Qwikster has a death sentence.

In 10 years not a single person is going to be getting DVDs-by-mail, not when they can have it all with instant streaming; on their TVs, PCs, Xboxes, iPhones, etc.

So what do you do?

Do you:

A) Keep a looser that’s not going to generate a profit, while at the same time incurring extra subscriber costs.

B) Separate the business into two divisions, with neither division able to file for bankruptcy without bringing the other one down with it.

C) Spin out a separate business called Qwikster, polish it off, and then sell it to a sucker (harsh, but realistic … as whoever gets into this business has an unrealistic model of the universe).

Netflix still faces big problems with costs of content deals (Starz) and premium content providers becoming competitors (HBO GO, MAXGO, etc).

I see Qwikster converting into a RedBox (local rental boxes in/next-to stores) and OnLive (”hosted” games) like business; with a slowly evaporating DVD-by-mail customer base.

Except that Microsoft made no such moves. And no real developers were “horrified”, because a real developer knows that HTML is just a markup language and JavaScript is not a replacement for the CLR + .NET.

At least that was what I thought!

Microsoft has now released a video demonstrating what Windows 8 is about.

The simple truth is that Windows 8 is a re-imagination of the desktop … geared towards the mass market which primarily uses their systems to browse the internet, post on facebook, check their email.

Windows 8 can run tailored apps where HTML and JavaScript widgets replace the traditional desktop window for the benefit of the user.

The underlining platform does not change. We simply get a new fancy UI option that uses a DLL shared with IE 10.

I’ve gathered links to keynotes from this year’s conference and videos from 2009 and 2008.

Start with the videos if you are mostly interested in the Apache Web Server. It seems to be a very small part of the 2010 slides.

ApacheCon US 2009 Videos: Hadoop Track, Apache HTTPD Track, Lucene Track.
ApacheCon US 2008 Videos: Apache HTTPD System Administration, Security, Administration.

2010 ApacheCon Slides and the schedule of the talks.

It took up an entire cpu on a 4 core processor, ballooned IE load time from 1 second to 15 seconds, caused tabs to crash, and just made the entire system sluggish.

And that was after I turned all the toolbar’s options off.

It’s too high of a price to pay for seeing the PR of websites. Thanks, but no thanks Google. It’s now disabled.

link

1992’s version…

Don’t Copy That Floppy Wikipedia entry.

I doubt it.

Ask yourself this… What is it that has changed since Google entered the Chinese market in 2006?

Google knew what they were getting themselves into: dealing with censored results, government interference, corporate espionage (sanctioned by the state), and much much more. Not to mention having the entire deck stacked from the onset against all foreign companies (in China, you get used, striped, and then disgarded in favor of the home-grown competitor).

So a dozen Gmail accounts get compromised and the finger points to China. A few networks get breached.

So what?

How many Gmail accounts where compromised by government interest in the rest of the world? How many times did a corporate network get compromised by a competitor or a foreign interest? This is standard-operating-procedure in big business and politics.

Let’s try this on for size…

1. Google enters the Chinese market.

2. Chinese market/government favors own state side Baidu.com

3. Google breaks even or loses money on investment. Marketshare does not come.

4. Google realizes how difficult things are in China for “outside” companies.

5. Google, not being able to hack it here, to save face and score some points, uses its PR machine to a) start the process of pulling out of the market, b) make themselves look good doing it, and c) take advantage of a whole lot of people in the process.

And what do you know, it fits!




I’ll concede this could be a bluff to get something they want or there is much more going on that we have not been made aware of.

Zed Shaw – The ACL is Dead from CUSEC on Vimeo.

Here I present you Google Failures of Epic Proportions (a.k.a the other side of the story).