2009: the year that Microsoft lost its dominance on the desktop and became a 'normal' IT company

2009 will be the year that Microsoft has lost its monopoly on the desktop, as Asian manufacturers like Asus and Acer, prefer to invest in Linux based desktop solutions. "Arrogance" is mentioned as motivation. But also price is a major issue: in the current downturn consumers and business want to spend less on IT.

The EU is also doing its best to make it Microsoft difficult. The EU commisioner for anti-trust cases, Neelie Kroes, ruled in favour of Norwegian Opera that Microsoft should unbundle its web browser Internet Explorer from its operating system and offer it separately.

The increase in competition on the desktop will lead to a Microsoft that is a "normal" company as all companies, that are competing merely on quality than on politics. Hopefully, Microsoft will then gradually become more supportive of open source and open content initiatives, like its major competitor Google.

CircuitCity Broke, Interesting Times for Etailers

CircuitCity files for bankruptcy today. A whole series of US retail chains Boscov’s, Sharper Image, Mervyns, Linens ’n Things, Whitehall Jewelers and Steve & Barry’s filed for bankruptcy protection in 2008. Good news for Amazon and the 1000s of smaller etailers. The recession speeds up the shift from traditional retail towards etail. Predicted 10 years ago, but eminent today. As Amazon and in NL BOL.com have reported double digit growth figures, the picture is clear.

The recession speeds up the virtualization of Western economies. The dramatic events in the financial world are continuing, now that Citigroup wants to split itself up after reporting almost 19 Billion USD losses over 2008.

As long as governments are able to limit the fall-out, I think this cleanup in the financial and retail industries are extremely healthy. Also the boost in investments in green energy and green infrastructures is really promising. The election of Obama can mark a new era.

Open Content Alliance.. also for open business content?

The Open Content Alliance (OCA) is a collaborative effort of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that helps build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia material. Yahoo! is one of the founding members.

Today, I mailed them and wondered if Open ICEcat would fit in their definition, as most of their projects are focused on digitizing libraries and putting the content in public online archives.

As ambitious is Google's book search which is effective in unlocking the wisdom of ages to every scholar or user. Microsoft ended its book scanning project, by the way. Google seems to be the winner in many fields in which it competes with Microsoft.

The proprietary (=closed) competitors of ICEcat were taken over last year:
- Cnet Network (incl. content provider Cnet Channel) is bought by CBS News in May 2008
- in December GfK's Encodex daughter acquired a 51% stake in Etilize.com
I congratulated today Azhar Hameed (ceo/owner Etilize) with his deal, as I was a little bit late in receiving the news ;-). Het thanked me for my kind email.

The acquisition of Cnet led to loose of focus, and the open content catalog could silently replace Cnet's closed solution. GfK Encodex is traditionally strong in Germany and in whitegoods/browngoods retail. The database was originally setup for research, but gradually expanded. Gfk had tried -during the CBS - Cnet negotiations - to buy Cnet Channel, but rumour says that the price was too high. It is clear that US contender Etilize was available for a relatively more attractive price. At the same time, Etilize is successful in the US, although has no good answer on Cnet's local (US) full-service concept incl. support of e-ordering.

Normally, it takes at least one year before an integration process is successful if at all. ;-)