An acquaintance sent me an email, referring me to an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times about Yahoo, proclaiming “from now on I’ll never use Yahoo again”. I had been intending to provide further coverage on the topic of ghosts this week, but this startling statement defected me to investigate the “Yahoo thing”.

Apparently Congress’s House International Relations Subcommittee on Global Human Rights subpoenaed four IT companies; Cisco, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo in order to-er well, to be honest, give them a bad time in public. It must have been terribly embarrassing for the Don’t-Be-Evil Google and a little disconcerting for Cisco as neither company is used to being in the political cross-hairs. For Microsoft it was probably just an another-day-another-dollar kind of thing.

Cisco was criticised for selling equipment to the Chinese that could enforce censorship. (Pardon me, but isn’t there some kind of list the US government produces that restricts technology sales to “certain regimes”. If Congress is unhappy with these sales, why is the Cisco kit not on the list? I’m sure HP, IBM, Dell, Sun and others sell the Chinese kit that is or might used for censorship). Google and Microsoft were both criticised for directly imposing censorship in their search services to China.

But Yahoo, in this case, is a horse of a different colour. Over a period of years, Yahoo has revealed the identity of a number of Chinese citizens to the Chinese government. As a consequence many of these individuals (about 49 by some estimates) are now serving time in Chinese jails. These are the names of two of them, and a brief description of the heinous crimes they committed:

Li Zhi posted comments in an on-line discussion group criticising official corruption in China. The nerve of it! This 35-year-old ex-civil servant from Dazhou and running-dog-capitalist-lackey was promptly given an eight-year jail sentence in December 2003 for inciting subversion.

Shi Tao, a reporter, brazenly forwarded an email that openly divulged state secrets. He revealed the risks of referring to the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests and he even used seditious words like “democracy”. Mr Shi, a shameful-tool-of-American-Imperialism, who used the pseudonym ‘198964′ (the numbers form a completely meaningless date on which nothing of import happened especially not in
Tiananmen Square) will spend 10 well-deserved years in jail.

Oddly, there are some people who are not entirely happy with Yahoo’s prompt and responsible actions in this matter. Some of them are visiting a web site, www.booyahoo.com, in order to sign a petition and send Yahoo a letter that expresses their misgivings. They are even closing down their Yahoo email accounts, ceasing to use Yahoo’s search capability, or movie service, or GeoCities or HotJobs. Some are even demanding that Yahoo provide financial support to the families of the criminals it grassed up. What is the world coming to?

Yahoo may come to regret its decision to compromise the privacy of its customers, commercially. Nevertheless we should not lose sight of the fact that Yahoo was “only following orders”.

AntiVirus In Dread is the theme for this latest AVID column. (For the stray reader who may have stumbled on this posting by accident, AVID is an acronym for AntiVirus Is Dead, my ongoing campaign to bring down the AV industry, whose products are so lamentably ineffective).

The AV companies are now dreading the proliferation of Vista for obvious reasons. AV technology offers scant protection against viruses which, in a world that’s dominated by versions of pre-Vista Windows, is awash in viruses. However, nothing convinces the sorry buyers of AV technology to waste their money on ineffective AV products than stories of one virus or another giving someone, somewhere a bad time.

Unfortunately a few weeks ago, Jim Allchin of Microsoft implied, in a comment about his 7 year old son, that Vista would be pretty much immune to viruses. And indeed it will, if you configure it correctly, because you can lock down the environment. It will then ask you to confirm the validity of any spurious executable that tries to run. Just to make it plain, apart from ‘lock down’ there’s nothing magical about Vista that stops viruses from running, although Microsoft has put in a neat memory mapping feature that is likely to make virus proliferation more difficult to achieve.

On the day of the Vista launch, Sophos released a statement, which claimed that vari-ants of W32/Stration, W32/Mydoom and W32/Netsky were still capable of running under Vista (in other words Vista stopped some viruses dead in their tracks but didn’t stop them all). Microsoft responded saying that rather than exploiting the operating system, these threats had used social engineering to trick users into letting them run.

But actually that’s a vulnerability in all operating systems. If you can trick someone into allowing malware to run, then it will run. The way that Vista works is not so different from the way the Mac works and the Mac has no significant virus problems. In truth, Microsoft should have added the lock down feature long ago. If it had, then the virus population of the Internet would be much lower.

This feature is, after all, the first step in the implementation of viable software authentication, which is what vendors like SecureWave, Savant Protection, AppSense and Bit9 provide. Businesses that use such software do not have malware problems.

So the question arises as to whether the AV technology vendors will go the way of the Dodo when Vista proliferates (despite the fact that Jim Allchin, in a fit of charity to AV companies, has stepped back from suggesting that Vista needs no AV). This is indeed quite possible. As legacy Windows PCs are retired the prevalence of viruses should diminish.

There will still be problems, especially from new security exploits and from hackers that use social engineering to barge their way in to the corporate network. And it is worth pointing out here that viruses themselves can attempt social engineering tactics to get a foothold. However, such security issues will be dealt with far more effec-tively by the vendors of software authentication products (SecureWave, Savant Protec-tion, AppSense and Bit9). The future belongs to them.

Ever since it started to generate revenues at a dramatic rate, Google has been hailed as a kind of successor to Microsoft—on the basis of the idea that Microsoft was the giant of the PC era and Google is the giant of the web era. To put it another way, Microsoft dominated PC-based computing and Google dominates web-centric computing.

In terms of financial muscle it is indisputable. Once Microsoft attained its position of PC dominance, it could not be shifted by IBM or anyone else. Microsoft was sitting on a gold mine (2 as it happens, the Windows OS and the Office Software gold mines). It still works these seams, but it has never repeated these successes.

Google’s particular gold mine was not search itself but ad placement. Google didn’t invent the idea, but it did realize it in a very effective way—and in doing so became the dominant advertising force on the Internet. This coincided with the time that advertising was moving to the web at a dramatic rate, with advertising revenues increasing at about 30% per year (and they still are). This virtually guarantees that Google revenues will grow at that rate—and in fact they are growing faster.

In terms of software ecosystem, Google can also be compared to Microsoft, but actually there are many software ecosystems (IBM’s SAP’s, Oracle’s, etc.) so this is not such a distinguishing phenomenon. Nevertheless the inability of competitors to dent Google’s momentum (in its chosen markets) and the enthusiasm of its developer community is formidable.

To my mind there are two questions we can ask about Google:

1. Will it really establish a large user base for its “alternative” (web-centric, web 2.0 etc.) word processing, spreadsheet and other products (in 2007)

2. Will it retain dominance of search. (in 2007)

My answer to the first of these questions is “no”. It’s too early for many companies, even small companies, to depend on web-centric computing. The simple reality is that the web is not ‘always on’, so you need in-house PCs or Macs. Co-ordinating the in-house files with files located on the web is either too hard or too much bother for most businesses.

The answer to the second question is almost certainly “yes”, although it probably shouldn’t be. Google is very sticky as a search site. It is easy to standardise on it. But in my view Google search simply isn’t very good.

OK, it was/is a lot better than AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo and MSN—which is why most of the web, me included, voted for it with their browsers. But last year was arguably the year of the social network and, along with many others, I subscribed to Del.icio.us, Digg, and StumbleUpon. These sites demonstrate the power of the people working together. In essence these sites are no different to Wikipedia, except that they have provided access to collective opinion rather than collective knowledge.

So if you are not familiar with them: Digg provides you with links to news stories and blog postings that are getting attention, StumbleUpon simply provides access to web pages that will probably delight you or interest you and del.icio.us provides a mixture of Digg-type news postings and quality reference sites. Personally, I was so impressed with the quality of Del.icio.us links that I now use it as an alternative search engine… and that’s the point.

Now Del.icio.us was not designed to be a search capability per se, but it turns out to be a good one. But I picked up the news recently that one of the creators of the Wikipedia has set up a company, called Wikia, to create a purpose designed user-driven search. If the design work is good it will get traction and if it does, I think it will take search traffic away from Google. So I suspect that Google’s dominance of search will get challenged.

However I certainly don’t expect this to dent Google’s momentum much. Most likely Google will pick up the ad business from Wikia or any other site that establishes a popular search capability.

A final note on Google. I have been hoping to see some genuinely new technology emerge from Google and, to my mind, it hasn’t really done much since Google Earth. With any luck there will be something to admire this year.

If I read the runes correctly, the hopes of many of the committed followers and proponents of Open Source have been disappointed by its progress in recent times. Admittedly, the attempt by SCO to stop Linux in its tracks (or get a royalty from its use) looks to have failed and last year saw Microsoft almost accommodating Open Source in a deal with Novell (but not without spreading a little FUD).

However, it also saw Oracle train its big guns on Red Hat, threatening to spoil its whole business model simply by competing directly—and this was not long after Oracle had embarrassed MySQL by buying up the Open Source providers of two of the database’s key complementary components. On the desktop and laptop it is not Linux but Apple that is providing genuine competition for Microsoft and in other areas, such a mobile devices, it looks like Linux is not really a significant player.

What I think is happening is neither the defeat of Open Source, nor its saturation. I think we have become too accustomed to treating Open Source products as if they were commercial products and thus trying to judge their progress in terms of growth and market share. I don’t think you can look at it like that.

A good deal of Open Source adoption doesn’t occur in the same way as the purchase of commercial product. I was at an IT site recently that suddenly decided to use Hibernate. Why? Because some contractor on the project had used it. The product adoption process must have taken a whole ten minutes (about the time it takes to download). But nobody would adopt Open Office in the same way. It would be a major decision and a staff training issue would need to be addressed.

I still keep seeing signs that some Open Source products are likely to increase market share. Microsoft’s introduction of IE7 seems to have had no effect on the population of Firefox users (despite one or two analysts suggesting that users would switch back). The Firefox user base continues to grow (and so does that of Apple’s Safari and Opera, by very small amounts). IE7 is simply replacing IE6. The adoption of Open Office may be slow, but as far as I can tell it is increasing (and so is the user base of Apple’s iWork).

Microsoft clearly doesn’t have a full lock hold on the office market. It will be interesting to see what effect the new version of Office has. Microsoft has introduced a new file format for the first time in 10 years and a new interface. Although the product is clearly improved, I expect it to have a very slow take-up. I also expect that it will cause some defections to Open Office. (When there’s going to be a learning curve anyway, why not go for the zero cost product?) How many defections? Significant numbers but not vast is my expectation.

Another interesting Open Source play comes from EnterpriseDB which has embarrassed Oracle by acquiring some high profile defections from Oracle (Sony and Vonage). If you didn’t know EnterpriseDB is a version of PostgreSQL which has a full PL/SQL capability. (Ninety percent of Oracle applications work with no changes). EnterpriseDB is not zero cost but it cuts the Oracle cost to ribbons. If I were Red Hat looking for a way to defend myself against Oracle I’d buy, merge with or strongly partner with EnterpriseDB. I expect EnterpriseDB to succeed—in time it will challenge SQL Server and DB2, if it continues to have success against Oracle.

Another factor in the Open Source equation is the OLPC (the $100 laptop or OneLaptopPerChild) initiative. It hasn’t taken off dramatically yet, but it has clearly gained enough traction for us to know that it will persist. In time, this initiative will boost the Linux laptop market in a dramatic way. It is quite likely that the OLPC initiative will lead to the manufacture of 10 million laptops per year for use in developing countries. This constitutes about 10 percent of the global laptop market.

So in summary, the Open Source story is, like the curate’s egg, good in parts. Linux is still a growing force and the commercial use of Open Source is becoming increasingly common in many areas. There was even a recommendation to use it from the EC recently, which stated quite clearly that the evidence is that Open Source reduces costs. Well, duh!

Apple has become an industry force. For its last financial year (ending September 06) it had revenues of $19.3 billion, 38% greater than the previous year. As such, you could claim that it wasn’t such a good year for Apple as the growth rate in the previous year was 69%. Some commentators claim that sales of the Mac were hampered by the switch to Intel—even though Mac sales grew at about 30%.

There may be some truth in this (time will tell). Adobe has yet to release its Apple Intel port for its Creative Suite products and when it does, it may act as a sales booster amongst the traditional Mac users in marketing departments across the world.

The main point about Apple is that it is now head-to-head with Microsoft in the home market and gaining strongly there. Most of the reasons not to buy a Mac have simply disappeared. Probably the most important objection was “I don’t want to have to buy the applications I use all over again”. The existence of Parallels Software and Apple Boot Camp, which allow you to run Windows apps, anyway has laid that to rest. The consumer is left with 2 considerations:

1. Do I want the Apple learning curve?

It is undeniably the case that you will undergo a learning curve with Apple—and it will be a week or two before you are as productive with Office software as you were on the PC. However, Microsoft has just released Vista and that means you’re in for a learning curve anyway, when you buy a new PC. As it happens, the Apple learning curve is longer, but it is also more rewarding. It is only a mild objection.

2. Do I want to pay the Apple premium?

Apple computers are not always more expensive. The top end Mac Pro is a little less expensive than the equivalent Dell product. However you pay a premium for the laptops. Price is only a mild objection, unless you have a constrained budget, because Apple products are designed quite differently and have a number of extra features (both in the OS and the hardware) which will be worth the expense to most users.

To add to this, there is the Mac advantage, which is best summed up with the words “it just works”. Macs are not hassle free, but they are hassle-lite.

A survey in December last year of US consumers (the IBD/TIPP Home Computer Purchase Outlook index) indicated that increasing numbers of people “intend” to buy a Mac. In the survey, US consumer PC buying intentions placed Dell at 47 percent, HP at 13 percent and Apple at 12 percent. When it came to laptops, it was Dell 47 percent, Apple 15 percent. You can compare this with a survey by S.G. Cowen & Co. in June 2005 (18 months before) which put Mac buying intentions at 7.5 percent.

Clearly Apple has growing momentum in the US consumer market. US trends normally drive world trends, infecting the UK first in Europe and Japan first in non-English speaking Asia. Apple’s retail strategy is mirroring this as it has opened Apple stores in the UK and Japan. Its retail activity is being pushed as hard as possible, because it is so profitable and it drives take-up of the iMac.

As for Apple’s old enemy, Microsoft, it must now be scratching its collective head and wondering how to compete. Apple delivers an end-to-end product and an end-to-end product range. (Web + hardware + product range + software). Microsoft simply cannot do this. In particular, it cannot manufacture PCs—it would be financial suicide. So it is condemned in many of its activities to imitate Apple—a strategy that once served it well, but is increasingly defunct.

So I am writing this on the eve of MacWorld 2007, when Steve Jobs is expected to announce a new Apple cell phone/iPod, a new version of OS X (in an effort to put Vista in the shade) a new video server and possibly a video iPod. There will probably be a few innovative surprises and, most likely the new crop of Apple products will sell well.

It is difficult for me or anyone else to forecast anything other than that Apple is going to have a good year in 2007. Right now there are no clouds on the Apple horizon and it looks like Apple won’t pause for breath until it has doubled its revenues to about $40 billion—which is likely to happen in 2008