Alec Saunders SquawkBox

This morning we recorded another SquawkBox with Randall Howard, Howard Thaw, Jim Courtney and myself.  We talked about 

1. Sun's acquisition of MySQL this week for a cool $1 billion.  What's Sun's game here?  Speculation runs the gamut from building enterprise applications to compete with Oracle all the way to cloud computing a la Amazon EC3.  Why pay so much for this asset? What will they do with it?
2. DSL Reports leaked Time Warner Communications internal memo that talks about testing a usage metered version of the Internet in Beaumont Texas.  The memo says that the system is aimed at gaining additional revenue from the "5% of subscribers who use half the bandwidth" on the network. Who are these people? How will customers respond?  Will people simply go to service providers that don't have limits?
3. The report that China is close to surpassing the US as the worlds largest internet market, measured by users. According to statistics released by the Chinese, they're now just 5 million shy of passing the US.   Will this mean more freedom and less censorship for the Chinese?  Is this end of US dominance of internet technologies.  
4. Scrabulous — the wildly popular Scrabble clone running on Facebook.  With over half a million daily users it has popularized Scrabble to a brand new generation of game players, many of whom have never played it before.  Now Hasbro and Mattel have come forward, claiming that their trademark is being infringed, and have asked that Scrabulous be removed.  It's turned into a PR nightmare for the company as thousands of Scrabulous players have spoken out against the move.  What should Hasbro do?  While within their rights to enforce their trademark, they risk a brand damaging black eye.
5. And what about the Apple Macbook Air?

Next week the SquawkBox moves to 11 AM Eastern Time, or 8 AM Pacific.  Enjoy this week's recordings, and I hope to hear you on the call next week.  

UPDATE: I am not sure why, but this file doesn't play correctly directly from this web page in the Podango player.  Click the download link, however, and it will play properly from either QuickTime or Windows Media.

 

 January 18 Squawk Box [27:30m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Larry O’Brien, writing about the possibility of a mobile phone being the consumers only client, had this to say:

Having used Sun’s SunRay thin clients back in the dot-com days, I can attest to the user-friendliness of “plug and play” computing – put your smart card into any computer in the company and get your desktop. Very, very nice experience. However, I think the idea of a dumbed-down appliance-based OS has been tried and failed – WebTV springs to mind, Audrey, all of those things.

He continues relating his experience with SunRay clients at a recent tradeshow, and concludes "Thin clients suck". 

At VON last week there were SunRay stations for attendees to log into and check email, etc, everywhere.  Screens painted slowly, with frequent tears.  The Sun browser was substandard, with obvious paints / repaints as CSS pages were rendered.  The included VoIP phone had a primitive UI, and voice quality was substandard. 

I think Sun makes great servers, but their thin clients, and their thin client religion, sucks.

Microsoft Must Bundle Java. There’s good news for competition now that a federal judge has said he’ll support an injunction requiring Microsoft to bundle… No surprise that I disagree with Dan Gillmor on this.  Yes, it’s true that Microsoft took aim at Java.  It’s also true that Sun aimed Java at Microsoft.  I can’t think of anything more ludicrous than a failed competitor winning an injunction to force the foe to bundle the competing product. 

Free Software, at Least to a Certain Point.  The free software foundation holds a dinner and passes the hat, collecting $6,000 to keep the thing going.  Why? "Mr. Stallman’s point, now supported by many thousands of programmers worldwide, is that software becomes better when more people can work on it. Recently, several companies, including I.B.M., Sun Microsystems and Red Hat, have started trying to make money on that premise by selling software and technical support for Linux, the main competitor to Microsoft’s Windows."

This is just so much baloney.  Linux is demonstrably not better than Windows.  It’s more difficult to use, supports fewer devices, and uses an outdated kernel architecture (even Linus admits that he should have written a microkernel).  Furthermore, a business built on service margins cannot compete effectively with a business built on IP margins.  Red Hat is still in business is because they live off the good will of the open source programmers that aren’t on their payroll.

Multiple wars raging in Linux land. Sun stirs controversy with its commitment to Linux

Sun just doesn’t get it.  Linux on the desktop?  Boy, am I glad I don’t own any Sun stock.  Fighting a war with Microsoft over the desktop is a sure route to financial ruin.  Just ask Corel.