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My local Apple Store is an attraction, not just a store.

More recently, my wife went in to buy me a Shuffle as a surprise–my 4th-generation iPod died a copule years ago, her iPod is permanently connected to an iHome clock radio upstairs, and my 30GB
Zune is a little bulky for walking the dog or going to the gym. After talking to a salesperson who led her through colors and GB sizes and prices, she said she was ready to buy and started walking toward the registers at the front of the store. Not necessary–the salesperson had a handheld device with a credit card scanner, checked her out on the spot, and e-mailed her a receipt. Genius.

I’ve occasionally seen and heard rumors of a Microsoft push into retail. If so, they should be using the Apple Store as a model–nobody else does it better.

A few months ago, they remodeled to get rid of the large screen and seating area they used for in-store workshops. I liked the few classes I happened in upon during the weekend, but most of them were sparsely attended, and the workshops I really wanted to take–like Garage Band–were during normal work hours. In place of the demo area, they more than doubled the size of the Genius Bar, Apple’s in-store customer support desk. The end-result: a mass of highly engaged customers at the back of the store, instead of a mostly empty space. (Engaged might mean enraged, but it seems that even customers with serious problems–like a dead
iPod out of warranty–remain calm when faced with a real person as opposed to an anonymous phone support employee.)

Sony has a lot of great products as well, but when I go to the nearby Sony Style store, it always feels a little haphazard, with PlayStations next to flat TVs next to Blu-ray discs. And it’s never crowded. And I never leave with a purchase. (Although the array of flat-screens looping this Bravia commercial is refreshingly inoffensive–very little branding–and completely mesmerizes my two-year-old daughter.)

Recently, I’ve noticed two interesting changes at my local Apple Store, both evidence of Apple’s mastery of retail.

“We wanted to make (World Youth Day 2008) a unique experience by using new ways to connect with today’s tech-savvy youth,” Bishop Anthony Fisher of the Archdiocese of Sydney said in a statement provided to Reuters on Wednesday. Pope Benedict XVI will be in Sydney for the six-day celebration, which starts on July 15, and Australian youth will be able to connect on a very familiar level: daily inspirational text messages, “digital prayer walls” throughout Sydney, and a social-networking site.

ZOMG HAVE U SEEN MY NEW HAT? Text messages from Pope Benedict XVI.

Ever gotten a text message from the pope? Well, to commemorate the Catholic Church’s annual World Youth Day this July, thousands of young Catholics in Australia will be able to say that they did.

I spent 10 years in Catholic school and we definitely never had anything like this. Guess the digital age does change everything.

According to Reuters, the broadcast, mobile, broadband, and other tech-related services surrounding the event will be provided by the Australian telecom company Telstra, which is preparing for 225,000 pilgrims, 8,000 volunteers, 2,000 clergy, and 3,000 members of the press in Sydney for the celebration.

According to Brother, both models will be available in early April.

The following product is available:

On Sale Now: $258.99 – $458.00
View the latest prices for Apple Time Capsule (500GB)

The MFC-7840W is the standout product here, it includes all the features you would expect from a high end all-in-one printer, such as a speedy 23 page per minute output, 2400×600 dots per inch resolution, and a 35 sheet auto feeder. We’re excited to take a look at the 7840W’s 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi feature after our recent adventures with Apple’s Time Capsule and the Canon Pixma iP2600.

With spring just around the corner, it’s time to clean up your workspace. To help you clean up your clutter, Brother is releasing two multifunction printers: the MFC-7440N ($249) and the MFC-7840W ($299). Both are significant upgrades to their predecessors, with the MFC-7840W living up to its prefix multifunction name.

Both printers support PCL6 and BR-Script3, and information technology departments will be happy to know that the system is compatible with Buffalo Technology’s AirStation OneTouch Secure System and Linksys’s SecureEasySetup.

Nokia was forced to apologize to users Tuesday after the launch of its Ovi Store did not go as planned.

Nokia’s Ovi Store is the company’s response to applications stores for the
iPhone, Google Android and BlackBerry devices. It allows users to download free and paid applications for more than 50 Nokia devices.

According to the statement posted on the company’s Ovi Blog, the store suffered from performance issues due to a large spike in traffic. “We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused Ovi Store users,” the statement said.

In its statement, Nokia said that it was able to make “intermittent performance improvements” after it added extra servers. The company also said users who entered through the Ovi Store device client encountered no issues.

Though CNET was able to browse the Ovi Store on Tuesday evening without any issues, reports of major problems circulated earlier in the day. TechCrunch’s Robin Wauters, who reported slow load times and complete outages, characterized the Ovi Store launch as an “utter disaster.” Also, several users who commented on the Ovi Blog reported similar problems.

“If they wanted to pass a law that said no more subsidies, I’d eliminate it tomorrow. None of us (the carriers) would complain.”

Click here for full coverage of the D: All Things Digital conference.

McAdam said he’s aiming for service penetration beyond the current 80 percent or so that Verizon Wireless enjoys. He’s looking for growth up to “500 percent penetration.” How is that possible? By counting access to multiple Verizon services available to each customer, perhaps home network access and other services.

“Would you have done this without Google?” Swisher asked Verizon’s McAdam, referring to Google’s push for open wireless access. “Yes, we launched this before Google. We’ve seen what open networks can do. We don’t ever want to be in the business of excluding business.”

CARLSBAD, Calif.–The D6 conference wrapped up on Thursday with a session on broadband access: Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher interviewed Lowell McAdam, CEO of Verizon Wireless, and Kevin Martin, chairman of the FCC.

Martin agreed that termination fees “need to decline over time,” and that new customers should have a period of time for a new phone–”14 days or so, after your first bill”–during which they should be able to cancel with no nuisance fee. There are class action lawsuits already under way, he said, which are blocking the FCC from working on this issue proactively.

So why do we pay four times as much per megabit, Mossberg asks? Again, Martin says, it’s because of demographics: The average cost considers rural areas, which are more expensive to serve. On the issue of providing service to more communities, Martin wants to get away from providing subsidies to multiple carriers in rural regions, although he recognizes that limited subsidies will lead to the “carrier of last resort” being the provider in each community.

Martin: “I think it’s important. I’ve heard that from consumers and entrepreneurs. So in the most recent auction we did, we proposed that whoever wins this spectrum has to be willing to be more open.” He said, “We’re not completely there yet, but every carrier is embracing and talking about how they are going to be more open.” He listed T-Mobile, Sprint, Google, and Clearwire as participants in this movement. And, of course, he was sitting onstage next to Verizon Wireless’ CEO, which has also announced open access to its network.

Mossberg started by putting a chart up showing how far behind the U.S. is in broadband access, and how expensive our access is. Martin said you need to look at the unique demographics of the U.S., and if you compare some states, like Massachusetts, to Korea, then they’ll hold up better. Of course, providing access to less-advantaged areas is still a challenge.

Conference co-hosts Walt Mossberg (left) and Kara Swisher interview FCC Chairman Kevin Martin and Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam.

Mossberg repeated to McAdams an AT&T claim that it can double their wireless access speed this year, triple it next. “And you guys are stuck,” Mossberg said. “Is your technology limiting you?”

Terminate!

“Let’s talk about termination fees,” Mossberg said, bringing up a pet bugaboo of his. “How do you justify charging people hundreds of dollars two years after they’ve bought a phone?”

(Credit:
Ina Fried / CNET News.com)

“We don’t do that now,” McAdam said. It’s been about a year since the charges have been adopted. It costs about $200 to subsidize a smartphone, he said, but “we’re going to tier that down…pro-rate it over time, so it makes it easier for the customer to leave if they want.”

“This practice is now going on in other industries,” he said, and implied that he would like to halt the spread of it.

Open access
Mossberg asked about spectrum auctions and the open access provision that go with that spectrum. Will we have an open system?

Regarding the new “open Verizon” network that’s been announced, McAdam said access to it will be at the same rates as it is for Verizon’s own hardware, although some value-add services that Verizon handset customers get may not be available, at least not for free, for the non-Verizon customers.

“There are no miracle technologies. You have to work through it. There’s a difference between peak speeds and average throughput in the field. There’s a difference in how much spectrum you want to dedicate to it. And the third factor is devices. In the next three or four years, that’s a series of interesting financial decisions.”

Access and speed

Martin said that many of the same debates that we have on wireless networks apply to other networks. Access providers cannot limit access to content, he said, but “network management” applications can be appropriate. “I think the commission needs to address that in a constructive way, to reinforce that the consumers have unfettered access to the network without the operator getting in the way.”

So, yes, the obvious reason for Red Hat to do this deal–KVM–does indeed appear to have been the main reason. But a number of folks within Red Hat, are genuinely excited about leveraging Qumranet’s VDI assets as well.

Last week’s big virtualization news was Red Hat’s purchase of Qumranet for $107 million.

It seems clear that KVM was the major impetus behind Red Hat making this buy. Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens has been making favorable noises about KVM for a while. And, last June, Red Hat announced that it would be releasing an embedded hypervisor based on Xen. Red Hat prefers KVM over Xen for both technical and business reasons. I won’t rehash them here (see this previous post), but suffice it to say that KVM plays a key role in Red Hat’s OS strategy. Given that, and given how virtualization-oriented companies are being gobbled up at a torrid pace, Red Hat probably felt that there was considerable risk in not having some level of control over its prime virtualization asset–especially as almost every major Red Hat competitor does have at least some degree of such control.

Some aspects of this buy are pretty straightforward and obvious. Others less so. As a result, I held off writing until I had the chance to discuss some of the specifics with Red Hat and my colleagues.

Given that, it’s tempting to suggest that Qumranet’s desktop products just came along for the ride.

My first observation is that virtualization remains a hot acquisition property. Now, $107 million may not seem like a huge sum. After all, Citrix bought XenSource for something closer to $500 million about a year ago. But XenSource was the well-known entity behind the Xen Open Source hypervisor project, and its commercial XenEnterprise product was gaining at least some market traction. By contrast, Qumranet is largely unknown by all but the most serious virtualization watchers–$107 million for a company whose “acquisition is not expected to contribute materially to revenue in the fiscal year ending February 28, 2009, but should add up to $20 million in revenue in the following year” has to be seen as a nice cash-out for Qumranet investors.

My conclusions? What seemed straightforward is straightforward. What didn’t seem straightforward? Well, that’s going to need some time to play out. Nonetheless, I got some good color and food for thought, which I share here.

commentary

By way of brief background, Qumranet has two overlapping, but somewhat independent, technology sets. The first–for which it is probably best known–is KVM, an open-source hypervisor that is in the process of being added to the Linux kernel. The other is its SolidICE virtual desktop solution that uses a back-end Linux server (virtualized with KVM) connecting to clients with the company’s own Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments (SPICE) protocol. The virtual desktops themselves can be Windows, as well as Linux.

VDI is a hot technology area, and Qumranet’s products are, by many accounts, solid offerings.
As an established data center infrastructure software player, Red Hat is much better positioned to bring VDI to market than a start-up selling only VDI. In general, pretty much all the major server virtualization and operating system vendors seem to have accepted that they need to display at least a base level of interoperability and compatibility. (Thus, Windows and Linux guests have to play with pretty much every virtualization platform whether Windows-based, Linux-based, or something else.) It is at least Red Hat’s hope that general client computing trends will make Microsoft’s current desktop dominance a less compelling  factor as more computing moves into the network.

My impression is that even Red Hat isn’t certain quite how the desktop end of things will play out. On the one hand, it’s clearly less of a clean fit than is KVM. At the same time, there’s more than one reason to think that VDI and Red Hat aren’t exactly oil and water.

In contrast to Novell (with SUSE) and, especially, Canonical (with Ubuntu), Red Hat has never shown much of an interest in the client side of computing. True, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) clients run on a virtualized server; they’re basically VMs that get delivered to a thin client or other client endpoint rather than “fat client” Linux desktops as they’ve been most commonly promoted. But, in some ways, this would seem to make the technology even a worse fit for Red Hat, given that the vast majority of deployed virtual desktops run Microsoft Windows, whatever the back-end infrastructure delivering them is.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, the product went nowhere and is now better-known as the answer to the trivia question, “What was Melinda French’s claim to product fame?” (Of course, Melinda French later went on to fame and fortune as Mrs. Melinda Gates.)

Microsoft envisions ASA as a tool companies will deploy to help reduce costs associated with call centers or internal help desks. The way it would work, a user engages in a chat-type session asking questions in conversational English. The system then would tap into a knowledge base to find the most fitting answer.

Among other things, Microsoft asserts that:

Most computer users are more familiar with the Clippy, the office assistant Microsoft put into Office 97 that offered advice to user queries. The feature was subsequently panned by Smithsonian magazine as “one of the worst software design blunders in the annals of computing.”

“We see this as offering a lot of advantages over FAQs or keyword searches,” said Clinton Dickey, director of Microsoft’s Automated Service Agents. “When you have an FAQ, a customer still has to go through the a long list of possibilities to get the answer–if they get it at all. We see this as driving self-service on the Web where ASA can provide very particular answers. The beauty of ASA is that it can ask questions in natural ways and will link answers from a knowledge base that expands over time.”

Over the years, Microsoft has taken different approaches to offering online support. Some of you may remember Microsoft Bob, a bizarre software desktop replacement whose personal guides were supposed to offer personalized help.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

But Microsoft is now about to take another stab by rolling out an updated natural language search tool it acquired when it bought Colloquis in 2006. The company this week is giving private demonstrations of Automated Service Agent, or ASA, a hosted online customer service technology, which makes its official debut next month.

At this point–and for the foreseeable future–Dickey said Microsoft does not intend to use ASA’s technology in a consumer search application. That’s likely the smart move. Routine in-house questions that go unanswered waste time and money. Any technology provider that can reduce costs at call centers or other internal support centers will find no shortage of takers among the corporate set.

• ASA will offer direct answers to even the most technical questions.
• The service will be available 24/7.
• Microsoft’s Knowledge Modules will include
terms and phrases germane to different industry niches.
• ASAs can serve as a training tool for new employees or for retraining existing staff.

With spring just around the corner, it’s time to clean up your workspace. To help you clean up your clutter, Brother is releasing two multifunction printers: the MFC-7440N ($249) and the MFC-7840W ($299). Both are significant upgrades to their predecessors, with the MFC-7840W living up to its prefix multifunction name.

Both printers support PCL6 and BR-Script3, and information technology departments will be happy to know that the system is compatible with Buffalo Technology’s AirStation OneTouch Secure System and Linksys’s SecureEasySetup.

According to Brother, both models will be available in early April.

The following product is available:

On Sale Now: $258.99 – $458.00
View the latest prices for Apple Time Capsule (500GB)

The MFC-7840W is the standout product here, it includes all the features you would expect from a high end all-in-one printer, such as a speedy 23 page per minute output, 2400×600 dots per inch resolution, and a 35 sheet auto feeder. We’re excited to take a look at the 7840W’s 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi feature after our recent adventures with Apple’s Time Capsule and the Canon Pixma iP2600.

You’ve read the blog, now see the video. Starring Phil and Canon’s new consumer dSLR, the EOS Rebel XSi.

Jonathan doesn’t say, but the answer is clear: Marten wanted to build an IPO-able, independent MySQL. He eventually sold because it made sense (and, I suspect, because the prospect of living in the glare of Wall Street’s impatient eye was not looking as appealing as it once had, but that’s just Matt Asay personal conjecture).

In addition, the single biggest impediment to MySQL’s growth wasn’t the feature set of their technology – which is perfectly married to planetary scale in the on-line/web world. The biggest impediment was that some traditional enterprises wanted a Fortune 500 vendor (“someone in a Gartner magic quadrant”) to provide enterprise support. Good news, we can augment MySQL’s great service team with an extraordinary set of service professionals across the planet – and provide global mission critical support to the biggest businesses on earth.

I was surprised that Sun could go from idea to acquisition on MySQL in just five weeks. What turns out to be more surprising, however, is that Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s CEO, had been talking with Marten Mickos of MySQL for over five years on precisely that topic, as Jonathan reveals on his blog. The real question, then, is why did it take so long?

The more interesting question is “where aren’t the synergies?” Wherever MySQL is deployed, whether the user is paying for software support or not, a server will be purchased, along with a storage device, networking infrastructure – and over time, support services on high value open platforms. Last I checked, we have products in almost all those categories.

This deal makes sense. It makes sense for MySQL and it makes sense for Sun. It doesn’t necessarily make sense because it’s going to push a gazillion more Sun servers, despite some complaints that Sun keeps “forgetting that it’s a hardware company.” It makes sense because it enables Sun to renew its standing as the “dot” in “dot-com,” and helps to take MySQL beyond its dot-com beachhead into the Global 2000.

Where are the revenue synergies?

commentary

Jonathan’s post is a fascinating read. Here’s just one of the sections I found revealing, coming on the heels of his suggestion that there are no “cost synergies” in the deal (Sun isn’t going to save money by marrying salesforces, for example):

Because of this, it’s very, very good for open source. I’ve noted before that well over half of Alfresco’s customers both evaluate and deploy on MySQL, including for mission-critical applications. (We manage a slew of major websites that account for billions of dollars a year in business, among other things.) I’d be ecstatic to see the other half of our customers transitioning from proprietary databases to open-source and open standards databases.

Sun will help accelerate MySQL’s relevance for Global 2000 customers and, hence, for my customers. I’m a fan of this deal because it’s good for me, it’s good for SugarCRM, it’s good for MuleSource, etc. etc. etc. It’s good for the commercial open source ecosystem.