No longer. Not only are more mobile phones being sold now than ever before, there are more types of folks making money off it. For smartphones with an ecosystem such as iPhone, there is

- Apple, the iPhone manufacturer

- AT&T (in the U.S.) that provides cell phone connectivity

- tens of thousands of developers who sell their iPhone applications through the App Store (with Apple getting a cut). And this is not just indie developers. Amazon stands to make a huge bundle through book sales via its Kindle Reader app for iPhone [2]

- businesses that create free iPhone applications but make money off ads within their applications [3]

- record labels that offer their music for sales on the iTunes Music Store

- television networks and Hollywood studios that offer their TV shows and movies (respectively) for sale/rent, also on the iTunes Music Store

Of course, this runaway success has inspired every smartphone label to scramble to bake its own pie. Witness the plethora of application stores (Palm, Nokia, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Android) [4], and Nokia’s attempts to sell music.

Open or closed?

The more mature a product category gets, the more players there are that stand to make money off it. That’s because the pioneer quickly realizes that for true scale, it must “open up”  the product to entities other than itself. And that’s where it seems we have from history, a clear lesson: IBM opened up the specs of its original PC, and hordes of beige box manufacturers crowded Big Blue out of its own market. Apple itself nearly destroyed all that the Macintosh stood for when it licensed the Mac to other manufacturers.

“Opening up” a successful product and creating an open ecosystem divides the pie into so many slices that the pioneer is left picking up only crumbs. Apple’s iPhone ecosystem has been “opened up” to all those players above through the iPhone OS developer API, the iTunes Music Store and the iPhone App Store, but the ecosystem itself remains tightly closed.

[1] OK, so there were (are) electronic component manufacturers on the source side and advertising agencies on the sell side. But let’s limit ourselves to those that gained directly from the mobile phone. 

[2] Also with iPhone OS 3.0, developers can now charge for features within the application (unlocking extra weapons and purchasing weaponry within games being the most commonly cited examples), so you could have a free basic application with paid features if you like. Before OS 3.0, the best that developers could do was offer separate “free” basic and “paid” full-featured apps.

[3] Take Twitterific, for instance. The free version of the application inserts ads into your tweetstream.

[4] With comical attempts to make them sound different (Palm Software Store, Nokia Ovi Store, Blackberry App World, Windows Mobile Marketplace, Android Market). 

Well, think of the Personal Journal as a kind of scrapbook. You can create journal entries, file them under zero or more (user-defined) categories, format the text with all the rich elements that you associate with a word processor, paste attachments in exactly the same manner as you do in a Notes email or Document Library.

We all have dozens of Word and text files lying around our Documents folder, right? Containing lists, tips, TODOs, email drafts, temporary code snippets, drafts of articles, and numerous other stuff. Now think of the Personal Journal as a way of consolidating all that data, being able to give all your data a consistent look and feel, being able to categorise it, perform all sorts of searches, including full text searches, leverage the advantages of it being a Notes database, like replication, the ease of being able to forward a Journal entry as an email through one click.

I have categories like Articles, Blog Post Drafts, Email Drafts, SANFS (that’s the product I work on at IBM), Defect Analysis (my work), and the default “Uncategorized” category. And I’ve only been using this for about three weeks, I’m sure I’ll add a lot more categories as time progresses. You can even create folders, and categories within folders. I’m not sure if entries can belong to more than one folder, but I don’t think so.

Since I discovered the power of the Personal Journal, I’ve been able to get rid of the HUGE amounts of small text files I’ve tried to maintain over the years. I have been tirelessly evangelising the Personal Journal here at IBM’s India Software Labs Pune, with very positive feedback! My TODO list is now a Journal Entry, a number of useless text files containing little UNIX/Windows tips accumulated over the years are now neatly arranged in a “Tips” file, which I can and do search extensively before I turn to Google for what I want. This kind of feature is right in line with the concept of Notes being the focal point for all your communication and collaboration.

If you use Notes at work, you ought to give the Personal Journal a try! Do email me if there’s a cool tip about the Journal that you’d like to share, and I’ll put it up here.

There are two products that Personal Journal ought to learn from:

Tomboy for the Linux desktop – http://www.beatniksoftware.com/tomboy and
Microsoft OneNote.

I won’t go through what PJ should take from each product specifically, but here are a few improvements I’d like to see very much, in the Personal Journal of the future:

• Be able to create links to documents that open in external applications. I’d like to be able to create a list of path links to MP3 files lying somewhere in My Music, then simply select this piece of text, and hit “Enter”. This should open up Winamp/Windows Media Player/whatever with this list as the curent playlist.
• Alternatively, create links to emails, in drag-and-drop fashion, which could open up in my Notes Inbox. The possibilities are endless.
• Links between Journal entries, like a Wiki. Tomboy does this in spectacular style. Personal Journal must be able to do this. In the future, we ought to be able to link to elements to other databases. Today, we can easily create links to entire databases, but we’d like specific elements within databases. At the very least, only in local replicas.
• I’d also like my TODO list to be linked to my actual TODO database, or alternatively, my TODO database to be exported as a Journal entry. Now that I think about it, there needs to be greater interoperability between the calendar and the TODO database.
• Being able to edit attachments, and have those changes show up in the original document. Like, for instance, I attach a Word document to a Journal entry, and edit it after opening it in the Journal, then all the changes that I make ought to be reflected in the actual Word document on disk, in my Documents.

The ostensible reason from IBM is that they don’t anticipate customer demand for Solaris 10 on x86. An IBM spokesperson said that if and when Solaris 10 on x86 reaches “the required level of customer interest”, they’ll “review the matter”.

The argument does sound a little specious. If IBM begins this process of testing and certification only when customer demand does hot up, it might be a case of too late. Especially if other vendors can competing products, all certified. And IBM has time on its hands: Solaris 10 for both platforms will be available only in March, so there’s time for the certification process.

So, being the conspiracy theorists we are, let’s try to analyse the real reason behind IBM’s stubborn refusal. According to most analysts, IBM wants to thwart Solaris on x86 entirely. Solaris is an OS that directly competes with IBM’s AIX and Linux OSes. AIX currently runs only on the POWER platform, but IBM offers Linux on its entire range of Intel-based xSeries servers. With Solaris on x86, IBM loses an opportunity to offer a Linux-and-xSeries bundle, especially with the hype that Sun’s successfully built around Solaris 10. Novell might also figure in the calculations, now that IBM’s pumped in USD 50 million into the company to enable it to buy SUSE. IBM provides Enterprise Linux flavours from Novell and RedHat on its servers.

Also, IBM’d like nothing better than to replace a Solaris-on-x86 configuration with an AIX-on-POWER 5 one, for high-end systems. One pitch it could make to customers is that a complete IBM solution might be cheaper and easier to support than a bits-and-pieces Sun-and-IBM one. Indeed, according to the article, Scott McNealy was told by IBM’s CEO Sam Palmisano that “IBM no longer has to support an environment that includes Sun, even if it is one that is best for the customer.”

IBM has the advantage of being able to offer a wide product range, whereas Sun still remains very much a platform provider. IBM can use its middleware applications muscle to promote its platform further, and vice versa.

Today, I hit pay dirt. Here’s an April 2004 interview with Novell’s CIO, Debra Anderson, (interestingly enough, also by ZDNet UK), which focusses almost entirely on this internal migration. Debra admits that a significant motivation for the migration was perception – Novell wanted to be seen as “eating its own dog food” – something that Microsoft is very proud of. Also, the migration strategy seemed to be to first use OpenOffice across the organisation – on Windows – and only later migrate fully to Linux. Novell also won’t be upgrading any Windows desktops they already have:

How is it working out winding up the Microsoft licences you do have – are they making that an easy thing for you to do?

It’s interesting you ask that — we just concluded our licences in March. That was our annual contract with Microsoft and we terminated the Microsoft OS and Office enterprise licence.

That was across the entire organisation?

What that means is that for all the OSes I have, I do not have upgrade rights. Now I still have perpetual use for the set number of Microsoft Office clients I purchased

I also stumbled upon a couple of March 2004 articles from Brainshare 2004 on – where else – ZDNet UK! Here’s an interview with Jack Messman himself ( Novell’s chief executive and chairman, for those not in the know). Jack also was in a particularly bombastic mood, declaring “We don’t need no stinkin’ Windows“! Remember, all of this was at Brainshare 2004, held at Salt Lake City between March 21-25 2004. It’s been over three quarters of a year since then. If Novell had indeed made significant progress on their promises, we’d be hearing from them a lot more than the stony silence we’re getting on this issue.

If IBM and Novell, the current flagbearers for Linux in the Enterprise, have both faltered on their own Linux migrations, they’re going to find it very hard to convince customers to do the same, either on the desktop or in the datacentre. There had better be some soundbites at Brainshare 2005 – March 20-25 2005.

Microsoft makes a big show of inviting customers to their Redmond campus to show off their internal usage of the latest in their product line. Gates devoted a large chunk of an entire chapter in his landmark “Business @ The Speed Of Thought” to this claim. Paul Thurrot, professional apologist for Microsoft, often touches upon this in his reports on his website. (Hey, to be fair, I admire his zealousness, and I recommend his website to all Windows enthusiasts!) It’s time IBM and Novell woke up to the need to not only do the Right Thing, but also to be seen doing so.

I had a DVD of this distro from Novell, but since my old PC didn’t have a DVD ROM, I never got a change to have a look at this supposedly cool distro. RedHat/Fedora has been my mainstay since the bad old days of Linux 2.0.

SUSE’s installation is about as easy to use as Fedora’s, but it’s certainly more powerful. The only gripe I have is their handling of multilayered dialogs – where one dialog/preference box leads to another – leavs much room for improvement. The NTFS resizer was a joy to use! IBM’s default partitioning scheme is to use a ~4GB partition (which they call PreDesktop Area) for recovery, and use the rest as ine large C: drive. In addition, when you first boot the TP, Windows converts this FAT32 drive to NTFS. I’m glad SUSE was able to resize this so well; Fedora and the rest MUST have this feature by now!

(I’d do away with Windows XP altogether except for the fact that I’d paid good money for this copy – and IBM doesn’t provide installation CDs! GRRRR!)

The installation is simple for a newbie – if he/she sticks with the (decent) defaults, and is sufficiently flexible for a power user to tweak. I picked almost all of the packages SUSE had to offer. However, the installation itself takes a very long time – 4 GB took 2 hours to install! This is unacceptable, guys!

Once I was done, though, the most adorable little chameleon greeted me at startup! This was a welcome change from the furious cascade of kernel debug messages I was used to in Fedora. Even RHGB – Fedora’s attempt at graphical boot, although professional-looking – isn’t as pretty as this. My first virtual console was in a nice framebuffer.

OK. SUSE makes the best KDE desktop in the world. Period. No arguments about this one. I’ve tried Mandrake, RHEL and Fedora, and no one puts as much into their KDE as SUSE. I’ll put up a screenshot of their default desktop sometime soon. YAST is very nicely integrated into KDE’s Control Centre. SAX2, SUSE’s X configuration tool, rocks. The menus are well arranged, lots of applications, sensible defaults. Two great-looking wallpapers.

Gnome sucks. I hope fervently that things have improved in the 9.2 release and in Novell Linux Desktop. It’s amazing that fonts that look so great in KDE can be so unreadable in Gnome. And don’t accuse me of not tweaking enough – I’m a Gnome lover too, and know a fair bit about using and configuring it. YAST isn’t too well integrated here – and it’s difficult for a user to run a pure-Gnome SUSE desktop , because all of YAST’s modules seem to have been written using the Qt libraries. Oh, well – SUSE did always tout itself as a KDE-centric distro. Wonder how Ximian’s changed that.

SUSE’s notebook support is amazing! I’ve yet to go over this in detail, but suspend/stand-by and hibernate worked like a charm! There’s this YAST module which is a front-end to kpowersave – and it’s the most intuitive way I’ve seen to manage a mobile computer’s power-handling features. I was advised not to try ACPI, and to stick to APMd. I’ve done that. There’s this nice piece on OSNews.com about SUSE 9.2 Pro’s power handling support. Hope to upgrade to 9.2 soon, will try that out. More on this as I explore further.

The R50′s scroll feature doesn’t work yet, but there’s a program by the name of TPScroll which apparently does a good job at fixing that. I’ve dowloaded it, will try it out tonight. More later.

OK – so that’s my first experience with Linux on a Laptop – and, as you’ve probably guessed, it’s been quite appealing!

Here are the specs:
1.) ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 64MB 128-bit DDR Video Ram Operating at 210 MHz.
2.) 14.1″ TFT Screen
3.) Trackpoint
4.) Touchpad
5.) ThinkLight at the top of the screen illuminates the screen in low light conditions.
6.) System and power status indicators:
Wireless status,
Bluetooth status,
Numeric lock,
Caps lock,
Drive in use,
Power on,
Battery status, and
Standby status.
7.) Function keys for screen brightness, full screen functionality, web browser forward and back buttons, (these are all hard-wired key functions, so their usage is not OS-dependent. However, a nice project called the TPB (ThinkPad Buttons) enables an on-screen display on Linux.
8.) Built-in microphone
9.) Volume increase/decrease/mute buttons.
10.) Centrino Mobile technology – wireless support built-in via”integrated dual diversity antenna built into the display”.
11.) 40 GB HDD
12.) DVD-ROM – no CD/RW! :-(
13.) 2 USB ports
14.) Video-out connector
15.) Agere systems AC’97 Modem
16.) PC card slot – to attach modem, data storage, network, and SCSI connector cards.
17.) Built-in Infrared port.

Right now I’m doing a bit of research regarding the best distribution for install on this new machine.

Since I’ve got a nice licenced copy of Windows XP here, I don’t want to dump this one to install Linux… but the problem is that all 40GB here on my TP has been allocated to one primary partition. So first I need a distro which can resize my Windows partition. I hear SUSE can. I have a nice SUSE 9.1 Professional DVD here which Novell shipped me free of cost sometime back… and I think it’s got Ximian Desktop included (drool!). So that’s my first choice.

If I don’t like SUSE (I doubt that!), I’m going to use their installation program to resize this partition, and install FC3 on top. But I’m tired of RedHat/Fedora and I want a change.
Let’s see how this goes.

Update (January 22nd 2005): I’ve got Novell Linux Desktop 9 on my Thinkpad now; and got rid of Windows XP altogether! Although this is a great distro, I still want to give SUSE Linux 9.2 Professional a try. I’m attempting to dload all the 5 CDs (Five! How bloated can Linux distros get anyways?), and I’ll write about it when I’ve installed the bunch.