Google Chrome's benefit for Mozilla Firefox

Image via WikipediaMozilla release Firefox 3.1 beta 1 today. Reading through the release notes and the blog posts about the new beta it is clear that Google Chrome's biggest effect on Mozilla Firefox was to encourage the Firefox developers to setup innovation and development a notch.

Mozilla had been costing for a while. IE ceased to be challenger. Google Chrome has taken over that role (at least for now). If Google Chrome never gets more than 1% of the market, I would still call it a success by giving the FireFox developers the necessary kick in the pants.

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Using transparency to regulate business

For a while I've regarded the use of transparency as a better way to regulate than brute force of law. In an interesting piece on lateral thinking in economics Ross Gittins, discusses the work of Dr Guren of Lateral Economics.

Many of the ideas proposed by Dr. Guren are not really new or innovative, if you've been following economics and the open movement. Taxing "bads" as opposed to "goods" are known as Pigovian Taxes. What I did find interesting was Dr. Guren's idea around improving health & safety in the workplace by this method:

Most workers care about workplace safety, but typically lack information about it when applying for a job. Yet the workers' compensation premiums paid by firms provide a good proxy for their past occupational health and safety performance.

We should publish them, Dr Gruen says, and require that existing and prospective employees are provided with information on how they compare with economy-wide and industry-wide average performance.

I already think that salaries should be published by each company. Publishing the salaries and benefits across the organisation, will promote competition between companies for labour. One of the key problems with the labour market has moved beyond flexibility, to information asymmetry. A real market can't exist with this asymmetry whether a market is flexible or not.

But the idea of publishing H&S premiums has got me wondering what other internal information should be published to make companies more transparent and so reduce the amount of regulation and enforcement action needed in the economy?

Off the top of my head I can think of:

• Number of harassment claims filed
• Amount of energy KWh used by the company

The more simple and available the information the easier it is to counter arguments about cost and burden. The use of open information would have a profound effect on the economy and the regulation of business.

Tags: Open Source, Policy

Driving Real Change at Microsoft - Get Rid of Win32

Microsoft announced yesterday that it was releasing API and Client/Server interoperability details. Coming on the heals of the Microhoo! deal and Bill Gates publicly saying Microsoft is after the Yahoo engineers it must seem like Microsoft is going all open and friendly. But that misses a big point. Changing culture, particularly one ingrained and strong as Microsoft's, is not going to be as easy as publishing specs and adding a load of Yahoo engineers.

It is possible to change the culture for the better and the Yahoo engineers can play a big role, but they can't do it on their own.

The catalyst for the change is dropping the Win32 kernal and going with a Linux/BSD kernal. The Yahoo engineers then become evanglists and mentors for the adoption of the open-source kernal. The combination of the two provides a greater probability for success than either on its own. In a previous post I looked at why using a Linux/BSD kernal was a good idea so I won't go into the details. The difference between now and then is that having the Yahoo engineers makes the probabilty of sucess so much greater and faster.

Dropping the W32 kernal would be at least as radical shift in corporate strategy as Microsoft's turn around in the late 1990s to the web. We know the company can do radical strategy shifts and this would be the most radical and risky. But without doing something like this Microsoft is always going to struggle in a networked world.

I would honestly like to see this happen. It would be the single biggest threat to Google's dominance by stripping away the competitive advantage that open source provides the company.

Tags: Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, OS, Open Source, Strategy, Disruption

Eclipse, Python & SAGE

Several fair comments on from my previous post on using Eclipse/Python so I think I should elaborate on what I see as problematic with Sage. Bearing in mind that I have used Matlab primarily and I am looking for a reasonably priced math program for non-technical users.

Lets first consider what Matlab and its ilk are. They are IDEs for development mathematical-based programs. Most include interactive UI for doing simple calculations. They also provide a large collection of common numerical computations that the user can string together into a larger program for completing analysis of information. So in all there are three elements: an IDE, a math engine and an interactive environment.

Sage is not a very good IDE (actually, I'll re-state that, it doesn't have an IDE). It strikes me as a good program for doing math but it really falls down without an IDE. Given how iuseful IDEs are for writing programs, this is surprising. Particularly when the program is pushed as an open-source replacement for Matlab et al., which do have useful IDEs.

One commentator asked what I found problematic. Well, you know the first one, No IDE. The second was after downloading SAGE, I found I then had to down VMWare, which I could only get after jumping through hoops at VMWare (not particularly happy about that). Third, the notebook interactive UI in the browser is a neat idea but ultimately, it left me underwhelmed.

Now I freely admit part of the problem was that I was expecting an IDE, with an interactive mode and a wonderful math engine. Unfortunately, that was not what I got but that was how it was marketed specifically "a viable open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and MATLAB". It is not an alternative to those programs while it lacks an IDE. The reason people use Matlab is it is easy to use. I really think this is a case of failing to see the forest for the trees. Matlab et al provide more than simply a math engine.

My suggestion to the SAGE team is to ditch the current UI method and use Eclipse. Build a wonderful math engine that uses the Eclipse to provide both a wonderful IDE and an interactive UI. The advantage for the SAGE team is they get to focus on creating an excellent math engine that is open source, while leveraging the work of other teams making Eclipse the best IDE around. Isn't that one of the key advantages of Open Source?

Short term, make it easy or at least write a very good explanation of how to call the SAGE engine from Eclipse.

Granted, I may not understand what SAGE is for, but when presented with marketing "viable open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and MATLAB" I certainly expect something that matches Matlab, if not exceeds it. SAGE does not achieve this.

Tags: Matlab, Mathematica, Eclipse IDE, Open Source, Sage Math, Python

Matlab Competitor? How about Eclipse & Python

Recently Sage was release to compete against Matlab, Mathematica et al. I had a quick try of it but back out. It quickly became difficult to do much. While I am sure it is very powerful math program, its got a long, long way to go before it offers serious competition to Matlab.

I think a better Matlab-killer is the combination of Eclipse & Python. Eclipse provides the visual IDE of Matlab and Python is an excellent scripting language that can easily replace m.files. All that needs to be done is bundle plotting into Eclipse (something it should have anyway), toss in a large library of numerical and symbolic python functions (complied or C) and you have a program that can successfully compete against Matlab and Mathematica.

Having been essentially using Eclipse and Python this way for the last few days I am convinced it is a very workable solution. Why re-invent the wheel?

Tags: Matlab, Mathematica, Eclipse IDE, Open Source, Sage Math, Python