The topic of state sales taxes has been a sleeper issue over the last few years. Congress keeps passing moratoriums on out of state Internet sales, but states are trying to come up with clever ways of taxing the business. Amazon seems to be the target of many state legislators and understandably so.
I recently bought a Canon T1i for $950. I bought it online at Amazon.com with free shipping (took 3 days to arrive). The local camera shop had plenty of them in stock and I could have picked it up that day. However, at 8% local sales tax, that camera would have cost an extra $76 for no incremental benefit to me as I wasn’t in any rush to get it so the 3 day delay was fine. The camera shop also closes at 5pm promptly during the week which is an annoyance and nearly impossible for me to get to anyway.
Why would anyone buy from a local store? I bought a plasma HDTV for a few thousand dollars a couple years ago. I saved approximately $175 that would have gone to sales tax by again buying it online (at Amazon.com). I buy EVERYTHING online these days. I’m probably one of a few power users of the iPhone Amazon.com app.
State sales tax policies will kill local retailers, local businesses, and local jobs. It’s odd, but your states implicitly encourage you to buy things from other states rather than the shop down the street. The Internet, USPS, UPS and Fedex have made it infinitely easier today than say 10-15 years ago.
The state sales tax is antiquated and adversely impacting local businesses. State governments need to stop trying to chase down Amazon.com and the 1,000 other Internet retailers who will pop up next.
How should states fix this? Who knows – taxes and markets are a complicated and dynamic system. I haven’t researched which states may have found alternative approaches, but I personally think the state sales tax has to go away. Sure, “local items” like gas, alcohol, etc are easy targets to continue a sales tax, but that’s because they can’t be shipped across state lines by individuals. I can see some moron legislator coming up with a plan to ban importing HDTVs next…
The reality is states needs to create a new, modern tax policies that align local interests and provide the funding needed for the services residents expect. It won’t be easy, but it can be done.
Many cities still tax personal income – another nonsensical issue. They should tax people based on the property the occupy. There’s no reason I should have to contribute to a local city 3x more than the guy down the street does just because I work harder, invested for more higher education, and accepted a more work-intensive lifestyle. I get the same municipal benefit he does but I should pay 3x more? When my wife and I moved from Tarrytown NY last year (no municipal income tax), we moved into another municipality that has no income tax as well. Sure, we pay for these things in property taxes, but it’s a more “even” allocation of the tax burden.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an “anti-tax” person. I’ll pay my fair share and that’s fine. I think that many of these taxation systems are trying to patch a failing system that no longer makes sense in our modern economy where physical boundaries are no longer relevant.
That’s what you get when you add an “app store” to HP Printers. As I mentioned a short time ago I think it’s time to develop an open framework for app stores and delivery of applications. There are so many “one off” instances, it becomes a very inefficient support process for ISVs and developers. These “non-Apple” (read non-market-leaders) followers have an opportune moment to collaborate together in an open forum and put forth a truly competitive platform.
In addition to receiving apps preloaded on the printer, people can download new ones as they become available at the HP Apps Studio to suit their interests and needs. With the sweep of a finger, users will be able to browse and view popular web destinations and simply touch the app of their choice to launch a web page where they can customize and print content on demand in an easy-to-read format.(1)
I think this is great news for potential patent reform (long overdue). David certainly has experience with open source licensing and IP issues related to open development.
While many will see the press generalizations about David’s views on IP reform, why not listen to his interview with Scoble from August of 2007 and hear for yourself? In the interview David talks about collaborative innovation, open standards and open source which I think many will still find very interesting.
The Obama administration’s choice to head the US Patent and Trademark Office, IBM’s David Kappos, appears to be getting rave reviews, which can only partly be attributed to the fact that Kappos has been a prominent advocate of patent reform.
Some very intriguing news over at Ars about California’s move to digital textbooks. I’m not sure they’re on a sustainable model yet and California will have to work out all the kinks. This comment in particular made me conclude this:
“We’re pretty excited about what we’re seeing,” he said. “We actually have one commercial publisher who is submitting several of their textbooks [as open sourced material] for review, so this will be pretty groundbreaking, and I think it will be a paradigm shift for the publishers as well. They’re taking a paid resource they used to charge the districts for, and basically allowing the districts to download it for free.”
In my opinion, California should consider establishing a governance body of key education materials stakeholders and find a way to both incentivize content submissions, ensure “polish”, and ensure there’s a strong pipeline of contributors. They’ll need a “community manager”.
I think the great news is that this approach appears to have been in the works for many years, it intuitively makes sense, and I’m sure there are many willing to contribute. Just think – perhaps PhD students should be required to contribute as part of their graduate coursework?? There’s many ways to make this work, but I really hope they don’t expect people will just come out of the woodwork with open source, “polished”, “free” textbooks that integrate and that anyone can use for all purposes.
The first link is to Arnold’s written statement, the second is to Ars’ interview where I pulled the quote above.
I can’t help but think with Apple, Sun, Nokia and others with “AppStores” live and working or clones in the works, is it time to have 1 set of open, “AppStore” APIs? I certainly wouldn’t expect it from Apple as they’re currently the market leader, but all these “me too” players should consider consolidating resources for 1 API set that could be shared and collaboratively built upon. There’s no reason this couldn’t be possible and successful. We need strong competition in this space – not just weak, feable, short term “tries” at building a competing store to Apple…
There’s a certain point in any technology’s adoption that you step back and think to yourself “there’s no going back now”. It’s then that you realize the technology has “crossed the chasm” and whether some would wish it away or whether early adopters start testing a new “next generation” that technology will still be here to stay. I **think** ODF is there now. When you look at the government adoption levels it makes a very compelling case for “here to stay”. The fact is that as governments develop a standard, all government agencies, citizens who use the documents, and vendors who work with the government will all start to adopt the format.
I know within IBM we’re making the switch. Bob Sutor recently pointed that out. On Friday I also upgraded to the latest build of Symphony (as did every IBMer did per our automatic update tool). The switch still has miles to go, but much of the mythical “last mile cable” has been installed.
What prompted me to realize this just today? I receive the ODF Alliance Newsletter regularly in my inbox. Today, I noticed the following:
(note that while the URL is in Spanish, the translation can be seen here thanks to Google)
ECUADOR CHARTS PATH TO ODF ADOPTION
The latest government in South America to advance the use of ODF is Ecuador. Upon its approval by the Instituto Ecuatoriano de Normalización (INEN) as an Ecuadoran national standard, ODF was also adopted for sending and receiving documents by the national government’s Secretariat for Information Technology (Subsecretaría de Informática), whose mission is to improve the government’s management of IT projects and coordinate actions in this field in other public sector institutions in Ecuador . In South America, the governments of Brazil, Uruguay and Venezuela have already adopted ODF, as have several regional governments, including Parana (Brazil) and Misiones (Argentina).
It amazes me the extent “ambulance chasing” attorneys will go. Personally, I would love to see a defendant use the attorneys own ads in trial somehow… Perhaps the local bar associations should do peer reviews or something to weed out the bad apples.
Yesterday on my way to the Cavs game, I saw a truck that was essentially a big billboard for an attorney advertising just like “Pyle Law”…
Why are Netbooks such a threat to Microsoft? It’s not just the abundance of Linux shipping on them. It’s their profitability flying off the shelves (or via UPS these days…)
Consider: 1 Dell Mini 9 Netbook with Vista Home Basic for just $299
Consider: 1 Dell Mini 9 Netbook with Ubuntu for just $249
So, for $199 you can get a software license for Microsoft. For just $100 more, you can get a working netbook with that software license. Or, for just $50 more, you can get that same Netbook with Linux.
If you had just $300 to spend, who wants to pick the software license?
Now, consider what this is doing to Microsoft’s margins… Your premium pricing power has just been put under pressure – not by Linux, but by the hardware underneath the OS that just dropped from days of $1,000 laptops to $299. Microsoft can’t justify doubling the price of the product just for its software license. And Ubuntu is clearly offering hardware vendors a key counterpoint in their negotiations with Microsoft.
Microsoft is also in a bind as enforcing its premium pricing will either
invite priracy b/c who can look at the offerings and justify paying that much retail for the OS, and which hurts their margins more (a paying customer is better than a pirating one…)
2) alienate a new set of younger, price conscious buyers entering the market (not just in the US, but around the world)
Clearly Microsoft is in need of a strategy refresh – and fast. I see the tide turning where their downstream users and upstream suppliers will create a challenging negotiation. Michael Porter would have fun with this analysis.
And with that… I may just order myself a Netbook soon. They’re almost as cheap as iPods now…
I don’t buy the argument that the economy caused Circuit City’s failure. Take one look at its competitors, and you know that the market for consumer electronics and computer equipment remains strong, even in this economy. You can walk into any Apple Store and see large crowds of people lining up to buy computers and iPods. But enough has been said about how wonderful Apple is. I want to tell you about another first-class consumer electronics retailer — a much smaller business you probably haven’t been to, unless you live in New York City or are a professional photographer or an avid hobbyist. It’s called B&H.
It may also be accessing Web data stores like Wikipedia (which runs on Linux – Ubuntu I hear) over a router (possibly running Linux), protected by a firewall (likely running Linux). Starting to see a theme?
I’ve given several talks in the last two months about the relationship of Linux to the Smarter Planet initiatives. The key elements to that are the three “I”s: being instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent. This Jeopardy! project is definitely related to the last. To borrow from a slide I use: “How can we take advantage of the wealth of information available in real time from a multitude of sources to make more intelligent choices?”
I won’t belabor the point but you get the idea. More and more Linux is being used as the foundation on which innovative applications are being built. We don’t always know it, we can’t always measure it, but it’s there. And someday it just might help beat you at Jeopardy!.
I just read Stephen O’Grady’s classic Q&A on Sun-Oracle. Another through analysis. There are certainly many angles to this one… and many questions that will play out over time.
TomTom has belatedly joined a patent holding company, which champions the Linux ecosystem, in a clear message that the GPS maker won’t take its escalating legal with Microsoft lying down.
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The group, which has some big backers in the open source community, including IBM, Novell and Red Hat, was founded with the sole aim of acquiring patents relating to Linux and offering them royalty-free to Linux developers.
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“I’d say the Microsoft/TomTom battle just got bigger, and TomTom is in a stronger position than it was”, wrote Groklaw today in response to the OIN announcement.
I just saw Al Gillen covered the news from Red Hat and Microsoft on virtualization. Note the differences between this announcement and the Novell-Microsoft announcement. Two approaches that both achieve the same general customer result – which approach is better is up to you to decide/discuss ;-)
What’s also interesting is that so far, Red Hat has only submitted for Windows certification on KVM and not yest on RHEL/Xen (which is currently shipping).
With the continuing growth and scale of Linux, you would think it was still early in its lifecycle, but today’s blog post by Alex Pinchev at Red Hat reminded me it’s been 10 years since IBM and Red Hat first partnered. 10 years – so much has changed in that time. I was only around for less than half that time working on the IBM side, but it was always an exciting and dynamic area to work in. I think we’ll see many more years of success ahead.
Today we are celebrating a momentous occasion. Ten years ago today, Red Hat and IBM began our global collaborative partnership to expand the use of enterprise solutions on Linux. It was a small but important start to announce that IBM would run Red Hat Linux on its industry-standard systems. Back in 1999, Red Hat was on the eve of its IPO, and IBM was testing the waters of Linux. Only 10 million users ran the Linux operating system at the time, according to IDC Research quoted in our original partnership announcement.
First, Windows 7 is over-hyped already just like Vista was. Unfortunately for those who buy into the hype, a reality that Windows 7 is nothing more than a minor update will set in real fast. It’s a good update nonetheless, and the more I’m using it the more I’m seeing “this is better than Vista” attributes. It’s a more “polished” version to steal a phrase commonly reserved for Ubuntu vs other desktop distros.
Regardless, I found a new, interesting feature playing around with the Windows 7 beta. First, fire up the msconfig app
Now in the Boot tab, you will see options for “No GUI boot” and “OS boot information”. If you check both of these options, you can see Windows starting up similar to what you’d expect in a classic Linux boot. Now I’ll warn you – this can take a long time. I’m not sure why, but it took forever when I did this. I would think it’s no different from a booting perspective, but it’s not…
Now that it’s been announced internally, I can briefly spill the beans that I have a new and expanded role in IBM. My standards and open source IP/membership/policy team and I are moving to the Software Group, and I am picking up…
Wow, even I’m impressed. I like to think IBM’s long term strategic planning and insight helped the company prepare for this environment.
There’s a lot of bad economic news floating around, but there wasn’t much coming out of Armonk, New York, today as IBM reported its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2008. Despite the Meltdown, IBM reached record revenue, pre-tax profit, cash flow, and earnings per share levels in 2008, thanks to a strong close in the final quarter of the year.
Admittedly I have neither read or heard much about Samba 4, but it sounds like they’re gunning for Active Directory replacement (finally). I’d be very interesting in seeing a comparison table of what features are supported (and in what DC roles) vs AD… if you know of such a comparison, please let me know. I checked samba.org and wikipedia but didn’t find anything.
Looking at the article /. linked to, this may be a while off with Bartlett saying, “we don’t know what people need”
“Enterprise networks now have an alternative choice to Microsoft Active Directory (AD) servers, with the open source Samba project aiming for feature parity with the forthcoming release of version 4, according to Canberra-based Samba developer Andrew Bartlett. Speaking at this year’s linux.conf.au Linux and open source conference in Hobart, Bartlett said Samba 4 is aiming to be a replacement for AD by providing a free software implementation of Microsoft’s custom protocols. Because AD is ‘far more than LDAP and Kerberos,’ Bartlett said, Samba 4 is not only about developing with Microsoft’s customization of those protocols, it is also about moving the project beyond just providing an NT 4 compatible domain manager.”
Interesting news out of my employer today. Here’s the thing, everyone who hears “Linux desktop” has a knee-jerk reaction and thinks of all the things they do on their own PC, laptop, Mac. The reality is you’re probably not the target market for virtual desktops. The market is large desktop environments that have thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of users and who are not doing consumer-oriented work (or shouldn’t be). The cost savings of moving from physical PCs in a 1 user to 1 PC model to a managed model with virtual terminals can be significant. We’ll see where the market goes for this model, but I know of a few very large companies that want to make this model very real. The economic situation and the impact on IT budgets may act as an accelerant.
Oh, I forgot to mention that the IBM solution runs on Ubuntu and can be easily deployed on RHEL/SLED too ;-)
IBM is working with Virtual Bridges and its VERDE (Virtual Enterprise Remote Desktop Environment) product to ship a virtual Canonical Ubuntu Linux desktop, with Lotus email, word processing, spreadsheets, unified communication, and social networking software included, to a variety of end-point devices. Virtual printing is also included.
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When we look back several years from now, I think we’ll see this time as an inflection point when the economic climate pushed the virtual Linux desktop from theory to practice. The financial pressures on organizations are staggering; the management of PCs is unwieldy, and traditional office software innovation is paltry. Today’s virtual desktop is delivering superior collaborative software, an innovative delivery method, and an open-source operating system that is demanding clients’ consideration.
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