business plan

Like a lot of people, I too wonder what will happen to the MySQL, Java, and hardware once Sun is integrated into Oracle.  I have opinions but those opinions alone aren't worth a hill of NetBeans.  Luckily, people like Gavin Clarke know what they're talking about.  Clarke has written an excellent article at The Register titled,  Sun and Oracle: end of a beautiful dream.

Oracle will take the decisions Sun could not, and that's what'll have people at Sun worried. And while change should be welcomed, there's no way this should be seen as a bright new dawn for Sun customers or those who've come to believe in its actions on open source or Java.

The first thing you can expect from a Oracle acquisition is due-diligence of the assets and a comparative analysis where Oracle has competing assets. Oracle will weigh up what's worth keeping and jettison the rest. The latter will be marked by end-of-lifing via support and maintenance, or releasing code to the community - where it will fade and die.

The article isn't as gloomy as the title or the above excerpt would imply. However, the article is pragmatic and leaves little room for dreamers.  Be sure to read the article!

The November 1st issue of the Wall Street Journal has an interesting article regarding Netlog.com (formerly Facebox). The article is titled, "How Netlog Leaps Language Barriers".

The article focuses on the diversity challenges that social networking sites have in Europe with Europeans speaking more than a dozen languages. Netlog appears to have stepped up to the cultural diversity challenge and is doing so at a much lower investment cost than its rivals. Netlog's secret weapons: the use of open source tools (apparently the site runs on PHP, MySQL, Ajax, etc.) as well as an army of foreign students at a nearby Belgian university.

By relying on some clever technology and a ready supply of foreign students at a nearby university, Netlog has become a veritable Tower of Babel. It counts 28 million members and has versions in 13 different languages, including French, German and Italian, as well less common tongues like Romanian and Norwegian. Polish and Russian versions are nearly finished and another dozen languages, including Catalan, Estonian and Arabic, are on the way.

That is a notable achievement, because outside of North America, many Internet start-ups are hemmed in by linguistic barriers that limit their ability to attract users and generate revenue.

I applaud Netlog's forward-thinking to build from the ground-up a multi-language content/social management system. More interesting is that while Netlog's developers understood what was at stake, the much larger U.S. social networking sites have been hampered by not thinking on more global terms.