but industry best practices that are very different between, say, the pharmaceuticals industry and manufacturing. IT is already a part of this in many areas and its importance will only increase. There is also the factor of local liability laws which are different between Germany, the UK and the US. The challenge for Open Source is to fit well within such best practice schemes and this normally means providing an acceptable support structure. Commercial software vendors are normally well aware of such issues but Open Source organizations are less so.

With Open Source, we are looking at a relatively new, and increasingly successful way of introducing new software which, at the moment, is rarely driven by commercial considerations that are important to many organizations. It’s a new model and it is still evolving. In contrast. Commercial vendors have for many years evolved ways of doing business that address most of these issues adequately for the customer.

Until major vendors began to endorse and promote Open Source products, it didn’t matter too much because the majority of Open Source products only had niche usage. Now it matters, not just because Open Source usage is clearly increasing, but because the technology trends – towards integration at all levels – is creating integrated software stacks and the big IT users need dependable support for these stacks. (think Veritas plus Oracle plus BEA plus SAP etc. Now throw in a few Open Source products.) The era of SOAs is upon us and software support, even from large commercial vendors, has become a complex area for vendor/customer agreement. When you introduce significant elements of Open Source into the mix, it gets more complicated still.

For Open Source to see wider use, the support issue needs to be addressed far better than is currently happening. Our expectation is that some major vendors (Computer Associates, Novell, IBM, HP and several others look like good candidates) will step forward to offer support for specific software stacks in a way that deals with most of the problems that are outlined above. Naturally there will be a cost for this, but that’s the whole point. In the end, opting for Open Source products needs to be a considered activity.

Open Source can provide exceptional value to corporate computing and can certainly bring down software costs, but it’s not a cakewalk.