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t's been a busy 24 hours in the online space. First, Amazon.com announced it was buying Audible. And now Microsoft has made a $44 billion bid to acquire Yahoo! Such aggressive takeovers generally occur either close to a top-when buyers are really optimistic-or after a bust, when survivors pounce on opportunities to pick up companies on the cheap. But coupled with yesterday's disappointing earnings report from Google, the deal-making points to a new phenomenon: the first economic slowdown of the Web 2.0 era. After a few quarters of defying the broader economic decline, even the best-of-breed technology companies are showing themselves to be subject to the business cycle. The slowdown is gutting margins, causing executives to revise their Power Point presentations on growth, and depressing stocks. As a result, the hot young singles of the NASDAQ are seeking to cut costs and ride out the storm by shacking up together.

Audible is a new media company that old-media types like to root for. Its founder and chief executive officer is the excellent magazine journalist and author Donald Katz, and its services provided a potential new revenue stream for long-form journalists. Audible survived the dotcom meltdown in 2000, and quietly built a significant business. (Projected 2007 revenues: $106-$108 million). But as shown by its third quarter earnings, impressive revenue growth of about 30 percent has been unable to overcome persistent spending on technology, marketing, and operations. The upshot: Audible is still losing money.

Enter Amazon.com, which, though it continues to put up excellent numbers, remains a retail stock. And when the end of a business cycle approaches, retail growth frequently comes at the expense of margins. Amazon.com's fourth quarter earnings release, which came out on Wednesday, showed sales rose an impressive 42 percent from the 2006 fourth quarter, to $5.67 billion (with an assist from foreign exchange translations). But operating income grew only 38 percent, and operating margins fell in the core North American market. (Translation: Amazon had to discount, or throw in free shipping, more than it did last year to help goose sales.) For 2008, Amazon is expecting revenue growth to slow to between 26 and 33 percent. So why get hitched? Amazon's huge infrastructure investments and distribution capabilities may make it possible for it to run Audible profitably, even if sales growth is muted. And Audible represents a significant revenue stream that it can acquire without spending too much. The agreed-upon price is $11.50 a share. While that's a small premium to Audible's January 30 closing price $9.33, it's below where Audible traded for much of the past year. At the end of October, Audible's stock traded at about $13.75.

Economic slowdowns are also bad news for media companies, as marketers cut back on advertising spending. And it stands to reason that while online advertising is still growing at a much more rapid pace than overall ad spending, reduced budgets may take a bite out of interactive marketing. The darkening outlook for online advertising and e-commerce, as well as the continuing challenge of competing against Google, is likely behind Microsoft's bold bid for Yahoo.

Both Yahoo and Microsoft are struggling online. Yahoo's fourth quarter earnings, released earlier this week, showed that in the 2007 fourth quarter, revenues rose a meager 8 percent from 2006, while operating income fell 38 percent. In Microsoft's bright quarterly earnings report, the one dark spot was the online division, which lost money, despite rising revenues. In the six months ended December 2007, losses increased from $236 million to $510 million over the same period in 2006, even as revenues rose from $1.16 billion to $1.53 billion. Google has been eating their lunch competitively, and the overall market isn't growing rapidly enough to allow all the major players to prosper. The stock of Yahoo, which is in the midst of a long-running (and so far, unsuccessful) turnaround plan, closed yesterday at $20, its lowest level since the fall of 2003. That has given Microsoft, which has invested billions in its own efforts to compete against Google in search and advertising, the opportunity to acquire Yahoo for a decent price. Yahoo said it would evaluate the offer. (So did the Justice Department.) By sharing development and infrastructure costs, Microsoft and Yahoo will likely have a better shot of going head to head against Google.

But even Google is showing signs of challenge. The company announced its fourth quarter results yesterday (Thursday). Revenues grew 50 percent from the year-before quarter. That's an impressive gain off a large base, but Google's rate of year-over-year revenue growth is slumping, from 57 percent in the third quarter. Operating income as  percentage of revenues fell from about 33 percent to about 30 percent. The stock fell sharply on the news and is off by nearly 30 percent since its peak in November.
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RSS feeds, mashups and social networking poised for big year in enterprise

By Jon Brodkin, Network World, 01/30/08

Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration products will "continue to steamroll the [enterprise Web 2.0] market" in 2008, despite taking heat from some observers about SharePoint's wiki, blog and social networking functionality, Forrester analysts say.

Continued success for Microsoft was one of nine predictions Forrester made for the enterprise Web 2.0 market in 2008 in a report that says the implementation of Web 2.0 software will be a priority for 24% of businesses over the next year.

SharePoint users have sometimes found basic Web 2.0 features difficult to use, and complain about a lack of advanced features commonly found in best-of-breed products, such as tools that let you build lightweight applications on top of a wiki, says Forrester analyst and report lead author Oliver Young.

These concerns won't limit adoption rates of SharePoint, though, he says.

"IT departments taking a leadership role in enterprise 2.0 deployments will look at SharePoint first," Young writes. "While the rest of the market – analysts included – will continue to gripe about SharePoint in 2008, Microsoft is clearly in an enviable position and can afford to wait for the market to come to it."

Microsoft has answered concerns about SharePoint's Web 2.0 functionality by releasing a social networking tool pack and partnering with vendors such as Socialtext and Atlassian to plug advanced functionality into SharePoint, Young says. IT shops have to pay more for that extra functionality provided through partnerships, he says.

Young says he expects major Web 2.0 upgrades in the next version of SharePoint, whenever that is released, but for now says Microsoft executives have given customers "the best solution that they can." (Learn more about collaboration products in our Collaboration Buyer's Guide.)

Here are some more of Forrester's Web 2.0 predictions for 2008, based partly on a survey of enterprises and small businesses in North America and Europe (fellow industry watcher Gartner also issued predictions this week):

* Web 2.0 will make it big in the enterprise. "CIOs will concede that they cannot quell passionate employees' use of consumer-oriented or SaaS Web 2.0 tools and will mitigate risk by deploying enterprise-class tools in their stead," Young writes.

* RSS feeds will become substantially more popular. "In 2007, many firms discovered the value of blogs and wikis for knowledge workers," he writes. "However, for these tools to truly fulfill their potential, an RSS deployment becomes a must-have, otherwise new content goes unnoticed and most blogs and wikis will fall out of daily view of their users."

* Businesses will be more willing to buy social networking platforms. "Suite offerings that include social networking like Awareness Software, Jive Software and IBM's Lotus Connections offering stand to benefit greatly from the attention, but nearly any vendor that uses the term 'social networking' will get at least some consideration," Forrester states.

* Midtier vendors, rather than start-ups, will pour into the enterprise Web 2.0 market. Vendors from adjacent markets such as search and portal will unveil Web 2.0 offerings, and an increase in specialized services will fragment the market and intensify competition.

* Enterprises will have more choices of consultants and systems integrators. "Look for services vendors like Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte Development, and IBM Global Services to capture much of this nascent services market," Forrester writes.

* Trial deployments will spread through more of the enterprise. The vast majority of deployments in 2007 were limited to small groups and teams, and "as of yet very few have hit the point of pan-enterprise adoption," Forrester says.

* Mashups will get better. With innovations from IBM, Microsoft, Serena Software and others, "enterprise mashups will move from a few one-off pilots to true enterprise-class software in the coming 12 months," Forrester states.

* Don't expect major acquisitions and market exits. The Web 2.0 market will eventually undergo some serious consolidation because there won't be enough demand to keep every active vendor afloat, but "very few will cash out in 2008," Forrester predicts. 

 

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First, let me just say that the Air is an extremely impressive piece of technology. The miniaturization, the optimization of space, the blatant disregard for current standards — it’s everything a revolutionary machine should be. Except it isn’t one. It’s a flight of Apple vanity that is completely impractical for anyone who needs to do more than the most basic functions with their computer. Find out why inside.

Let’s start with the obvious: no optical drive. I don’t think I need to list the many things that are available in spinning disc format exclusively, and the idea that you should pack around an extra drive (however compact) or piggyback on someone else’s kind of defeats the purpose of having an “ultraportable” notebook. I don’t use my drive that much, but in fact it’s indispensable even when I have enough USB drives to fill all my pockets.

Next, the processor. It’s fantastic that they’ve managed to micro-size the Core2 Duo, but for any kind of serious work — video and audio editing, watching HD video, playing games or emulating Vista for work — even my MacBook Pro is barely pulling it, and it’s got the Air under its thumb processor-wise. Not to mention that RAM is totally un-expandable; serious Photoshoppers will spend a lot of time waiting while they use that nifty multi-touch to zoom into their 400MB uncompressed PSDs.

And the inputs. One USB, one Franken-DVI. Hope you like plugging and unplugging things! It says it’s built for the wireless world - yeah, okay, but that world is make-believe right now. Sure, you could bring a hub along, but this goes along with the earlier complaint: what’s the point of a mega-portable laptop if you have to bring along a whole support team? It’s like a ditzy model-actress’s entourage: you just want to take the girl out, but she has to have her make-up guy, her photographer, her PA, and she’s totally incapable of doing anything on her own.

And lastly, let’s be honest: did we really need things to get that much thinner? My MBP is a great size, not too heavy, and it’s thin enough that there’s quite a lot of leftover room in the laptop compartment of my bag. The Air is whisper-thin but it does still weigh three pounds and its not like you can fold it up and put it in your pocket. What is losing that last half an inch doing aside from attracting stares?

There’s no doubt in my mind that a lot of people will buy this laptop, but its capabilities are really more in line with the Eee PC than a MacBook, and the Eee costs thousands less and actually is ultraportable. The price point is so far removed from this machine’s potential that it makes the iPhone look like a bargain. I’m glad Apple is pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with current PC tech, but right now this computer looks like a bit of a lemon. A sexy lemon, though.

The MacBook Air is not a subnotebook. The Eee and Everex, and Redfly are subnotebooks. They are tiny, basic, and are designed from the ground up to be micro-sized and limited. The Air is trying to be a regular notebook but failing - what Apple has done is take a regular notebook and flatten it (very well I might add), while simultaneously crippling it. Everything about it is a compromise except the width, and even the width doesn’t make it small; a real subnotebook is more than thin, it’s small in the other ways too. It may be thin, but with a 13.3-in. screen it’s not going in any cargo pockets. Look, it’s a sexy little thing but at that price it’s an atrocity and it is not a subnotebook or ultraportable. Sorry, but size, price, and hardware put it in budget laptop territory, and it’s simply not competitive there except in sex appeel. (Sexy lemon — get it)

 

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http://www.google.com/help/knol_screenshot.html

 

There's a new kid on the online block named Knol and even this early in the development stage, some people are already
predicting that it could bring about yet another significant change to the way we share information on the Internet.

For the past year, Chief Wikipedian Jimmy Wales has been doing a lot of trash-talking about taking on Google in the search business. Now Google’s striking back.
Whether it will be successful or not remains to be seen.

Knol is a new Web service being developed by Google that is meant to serve as a virtual storehouse of knowledge on the
Internet. With content being contributed by various experts on different topics, it will behave much in the same way that
Wikipedia does currently. In fact many industry experts have made the suggestion that Knol is set to become a direct
competitor to Wikipedia and other similar types of web sites.

Google is of course the go to web site as far as search engines go, being the most popular search engine web site today by far.
If Knol is as successful in drawing a widespread following as the developers hope, it could bring about the Google's
transition from a search engine into a company that creates and publishes Web content.

Some industry observers warn that one problem that could potentially arise is that Google's objectivity in presenting
search results could be compromised.

Knol – the name of which is derived from the word "knowledge" – is being developed to allow people to create Web pages on
virtually any topic. When completed, it will include several features that will allow its users the ability to perform a
number of tasks, such as submitting comments, rating individual web pages and suggesting changes.

We mentioned earlier in this article that Knol has been compared to Wikipedia by many industry analysts. While there are
in fact many similarities between the two web services, the main difference is that Wikipedia allows virtually anyone to edit an
entry while Knol only allows the author of each particular "knol," – which is what the individual pages in the service will
be called – to do so. This means that the same topics could have many different authors with sometimes contrasting – or even
competing – points of view.

Google has stated that the main thrust of the Knol project was to focus attention on authors who have sufficient expertise on
particular topics. As vice president for engineering at Google Udi Manber wrote in the Google corporate blog recently, the
Internet has evolved largely without the benefit of a standardized means to highlight the author's name on each web
article. He goes on to say that the company believes that knowing who wrote a particular web article will considerably
aid users make better use of the Internet and its various content.

Manber also stated that another important goal of Knol was to cover a wide range of topics, from the various sciences to
health concerns to history. Eventually they hope to have Knol become the first stop for research on any topic. Today it is
Wikipedia that provides that function and its web pages show up at the top of the results page of Google and many other search
engines more often than not.

Some in the industry have suggested that this latest move of Google is driven by the unprecedented growth of web sites that
combine knowledge resources such as Wikipedia, and that Google feels the need to have a strong presence in that particular
area.

Wikipedia is by no means the only web site that offers that type of service. Many other companies have taken slightly
different approaches in functioning as knowledge repositories on various topics on the Internet. These services include Squidoo,
Yahoo Answers, About.com and Mahalo.

In spite of the widespread popularity of these services – as well as the existence of many free tools that allow experts and
regular people the means by which they can share their knowledge online – Manber said that Google feels that it is still not easy
enough for the average user to do those things.

Interestingly, considering all the hype and excitement that is currently surrounding the news of Knol's existence, Google has
refrained from discussing the project any further than these initial details, and have even said that it is still an
experimental project at this time. This means that just like many other Google tests that never saw the light of day, Knol
could end up never even being released publicly at all.

As for Wikipedia, site founder Jimmy Wales has downplayed his site's comparison with Knol, saying that while Wikipedia's goal
is utmost objectivity in its content, with each individual article being the sum total of the collective knowledge of its
various authors, Knol's model will likely result in highly opinionated and possible even contradictory articles on even
the simplest of topics.

Another important distinction is that Wikipedia is a strictly non-profit web site that does not carry any type of advertising,
while Knol is a decidedly more commercial venture, with its content authors earning revenue from any Google ads on their
site.

Now if you think about it, the knol, despite its fancy name, is nothing but a classic move by a quasi-monopolist that wants to ensure it keeps getting the raw material (in this case, content on knols) for free, so that it can keep selling it at a premium. I stopped believing in Google’s “do no evil” ethos a long time ago, so that is why I am worried by comments this like from Manber:
Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results.

Which is to say that they won’t start making knols appear higher in the search results. Maybe it is the jet lag, but I don’t see knols as revolutionary as others are making them out to be. After all, you can set up a blog, make an expert page, maintain it and even put Google Ad Sense to monetize it. So how does this make knols special?
Sure there are APIs that allow knols to be shared with others, and Google maintains that it won’t give special weight to the knols, but who’s to know what they do inside their four walls. Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, who has the single best post on this subject, is a bit disconcerted by knols, it seems.

Google using its page rank system to its own benefit. Think of it this way: Google’s mysterious Page Rank system is what Internet Explorer was to Microsoft in the late 1990s: a way to control the destiny of others.


Editor's Note: Currently, Knol is accessible by Google invitation only. Some additional information on Knol can be found at:

http://www.google.com/help/knol_screenshot.html
http://mashable.com/2007/12/13/google-introduces-the-knol/
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-12-14-n19.html
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/encouraging-people-to-contribute.html

 

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Do a Google search for "PHP vs ASP.NET" (or "ASP.NET vs PHP") and the first hit you'll get is a seemingly well-written Oracle article. When the article was first published, the .NET community certainly made note of it.  There's actually a follow up article by the same author, but he only skirts around the mistakes he made and never really corrects them.

Macromedia might write documentation with horrible code examples, but Oracle flat out lies. Shouldn't we expect more from Oracle? There's a fine print at the bottom of the article that says "The opinions expressed by this author are entirely his own and do not reflect the position of Oracle or any other corporation." That's of little value when it shows up on oracle.com and as the first hit on Google.

Honestly, who would ever buy a product/service from Oracle or iHeavy Inc. (the author's employer) when they clearly don't know what they are talking about? Sean Hull's article shows that opinions can be wrong, and ignorance is still king. I'm calling Sean out and daring him to prove me wrong!

Object Oriented:
So according to Sean, PHP 5 and ASP.NET both have "strong" object oriented capabilities. It's true that PHP5 language supports every important OO concept, but that's just one part of the equation. Anyone remotely familiar with the ASP.NET or WinForms control model knows that for .NET, being object oriented goes beyond the language.  In ASP.NET, html markup is represented as server-side objects. This provides the ability to easily program against controls as well as extend them.  Gone are the day of procedural includes, you now include an object you can program against. This is a non trivial difference that's at the core of the two platforms.  PHP5 has really good OO support, but compared to ASP.NET it isn't remotely close .


Exceptions:
Both PHP5 and ASP.NET support exceptions. Funny how your PHP code uses db_check_errors() for it's "exception handling". Is that how you handle exceptions in PHP? Funnier still is that your ASP.NET example doesn't have any exception handling (or the fact that this ASP.NET example uses Console.WriteLine). If you ignore the fact that PHP5 doesn't have a finally (or using), which is pretty minor, the fact is a number of built-in functions don't throw exceptions nearly as much as they should. Let's take a look at the PHP documentation for opening a connection to oracle:

$conn = oci_connect('hr', 'hr', 'orcl');
if (!$conn) {
   $e = oci_error();
   print htmlentities($e['message']);
   exit;
}

So PHP5 has good support for exceptions, but you'll mostly be checking return values to see if an exceptional situation occurred. Joel Spolsky might switch to PHP.


Speed and Efficiency:
PHP5 is quicker than ASP.NET because Sean said so. No benchmark code is provided. It just is! It's really hard to argue against such a phantom point.  I will say that PHP5 doesn't have a caching API out of the box or support for OutputCaching (you need a Pear library for that sort of stuff).  Oh ya, PHP5 is also more efficient, but there's no explanation as to what that means.


Price:
Any price comparison that doesn't take into account total cost of ownership is incomplete. Sean himself admits that "PHP is the quick and dirty type of solution". I know the TOC argument is thrown around by Microsofties a lot. But any experienced developer knows that maintenance cost can far outweigh all other costs. If PHP really is a quick and dirty (and it really is), shouldn't a sane business owner be worried about how easily and quickly they'll be able to maintain it?

I know this is an old article and most have let it go, but I feel duty bound to clear up some of the FUD. I work with PHP daily, and I do like it.  I plan on making a post about why you would pick PHP over ASP.NET (ie, if you are using the SqlDataSource, just switch to PHP now). But Sean clearly has no idea what he's talking about.

 

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