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Au revoir Multimail = Au revoir SFR

J'annonçais le 2 Août que SFR allait fermer Multimail et Boîte SFR Mail. C'est effectif depuis ce week-end pour Multimail et sera effectif pour boîte SFR mail à la fin du mois d'Octobre.

Je ne remercie pas SFR qui ignore allègrement toute mes remarques. Le mail que je leur ai envoyé en Août leur signalant que le nouveau service (MMS Mail) ne répondait pas au besoin rempli par Multimail et Boîte SFR Mail n'a eu comme réponse que de les contacter pour utiliser les points pour acheter un téléphone MMS. Pareil au service client et multimédia qui n'y connaissent rien et ne sont la que pour vous fourguer un téléphone MMS et ignorer vos doléances.

Evidement le préavis est de 2 mois à moins de la jouer fine au niveau des clauses en appliquant les CGA de début 2005 qui indiquent que des changements de prix sur les options étaient des clauses de résiliation (ce qui n'est plus le cas sur les CGAs récentes).

Bien sûr je vais résilier l'abonnement de cet opérateur qui ne respecte pas les utilisateurs en fermant des options pour les remplacer par des services non equivalents. Mais au passage je pense qu'il est important de signaler que leur façon de procéder proprement scandaleuse. On vire des services utiles pour les remplacer par des services à la con et forcer les utilisateurs à migrer vers des solutions plus high-end (MMS, PDA, 3G, etc..). Alors très bien chers marketeux de SFR qui pensez avoir analysé l'impact des changements comme positifs, sachez que si je migre vers des services high-end, ce ne sera sûrement pas chez vous.

Vivement une vraie séparation de l'accès mobile et des services mobiles, ce qui permettra de choisir indépendement les opérateurs qui nous connectent des services qu'on utilise.

Peut-être faudra-t-il attendre l'avènement du WIFI et du WIMAX pour cela. Bonnes chance aux opérateurs quand cela sera le cas. Vu votre comportement commercial avec les clients, il ne faudra pas vous étonner du manque de loyauté des clients.

Il y a-t-il des lecteurs impactés par l'arrêt des services Multimail et Boîte SFR mail ?

Des sous pour BitTorrent

Toujours sur SiliconBeat

"--BitTorrent raises money: The hot file-sharing protocol company, BitTorrent, of San Francisco, this month raised $8.75 million in a first round of funding round led by DCM-Doll Capital Management, according to PE Week, and proving again that Om "scoop" Malik had it right all along. With so much VC interest, the valuation must have been pretty high."

Pas mal, rappelons que BitTorrent est un reseau P2P de distribution de fichiers et est open-source..

SocialText et SAP ?

SiliconBeat nous annonce que Socialtext aurait reçu des sous de SAP:

"--Socialtext wins SAP's backing: SocialText, the Palo Alto wiki and social software company, has finally scored more backing, this time from software giant SAP -- more on this later. Our first story on their funding a few months ago is here. Apparently, now chief executive Ross Mayfield is taking the company back to an open source model."

En plus le modèle serait de nouveau (full) "open-source".. Intéressant..

Via Jonathan

Ajax Day

C'est le jour de l'AJAX et aussi un peu de l'open-source..

Zimbra est un serveur open-source de collaboration Mail/Calendar vraiment impressionant.

Meebo est un service web faisant passerelle vers les services IM de Yahoo, MSN, AIM et ICQ. Il manque Jabber et donc Google Talk mais l'interface est top. (Via Jeremi)

Il semble clair qu'aujourd'hui la technologie AJAX (faire interagir Javascript avec un serveur Web) est en train de marquer des points.

XWiki Tags

On en parlait depuis un moment ! C'était réclamé par Olivier depuis des lustres..

Jeremi y a passé une nuit, et cela donne the XWiki Tag Cloud, pour le moment en demo sur XWiki.org.

Avec un compte sur xwiki.org, quand vous visitez une page que vous voulez tagger, double-cliquez sur le mot 'tags' sur la droite pour editer les tags (merci l'AJAX).

Bravo à Jeremi pour ce premier jet.. Il est à noter que cette implémentation est entièrement en API XWiki, ce qui montre une fois de plus les capacités de l'API XWiki.

While everybody looks the other way, Oracle buys Siebel

While everybody tries to understand why eBay bought Skype and looks the other way, Oracle swallows another big business applications software company.

After PeopleSoft, Oracle now gets Siebel, the leaders of CRM software. Looks like Oracle is becoming a growing challenge for SAP AG. and move more and more into business applications.

On a side note, Oracle and Siebel are both companies that are using XWiki ! And Siebel is running XWiki on Oracle 10g !

Skype @ eBay: the real story !

There are some interesting facts around the Skype acquisition by eBay:

* I wonder if the billions of this acquisition would account to Luxemburg's GDP. If it does, Luxemburg's GDP just grew 5% for this year with this acquisition (35 Billion $ according to Wikipedia). I wonder how much taxes will flow in Luxemburg for the period. Luxemburg already tops the GDP per capita list (before getting an instant 5% raise !)

* It seems that even with a highly successfull product, it seems impossible to create a lasting european company in the Internet Business. The US gorilla's have way too much money and can swallow any company, anytime. Skype's acquisition has been done for 2.5% of eBay stock and a significant amount of eBay's cash reserves (1B$ out of what seems to be reservers of around 2.5B$).

* A company that made 7M$ last year was sold for 2.6B$ ! My previous company was sold 15M$ for 7M$ revenue (ok we where not planning to do 10x this amount the next year !)

* These guys could have gone to jail when under attack by the RIAA for their work on Kazaa. They transformed this work into a Telecom Company killer product which turned them into billionaires (or close to that). They could actually build a online music business with that money to show to RIAA what P2P is about.. This would actually be an interesting thing to do with that money. Or maybe the Telcos should sue for "illegal sharing of audio conversations".

* This thing could trigger a boom in a few years in Estonia (the developement team seems to be mainly in Estonia) as the many employees there are becoming instant millionaires and might do something interesting in technology with that money.

* Are we really supposed to believe that with multiple hundred millions of $, Niklas and Janus will stick for long at eBay, a company where they will have very limited decision power ? I hope not and wish they will go on to create something new !

* Are we really supposed to believe that eBay bought Skype to give voice services to eBay customers ? It's really not to have some leverage against Google, which everybody expects to launch a PayPal competitor which will be backed by the leadership of AdWords and AdSense and that if it succeeds in grabbing market share from PayPal will be a good basis for launching an Google eBay competitor ? From the three worldwide leaders that now eBay owns, from my point of view, Skype will be the hardest to challenge, despite being the most recent.

* Some of the comments on Share Skype are pretty funny. I like this one "So Skype has been bought by a flea market. Too bad. They should have waited a couple of years, and then they could have bought ebay!".

* According to Ross, Skype's team uses Wikis and Agile methods. Are Skype's team the first eXtreme Programmillionaires ?

Any other real story ?

Skype @ eBay

Ce n'est plus une rumeur, mais bien réel..

Ce sera dorénavant eSkype, SkypeBay, Skybay ou encore eSkyBay ! Choisissez votre nom !

Apparement, eBay ne veut pas laisser la bataille de l'Internet se jouer entre Google et Microsoft.

Le Gartner aime les Wikis

Le Journal du Net relate le rapport "2005 Hype Cycle Emerging Technologies" du Gartner Group.

On notera bien entendu une mention des wikis:

"Quant aux wikis, ces outils conçus pour la rédaction partagée en environnement Web, l'institut considère que leur impact sera important sur le front de la gestion de contenu Web. Mais également sur le terrain du suivi de projets, et des activités de recherche et développement."

Yeahh !! Go go Wiki Go !

A panel on Open Web or Closed Web: everybody's open but how open ?

This panel animated by Marc Canter, co-founder of Macromedia has some nice folks in it:

* Mark Fletcher, vice president & general manager, Bloglines at Ask Jeeves

• Joe Kraus, Cofounder and CEO, JotSpot
  
• Ross Mayfield, CEO, Social Text
  
• Toni Schneider, VP, Yahoo Developer Network, Yahoo!
  
• Doc Searls, Senior Editor, Linux Journal

  What's funny is that, as Marc sais, nobody would commit to "closed" in this page, which is pretty nice from the intention standpoint.

  But practically it's much more complicated:

  - Ross Mayfield from SocialText uses Open-Source and adds his proprietary layer on top of it
  

• Joe Kraus from JotSpot says that at any time users can leave JotSpot with their data and reuse them elsewhere (Cough.. Cough.. without the software it seems difficult to reuse the pages that are based on the development API).
  
• Toni Schneider from Yahoo, talks about "Open Yahoo" with lot's of APIs to access Yahoo Services (with a limited number of queries)
  
• Marc Fletcher from Bloglines says his API is largely used by many without limits
  
• Doc Searls has nothing to sell and likes Open Source

  Marc Canter, who co-founded Macromedia knows about the 'lock-in' notion and points out solutions that are looking for this 'lock-in'.

  What's interesting is that openness seems now to be a 'must-have' and it is impossible to approach the market by willing to lock it's users in at least in the Marketing speeches. Because practically it still happens:

  - most web site editors that make APIs like Yahoo or Google propose APIs that are incompatible with similar services so developers are locked into solutions that uses these APIs (this could be called a soft-lock as developers can make a bridge to different APIs)
  

• SocialText profits from the Open-Source model but does not want to play the game til the end. Companies using the 'Pro' service which have a hard time getting out.
  
• JotSpot tries to make us believe that we could reuse data created in JotSpot elsewhere. It's like if Microsoft had told us you can reuse the code you wrote to build an application based on the Windows API !! How many applications are effectively running in WINE or other Windows API emulator (the work or the WINE people is incredible by the way). And even if they could, Microsoft has always known how to play this game and change the APIs at each version to make sure others are playing catch-up (with the Office file formats for example). It could be a little more true if JotSpot was an implementation 100% based on standards.

  No, when innovation comes up, it's impossibe to do 'Open Date' and say it's fully open. There won't be any other implementation any time soon. Until there is a standard and multiple cheap (and even free) implementation of that standard, you need to provide the module as 'Open Source' to guarantee a 'Right to Exit'. Somebody in the chat had talked about a 'Total Cost of Exit'.

  With XWiki, if you don't want to work with XPertNet (my company), you can take your data back. We try to use open standards when they exist (but as I say, when you do something new it's hard) and most importantly you can go away with the software and with some training (of yourself, or of a different supplier) you can fully take back the control of your project. It won't be zero-cost because you need to find a new supplier which is trained or will be trained but it won't have the cost of rebuilding the software from scratch.

  I'll reuse the words by Joe Kraus which says himself that each barrier which hinders you to play with the software is a setback for the adoption of the platform. It seems obvious that even with good Marketing, not to be Open Source for proposing an 'Application Wiki' platform is clearly a significant barrier. In the cas of JotSpot, you can't play around with the source code and build plugins, which many have already done with XWiki.

  But most importantly all the work you would do based on JotSpot would be based on something which is owned by others. This means you will have an issue if you don't want to work with this supplier anymore.

  The 'Open' mouvement is advancing, but be carefull about the differnet levels of openness.

  "Platforms should be open AND open source" is an article I had written about this subject. Jonathan Nolen has written an interesting article about 'open companies'.