VMforce is a good idea. Java is perfect for cloud computing: As the original “run once, run anywhere” platform, what VMware and Salesforce have announced has the potential to revolutionize the Cloud, and offer arguably the most compelling platform for many enterprises.

I see VMforce – the fusion of VMware’s virtualization technology and Spring framework with Saleforce’s Cloud infrastructure – as breathing new life into enterprise Java. Let’s face it: With Sun absorbed into Oracle, it’s clear that the Java universe has entered a whole new era where some are wondering about its continued relevance.

Given strong competition from Microsoft, with the new Visual Studio 2010, .NET Framework 4.0 and the Windows Azure cloud platform, Java has certainly looked vulnerable, and I wouldn’t blame Java-centric enterprises for questioning their long-term commitment to the platform.

I’ve heard it said that the Java community is going to look outside of the Java Community Process (now controlled by Oracle) for innovation and leadership. SpringSource (now owned by VMware) is frequently cited as the future of enterprise Java – not the JCP. There’s a lot of truth to that.

And while I never envisioned any particular synergy between Java and Salesforce, the VMforce announcement shows that the “no software” company is much more creative, quite frankly, that I’d given them credit for. Certainly it’s encouraging that Saleforce is looking beyond its Apex programming language.

Let’s review what VMforce is supposed to be. VMware is putting a version of its vSphere virtualization management platform into Salesforce.com’s data centers. Developers create Spring-based Java applications using an Eclipse-based IDE. Those apps can use many Java features, like POJOs, JavaServer Pages and servlets, but can’t use some key Java EE features like Enterprise JavaBeans. The apps also can access Saleforce’s distributed database system.

Of course, it’s too early to truly evaluate VMforce – it’s not going to be available for many months. The developer preview doesn’t appear until this fall, according to the companies. So, please don’t interpret these comments as an endorsement of this specific offering, but rather of the notion of bringing Java into the Cloud.

That said, VMforce is the best news that I’ve heard in many months for the Java community. Kudos to VMware and Salesforce for excellent out-of-the-box, into-the-Cloud thinking.

Free mobile applications are great. If those free apps are supported by advertising, that’s a trade-off that I’m willing to make – and I suspect many users that would agree with me.

Our feelings about advertising in software have changed. While we don’t expect our desktop software to contain ads – sorry, no pop-ups when using Excel or Photoshop, please – everyone accepts that Web sites are supported by ads. That’s true of everything from blogs and reference sites to NYTimes.com and SDTimes.com.

Mobile apps — pioneered on Apple’s iPhone, but spreading like wildfire to other platforms like Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 — are more akin to websites than desktop software.

Consider: You might not install a Yelp or OpenTable application on your Linux, Mac or Windows notebook to help you find a restaurant or reserve a table. Instead you expect to use their websites for that purpose – getting a free service in exchange for seeing some possibly relevant advertising. On your smartphone, instead of browsing to yelp.com or opentable.com, the natural tendency is to install a Yelp or OpenTable app – and both of those exist. If they showed ads, would you mind? Probably not.

This is a huge change of mindset. Ten years ago, in the very first issue of SD Times (Feb. 23, 2000), we published a story about an ad-supported software business model. We weren’t very happy about this: An editorial in that issue, entitled, “It’s an Ad, Ad, Ad, Ad World,” said,

It’s bad enough seeing advertisements on Web pages. But ads in your applications software? The latest trend is to embed advertising links into client applications using tools from up-and-coming companies like Aureate Media Corp. or Conducent Technologies Inc.

On one hand, that’s good news: Vendors are developing alternative revenue streams, which might allow them to offer full-featured applications for free or for reduced cost.

But the bad news is: Your employees are trying to do a job. To protect them, your company doubtlessly stops salespeople at the door and won’t allow them to canvass your busy employees while they’re working. Should embedded advertisers be afforded special privileges and 24×7 access to your staff? Of course not.

If you’re developing consumer applications, embedded advertising for your freely distributed software is a good idea, and can provide a valuable source of additional revenue for hot products. But please don’t inflict ads on your enterprise customers because, frankly, they won’t stand for it. Would you?

Yes, the world has changed. Ads embedded into mobile apps aren’t only tolerated, but are embraced as a legitimate business model. In fact, Google is buying an AdMob, a company that helps developers embed and sell ads in their mobile apps, and Apple has announced its own ad delivery system, called iAd.

Just don’t make the mistake of changing for an app… and then embedding ads anyway. Cable News Network has committed this faux pas with its US$1.99 CNN Mobile app, and the feedback is scathing. Here are the titles of the three more recent customer comments:

DO NOT BUY THIS APP! It’s full of advertisements!
Ads (!) – In a paid app – a ripoff!
Slow, littered with ads!

From websites to mobile apps, it’s an ad, ad, ad, ad world. But I guess we’re used to it.

Web developers like using Adobe’s Flash technology to deliver video, animations and interactive content over the Web. Apple doesn’t like Flash because it’s a proprietary system and because the runtime environment can be a resource hog.

Apple, like Microsoft, only likes proprietary specifications when it can control the spec itself. Otherwise, the company prefers open standards, such as the still-evolving HTML5.

That’s one reason Apple refused to allow Flash onto the iPhone and iPad touch devices – and won’t allow Flash onto the new iPad tablet computer. Given that the iPad can deliver an otherwise-excellent browser experience on its large screen, its lack of Flash hurts everyone.

In the short term, Apple is making life difficult for its customers, who can’t enjoy some Web content using the iPad’s Safari browser. Some consumers may refuse to buy the iPad because of the lack of Flash support. Web developers with Flash-based sites are faced with the choice of implementing a parallel content-delivery system (using a very immature HTML5) or risk alienating some potential end users. After all, most users will blame them – not Apple – if videos don’t play on their shiny new iPads.

The debate about Flash was been nasty, complete with public airings of nasty comments by Apple executives about Adobe’s products, and by Adobe staffers about Apple’s executives. This distracts from more interesting questions about the iPad. Like, what’s it for? Is the inexpensive single-purpose app paradigm replacing the familiar world of search engines and expensive broad-purpose applications? Is a vendor-controlled software approval and delivery platform better or worse for developers and consumers than a wide-open platform, like we have for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X?

In the long run, Apple is backing the right horse. Flash, like Apple’s own Quicktime or Microsoft’s Silverlight, is a transitional technology when it comes to the straightforward delivery of streaming content, like video, over the Web. The future of video belongs to wrapperless implementations like HTML5.

Apple has demonstrated, over and over again, that it’s willing to play the long game. The company is fearless in making discontinuous jumps, such as from Mac OS to Mac OS X, or from PowerPC to Intel, that hurt consumers and developers in the short term but offer huge benefits in the long term.

Often, Apple has sought to reduce the pain of those jumps. Early versions of Mac OS X (through 10.4) could run many Mac OS apps in its Classic abstraction layer. Until Snow Leopard, Intel-based Macs could run PowerPC applications in Rosetta.

The iPad is marketed as “the best way to experience the web, email, photos, and videos.” Flash is the most common way Web developers stream video. It’s a shame that the executives at Apple apparently didn’t want to work with Adobe to make Flash work – at least as a transition until HTML5 is more mature.

The public bickering and posturing around Flash and HTML5 has made Apple look like a bully. It’s also made Adobe look like a wimp. Nobody — nobody — is the winner here.

What can you do with an old dead computer? A family member asked me how to dispose of his ancient no-longer-functioning Dell desktop PC. The good news is that it’s easy, and usually free, to recycle unwanted electronics, whether it’s a computer or cell phone, television or batteries. Here’s an generalized version of what I told him:

• Contact your city office. My own town has a free program for recycling electronics; you can drop equipment off at their transfer station on Saturday mornings. Your town may offer a similar program.

• Watch for fliers or notices for recycling programs. Local organizations are always running “drop your recycling off for free” programs, sometimes as fundraisers. (I guess they sell the junk equipment as scrap metal.)

• Electronics and computer stores can help. Many will take old electronics, whether they’ve sold them or not. Best Buy, for example, has a program described here.

• Some general retailers have recycling programs. Walmart, for example, will take some items for free, and will charge to recycle other items, as described here.

• Check with the product’s manufacturer. Dell, for example, will pay the postage for you to ship the old Dell-branded equipment back to them for recycling, as described here.

Sure, it’s easy to toss the electronics into the trash, but please don’t. It’s irresponsible to put that type of equipment (with its valuable metals and toxic waste) into our landfills. For just a little bit of effort, you can dispose of unwanted electronics safely.

If you have other ideas, please leave a comment on this blog.

If you buy lots of stuff from Amazon.com — as I do — you might be fooled by receiving a message like the one below. It certainly looks real, as it came from a legitimate-looking email address. However, a real Amazon order confirmation lists exactly what you ordered. This scam message does not.

Also, a real Amazon.com order confirmation would not have been sent as a bcc to one of our info@ email addresses. Or have entered the mail stream via an unsecured SMTP relay server belonging to a law firm in Minneapolis.

In the email, the line labeled “ORDER DETAILS” is a link that goes to an online store selling “adult supplements,” if you know what I mean. I’ve seen other messages like this that bring you to a fake Amazon.com login screen, where you might be tricked into entering your username and password. That’s bad, bad, bad.

That is the only bogus link in the message. All the other links actually go to Amazon.com

Be very careful about clicking links in email messages, even if they appear to be from a legitimate sender.

From: “email hidden; JavaScript is required”
Date: March 16, 2010 2:38:37 PM PDT
To: Subject: Amazon.com – Your Confirmation (464-18147-30235)

Dear Customer,

Your order has been successfully confirmed. For your reference, here`s a summary of your order:

You just confirmed order #592-60631-10566

Status: CONFIRMED
_____________________________________________________________________

ORDER DETAILS
Sold by: Amazon.com, LLC
_____________________________________________________________________

Because you only pay for items when we ship them to you, you won`t be charged for any items that you cancel.

Thank you for visiting Amazon.com!

———————————————————————
Amazon.com
Earth`s Biggest Selection
http://www.amazon.com
———————————————————————

@bzmedia.com>@amazon.com>

SPTechCon San Francisco (Feb. 10-12) had more than 1,000 registrants. That made the conference nearly twice the size of our previous SPTechCon San Francisco, held in January 2009.

Attendees were drawn to SPTechCon’s outstanding faculty. While many attendees focused on SPTechCon’s classes and workshops about SharePoint 2010, many others went to classes on older versions of Microsoft’s collaboration platform.

Not only did we have huge attendance, but the show floor sold out twice. All our booths and sponsorships were reserved by November 2009 – but we able to secure additional expo space from the Hyatt Burlingame. That extra space sold out fast. The final count was a record 52 exhibitors!

Kent Beck and Ken Pugh are smart, smart fellows. Listening to them discuss the art and science of software development is guaranteed to excite the neurons… and leave you feeling supercharged with energy and ideas.

Both Kent (pictured) and Ken were keynote speakers at this week’s Enterprise Software Development Conference. As the conference chair, I had the honor of introducing their talks, of course – and then also got to hang around and chat with them afterwards.

Kent’s talk focused on what he calls responsive design. That’s a way of characterizing software changes, such as requests for implementing new features or functions. Kent has found a way of classifying software changes (which might be at a detailed level, like a class or a method, or at a higher level, like a module or complete application) into four groups:

• If you know where your changes are going and how to get there, easy changes can be implemented in direct “leaps,” while more complex changes might require a more resource-intensive “parallel” approach.

• If you don’t know how to visualize how to implement the changes directly, you may need to use “stepping stones” to inch your way to where you can gain greater visibility, or you may need to use “simplification” to eliminate requirements until the path becomes clear.

Sound simple? When you hear Kent speak, of course, everything seems completely obvious, because his work is so thorough and grounded in the real world. In reality, of course, his classification scheme is more complex and nuanced.

Why is this important? Each of these four approaches (leap, parallel, stepping stone, simplification) requires a different process to handle — and each of those processes can be surprising consistent, and therefore can be practiced and refined. If you can classify the requirements for a software change or feature implementation into one of those four categories, that can help you do a better job of estimating the project, marshalling the right resources and get the project off to a good start.

The talk was eye-opening. It’s a rare treat to learn from genuine Big Thinkers like Kent Beck. Shortly, I’ll share some comments about Ken Pugh’s discussion about the Dreaded Chasm of Chaos.

United Business Media is relaunching COMDEX as a virtual trade show.

This is hysterically funny. Laugh-out-loud funny. Roll-on-the-floor funny. The benefits of attending COMDEX were talking to people, seeing and touching new products, talking to people, making deals with both exhibitors and other attendees, talking to people, discovering new companies, and talking to people.

While much of the business at COMDEX was “formal” on the show floor, just as much (or more) was casual and informal, in bars, restaurants, nightclubs, cab lines, black-jack tables, hotel lobbies, hallways, hospitality suites and so-on.

COMDEX is where business got done, because everyone you wanted to do business with was at COMDEX.

Sorry, but a virtual trade show, where you get to view simulated booths from the isolation of your cubicle, isn’t what huge industry get-togethers like COMDEX are all about.

(PS: Grand Hall of Masters??????)

Here’s the news — see the press release here.

Leading virtual event provider takes COMDEX back to its roots

UBM, the leading global provider of business media and marketing services, is relaunching COMDEX as a virtual event which will take place November 16-17, 2010.

At its peak COMDEX was the world’s most famous tradeshow, attracting more than 200,000 visitors and 2,300 IT industry exhibitors from around the world to Las Vegas before the show closed its doors in 2003. UBM acquired the COMDEX brand as part of its acquisition of MediaLive International Inc in 2006.

The virtual COMDEX event is being launched by UBM’s Everything Channel business, a leader in technology sales channel media and services. Everything Channel is going back to the original 1979 concept of an event designed exclusively for the technology sales channel called “Computer Dealer Exhibition”. Everything Channel’s virtual COMDEX will include:

* Grand Hall of Masters will showcase the event’s keynote speakers
* The Conference Hall will offer technical, product, channel and business conference tracks
* The Exhibit Hall will feature booths and pavilions from technology vendors
* Hospitality Suites for private meetings, briefings and cocktail parties
* The Media Room will host registered journalists and industry analysts
* CRN Test Center will offer live reviews and demos of leading-edge technology solutions

For more information on and to register for Everything Channel’s COMDEX event, go here: www.COMDEXvirtual.com.

Virtual events are specially created online digital environments in which participants interact with online content or with other online participants as they would at live, face to face events. In 2009 UBM ran a total of 38 virtual events of different types, including careers fairs, technical seminars, tradeshows, conferences and sales meetings. For more information on UBM’s virtual events in 2010 go here: http://www.ubmstudios.com/featured-events/upcoming-events/.

Everything Channel’s virtual COMDEX event will be built by UBM Studios, UBM’s creative and strategic marketing business which specialises in building next-generation virtual media business solutions which connect global audiences through a robust virtual event environment with an intuitive user interface and appealing visuals. To find out more about the capabilities of UBM Studios virtual events go here: http://www.ubmstudios.com/virtual-product-suite/.

Separately, UBM Studios has signed a strategic alliance agreement with InXpo, the largest virtual event technology provider, to deliver next generation virtual business solutions using the InXpo Virtual Events Platform. As its first global media licensee, UBM Studios will use the InXpo platform to support the delivery of UBM virtual events at scale and on a worldwide basis.

David Levin, CEO of UBM said:

“The original COMDEX died because it stopped serving its core customers. We are giving COMDEX a future by going back to its past. Our virtual COMDEX is focused on serving the IT channel, Value Added Resellers, ISVs and all those people and businesses who make up the IT distribution system. Virtual COMDEX works right alongside and complements the other products and services we provide for the Channel and for the wider technology industry.”

“We are a leader in the virtual event market – we ran 38 virtual events in 2009. Through our UBM Studios business this year we’ll run many more virtual tradeshows, recruitment events and in-house training sessions for industries as diverse as construction, shipping and healthcare.”

“We run virtual events in tandem with live, in person events like tradeshows: we think we have a great opportunity to take advantage of the complementarity between online and offline events. Virtual events are emerging as a great, cost effective way of bringing customers together to engage and interact with branded business content and as well as a means of building professional business community interaction. These capabilities are key to delivering the measurable ROI that our customers are looking for.”

I’m not sure I believe everything the scammer says in this three-part interview with Scam Detectives, but this is interesting nonetheless.

Read all three parts:

Part 1: January 22, 2010

Part 2: January 26, 2010

Part 3: February 2, 2010

Wow, did Facebook blow it with its latest redesign. The new, simpler navigation system, unveiled on Feb. 4, was intended to make it easier for people to stay updated, discover content and interact with applications. Instead, the new nav structure is a “bag of hurt,” to borrow the phrase that Apple’s Steve Jobs uses to describe Blu-ray media.

Yes, as a heavy user of the system, I’m quite annoyed at Facebook. With the new nav system, it is apparently impossible to get a comprehensive and consistent listing of your friends’ status updates. The recommend method, to use Friends -> Status Updates, yields a list that mysteriously skips many friends, even from one moment to the next. And what’s with the new default view of “Top News,” a seemingly random collection of old updates that aren’t even in chronological order?

You blew it, Facebook. And not for the first time; the company regularly changes privacy settings and terms-of-use policies, settings off storms of customer protests.

Within their failure, however, demonstrates the weakness of SaaS. Any change to a Software-as-a-Service platform will make some users unhappy. It may also make some users happy, but that’s cold comfort for those who don’t like the changes but are helpless to do anything about it.

That’s true not only of social media sites like Facebook or Twitter, but also of business-style SaaS applications. Every time the oh-so-clever programmers add a nifty feature, redesign a menu, change a default or delete a function, they’re forcing all their customers to change as well. SaaS platform changes can disrupt productivity and really annoy end users and administrators, especially if takes away key functions or breaks third-party add-ins.

Contrast that with standard shrink-wrapped software. If you don’t like Microsoft Office 2007, you can stay on (or roll back to) Office 2004 forever. If you don’t like Apple’s Aperture 3, you can remain on Aperture 2. If you find that there are plug-in problems with the latest version of Firefox 3.6, you can downgrade to Firefox 3.5 or even 2.x. Heck, I’m running Photoshop 8.0 and QuarkXPress 6.52, and see no reason to upgrade.

Users of SaaS applications generally must upgrade whenever the platform owner dictates. Some SaaS vendors, of course, are more customer-centric than Facebook, and allow users to try out a beta of a new application version prior to roll-out and send feedback. Some also allow users to choose when they migrate; often there’s a deadline, but they give customers some control over their software environment. I’ve seen some SaaS vendors allow their customers to say on the “old” platform for a year or longer before forcing a migration.

There’s a cautionary tale in the latest Facebook fiasco. SaaS vendors, especially those with a very large user base, should be very careful when making platform changes that are imposed on unwilling customers. Whenever a company says, as Facebook does, that the changes make thing “easier,” beware. Easier for whom? In this case, not for many frustrated and confused Facebook users, going by the overwhelmingly negative feedback. Let’s learn from their mistakes, and not turn our SaaS customers into helpless victims.

>> Update 2/11/2010: Andrew Mager from ZDNet has posted a workaround that helps you fix your Facebook news feed to be chronological. It appears to help somewhat. Thanks, Andrew!