Zonkey. Web. Happy.

Oracle is reported to be under investigation by the US authorities for breaking federal anti-bribery laws in Africa.

The FBI field office in Washington, fraud prosecutors in the Justice Department’s criminal division, and attorneys for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) are reported to be looking into sales of Oracle databases and applications in unnamed Western and Central African countries.

The agencies are probing whether Oracle employees or people acting on behalf of the database giant made improper payments to secure deals in the countries, The Wall St Journal said.

Under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, US companies and staff are not allowed to offer bribes to officials representing foreign governments or employees of state-owned companies.

The Wall St Journal does not name its source for the story and Oracle would not comment when contacted by The Reg.

Oracle has been in hot water in the past with the US authorities and politicians.

The DoJ last year took Oracle to court alleging Larry Ellison’s software giant had defrauded the US government of hundreds of billions of dollars between 1998 and 2006.

Oracle had been obliged under contract with the US General Services Administration to tell the body when commercial discounts on software had improved and to extend them to government customers. The DoJ said Oracle had misrepresented its true commercial sales practices – meaning government customers received deals on worse terms than customers in the private sector.

Meanwhile, in 2002, state legislators in California investigated a $95m Oracle database contract that had been awarded without other bidders being considered and which saw the state paying for at least $6m in unused Oracle software licences.

Among the fallout from this California database investigation was the end to no-bid contracts on deals worth more than $100,000.

The US government, though, has also proved a valuable friend to Oracle in the past. Colleagues of the DoJ’s criminal investigation unit in the antitrust division in 2009 were hard at work lobbying European regulators to let Oracle’s purchase of Sun Microsystems sail through.

According to the latest WikiLeaks disclosures, European Commission regulators were concerned that Oracle would hamper development of MySQL, owned by Sun, should the deal proceed. The DoJ’s antitrust division had approved Oracle’s $7.4bn purchase in August 2009 but concerns lingered inside the European Union: Oracle president Safra Catz met with European Union Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes in October that year and with the US mission to “push for rapid European Commission approval of the merger.”

According to the leaked DoJ cable, the DoJ’s antitrust unit saw a successful completion of talks between Oracle and EU as a “high priority”.

“Its senior officials and investigative staff are currently engaging productively and intensely with their DG COMP counterparts, and are in close touch with Oracle and Sun, in the hopes of preventing a divergent outcome,” the leaked cable says. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/31/oracle_africa/

Comment “The more one pleases generally, the less one pleases profoundly” – Stendahl

Eric Schmidt had two objectives in the TV industry keynote he delivered last Friday evening, apart from getting out of Edinburgh alive. Those objectives were simple: plug Google, and plug the internet. Schmidt went about this by being self-deprecating and devoting much of his time to buttering up the audience, which was memorably once described to me as “TV’s bottom-feeders”. As a result, his speech was wide-ranging but fawning and bland.

Meanwhile, the audience listening to Schmidt appears more confident than ever that when it comes to TV, Google is the wrong company with the wrong plan.

The part of the speech calculated to “generate debate” was a short passage lamenting the absence of “polymaths”.

“There’s been a drift to the humanities – engineering and science aren’t championed. Even worse, both sides seem to denigrate the other – to use what I’m told is the local vernacular, you’re either a ‘luvvy’ or a ‘boffin’,” said Schmidt, adding that:

“Your IT curriculum focuses on teaching how to use software, but gives no insight into how it’s made. That is just throwing away your great computing heritage.”

Well, that part is true: but it’s only part of a larger dumbing-down of education in order to meet government targets – Goodhart’s Law in practice. The teaching of geography, history, basic maths and English has (arguably) become even weaker than science teaching in recent years. How else does one explain that almost half (44 per cent) of employers have to teach basic literacy to school leavers? Or that teachers try their best to dissuade pupils from taking hard sciences, knowing it will bump the school down the league tables? One pupil choosing a science subject over “soft” subjects can cause a school to drop 50 places. Including such observations into the speech would have given it real impact.

As would lamenting some of the rigour of what passes for computer science these days – I’m thinking of “web sciences” (more here). But Schmidt was hardly going to go there, was he?

Schmidt’s speechwriter – and one sees the work of the wondrous Sarah Hunter in this – fails to realise that while “luvvie” is always used pejoratively, “boffin” is almost always used affectionately. “Geek”, if anything, is the pejorative equivalent.

Schmidt mentioned antitrust issues without really addressing them, and accused his accusers of protectionism.

“Consumers are the ones in the driving seat – all we’re doing is hitching a ride; and the door is open to anyone. Online, competition is only ever a click away, and there is more of it than ever. As history has shown, it’s common for once-leading online services to become out-innovated and overtaken. Our rivals are formidable innovators and who knows what new start-up stars will join the fray.”

He also repeated the dodgy statistic that “the internet accounted for over 7 per cent of GDP in 2010: £100bn”. The figure comes from a Google-commissioned report. It is dodgy because it adds up the retail value of goods sold over the internet in the UK.

As for Google’s own platform, he presented a determinism that people in the audience found patronising.

“Doubts have been raised over whether personalisation to this extent is even desirable for society. There’s a fear that filters will become so narrow, we’ll wind up living in a bubble of our own prejudice,” said Schmidt.

“In practical terms – what’s the alternative?” he then asked. “Without some form of filtering, we would drown in information. So the real question is, if not personalisation, what kind of filtering should we have? The nanny model where someone else has the power to dictate what you should and shouldn’t see? Or the lucky dip model where things are plucked out at random? To my mind, both these alternatives to personalisation are far worse.”

For alternatives, ask HBO or AMC. The business plan there is very simple: you pay for the TV, and they make stunning programmes. Or the BBC of old, which with a charter to enlighten people, went about making quite mind-expanding factual TV, oblivious to accusations of “elitism”.

Google is very much in a straitjacket: it’s a classified ad-broker and Google’s technology is geared towards feeding those machines. Its vision of TV advertising is narrow and constrained, and hasn’t changed in years.

It’s much like Bill Gates’ idea of TV – and while Schmidt pleaded for more companies to be led by engineers, when Gates and Schmidt attempt to do “the vision thing”, it isn’t a great advertisement for companies led by engineers.

Schmidt unctuously praised almost every constituency there: BBC, Sky, ITV and the independents, as well as lamenting the regulation that kyboshed Project Kangaroo. ITV was shackled by onerous regulation (such as the CRR rules, which are going anyway), and Schmidt sympathised.

The answer to the criticism that Google takes more out of the UK than it puts in – it pays no tax – was addressed like this:

“We provide platforms for people to engage with content and, through automated software, we show ads next to content that owners have chosen to put up. But we have neither the ambition nor the know-how to actually produce content on a large scale. Trust me, if you gave people at Google free rein to produce TV you’d end up with a lot of bad sci-fi!”

We don’t doubt that. But whether Google is the right technology partner for TV companies looks as iffy as it did on Thursday.

At least he didn’t do a Steve McLaren, and deliver it in a faux Scottish accent. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/30/eric_schmidt_tv_industry_speech/

The unfolding saga surrounding the HP Touchpad contains a goldmine of salutary tales. So, just what can we learn from the last few days?

Anyone who says they expected the fire sale of HP touchpads to turn into a global gadget grab is a liar. Fortunately nobody has yet, not publicly anyway – indeed, apart from a few bits of coverage complaining about website crashes and HP’s risky strategy , there hasn’t been that much written about it at all.

Which is a shame, because the overall effect was pretty profound. Think about it. Here was a tablet computer that nobody wanted, apparently: not the customers in Best Buy, and certainly not the company that had spent $1.2bn to buy the technology just over a year before.

HP announced the Touchpad sell-off with very little additional information apart from vague statements about continued support, an over-the-air operating system update and general remarks to the effect of, “We’re not going to let WebOS die.” In theory, buying an HP Touchpad was – and still is, if you manage to get your hands on one – a huge risk.

But surely people aren’t so dumb as to buy a device when they don’t know what the future holds for it? Either yes they are – or just perhaps, the strategists and pundits got it wrong and there’s more to this whole tablet thing than a one-horse race with a few stragglers.

So, what lessons can we take away? First off, and to give the poor multi-billion company some credit …

1. The Tablet Effect is real. Really.

HP’s CEO, Leo Apotheker was not the first to coin the term ‘tablet effect’. While it is barely a year old however, we should be in no doubt about the impact the forearm-top devices are having on the low-end PC and netbook markets.

However, the take-away lesson from the past week is that we’re talking about a tablet effect, not an iPad effect. Whatever fan boys may like to think, Apple didn’t invent the form factor; however (and unlike Microsoft) it did make the device usable, embracing simplicity and the user experience just as it did for smartphones.

We should all be grateful for the relentless pursuit of great design exhibited by Steve Jobs’s Apple. But let’s not think that the only tablets in the world in a few years’ time will be iPads, any more than we should think the tablet itself will become the dominant form factor. We’re too fickle a race for that, and no doubt there exist form factors we haven’t even thought of yet.

Indeed, as the events of the past few days have illustrated, a massive pent-up demand exists for tablet form-factor devices from any manufacturer, if only …

2. A price point can be identified for mass tablet adoption

Apple may have been first to market with a workable design, application and content delivery model for the iPad, but it remains a premium product. Cue massive mistake from just about every other manufacturer – that Apple’s pricing structures should be adopted by everyone else.

What a bad idea, for so many reasons – not least that Apple purchasers are prepared to pay a premium because it’s Apple. The rest of the world’s customers are not prepared to do so, or indeed, simply haven’t been able to afford them. In other words (hope you’re listening Google), get the pricing right and customers will follow.

It could be argued that HP went in too cheap, moving the price point well within the $99 justify-to-wife territory, as (the uncondonably sexist) Linksys used to say. Linksys’s other, tried and tested price point for commodity tech items was the $199 justify-to-self: recent events quite clearly illustrate the existence of a latent opportunity for commodity end-point devices that are both simple to use and affordable to buy.

Given that cheap Android devices from unknown manufacturers are already available, it’s worth noting a third factor – that people buy from people and companies they trust. Even, apparently, if the companies are trying to divest themselves of the stuff in question. At least the quality won’t be in doubt.

Less relevant (sorry, geeks) is what’s happening under the bonnet, for example which OS is running. Which suggests, despite what the commentators might have you think, that …

3. WebOS has – or had – a market, as do other operating systems

A long time ago, the first Palm Pilot devices became very popular very quickly, on two counts: device usability and developer platform. That was it. With WebOS, the (supposedly rejuvenated, but cash-strapped) company strove for similar goals, achieving the first in spades but struggling to grow the second.

While things like mass market adoption don’t happen overnight, the fact is that the two factors work together. People build apps for Android devices because of the now-present user base, and people buy such devices because they have the apps. It’s a lesson that in-for-the-long-haul Microsoft knows very well, which is why the company continues to chip away with Windows Mobile 7 despite it being a seemingly thankless task.

HP knew it too – as HP’s CFO noted, the potential for ROI just wasn’t in a timescale which made sense for the company. That still offers an opportunity for others, and it would be folly to write off WebOS too quickly, particularly given that up to 2 million devices have just entered the market.

The fact that HP may have lost $400m in the process, on top of the acquisition costs, proves beyond reasonable doubt that the company is in a serious strategic mess. It proved itself tactically moronic as well in how it approached the announcements and subsequent sale, reinforcing the ancient adage of …

4. Fail to plan, and plan to fail

The old ones are the best, eh? In this case, HP – that self-proclaimed biggest computer company in the world – demonstrated how to get something very wrong by not thinking through the ramifications. This happened not once – with the plan to ditch the PC and mobile hardware divisions, announced without warning even to senior executives in those divisions – but then a second time by flooding the market with low-cost hardware without informing its resellers how to deal with the consequences.

The result was not only that multiple online sites were faced with a massive, though not unprecedented demand for technology. They then sent out mixed messages of their own, based one would imagine on the information they had received about stock availability, whether or not a discount was to be applied, whether indeed each reseller was eligible for HP’s discounted pricing.

You don’t have to be a specialist in the field to guess that confidence in HP’s channel operations has been undermined, as the company did the equivalent of pulling out the rug from under the feet of the its resellers and partners.

And even as this was happening, tablet-hungry geeks were whipping themselves into a frenzy of excitement. A problem exacerbated by the fact that …

5. We are not individuals, particularly where the web is concerned

Anyone who followed the HP Tablet thread on hotukdeals.com – now with 22,000 posts, the longest thread the bargain hunters’ forum has seen – would know that just the potential to join in was enough to entice some people. To paraphrase, “I didn’t even want one until I started reading this!”

While lessons 2 and 3 are undeniable, we must also take into account the propensity of the human race to want to participate. Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, the net effect is that people can follow the crowd, even when it’s not in their interests. Indeed, this factor is central to new technology adoption.

Not only was it demonstrated by the desire to own a device some may not even have heard of prior to the fire sale, but also the repeated behaviours that emerged once people had the bit between their teeth. Simply put, every time an online retailer mentioned the Touchpad, hordes of people would rush the site concerned, just about every time causing it to collapse under the load. Which led to the inevitable proof that …

6. Scalable deployment is even harder than clever people think

Call it what you like – adaptive IT, dynamic infrastructure, agile, whatever. If you believe the computer manufacturers, the whole point is that we can now build IT systems that can scale to meet unexpected spikes in demand. E-Commerce has been around for over ten years now, and site owners have had plenty of time to architect their systems in the right way to meet demand.

But site after site collapsed under the strain. Okay, the retailers exhibited some pretty daft behaviour of their own. You’d think you’d learn, if you were Misco or Staples say, and you’d just watched Dabs.com and shop.BT.com brought down, to keep schtum, or to invite people to a microsite by email, or indeed, to do absolutely anything other than say , “If you’re looking for reduced prices on the HP TouchPad, stay tuned! We’ll have some news soon, watch this space!” Come on guys, what were you thinking?

Worst culprit of all perhaps was HP itself, whose US website and employee shop collapsed under the demand. This is not a great advert for a company that sells world-class infrastructure, and who’s banged on about it for longer than anyone cares to remember.

From which we can draw the only conclusion that …

7. Information technology still has a long way to go

So, to summarise: we continue to be hungry for easier to use, cheaper end-point device form factors; Apple’s great designs and monopolistic stance may grant it short term success but it’s probably not going to take over the world; technology infrastructure is as big and prone to failure as it ever was; and as both companies and individuals we are, in the words of a Matrix agent, “only human”.

Disappointing perhaps – after all, if you’ve worked in IT for more than a couple of decades, you might have hoped we’d have learned some of these lessons and moved on by now. On the upside, the market churn, continued problems and countless mistakes will keep most of us in jobs for the foreseeable future, so it’s not all bad.

The HP Touchpad saga has still to play out: perhaps the level of market interest will spur activity around WebOS, and if not, Android; perhaps the flood of tablets into the market will spur other manufacturers on to produce lower-cost devices; perhaps the impact will be felt more around other industry areas such as publishing or HTML5 adoption; who can say.

The final lesson of all should be around making assumptions about which way this business is going, based on media hype or hearsay. However smart people make themselves out to be, however much research we ingest or advice we take, nobody has a monopoly on the future. ®

Jon Collins, director of Inter Orbis, researches the impact of technology on business, society and culture.

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/29/hp_touchpad_fire_sale_analysis/

As Linux celebrates its 20th birthday, its biggest success – mobile – is turning into its worst headache.

Thanks to Google’s Android, and in turn thanks to the success of Steve Jobs’ iPhone and iPad, Linux has found a fresh lease of life.

Smartphones running the Android version of Linux account for 39 per cent of the market; Android has given existing phone-makers a fresh opportunity and propelled newcomers. iOS is second to Android on 29 per cent of the smartphone market, coming as it does from just a single OEM: Apple. iOS is number-one on tablets, however, with Android coming second.

The smartphone and tablet have arrived just as it seemed Linux’s biggest disruptive days were behind it.

What started as an off-the-radar hobby for geeks had crossed into the business mainstream by the 2000s as companies recognised it as an alternative to the cost and lock-in of Windows on the server.

While Linux failed to unlock the desktop, still owned by Windows, it was application and server makers’ adoption of it that turned Linux into the second most popular server operating system. Linux has borne various distros running on those servers – Red Hat, SuSE and Ubuntu being the most popular.

And yet, Linux is second, not first – albeit a healthy second. Despite the hard work by IBM, HP and Dell in making and selling servers, and the engineering and support work of Red Hat, Novell and Canonical, Linux still lags Windows.

Linux ascended despite the best efforts of Microsoft to discredit and sabotage it. Microsoft called Linux a “cancer” that threatened software makers’ IP, it launched a “get the facts” campaign to undermine the commercial story for Linux, and tried to put people off by insinuating they risked prosecution by Microsoft as Linux contained Microsoft patents.

Microsoft’s attacks blew themselves out, though, and cooler business heads are in charge as Microsoft’s server business has worked to make Linux run better on Windows server through its hypervisor software. Linux on the Windows hypervisor means more Windows servers in the cloud, rather than Windows servers losing out to Linux servers in the cloud.

Microsoft hasn’t stopped being any less threatening towards Linux, however, it has just changed tactics as the excitement shifts to mobile. As phone sales have exploded, Redmond has started hunting down Android device-makers, claiming the Linux they love violates its patents, and it is either prosecuting them or tying them up in deals to license its patent portfolio. The result is that Microsoft is profiting from Android, because under these deals Microsoft gets a percentage of the money from the sale of each Android phone.

Microsoft’s attacks have come as Apple has turned aggressively litigious against Android and those companies making and selling phones and tablets running Linux.

Round up the cheerleaders

As the heat is turning up, the company responsible for Android – and credited for having propelled Linux into mobile – has taken two steps that have left techs speechless. The standing army of cheerleaders who’ve spent the last few years shouting about how it’s game over for Apple, Microsoft, Nokia, RIM and anybody else not in love with Android are suddenly chilled by uncertainty.

First, Google caused consternation by ending the Android code free-for-all. It broke with its practice of open-sourcing the most recent version of Android – Honeycomb. Google claimed it took a “shortcut” to get Honeycomb to market and did not release the code because it was not suited for use on phones. The next version of Android, dubbed “Ice Cream Sandwich”, will be open-sourced “by the end of the year“, we are now told.

Next, Google unsettled Android OEM partners with its plan to spend $12.5bn buying Motorola’s phone business – Motorola being the world’s second-largest maker of Android handsets. Google’s Android chief Andy Rubin claims it’s business as usual and that Google’s Android partners are on board with the deal, but the facts say otherwise.

Next page: A time to panic

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/26/linux_20_anniversary_google_threat/

Apple has given its new CEO, Tim Cook, a million reasons to stay on until August 24, 2021.

As required by Securities and Exchange Commission rules, Apple filed a Form 8-K on Friday to officially inform stockholders of company leadership changes that might affect stock performance.

Oh, if you haven’t heard, Steve Jobs resigned his CEO position on Wednesday, and was replaced by former COO Tim Cook.

Included in the brief filing is the following bit of largesse proffered to Mr. Cook:

In connection with Mr. Cook’s appointment as Chief Executive Officer, the Board awarded Mr. Cook 1,000,000 restricted stock units. Fifty percent of the restricted stock units are scheduled to vest on each of August 24, 2016 and August 24, 2021, subject to Mr. Cook’s continued employment with Apple through each such date.

At today’s value at the close of markets, those 1,000,000 shares would be worth $383,580,000.

Or, to look at it another fun – if ludicrous – way: on August 24, 2001, Apple’s stock was going for $9.29 a share. Today’s stock price is a 4,029 per cent increase over that 10-year-old bargain.

If Cook can keep Apple’s value increasing at the same rate that Jobs managed to achieve over the past 10 years, his 1,000,000 share bonus on August 24, 2021 will be worth $15,454,438,200.

That is, should he decide to sell such a hot stock immediately upon vesting. One doubts he’ll need the money. After all, according to Apple’s most recent Proxy Statement, Cook’s total compensation for 2010 alone was a cool $59,092,572. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/27/tim_cook_bonus/