BI is dead; long live BI
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The Story: With three of the largest competitors in the field taken over by software giants, you?d think that the best days of the business intelligence market were over. You?d be wrong.[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]                                                    Far from heralding the death of BI, the loss of Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion to SAP, IBM and Oracle may well signal ?a golden age for business intelligence,? says AMR Research analyst John Hagerty.Sure, that?s a brave statement. But the BI market has never been as narrow as many people assumed. There are significant players left, including SAS, SPSS, MicroStrategy, Actuate, and dozens of smaller, often specialized, vendors. ?Go beyond the core tools of reporting and analysis and you?ll see lots of data-mining and statistical tool vendors, as well as industry-specific developers,? says IDC analyst Dan Vesset.The acquisitions of the big guys now creates space for those other companies to flourish, says Rob Tholemeier, a former industry analyst turned private investor. The same thing happened to the database market, he notes: ?There are more database companies around now than when Informix was purchased.? BI, Tholemeier says, is likely to follow the same course. ?Innovation will come from the outside [companies] as the big guys expand their scale and scope,? concurs AMR?s Hagerty. Pricing, of course, is a major concern as markets consolidate. But because the supply of BI software is still ample, given the large number of independents, buyers still have significant leverage, says Vesset ? though that could change further out, he adds. Moreover, it will take the platform vendors some time to integrate their acquisitions, both in terms of code and business process. And while that process plays out, prices aren?t likely to spike.The Bottom Line: As investor Tholmeier puts it, ?Clearing out the old-timers leaves a huge vacuum for the dozens of innovative players ready to strut their stuff. The business intelligence industry is dead. Long live BI.? That change presents both a challenge for IT to understand the new BI, and the opportunity to drive BI?s benefits to a greater portion of the company.Complete list of 2007 underreported stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
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Following the sudden death of hip-hop star Olâ Dirty Bastard, the cause of his passing has been finally revealed. The New York Medical Examinerâs Office has reported that ODB died of an accidental drug overdose.
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Ancel Keys, a pioneer in public health best known for identifying the connection between a cholesterol-rich diet and heart disease, has died.
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My black MacBook, purchased in May of last year, a day after the product was announced and a day after the computer it replaced, a white G4 iBook, died -- died itself earlier today. There was an evil clicking sound coming from the back. The spinning rainbow cursor. Reboot it to see a disk with a flashing question mark.  The death of the black MacBook can only mean that there's a new sexy Apple laptop coming soon. Somewhere between a fat version of the iPhone and a Sony Vaio. Hope it has a real keyboard, not a virtual one.
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_ Rapper ODB was remembered by family and friends today as a &quot;sweet, quiet kid&quot; who died too young. The 35-year-old collapsed and died Saturday in a Manhattan recording studio.
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On his blog, Ian Bicking has posted some of his thoughts on a positive look at PHP - what he thinks PHP has done right.   With the recent talk on the blogosphere about deployment (and for Django, and lots of other posts too), people are thinking about PHP a bit more analytically. I think people mostly get it wrong.   He points out that PHP, in essence, is a CGI-style execution and, in being so, makes it more flexible. Both sides, web and command line, can work with the language equally well. He also mentions the developer/administrator split he sees in PHP's structure and how the language facilitates it.
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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Â· Elderly woman found battered to death at home  Â· Sex attacker who killed in 2005 also lived at facility
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Why your beloved gadgets die so young. By Kris Wagner from Wired Test.
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A ll William Kim has left of his only son is a new kind of life after death: Daniel's electronic remains. A cellphone with its address book -- the father calls each number on the list, hoping to connect to someone who knows something. An instant-messaging account. Online game rooms, filled with...
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Also: When iPods die. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
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Plus: At 80, fractal discoverer Benoit Mandelbrot says he has much math work left to do. [News.com Extra]
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Yes, Cobol is dying -- just not yet. In that gap, some wily coders see opportunity for a career, or at least a secure job.
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Â· Verdict delivered almost two years after tragedy Â· Boyfriend in death crash under legal hiring age
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Rest in peace, Netscape. Your story lives on.
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BusinessWeek Online - Seventy-five years is a mere blink of history's eye. Yet since 1929, when BusinessWeek was first published, the world has been transformed by profound innovation and technological wizardry. Three-quarters of a century ago, there were no safe and effective antibiotics, no jet travel, no commercial television, and no computers. Many died of routine infections. A five-day ocean voyage was the main way to get from America to Europe, and "wireless" meant the wood-paneled Radiola in the parlor. Since then our mastery of the physical and biological world has strengthened remarkably. ...
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Malachi Ritscher envisioned his death as one full of purpose. He carefully planned the details, mailed a copy of his apartment key to a friend, created to-do lists for his family. On his Web site, the 52-year-old experimental musician who'd fought with depression even penned his obituary.