Back from the Ashes: The Internet Appliance

Earlier this morning I read a terrific article from cnet’s Ina Fried about the state of the “Internet Appliance”.

Basically, the Internet Appliance rested on the idea that there were, to paraphrase Ms. Fried, many “on-ramps” to the Internet (more specifically the web). These “on-ramps” would give relatively fast, simplified access to the web in order to access information.

There’s no doubt it was a great idea, but the execution was hampered by spotty, slow, and expensive internet access and a lack of justifiable content. The result was a swift and untimely death for the entire concept.

But fast forward to today and you’ll find the Internet Appliance is alive and well. While there isn’t a single product or category that can claim the “appliance” concept outright, most of us have and use these devices everyday.

Be it an iPhone or Android, a PS3 or a Wii, all of these devices have constant access to the web to some degree.

Looking again at Ms. Fried’s article, one of the most glaring examples of an appliance’s “revival” of sorts is the concept of the “Network Computer”.

Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison dreamt up the concept of a modern mainframe computer, a “thin client” that simply accessed a core computer for its computational muscle. In the 90′s, the idea fell flat. These network computers looked and acted like standard desktops, only they were designed to be used completely differently and simply didn’t have the muscle of your standard PC.

Today? Mobile “thin client” devices are everywhere and this space is slated to get a lot more competitive with devices like the iPad and the upcoming Chrome OS.

From the standpoint of a hosting provider, the needs of web users have changed dramatically since then as well. In 1999, web pages were largely static and couldn’t break. When all you’re doing is throwing an animated “hamster” gif up with a looped audio track, well, that could very well stay up forever without a hitch.

Today, even the most basic sites require databases. Whether it’s video sharing sites, online gaming, or even a simple blog with comments, it’s hard to imagine an internet that didn’t involve real time user participation of some kind.

That got me thinking, I know how my internet creation and consumption habits have changed in the past decade, but what about everyone else’s? For those who own and operate businesses, how has your company or business adapted to the modern web? For consumers, how has your experience consuming content changed with this latest generation of internet appliances?

Let us know in the comments, on Facebook, and follow ServInt on Twitter!

Follow Eric Morales on Twitter.

Photo by Steve Rhode.

Supporting Open Source One Download at a Time

We’ve always been vocal about our support for open source software and the communities surrounding the movement. After all, we wouldn’t be around without Linux and the myriad of open source components that help us run our business. This isn’t a simple reaffirmation of the obvious here, we are true believers and we want to show it. Below are a couple of the open source initiatives we’ve been involved in the past few weeks, with even more to come!

In April, we decided to double down and become Silver members of the Linux Foundation. We did it for two key reasons.

First, our entire product line is is based on Linux, so we felt compelled to help ensure that the platform is sufficiently protected and represented in the growing tech world. Secondly, we believe that real innovation comes from a level playing field.

There is no fairer platform than Linux.

A little while later, we also became official sponsors of the CentOS.org. Our VPS, SuperVPS, and Solo Series all leverage the power, and flexibility of CentOS Linux and we’re proud to put our money where our mouth is. We’re also hosting a CentOS mirror on one of ServInt’s Solo Series Dedicated servers, so those interested can download our favorite distro!

Finally, ServInt’s COO, Christian Dawson, will be visiting LinuxCon 2010 in Boston this coming August. If you’re in town, don’t forget to say hi!

In the near future, we’ll be announcing even more open source initiatives so stay tuned!

Questions? Comments? Let us know below, on Facebook, or on Twitter!

Follow Eric Morales on Twitter.

Photo by sidereal.

3 Lessons We Can Learn from the Resurrection of Palm

If you follow the tech industry, it was hard to miss HP’s recent acquisition of Palm, Inc.

The Sunnyvale based smartphone maker was in serious trouble after its seemingly meteoric rise from a very similar grave in January of last year. Palm was on the ropes, its wonderful webOS platform overshadowed by ineffective marketing and distribution. The company’s audacious reentry into a space dominated by Google, RIM, and Apple seemed to be a lost cause.

Then HP, probably the most bland hardware manufacturer in the world, came to the rescue. The marriage of the two seems like the perfect solution, Palm will invigorate the stale HP brand with a fresh new mobile operating system that is light years ahead of HP’s own offerings, and HP provides the firm with the financial footing and market share to take some serious – and expensive – risks.

So what can small online businesses learn from this soap opera? Here are a few things that stuck out for me.

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Google Chrome OS – Eating Words and Raising Eyebrows

“We drive into the future using only our rear view mirror.”

- Marshall Mcluhan

Now that the hype has died down a bit, and now that I’ve had a chance to play with very early builds of Chrome OS myself, there are some interesting questions about the new OS that arise as they pertain to the web, and to web hosting in particular. I’ll start by saying this, what Google is doing through Chrome OS will eventually change the way we use computers forever. Bold statement, I know, but here’s my take.

For those who aren’t knee deep in the geeky tech news world, Chrome OS is a new operating system by Google. The premise behind the open-source project is simple, it’s an extremely light-weight operating system that is nothing more than a web browser on top of Linux.

Its file system would be largely inaccessible to the user, its applications would be web based, and again the actual OS would be the Chrome web browser itself. Your documents and preferences would primarily be stored online by Google, in “the cloud” (take a drink), so that if your device were ever lost your data could easily sync back to a new device or to a different computer. By eliminating the distinction between a web browser and an operating system, Google is banking on the idea that most people only use their companion computers to surf the web.

More after the jump…

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Open Source and Private Stewardship

On September 25th, CNet’s Matt Assay wrote a terrific post on his blog The Open Road entitled “Free software is dead. Long live open source.”

The crux of the post was that the particular brand of free software or FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) that is much-lauded by software partisans like Richard Stallman and Cory Doctorow is now irrelevant. Assay makes a distinction between FLOSS, meaning software that is free as in freedom and which incorporates no proprietary standards of any kind by default, and open source, meaning software that is usually free (as in beer) and that allows users to contribute to and derive from it, up to and including proprietary standards.

With open source, there is no reason to worry about standards strangling innovation because the community will simply code it’s way out of a corner. Information and software can be shared, and you can still make money.

The free software movement was born from a climate dominated by belligerent and aggressive software giants. Standards and software patents were created or acquired to hold developers hostage in exchange for exorbitant royalties.

Suing over patents became a business model in and of itself. It’s completely understandable why free software rose to prominence so quickly.

But a lot has changed in the past 15 years in the open source world. IBM, once Microsoft’s closest ally and creator of the OS/2 operating system, began an open embrace of…well…openness. Sun Microsystems open-sourced Solaris, laid the foundation for OpenOffice.org, and open-sourced Java.

Apple’s contributions to the Webkit project were immense in its adoption as the defacto mobile web browsing platform. Webkit powers MobileSafari on the iPhone and Google’s Android browser, cementing it as the platform to beat on mobile devices. On the desktop it powers Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome and is thus a key component of Google’s upcoming ChromeOS, a linux-based operating system that uses the Webkit browser as it’s main navigational tool.

The backbone of ServInt’s network was created using open source software and the vast majority of our server’s run CentOS, a Linux distribution derived from Red Hat Enterprise. We have included well over 50,000 lines of unique code that has better optimized and secured our products…a task that would have been considerably more difficult in a closed development environment.

Even Microsoft has approached the open source community with a level of engagement that would have seemed absurd just a few years ago. The famously closed source company even released Windows 7 as an incredibly generous open beta for nearly two years…unheard of even in most open source circles.

The point of Assay’s article, and I suppose the point of this one, is that these projects are open, but they are all stewarded by forward thinking tech companies, organizations, and individuals who seek to make a living. Revenue and profit are not the enemy of innovation, they are the reward for innovation.

Today, the biggest competitor in the software world is not Microsoft or Adobe or Google, it’s free software. The fact that we are competing with terrific no-cost solutions has forced everyone to be more creative and take productive risks.

So allow me…’Free software is dead. Long live open source!’

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Freeing Information Can Save Business On the Web

Most businesses have prices dictated by their resources. It’s the cornerstone of capitalism after all, turning raw materials into products to sell for a profit.

High value items, like gold and oil, have a relatively high cost in their raw form, so it complicates the final product and causes either thin margins or high prices in increasingly niche market segments. Either way, it makes running a business harder.

In hosting, general technology, and the web, we are primarily dealing with the trade of information, the value of which is entirely dictated by the ease of access to that information and the medium by which it’s delivered. An article in the New York Times is generally considered more valuable than a post on Myspace.

What happens when the source of information, the raw material of the web, is controlled or even throttled by a select few outlets? How does that affect your site or your product? How does it change your business model and marketing strategy?

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While My Plastic Guitar Gently Weeps

Everybody has their passions and I wear mine on my sleeve.

I am a huge dork on two very dorky subjects, IT customer service and support (seriously – I study up on the theories and techniques – it’s scary) and music.

Today the two conflict.

You see, we’ve got some pretty cool stuff going on around here at ServInt that’s keeping me really busy. I am shoulder-deep in a stack of exciting work on some cool future projects we’ll be able to announce in the coming months.

And my project passions are keeping me from the other thing I really want to be doing – skipping work altogether to play Beatles Rock Band and listen to remasters of The Beatles’ entire back catalog. I spent WAY too much money and ordered both. Both come out today, and I’ve been counting the days for weeks.

I’m a major music geek in general, but The Beatles captured my imagination long ago. In the late ’90s I even helped start a tech-themed Beatles cover band called ‘The ISPtles’. No joke! We wrote song parodies and recorded (long lost) demos for an ISPCon tradeshow party that thankfully never actually materialized.

We ACTUALLY had a bunch of songs. Our biggest ‘hits’ were “I Want To Hold Your Palm(TM)” and “BSD”, our ode to Unix sung to the tune of “Let It Be”.

As an act of kindness, I won’t mention what other 2 current members of ServInt’s staff rounded out our quartet. They can out themselves if they want to share in my public embarrassment.

Has anybody else tried, even as a joking flight of fancy, to combine their disparate passions like that? Let us know! And is anybody a Beatles fan like me, sitting at work with way too much to do when you’d like to be at home? Let me know that too!

The best story as judged by myself and our tech savvy at-risk youth wins a ServInt T-Shirt. Let’s hear it in the comments, on Twitter, or our Facebook page!

Don’t let me down.

Photo by dunechaser.

Outrage in Search of A Problem

The “internets” have been abuzz about a recent bill being pushed through the US Congress that many reports claimed would allow the President of the United States to “take control” of the internet in a national security emergency. This would be incredibly alarming, if it were true.

News outlets as prestigious as CBS were reporting the inaccuracy, helping to stoke the flames of Right-leaning bloggers everywhere while simultaneously trying to inject some adrenaline into what was clearly a slow news week.  Nicholas Thompson of Wired wrote an excellent blog post on the subject, categorically shooting down several issues that have helped degrade the conversation and in the process revealed the true fault of the bill.

This recent set of events got me thinking about a few of the other core issues that seem to drive heated policy conversations within the tech community in America, and presumably elsewhere in the world as well. Net Neutrality, that great, not-yet-realized threat in the sky has been an enormous rallying cry for concerned bloggers and web companies for years now.

The threat, as explained by proponents of net neutrality is thus: without legislation specifically preventing it, internet service providers will eventually create a tiered internet whereby individuals and corporations who pay for a higher tier will have higher priority over individuals and corporations who pay for a lower tier. Higher tier packets move faster through the tubes, and lower tiered packets wait their turn.

Let me be clear here, if this were true, it could severely damage innovation on the internet and create a de facto caste system in ecommerce.

But it’s not true, and it hasn’t happened in the U.S.

The web is a terrific way to disseminate information, but that doesn’t mean it get’s disseminated accurately. There is no need for net neutrality legislation for the same reason we don’t need anti-dinosaur legislation…it’s legislating a problem we simply don’t have. Likewise for the outrage, pundits are getting worked up for nothing.

In America, there is an inherent distrust of the government. Depending on who is currently in control, the level of paranoia shifts from right to left and back again. From a political and cultural level, this is to be expected.

I don’t mean to slight those countries where there have been truly atrocious policies pushed by ISP’s, there are indeed many. But the webhosting industry prides itself on innovating our way out of a slump. When the world needed connectivity the Internet came to prominence, when the Internet needed structure the World Wide Web came to the rescue, the chain goes on and on.

The tech world, be it the software developers, hardware engineers, service providers, or open source community will not allow seismic shifts in the prioritization of information. It just doesn’t flow with the way business is done.

The increasing urge to have the government step in as a mediator before there is conflict is counter-productive. Conflict, from a technological standpoint, is a good thing, why would we stifle the ebb and flow of economics to avoid “problems” that aren’t even problems yet? Even worse, the argument is being muddled and warped as we speak.

What was originally a 1st amendment issue with the prioritization of packets has now become a metering issue with people arguing over whether they should be charged more for using more bandwidth. That’s not net neutrality, and that doesn’t infringe on anyone’s rights.

So everyone take a deep breath, relax, and keep on keeping on. Don’t base the priorities of your business on hypotheticals.

But if you do, I have some dinosaur insurance to sell you.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Eric Morales.

Photo by pdxdj.

An American Broadband Stimulus

I hadn’t much thought about the proposed Rural Broadband Stimulus until recently.  The fact that the government is hoping to spend $7.2 billion, or more, on rural broadband just wasn’t all that interesting to me.  I think they spent that much on toilet seats or something last month.  The government wastes some money, spends some wisely, and will always continue to do both. However, upon recently relocating my home office to a different neighborhood, I really got to thinking about it, and started wondering whether the FCC has the right broadband strategy or whether they’re missing the bigger picture.

My old home office was in McLean, Virginia, one of the most broadband connected places on earth.  I got to choose between COX Cable Modem, Verizon DSL, Verizon FIOS, and a number of others.  I had COX because it was cheap and easy, and yet I’d often complain about it.  What I took for granted though was that I never had to reset my cable modem, and I could start watching an HD movie from my Apple TV in about 1 minute, on average.  Videoconferencing wasn’t a problem either, nor was VOIP.  In general my service just worked, unless I needed help.  COX customer support for my area was so bad I’d rather cancel and sign up elsewhere than have to call them, but fortunately I rarely had to.

Then I got relocated to a neighborhood in La Jolla, California.  I love it here–I can see the beach from my office, I have a balcony where I can sit outside typing things like this blog post, and the house is great.  I’m not sure how long I’ll be here, but for now I love almost everything about it.  Except for my Internet service.  You see, my neighborhood is over 50 years old.  The house I’m in is a rebuild, its a little over 10 years old.  The telecommunications infrastructure is definitely aged, and it shows.

My choices here are Time Warner’s Roadrunner or AT&T’s DSL.  I got cable from TW, so I opted for their Internet service.  I’ve been kicked offline twice since I started writing this post, and I have to reset my cable modem 4-5 times a day.  It takes 85 minutes to start watching a 30 minute HD TV show on my Apple TV.  I can’t use VOIP due to the quality, and at best I enjoy download speeds that range between 20KB/sec and 150KB/sec.  I know that’s 160 Kbps to 1.2 Mbps, and that qualifies as broadband.  But La Jolla, California is a wealthy suburb of San Diego, is definitely a semi-urban area, and hundreds of executives live here.  How can Time Warner possibly offer such substandard service in an area that is rich in so many ways?

I was amazed to find that while here in the United States we still have the most Internet connected users in the world, we are only fifteenth in broadband adoption, what this says to me is that broadband isn’t just a rural problem.  Instead of a Rural or an Urban Broadband Stimulus, maybe we need an American broadband stimulus.  Maybe we need to deal with the core inadequacies of the system as a whole.  It’s eye opening to see how inadequate connectivity is, especially when each day it’s becoming even more important to our daily lives.  Hopefully over time good old fashioned competition will solve this problem for everyone, as I’m none too thrilled by the idea of the public sector running with this.  Still, a solution can’t come soon enough for my tastes!

As you probably guessed, my AT&T DSL is being installed as I post this.  People tell me not to expect much better.  If any of you have similar experiences with broadband in your area, I’d love to hear your comments.

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How Will You Host Your Website In 10 Years?

How things change.

Ten years ago, ServInt was a dedicated hosting provider with exclusively physical servers. We were also offering DSL and T1 services which was, in hindsight, a lack of focus that was also evident in our competitors all around us at the time.  Most of them aren’t around anymore as a result.

Fast forward to today, there are thousands of hosting providers in many different tiers offering services.  Low cost shared hosting, VPS, and dedicated hosting are all abundant and new and fledgling cloud solutions are on the horizon from unexpected industry players like Amazon and Microsoft.  Who would have thought that a bookseller and the creators of clippy would ever get into hosting?

That leads us to today. This industry and the services that define it are in a state of transition.  Some companies are handling it better than others, and the general consensus is that there is something very new and very exciting on the horizon despite no one knowing exactly what that is.

Will all websites be hosted on a load-balanced, drastically scaleable cloud without a concrete location or will the spine of the internet remain a mishmash of physical, virtual, and cloud based solutions closer to what we already have today?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Share them in the comments, on our Facebook fan page, and on twitter @ServInt!

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