Linked List: March 29, 2014

Saturday, 29 March 2014

Igloo 

My thanks to Igloo for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Igloo bills itself as “an intranet you’ll actually like”, which is a perfect description. Igloo offers blogs, calendars, file sharing, forums, microblogs (think: private Twitter), and wikis. Everything you’d want. It’s all modern (including responsive design for mobile devices), and all configurable.

If your company has a legacy intranet or a customer community built on SharePoint, you should give Igloo a try. This report from Igloo outlines the five main areas SharePoint falls short and how Igloo does it better. Best of all, Igloo is free to use with up to ten people — free! — so you can start building your own Igloo today with no obligation or hassle.

‘This Is a Generic Brand Video’ 

Pitch perfect.

Google Mandates ‘Powered by Android’ Branding on New Devices 

Russell Holly, writing for Geek.com:

HTC and Samsung have something new popping up on their smartphones every time you boot them up, and apparently the feature was mandated by Google.

Android is not a household brand. Google is but, despite having a significant portion of the global marketshare, their smartphone OS is not. And as long as hardware manufacturers are allowed to design their own user interfaces for Android, it’s going to be very difficult for the average consumer to look at a Nexus 5, an HTC One M8, and a Samsung Galaxy S5 and know that they are all running the exact same operating system. Google is hoping to change that, and one method the company has started to use is mandating that the phrase “Powered by Android” be present during the boot animation on new phones.

Yet another sign that Google’s relationship with Android OEMs is growing ever more adversarial. The handset makers do not want this — or at least the major ones like Samsung and HTC do not. Samsung and HTC want to promote their own brands, not “Android”. (If they wanted to promote Android, they’d have done so before Google mandated it.)

And this is quite different from the Windows and “Intel Inside” stickers that most PCs have shipped with for years — PC OEMs get paid for those promotions.

Roku CEO Claims Apple TV Is a Money-Loser 

Joan E. Solsman, reporting for CNet:

“Apple TV is essentially an accessory for the iPad. They lose money, which is unusual for Apple,” he said Thursday, speaking at the Recode conference here. “If you’re losing money, why would you want to sell more?”

He characterized his comments about Apple TV as speculative.

Always fun to read speculation from outsiders regarding Apple and profits.

Three Mozilla Board Members Resign Over Choice of New CEO 

Alistair Barr, reporting for the WSJ:

Three Mozilla board members resigned over the choice of Brendan Eich, a Mozilla co-founder, as the new CEO. Gary Kovacs, a former Mozilla CEO who runs online security company AVG Technologies; John Lilly, another former Mozilla CEO now a partner at venture-capital firm Greylock Partners; and Ellen Siminoff, CEO of online education startup Shmoop, left the board last week.

The departures leave three people on the Mozilla board: co-founder Mitchell Baker; Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, and Katharina Borchert, chief executive of German news site Spiegel Online.

Two thoughts:

  1. If there were six board members, and three of them were so staunchly opposed to naming Eich as CEO that they resigned afterward, how exactly did the math on that vote work?

  2. An ugly transition like this is as sure a sign as any that Mozilla is in the midst of institutional collapse. They have one successful project: Firefox for Windows. That’s a relic of a bygone era. All the growth in the industry is in mobile, and Mozilla browsers have, effectively, zero share of the mobile market.

And this doesn’t even get into the fact that the Mozilla rank-and-file are opposed to Eich on the grounds that he was a financial supporter of California’s Proposition 8, a ballot initiative to prohibit gay marriage.

Microsoft Changes Policy on Inspecting Customer Email 

Brad Smith, Microsoft general counsel:

Last Thursday, news coverage focused on a case in 2012 in which our investigators accessed the Hotmail content of a user who was trafficking in stolen Microsoft source code. Over the past week, we’ve had the opportunity to reflect further on this issue, and as a result of conversations we’ve had internally and with advocacy groups and other experts, we’ve decided to take an additional step and make an important change to our privacy practices.

Effective immediately, if we receive information indicating that someone is using our services to traffic in stolen intellectual or physical property from Microsoft, we will not inspect a customer’s private content ourselves. Instead, we will refer the matter to law enforcement if further action is required.

Seems like exactly the right way to handle this. And, credit to Microsoft for acting on this in a matter of days.