It was surprising and not surprising, at the same time, to see that MS and Yahoo had come to an understanding about joining forces. The presidents of both companies signed an agreement, to last for ten years, in which MS gets to use Yahoo’s technologies and Yahoo gets 88% of the ad revenue generated during that time period. There was no cash payout. Yahoo will concentrate on product development, but not on search, using the MS engine recently re-labeled Bing for that role. In essence, it seems that MS takes over the search function on Yahoo and passes on a very nice part of whatever money the new gadget can bring in. The lack of a cash payment apparently upset some Yahoo shareholders who dumped their stocks. The advantage to Yahoo is said to be steady revenue and the advantage to MS is the leap from third to second in the world of search. Some techie commentators were rather caustic about it all, saying that Yahoo had abandoned any pretext of being a technology company and was simply in the business of dreaming up ways to amuse and distract the yobs, and there’s no tech-cred in that. Using Bing means that Yahoo is giving up on its own search technology, and that must be hard to swallow for old hands, if there are any. Yahoo was the hot ticket in search in the period just after the web started to take off….1994 or so? So, for them to give up on it definitely seems to be a humiliating admission that they’re just not up to the job. Since MS was offering 47 billion last year in an effort to buy Yahoo outright, it seems they’re getting a lot of what they wanted for a lot less. So maybe the shareholders who walked were on to something. Ten years from now, the deal will show itself to have been either a blunder or a stroke of genius.
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The new buzzword in the Hi-tech world is the “cloud”, which is a metaphor used to describe a new situation in which users reduce or abandon local information generation, storage and retrieval technologies, such as desktop software, in favor of remotely located, web-based central platforms. So, cloud computing lets people work on a spreadsheet or create a report without much in the way of onboard software in our machines. All that is on the web, in ‘the cloud’. There are some advantages: power, size, memory, ease of sharing information, no more expensive updates, and largely meaningless new ‘versions’. Corporations wouldn’t need big IT departments and could save a bundle there. Quite a few folk are taking this seriously, or at least writing about it. And it may be the next big thing, or the next but one, in computer technology. But some people have noted the drawbacks, and they’re big ones. Once your data is located someplace, it’s outside your control. Hackers and crackers can get to it, soothing assurances to the contrary notwithstanding. Read the papers; almost every week you see an instance of some big outfit discovering that bad boys have broken their vaunted security system and made off with thousands of names and lots of personal data. What’s to stop that from happening in the cloud? Well, presumably, the same kind of security measures now generally in place, and shown to be rather leaky ones at that. What will keep government agents or business competitors or professional rivals from penetrating the cloud, or suborning some employees, to get access to all these ideas, inventions, musical scores, patents in progress? Then too, there is the little matter of physical security, and the not so little one of corporate failure or transformation. In a bankruptcy, for instance, is stored data an asset? Can users get to their material? Who owns it? So, before you go all cloudy, think about this a little bit.

Clouds

Not to be outdone by Amazon, Barnes and Noble announced that it will also launch a site for downloading e-books. They won’t be selling a reader, at least not right away, but they will be making the books available in a format compatible with the different devices now held in the hot little hands of millions of Americans and potential readers. Several things are noteworthy here. First, the total array of titles is much larger than the one Amazon is fielding. Second, a very large number of these items will be works in the public domain and available at no charge. Thirdly, this “no charge” policy is a result of a deal with Google Books, which will be supplying the titles drawn from its digitized collections of books drawn from its library partners. SONY made a similar deal recently for its Reader platform. And lastly, the fact that B&N is not selecting one device or format is interesting in itself. You have to download reading software from the B&N e-book site, but I-Phones, Blackberries, laptops and desktops can serve as the base. They may not have a good enough reader of their own, or perhaps they decided to bank on the capacity and flexibiltiy of current and future handheld devices to accept e-books. They want to get into the game before it turns into Amazon’s own preserve. B&N is being coy about selling the PlasticLogic reader when it becomes available this Fall or early in 2010, but they did say that PL will have a special section on the e-book site. Digital books are still a small part of the total market, but the actions of these two biggies will push things along very smartly. Publishers remain concerned about the pricing policy the two booksellers are using,especially for new releases. I should add that many B&B e-titles will be availiable in a POD or Print On Demand basis, in which the customer winds up with a bound hardcopy of the item. Several technologies for doing this are already in play. I can see both sides of the reader thing. If you don’t have one, you miss out on the razor part of the razor and blades advantage. The money is really in the item people come back for and need, the blades, but you get to sell them the razor anyway. But having a dedicated reader gets you into design, manufacturing, quality control and the whole bag. If you let somebody else worry about that, you save yourself a lot of headaches. I think these developments may turn a whole bunch of Americans into readers, and that’s good for them It’s also good for the publishing industry, broadly conceived. And it’s good for the larger society. Who knows what might happen when millions of Americans start reading again. Interesting times.

B&N