Odds and ends

IT’S time once again to take stock of the year in technology and figure out what’s in store as 2009 approaches. And what a year it’s been. The big stories:

Online campaigning goes big time. US president-elect Barack Obama rose to power on the back of an unprecedented grassroots campaign that capitalized on social networking on the Internet. His Web site, which offered volunteers all sorts of ways to get involved, drew more than 3 million donors, at least 750,000 active volunteers and over 8,000 affinity groups—all of which gave Obama a huge financial advantage going into the presidential race.

For better or worse, expect other politicians to try to replicate this online success. Here in the Philippines, presidential hopefuls have moved to register Internet domains featuring variations of their names—even though elections are still in 2010. Somebody from the Araneta Group is already the registered owner of marroxasforpresident.com. Somebody from Legaspi Village, Makati, with no clear corporate or political affiliation, owns mannyvillarforpresident.com. Hmmm… can you say cyber-squatting? Not to worry. Lorenforpresident.com is still available, the last time I looked.

Web War II breaks out. In the first browser war in the 1990s, Microsoft shot its competitor, Netscape, out of the sky, paving the way for its dominance by building Internet Explorer (IE) into the Windows operating system. Mozilla Firefox rose from Netscape’s ashes to challenge IE, offering faster and more secure browsing, but a new entrant, Google, entered the fray this year with Chrome.

So far, Microsoft’s ploy of bundling IE into Windows continues to work. As of November 2008, 69.77 percent of people still used IE, probably because they are too lazy or too ignorant to shift to a better browser. Firefox has 20.78 percent while Safari (for the Mac) holds 7.13 of the market. Google, which introduced Chrome in September, had just under 1 percent, but I expect that to grow rather quickly. Unfortunately, that may be at the expense of Firefox rather than IE, unless Mozilla or Google figure out how to crack the inertia that Microsoft enjoys.

Vista rhymes with disastah. Not even a $300-million advertising campaign featuring comedian Jerry Seinfeld could save Windows Vista, Microsoft’s memory-hungry successor to XP. You can almost hear Seinfeld doing “how bad is Vista” jokes. So, how bad is Vista? Vista is so bad, Microsoft has had to extend the life of Windows XP—not once, but twice. Vista is so bad that top officials from Redmond would rather talk about the Windows 7, which is scheduled for release in early 2010. Vista is so bad, pundits are predicting Windows 7 will be rushed into production by late 2009.

Boo-boo over Yahoo. Talk about a lose-lose proposition. The only one happy about Microsoft’s bungled $44.6-billion hostile takeover attempt at Yahoo last February was Google, which clearly doesn’t want to see the two companies join forces. Microsoft ended up with egg on its face—and still no credible response to Google’s dominance in Internet search. Yahoo shareholders, on the other hand, have seen the value of their stocks plummet, especially after the US financial system went into the tank. To put all this in proper perspective, however, I don’t believe a buyout would have worked, anyway, given Microsoft’s poor track record in its online businesses. Windows Live? Who uses that?

Netbooks: the little engines that could. It isn’t often that technology predictions come true, so please excuse a modicum of self-congratulation. In January, I wrote that netbooks like the Asus Eee PC would change the game by introducing Linux to the masses. By the third quarter this year, iSuppli Corp. was reporting that the worldwide sales of notebook computers (38.6 million) had surpassed desktop PCs (38.5 million), driven by a surge in netbooks. The research company singled out Acer, which sold 9.7 million units in the third quarter, with about 2 million of those being netbooks. For the same quarter, DisplaySearch reports a total of 5.61 million netbooks sold, with Acer leading the way with 38.3 percent, followed by Asus with 30.3 percent. HP, MSI and Dell manage only 5.8 percent, 5.7 percent and 2.8 percent, respectively.

My forecast: netbooks are going to get even hotter in 2009 as buyers turn to affordable PCs with decent performance during an economic downturn. An alliance to watch: Acer and Canonical. As good as its netbooks are, Acer could benefit from Ubuntu, one of the most popular and user-friendly Linux distributions. Canonical, Ubuntu’s sponsor, stands to gain from a sharp rise in its installed base that a bundling deal with Acer would bring. What are these two waiting for?

Some odd ends. The year ended with an odd announcement that Steve Jobs, the rock star of Macworld, would not be giving the keynote at the yearly gathering of the Apple faithful in January. At the same time, Apple announced that 2009 would be the last year it would join the trade fair organized by IDG. The announcement raises all sorts of questions but mostly it’s a little sad. The Jobs keynote at Macworld was a tradition that was always good for a story or two, and the technology press will surely miss that.

And speaking of odd endings, this story from a reader illustrates how not to conduct an online marketing campaign. As part of a Christmas promo, Canon was giving buyers of its digital cameras free gifts through the Express Regalo.com Web site. Unfortunately, anyone who went to the site to redeem his free gift was told that it was on “seasonal downtime” from Dec. 23 to Jan. 1, 2009. The site then helpfully suggests that anyone who wants to redeem his free gift should visit the Canon office in Makati. Now what marketing genius thought this one up? Shut down a gift site in the middle of gift-giving season. Brilliant.