IT Investment Research

The Numbers Explain Why Oracle Should Abandon EU

I said in my post on November 12 Larry Ellison should ask himself whether it is even worthwhile for the new Oracle (ORCL)/Sun (JAVA) combination to do business in the information technology (IT) backwater that is the European Union (EU). Why go through the hassle of dealing with EU regulators when it appears the return on investment is so low? My suggestion is to just consummate the merger without EU approval and don’t do business in the EU.

A bunch of Euroblatherers on seekingalpha.com commented that my idea was anti-Europe bashing. One even criticized the quality of my photograph, which I love because it is a snapshot taken by friend in front of an old restaurant on Helsinki harbor. I love to go to places like that in Europe and look at the old cathedrals and decrepit palaces.  It’s just that the over-regulated EU is an increasingly bad place to sell enterprise software and IT.  Look at the numbers.
 
According to its 10K, Oracle received less than 15% of its revenue from the EU big three—the UK, France and Germany—during fiscal 2009.  And that’s down from 16% in fiscal 2008. Given those countries’ contracting economies that number is bound to keep dropping. Because the revenue is based on GAAP accounting, it would take some work to figure the real compare (e.g., would need to factor in the percent of business BEA and other acquisitions did in the EU) but maybe—best case and counting Slovenia and Wexford and all those other great bastions of industry—Oracle gets 20% or 25% of its revenues from the IT consumers regulated by the non-tech-savvy bureaucrats in Brussels.

According to its 10-K, Sun (JAVA) on the other hand gets almost as much revenue from Europe (that's not the same as EU but that’s the best number we have) as it does from the U.S. And a third of Sun’s U.S. revenue comes from Avnet. In fact, while Sun revenue in the U.S. dropped 25% in the last few years, it only dropped 15% in Europe. The trendline of Sun’s EU numbers vs. the U.S. numbers should forever be considered a good leading indicator of failure in the IT market for all companies. Clearly when everyone in the U.S. is bailing out of a company’s IT products and services as with Sun, but the IT consumers of the EU haven’t got the word, sell your shares. 

As with the Oracle numbers, there might be some falling/rising/falling dollar issue in those statistics. But I bet it wouldn’t take a lot of analysis to figure out that that revenue—whatever the apples-apples revenue numbers are—is no where near as profitable as doing business in real markets where politicians don’t try to regulate the shape of fruit. For example it looks like half the employment of the combined company would be European even though only 25% of the revenue comes from there.  If Snoracle gets out of the EU, that salary expense drop to the bottom line.

-- Dennis Byron

Memo to Oracle: With Sun Comes Widgets

With Oracle (ORCL) going to the mattresses with the European Union (EU) over its proposed Sun (JAVA) acquisition, many analysts are suggesting Oracle walk away from Sun.  I am suggesting Oracle walk away from the EU. Larry Ellison should ask himself whether it is even worthwhile for Snoracle to do business in such a backwater.

The EU is the place that 50 years after Plan Calcul is still trying to launch a nativist information technology (IT) company to compete with IBM. Larry, ask Neelie about Tulip.  Remember Cii and that crazy Siemens, ICL, Nixdorf, Bull, Olivetti thing in the mid 70s. No prolonged effort to get approval of the Sun acquisition is going to change that basic dynamic. No three-year effort to get to the Court of First Instance of Last Resort in Strasbourg is going to be worth spending all that time walking around in Stalinist architecture during days of little sunshine (the EU does not work in the summer and it rains all the time there in the spring).

So why go through the hassle of dealing with EU regulators when it appears the return on investment is so low? That’s especially true if Oracle is serious about keeping and growing Sun’s systems/storage business.  Software—the market that Oracle knows well—is portable. But message to Redwood Shores:

"With Sun, comes widgets."

So Larry this should be the opening position at the meeting on November 25, if you haven’t told the EU already: 

"Approve the Sun deal or the new Snoracle does not do business in the EU."

(Update on my post of November 10 about not being able to analyze the EU’s statement of objections, I received the following from the EU’s crack PR folks:  “We regret to inform you that Statements of Objections are not documents of public domain. They are sent to the parties concerned in the transaction.”  So I’ll have to wait until later this week when SAP leaks it to the Wall St. Journal.)

-- Dennis Byron

European Union Database Market Takes on Oracle: They Call the Wind 'Maria'

This is the battle I have been waiting for (at least until November 15 when New England takes on Indy).

I must admit part of my lust is just for the sport of it… to see Ellison do what Ballmer should have done. But it’s deeper than that. The statement of objections reportedly filed by the EU Competition Commissioner against the Oracle (ORCL)/Sun (JAVA) merger pits the statism of the 50-year European Union (EU) attempt to nationalize industries and markets, including a score of failed attempts to spawn an EU information technology (IT) industry and various EU IT markets, against a future world order totally tilted to the western part of North America and the rest of the Pacific Rim in all things economic and political, not just IT.

I’d really like to dig deeper into it but I cannot find the actual statement of objections being raised by the EU.  This makes it hard to comment but the paragraphs below summarize what Oracle says in rebuttal.  I am clearly not going to be disappointed because Oracle’s bombast is as usual seriously misleading and yet cuts to the quick. For example:

"Oracle's acquisition of Sun is essential for competition in the high end server market, for revitalizing Sparc and Solaris… "

Well that’s clearly not true because Sun has been a nonentity in the server market for some time so there is no essential competition.  I guess you could say it might be important to “revitalizing Sparc and Solaris……and for strengthening the Java development platform” but the IT market has already said it doesn’t care.

“The transaction does not threaten to reduce competition in the slightest, including in the database market."

This is apparently the heart of the matter and is true because no merger or acquisition reduces competition; bad products decrease competition. As usual, a bunch of European guys with an apparently bad database management product called Maria (forked out of MySQL but see paragraphy below)--unable to compete on a level playing field, the worldwide IT market--are trying to tilt the EU database software playing field in their favor.

“It is well understood by those knowledgeable about open source software that because MySQL is open source, it cannot be controlled by anyone. That is the whole point of open source."

This is a side issue, or at least it should be, but the statement is true.  Apparently the EU marches on because of the EU losers who were not able to take over the world with their low-functionality EU database software.  It’s the same meme as the loser Norwegians that screwed up Windows 7 because no one used their Opera browser.

“Oracle and MySQL are very different database products.

Well that’s not true.  Why would these EU losers who are marketing Maria start this battle if it was a different product than Oracle's database software.  The whiners know that it’s just that Maria is 30 years behind Oracle’s relational database research and development.  In theory, Maria could catch up if the EU tilts the playing field enough.

“The U.S. Department of Justice carefully reviewed the proposed acquisition during the normal Hart-Scott-Rodino review and considered it again when the European Commission initiated a second phase review.

Well Larry, that's not a winning argument.  Don't you know that nothing makes the EU feel more comfortable than telling them the American government thinks it’s OK.  Look how well the EU is coming through in Afghanistan. I hope Ellison has already made the threat Ballmer should have: 

"Approve this or Oracle is out of Europe.  Who needs your dying statist economy anyways?"

-- Dennis Byron

IBM, Oracle, Microsoft Not Worried about a Drupal White House

If you follow the growth of content management software (CMS) in the enterprise software market for a living and also follow United States (US) politics as a civic responsibility, your worlds intersected during the week of October 26.  The leading related headlines in the blogosphere in terms of most frequent appearance went something like this:

• "White House Switches to Drupal, Making Obama Our First Open-Source President.."
• "WhiteHouse.gov goes Drupal: can open source lead to open government?"
• "White House opens Web site programming to public."

So if you invest in IBM Filenet, Oracle (ORCL) Stellent, Microsoft (MSFT)  Sharepoint or dozens of other CMS products marketed by publicly traded companies [e.g., Autonomy (LSE:AU), EMC (EMC) Documentum, OpenText (OTEX), and more], should you be following these developments closely? 

The answer is yes, but don’t depend on any of the stories or blog posts that appeared on the blogosphere during the past week for your background information.

You should pay attention because CMS is a hot enterprise software market area that should buoy many of these public companies’ share prices over the next decade as the need to manage unstructured data (like rich web site content, email databases, etc.) becomes more prevalent than managing structured data (like numbers, names and addresses in an ERP system, supply chain logistics, etc.).  Just as the ERP market matured and consolidated during the 2000-2009 decade, CMS will mature and consolidate between now and 2019.  So there will be winners and losers just as with ERP, a market that could not support the dozens of separate suppliers that existed 10 years ago and that has now effectively been winnowed down to a few choices (Intuit, Microsoft, Oracle, Sage and SAP).

As for the whitehouse.gov stories that have permeated the blogosphere this week, I have not seen so much drivel and deception since 2005 when IBM and a few low-level information technology (IT) bureaucrats in Massachusetts tried to convince you that Massachusetts was some kind of leading-edge proponent of Sun (JAVA) Open Document Format. The Drupal postings whose headlines are noted above are full of the same kind of incredible misinformation as the Massachusetts ODF articles of 2005:

• As explained here on capitalgig.com, Obama was NOT the first open source president when it came to CMS at least (Clinton probably was but no one from that era has weighed in)
• Open source—at least commercial open source marketing that involves red, white and blue for-profit companies such as Acquia, the sponsors of Drupal, along with General Dynamics (GD), the developers and implementers of the current whitehouse.gov—has nothing to do with open government and GD’s and Acquia’s market dynamics are exactly the same as IBM’s, Oracle’s, etc.
• The White House did not open its website’s code to the public; that would be just plain dumb

As for all of the blogoblather about Drupal there were a set of anti-Drupal headlines during the week as well.  For example

• "Why Drupal in the White House is a Bad Idea"
• "Obama's biggest blunder - Drupal?"

Less you think these posts come from George W. Bush supporters mad that he wasn’t given the credit he deserves (as if he even knows what the discussion involves) for putting up an open-source-Perl-based CMS in 2001-2002 or from IBM, Oracle, etc. CMS proponents worried about Acquia and its 300 support customers, neither is the case.  All the anti-Drupal vitriol comes from other open source CMS products.  Go figure.

And only one blog post that I saw in the past 10 days pointed out that Drupal got kicked off the recovery.gov web site at the White House the same week that it got put on the whitehouse.gov web site.  Not much investment potential in a marketing machine that loses one for every one that it wins.

Open Standards Bigots Still Putting Out the "Big Lie" about Massachusetts and ODF

About once a year, some blogoblatherer peddles the “big lie” that earlier this decade all State of Massachusetts government information-technology (IT) groups were major supporters of Sun's (JAVA) Open Document Format. So once a year, being Massachusetts born and bred, I feel the need to knock down the Massachusetts/Open Document Format (ODF) 'big lie" by providing links to the relevant public records.

This year the offending blogger is Paula Rooney of ZDnet (see her paragraph about "brave Massachusetts technology execs") but if not her, it would be someone else before long. It is unfortunate that she did not check her own web site before writing about the "brave… execs." In addition to the relevant official state documentation on the subject in the links below, there was some pretty good contemporaneous reporting of the back-room dealings between Sun and a few state IT employees right on ZDnet. One of the more telling sentences about what appears to me to be a Sun-ODF effort to manipulate Massachusetts was this information from David Berlind of ZDnet in October 2005:

"Although it isn't clear what Massachusetts' test for openness was back in the early 2005 timeframe, it is clear that "the test" was officially revised... by the time (Massachusetts' Enterprise Technical Reference Model) ETRM was ratified on Sept. 23..." 

Why (and how) the test was revised was answered in 2006 but the open standards blogoblatherers conveniently leave out that fact. The information about a flawed process developed by Berlind was confirmed in a Massachusetts legislative report, which said that that particular version of the ETRM (3.5) was put together by a "kitchen cabinet," which not only failed to give outsiders such as Microsoft (MSFT) a reasonable chance to comment on or react to its plans but also froze out all other relevant Massachusetts IT groups, including the ones involved with aiding the disabled and those in charge of public records.

The legislative report lays out how this small group—actually one department in one part of one branch of the Massachusetts government—took numerous underhanded (even by very generous Massachusetts state government standards) to try to wire the procurement process for Sun. The “brave… execs” issued--possibly illegally according to the legislators--ETRM 3.5 saying that Massachusetts government would only use documents produced in the following four "standard" formats: HTML, Sun ODF, Adobe (ADBE) PDF and TXT. Note that there were four “standard formats” listed, not just ODF. "Standard" is in quotes because PDF was no more a "standard" at the time than Microsoft’s Office formats but clearly the "brave... execs" had to make their "open" version of the ETRM look somewhat open.

The effort was part of a multiple-year process that began in 2002 with a study by a state-sponsored group called the IT Commission, apparently orchestrated by the same "brave... execs." The IT Commission was “facilitated” by IBM (IBM) consulting employees under contract and included a Sun employee but no Microsoft employee. IBM uses ODF in one of its less popular Lotus products or at least did so at the time. Microsoft was a major supplier of technology to Massachusetts at the time (and still is I believe) and should have been represented on the commission or all vendors should have been barred.

The legislative committee concluded that Rooney's "brave... execs" were:

“… not aware of the cost of the ETRM, the impact it could have on the state’s public records, limitations on IT accessibility for persons with disabilities, that the agency excluded key governmental and advocacy groups, and that the proposal was issued in violation of state law.”

The above is the summary.  The details run on for 30-40 pages. The finding of disregard by ITD and the IBM-Sun group for the disabled bordered on immoral, a much more serious charge than illegal here in Massachusetts.
 
Today as in 2005 the issue of document format standards is, as it should be, a miniscule part of Massachusetts’s ETRM (now in its fifth version). New IT management in state government gave Microsoft a chance to make the list and gave Sun a chance to make ODF handicapped accessible. Massachusetts considers HTML, ODF, OOXML, PDF, RTF and Text to be acceptable document formats. The issue of accessibility for the disabled is now a key part of the IT procurement process.

Common sense triumphed over the attempted Sun-ODF coup in Massachusetts earlier this decade. Unfortunately other Massachusetts politicians went on to try to extort money out of Cognos.

-- Dennis Byron

MySQL to Oracle? Marten Says “Kylla!” Monty Says “Ei!”

In dueling blogoshots released in October 2009, the two Finns most associated with the MySQL database software company, which they sold to Sun (JAVA) in 2008 for a bazillion markaas, are urging the European Union in opposite directions when it comes to Oracle’s (ORCL) takeover of MySQL (by virtue of Oracle’s pending acquisition of Sun). 

Marten Mickos, the CEO of MySQL from 2001 to 2008 and now an entrepreneur in residence in Silicon Valley at big MySQL cash-out winner Benchmark Partners, says

"Oracle has as many compelling business reasons to continue the ramp-up of the MySQL business as Sun Microsystems and MySQL previously did, or even more. Even if Oracle, for whatever reason, would have malicious or ignorant intent regarding MySQL (not that I think so), the positive and massive influence MySQL has on the DBMS market cannot be controlled by a single entity--not even by the owner of the MySQL assets. The users of MySQL exert a more powerful influence in the market than the owner does." (Source: CNet)

Ulf Michael Widenius (called Monty), co-creator of the MySQL project, founder of the company of the same name in 2001, and now founder of the MySQL fork project called Maria, says (on his blog post quoting himself from a press release that was not released):

“… Oracle should resolve antitrust concerns over its US$7.4 billion acquisition of Sun by committing to sell MySQL to a suitable third party… MySQL needs a different home than Oracle, a home where there will be no conflicts of interest concerning how, or if, MySQL should be developed further."

Mickos wins this Arctic Circle standoff on the numbers from an information technology (IT) investment perspective.  Oracle can’t sell MySQL because it’s sitting on Sun’s books at a half a bazillion markaas and is probably only worth about as much as a markaa is today given the trivial number of paying MySQL customers estimated by Mickos in his blog post.  

Monty's argument against Oracle makes no sense in that he has already forked the project. And anyone else can as well because of the license terms and conditions he used to initially release it.

Of course Mickos' trivial numbers kind of fly in the face of Mickos’ claim to the EU Anti-competition Czar Neelie Kroes that MySQL has a “dramatic effect” on the database market. Unless the dramatic effect is that non-paying customers are not buying database software, something that disagrees with what I see in the marketplace. But Neelie wants out of this job so badly she already gave Microsoft (MSFT) everything it wanted in a recent decision.  She probably wants out of there before Ellison starts tearing into her. He won’t meet her for a quiet breakfast of Belgian waffles some morning the way Ballmer did.

-- Dennis Byron 

Ballmer Does Boston

People that live in first-tier towns like NYC, London, San Francisco and Chicago always say they cannot believe how provincial Boston is. As a native, the charge always bothers me but Boston keeps proving what a one-horse parade it runs--even in terms of the enterprise-software world--when it gets all a twitter (literally and figuratively) over the fact that Microsoft’s (MSFT) Steve Ballmer met some people in Boston (actually across the river in Cambridge I think) for breakfast on Friday morning October 16. 

The home-town Boston Globe is all over the “story,” except that there does not seem to be a story.  They just had a business breakfast like the last 5000 business breakfast you’ve attended.  According to the Globe, the “guest list” included an eclectic bunch for sure:

• Two old enterprise-software dinosaurs, now VCs, Dan Bricklin from the 70s (Visicalc) and John Landry from the 80s (Lotus)
• A much younger dinosaur, Bill Warner, who founded Avid Technology (AVID) in the 1990s and now seems to mentor enterprise software folks
• A bunch of younger VCs (Microsoft is always on the prowl; it picked up its Chief Technology Officer Ray Ozzie in Massachusetts, not that Ballmer needed a VC breakfast to find Ozzie)
• A college president, Gloria Larson (not a college whose name you’d recognize unless you follow Division II basketball where Bentley is nationally ranked perennially; Larson has the college presidency because of politics, probably the same reason she was at the breakfast)
• A couple of leading local Internet entrepreneurs (and the head of the Mass Technology Leadership Council that designated them “leading local entrepreneurs”)
• A twit named Laura Fitton; read it for yourself; I can’t make this stuff up (actually Steve Mann is advising her so she might have something going under the twill)

The Globe is hard at work trying to find out what was discussed other than “Do you believe it snowed in Boston on October 16th?” 

Looking at the guest list I see two themes: mentoring and old and new software start-ups.  Take a guess at which subject Ballmer was probably interested in.

-- Dennis Byron

What’s with these SaaS Enterprise Software Fanboys?

Saugatuck Research is out on October 8, 2009 with one of its periodic hallelujah pieces about a so-called class of enterprise software suppliers it calls Software as a Service (SaaS) software providers. (This link requires you to sign in but I believe there is no charge to see the summary.) To be fair, Saugatuck is not the only firm putting out this poorly structured view of the enterprise software industry. Look at Saugatuck's and similar SaaS-slanted research very skeptically from an information technology (IT) investment and IT market analysis point of view.

According to Saugatuck, the SaaS class is posited as different than “On-Premise software providers,” which it periodically also calls "ISVs." The SaaS class is regularly described as a new phenomenon. In one Saugatuck report, this SaaS class is even said to be “…Starting to Feel the Effects of Tough Economy” (see Saugatuck report RA-602, published on 28 May 2009). But the October 2009 announcement says,

“By YE2010, our SaaS basket will be growing at a 20 percent year-over-year rate (with the slope suggesting a potential path to achieve 30 percent or higher segment performance in 2011).”

There is no better way to understand the Saugatuck research’s flaws than to look at its so-called “baskets” of different classes of enterprise software suppliers

On-Premise ISV Basket: 
• Autodesk (ADSK)
• BMC (BMC)
• Compuware (CPWR)
• Epicor (EPIC)
• Lawson (LWSN)
• Oracle (ORCL)
• SAP (SAP)

SaaS Market Basket:
• Blackboard (BBBB)
• Concur (CNQR)
• DemandTec (DMAN)
• Kenexa (KNXA)
• NetSuite (N)
• RightNow (RNOW)
• Salesforce.com (CRM)
• SuccessFactors (SFSF)
• Taleo (TLEO)
• Ultimate Software (ULTI)

It is the most misleading bit of cherry picking and revisionism I’ve seen among this sort of SaaS fanboy research. It is absurd to include BMC and Compuware in a listing that is otherwise made up of enterprise applications suppliers.  Or if there were any logic in including BMC and Compuware, why not include Red Hat (RHAT) and VMware (VMW) also?  Maybe Saugatuck left them off because it would skew the results of Saugatuck’s share-price comparisons in a direction that invalidates Saugatuck theories?

It is equally absurd for Saugatuck to leave off Microsoft (MSFT) and IBM from a list that is supposed to accurately portray the so-called “on-premise software community.” Saugutuck says that’s because the two market leaders do not segregate “their reported revenues between new license sales, maintenance and services revenues” but of course neither do most of the so-called SaaS providers.  So you cannot compare apples to apples. 

And on which list should I put Google (GOOG)?

Then you have the research's logic problem that all of the so-called on premise software community also offers its software functionality as a service--that is, SaaS--and has done so for years.  In fact, although I don’t buy Oracle's actual claimed dollar amount, I agree directionally with Oracle’s claim that it is already the number-two provider of software delivered via SaaS delivery mechanisms.  Of course that is what SaaS is: an enterprise-software delivery mechanism, not a market. That misunderstanding is the biggest flaw in Saugatuck’s and similar SaaS research perspectives.

Conversely, as explained in my IT Business Edge research, almost all of the so-called SaaS basket entrants also offer or used to offer “on-premise software.” That’s another way to say they are all or mostly also 10 or more years old so any share-price time-series analysis similar to that included in the Saugatuck research should span a few decades, not a few quarters.

There are all kinds of finer points to watch for but bottom line: don’t use this stuff to decide on how you invest in the enterprise software market.

-- Dennis Byron

Judge Microsoft-EU Deal Investment Implications by Its Opponents

In reading about the almost Microsoft (MSFT) agreement with the European Union (EU) announced October 7, I feel Microsoft investors have finally got a good deal from the EU regulators. The mounting opposition to the deal is my proofpoint. Just as the Opera (on Oslo stock exchange) company executives that started the anti-Microsoft (MSFT) browser complaint in EU now feel chained to an EU Competition Commission (EUCC) boat anchor being thrown overboard by Neelie Kroes abandoning ship, Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) executives are also worried by what looks like a done-deal agreement between Kroes and Steve Ballmer.

The oddly named European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS) is supposedly against it but has not posted a formal statement. [It's oddly named in that the leading members of the "European Committee" appear to be the North-American-domiciled corporations Adobe (ADBE), Corel, IBM, Oracle (ORCL), Real Networks, Red Hat (RHAT) and Sun (JAVA).]

The FSFE and ECIS, rightly so, seems more concerned about the interoperability part of the agreement than the trivial "browser ballot" bulloney. On September 28, Karsten Gerloff—FSFE President—wrote in a blog:

“We are concerned that the Commission may end up reversing years of successful antitrust work if Neelie Kroes settles for far too little in order to close a deal, any deal. That would mean that Europeans remain stuck with the present Microsoft monopoly in most areas of the desktop. Even worse, that monopoly would have the Commission’s official seal of approval, effectively ruining many years of outstanding work by Ms Kroes and her team.”

“Of the desktop” is the key phrase in Mr. Gerloff’s complaint. Microsoft no longer cares about the desktop.  It’s just a cash cow it will milk as long as it can. Technologically and from a business model perspective, Microsoft has moved on, while the EUCC, ECIS and FSFE continue to look backward.

At least the FSFE--looking backward--has a hint that something’s about to hit it in the back of the head. On October 6 (apparently after the story of the impending Microsoft-EUCC deal began to spread), Gerloff wrote Kroes in an open letter saying:

“Microsoft must be required to provide interoperability information either royalty-free or in return for a one-time payment. Running royalties are incompatible with Free Software. The PFIF agreement, which resulted from the Samba case, provides a tested and working instance of such an agreement.
“Microsoft must provide a legally binding assurance that it will not assert those of its patents which relate to the interoperability information against Free Software. The lack of such assurance would let the company use Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) to discourage competitors from making use of the interoperability information, leaving the remedy ineffective.”

On October 8, the FSFE posted an even more strident complaint to the EUCC.  With all guns blazing, it says

"There is no clear commitment from Microsoft to adhere to web standards in the future, nor to end the company's habit of adding proprietary extensions to standards."

Bingo, the FSFE is on to something even though it does not appear to know what it is. Microsoft is totally willing to let the European Free Softies re-invent all the desktop spreadsheet and word processors they want, and let them waste even more cycles making their “free” spreadsheet and word processors work with deskbound Word and Excel if they want.

While the FSFE and the EUCC is worrying about 20th century technologies, Microsoft is moving on to augmented reality that makes browsers prehistoric, clouds that make permissive licenses and desktop applications irrelevant, and new (or repurposed Entertainment and Device Division) hybrid consumer/enterprise products that bundle software down in the silicon, where the FSFE cannot find it to re-invent it.

While the FSFE and EUCC is worrying about standards no one in the industry cares about (including all the Microsoft competitors that pay lip service to the ECIS), Microsoft is not only not promising to adhere to any standards, Microsoft is making all these standards irrelevant.  Steve Ballmer explained why and how this works at his July 2009 Microsoft Financial Analyst presentation (see second bullet).

-- Dennis Byron

Be careful what you wish for, Opera!

The failed Norwegian browser provider, Opera, says it is not sure about the Microsoft proposal for a European-Union (EU)-mandated “browser ballot” to be used with Windows 7 as an alleged means to lessen Microsoft (MSFT) Internet Explorer (IE) market power. According to one of the UK information-technology rags (I now can't find the link) Håkon Wium Lie, Chief Technology Officer at Opera, said:

"Opera Software supports the concept of a ballot screen to give users easy access to better browsers. The important question is how this ballot screen is implemented. We are still studying the announcement from the European Commission and will have further comments at a later stage."

Opera (on Oslo Stock Exchange) of course is the sore browser-market loser that started this whole waste of time and investor value.

I can see why he is withholding comment. The example ballot available on the Microsoft site implies that Opera makes it into an all-important top 5 listing of browsers by “share” (term in Microsoft document) or by popularity (term in EU terminology). But neither “share” nor popularity is defined in the accompanying legal blather that I can see. Nor is the time period being measured. Opera’s “share” at given moments in time by various counts hovers around 1%, a third the size of the fourth place browser (which is of course years behind IE. But Opera could actually be surpassed by Netscape or Mosaic for all I know if some more meaningful cumulative criteria were used. Cumulative usage would seem to be the best metric. For example if I started with Netscape years ago, I still want to use Netscape.

It would be poetic justice if after this collosal waste of effort the product didn't even make it on to the ballot?

-- Dennis Byron