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When eWeek’s Peter Galli wrote last year about Microsoft fracturing the open-source community, who could have known that he would become the very person chosen to strengthen the software giant’s role in it?

This past week, Galli accepted a job as the newest member of Microsoft’s open-source team, focused on community relations. According to an internal e-mail sent out by Robert Duffner, Microsoft’s senior director of Platform Strategy:

It is my great pleasure in welcoming Peter Galli who is joining Microsoft as Senior Communications Manager on the Platform Strategy team. This is a unique opportunity for the Platform Strategy team to leverage Peter’s talents and experience as he plays a key role in setting strategy for our Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community marketing efforts. Peter’s distinguished career as a journalist, his illustrious tenure at eWeek, his intimacy of our customer’s voice, and his impactful storytelling will offer us a force multiplier in our ability to change customer and industry perceptions as we reach broader audiences.

Galli is the latest member of the media to find himself joining a company he once covered. Joe Brockmeier, former editor-in-chief of Linux Magazine, joined Novell last year as its OpenSuse community manager. I guess this means it’s about time for John Markoff to leave The New York Times to head up Google’s community relations.

On Galli, I’ve found him to be fair in his past coverage of open source. Let’s hope it stays that way.

The headline read, “Dell’s business priorities drive revenue up 10 percent in fourth quarter.” The real story was that profits slumped 6.5 percent because of a bevy of charges.

What it means is that Michael Dell still has a lot of work ahead. Dell has already fired 3,200 employees in the last eight months to get costs down. But the restructuring work isn’t over and it will impact future earnings. (In the press release, Dell’s PR team put it more delicately, allowing that “the company will continue to incur costs as it realigns its business to improve growth and profitability.” (Here’s the Reuters wire story.)

Dell CFO: Don Carty

(Credit:
Dell)

Donald Carty, the company’s vice chairman and chief financial officer, started off the post-earnings conference call today by cautioning that “we clearly have a lot more work to do on cost.” If you prefer the glass half-full approach, this was the first time in the last three years that Dell posted double-digit quarterly growth. The company posted strong laptop PC sales and enjoyed overseas growth. True enough but don’t pop champagne corks just yet: Dell’s top line growth still came in around $200 million shy of Wall Street expectations.

The problem is that Dell’s far removed from the days when its manufacturing and distribution system was the envy of the industry. Over at Hewlett-Packard, now the world’s largest PC maker, Mark Hurd has proved a master at maintaining a relatively lean cost structure while pushing his sales force to ring up bigger numbers.

The company’s no longer a pure play direct seller. There was a time when price and distribution were good enough. But with buying tastes evolving, Dell’s been branching out into retailers including Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Staples. That may work out to Dell’s advantage but management is going to face a new set of business issues associated with an increasingly hybrid distribution system.

On the conference call, Michael Dell said the company was “managing closely and watching closely “the stocking levels during the transition. But he passed when a questioner asked about the level of channel inventory right now. “We’re still learning how to balance it perfectly but pretty pleased with our progress at this stage.”

That’s a big comedown from the go-go era when Dell was running circles around the competition - and crowing loudly about it. Why have costs gone up so sharply? Dell sought to assuage concerns on the call with a heavy helping of business platitudes. I don’t know if he convinced many listeners. Tony Sacconaghi with Sanford Bernstein wasn’t buying it. He pointed out that SGA expenses have climbed 46% in the last couple of years. Carty, who disconcertingly sounds like the cartoon character, Foghorn Leghorn, acknowledged that Dell wasn’t “as prudent with cost controls” as it ought to have been. That rates as understatement of the day.

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…Apple Corporate is nowhere to be seen at OSCON. Steve Jobs must be locked away, designing the next proprietary software platform tied to proprietary hardware and proprietary online Apple services. And yes, The VAR Guy will buy it.

Still, Apple is EVERYWHERE here at OSCON. The VAR Guy estimates that 20 percent to 35 percent of the crowd is carrying MacBooks or MacBook Pros….So here we are, at a big event where Microsoft is spending big marketing dollars - and Apple won the hearts and minds of attendees before they even arrived at OSCON.

Perhaps open-source developers care as much about usability as anyone else.

The VAR Guy was on location at the annual O’Reilly Open Source Convention. Despite it being an open-source conference for developers, the event was awash in a sea of (highly proprietary) Macs.

I’ve written on this before, but I’m increasingly of the mind that open-source developers appreciate the excellence of Apple’s products, and like the
Mac’s quick access to the command line and the increasing array of open-source applications that run on the Mac (like Adium, Handbrake, etc.).

Flickr announced today that they now support video sharing to go along with their popular photo sharing services. The option is only available to “Pro” accounts, however, so those using the service on the free level will not have the option. Adding video support not only encourages the upgrade to the pro account, but it also takes an obvious swipe at YouTube.

A footnote: slipped in at the end of the video announcement is a second announcement that Flickr is doubling the size of photos that can be uploaded to 20MB per photo for pro accounts and 10MB per photo for free accounts.

The philosophy is decidedly different than that of YouTube, and most likely the intention is not only to control size, but also subject matter; it is positioned to be member video and not the more wide-reaching (and copyright-challenged) posts of YouTube.

Videos can be uploaded and organized in much the same way as photos. They can be organized alongside photos in Sets and Collections or separately. An initial test of posting video shows that, like photos, links embedded in descriptions are nofollowed, but links in Set and Collection descriptions continue to be free of them and pass on PageRank.

Says the announcement on the Flickr Blog, “If you’re a pro member, you can now share videos up to 90 glorious seconds in your photostream…90 seconds? While this might seem like an arbitrary limit…you know that Flickr is all about sharing photos that you yourself have taken. Video will be no different and so what quickly bubbled up was the idea of ‘long photos,’ of capturing slices of life to share.”

The cell phone motor robots are scheduled to be demonstrated Wednesday at the annual International Conference on Artificial Life, which is being held in Europe for the first time.

The tiny motors normally used to vibrate cell phones can provide researchers with a significantly more affordable option for building robots.

Using those motors, the group designed a new type of robot platform that brought their material cost down to about $48 (24 pounds) per robot, according to a university announcement Wednesday.

Research into swarm robotics focuses on coordinating large numbers of identical robots, often small and compact, to collectively work together.

Swarm robots have become popular among researchers, government agencies, and companies addressing needs for data gathering in hard-to-reach places like hazmat areas, post-earthquake rubble, and buildings held by hostiles in a war scenario. Even toy companies have been embracing the idea of low-tech, affordable robot bugs.

A team of students led by Alexis Johnson at the University of Southampton’s electronics and computer science school realized the tiny motors intended for cell phone vibration are already designed and manufactured to be attached to circuit boards making them ideally suited for use in swarm robots.

“This is truly exciting: now we can order robots from the same U.K. companies that regularly make circuit boards for our projects–for them it is just a circuit board they can mass-produce like any other, but actually it is a complete functional robot,” Klaus-Peter Zauner, professor of bio-robotics at Southampton, said in a statement.

The Southampton team’s 25 swarm robots are capable of performing autonomously for up to two hours at a time before needing to be recharged or running out of code capacity. The robots also have enough processing power to run complex algorithms.

The new, inexpensive platform might also force robotics researchers to focus more on swarm robotics software development. Some students have already been addressing how software might effectively control thousands of robots at once by looking at the way “bacteria exchange code for drug resistance,” Zauner said.

Second-quarter revenue, excluding traffic acquisition costs: $1.37 billion meets Wall Street estimates/$1.39 billion meets Citi’s estimates. Wall Street expects a 10 percent year-over-year growth.

A number of Wall Street soothsayers and Microhoo observers have been speculating for weeks that a strong first-quarter earnings report from Yahoo could serve as a face-saving catalyst for Microsoft to increase its bid and draw Yahoo into formal negotiations.

The high end of the analyst range is 14 cents a share; earlier in the year, Yahoo’s management gave a revenue range that topped out at $1.38 billion, excluding traffic acquisition costs.

EBITDA: $435 million meets Wall Street and Citi’s estimates. Look for 33 percent EBITDA margin

Owned and operated display ad revenue growth, year over year: More than 18 percent growth is considered good; 15 percent to 18 percent is so-so; and Citi’s estimate is 17.8 percent.

Wall Street is expecting Yahoo to report earnings of 9 cents a share and revenue of $1.32 billion, which excludes traffic acquisition costs, according to a consensus of analysts reported by Thomson Reuters. Yahoo will report its first-quarter results after the markets close Tuesday, in what is expected to be one of its most closely watched earnings reports.

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer, speaking in Morocco for the launch of the software giant’s North Africa Web portal, issued these comments, according to a Reuters report:

Owned and operated search advertising revenue growth, year over year: More than 28 percent is considered good; 25 percent to 28 percent is so-so; and Citi’s estimate is 27.7 percent.

Microsoft just threw cold water on hopes that a better-than-average Yahoo earnings report Tuesday would likely yield a higher buyout bid for the Internet pioneer.

Buyback of Yahoo shares

Comments on macro environment impact on Yahoo’s display business

“We think we can accelerate our strategy by buying Yahoo and will pay what makes sense for our shareholders,” Ballmer said, according to the report. “I wish Yahoo all the success with its results, but it doesn’t affect the value of Yahoo to Microsoft.”

GAAP earnings per share: 9 cents per share meets Wall Street estimates /10 cents meets Citi’s estimates.

So, with this score card, tune into Yahoo’s earnings report, following the market’s close later on Tuesday.

Improvements to search monetization and Google search test results

Future forecasts

EBITDA: $460 million meets Wall Street estimates/$456 million meets Citi’s estimates.

Ad networks/exchange rollout

Comments on impending Microsoft offer

One great little “cheat sheet” to stack up the performance of Yahoo’s first quarter is provided by Citigroup Global Markets analyst Mark Mahaney. Here’s his guide for tracking the quarter:

While Yahoo’s first-quarter results may not affect the value of Yahoo to Microsoft, it could affect the stubborn factor for Yahoo and its institutional investors, who may dig in their heels even more on wanting a higher buyout bid should the Internet pioneer perform well on its earnings report.

Revenue, excluding traffic acquisition costs: $1.32 billion meets Wall Street estimates/$1.34 billion meets Citi’s estimates. Wall Street expects a 6 percent quarter-over-quarter revenue decline.

10,000- foot items:

Nitty-gritty Q1:

The New York Post, citing several sources close to Yahoo, reported Tuesday that the Internet company will “not blow the lid off earnings, but will likely beat analysts’ expectations.”

Updated 8:45 a.m. PDT to include comments from Microsoft.

The participants were from all over the world, and many of them were working in countries other than where they grew up. Their industries ran the gamut from tech and software to oil and gas and mining, with everything in between, so it made for engaging and wide-ranging discussion.

Indeed, a Deloitte study from a couple of years ago revealed that executives resort to “back door” methods to foster innovations through the corporate pipeline almost 50% of the time. This type of “subterfuge” is necessary in a calcified environment, but by the same token there are often very logical reasons why that narrowing of corporate perspective has occurred, which cannot be rolled back overnight.

This last week at frog design we hosted a group of almost 40 global executive MBA’s from IESE, the renowned business school in Barcelona. It was an intensive and stimulating day looking at issues of innovation - what methods are successful, what mindsets are required, and how do you bring insights from customers into the picture?

One of the things that became clear was that companies of all sizes and types are struggling with many of the same issues around how to become more innovative and customer focused, and facing the same challenges of cultural change that are required to make address these issues most effectively. They are certainly difficult things to tackle - many a company can “luck out” with an innovation making it through the corporate bureaucracy, but it takes a cultural attitudinal shift to make this happen repeatedly if you are more used to step-wise product introductions.

Thanks to IESE for collaborating with us, and thanks to my colleagues Ben Dempster (who ran and facilitated the event), Phillip Vasquez and Catherine Sun (who co-facilitated and helped with preparation).

Gray was a pre-eminent researcher, doing groundbreaking work in databases and other areas, paving the way for ATMs, online ticketing, and other large databases. In 1998, he received one of computer science’s highest honor, the Turing Award. More recently, he worked on satellite imagery, building the Terra Server Web site and Sky Server, an astronomical Web site.

Gray, who disappeared Jan. 28, 2007 while sailing on his boat, has been the subject of an extensive search, but one that has thus far turned up few promising leads.

Jim Gray

“Jim was a true visionary and leader in this field,” Shankar Sastry, dean of the College of Engineering at UC Berkeley, said in a statement. “We are honored to host this tribute to Jim’s remarkable achievements and the impact he made on so many of us.”

Gray attended Berkeley from 1961 to 1969 and was the school’s first Ph.D. recipient in computer science. He went on to work at Bell Labs, IBM, Tandem Computers, and Digital Equipment, before joining Microsoft in 1995.

Olson is among those who will speak at the tribute, which is being hosted by ACM, IEEE Computer Society, and UC Berkeley. Other speakers include: UC Berkeley professors
Joe Hellerstein and Mike Harrison, Microsoft CTO David Vaskevitch, research head Rick Rashid, and architect Pat Helland. Therapist Pauline Boss will also speak on understanding ambiguous loss.

“It is important to note that this is a tribute, not a memorial,” Oracle Vice President Mike Olson said in a statement. “Many people in our industry, including me, are deeply indebted to Jim for his intellect, his vision, and his unselfish willingness to be a teacher and a mentor.”

Missing Microsoft researcher Jim Gray will be honored at a daylong event at the University of California at Berkeley on May 31.

Vista SP1 has been held up because of a problem in which some drivers don’t work with the update. That appears to still be a problem, according to an e-mail I got last week when I queried about SP1’s status.

Microsoft finalized the code for Windows Vista Service Pack 1 at the beginning of February and eventually allowed some technical users to start downloading the code. Broad release though, has been slated for “mid-March,” which by my calendar means it should come this week. Mary Jo Foley notes that Amazon appears to be expecting the retail version to be available this week as well.

For a long time now, Microsoft has been arguing that service packs are less significant than they used to be. What was once taken as a sign that a product had the kinks ironed out is now more a psychological milestone than a technical one.

The company said that starting in “mid-April,” it will start to push SP1 automatically to those Vista customers using the operating system’s built-in automatic update option.

“In mid-March, we will release Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Update and the download center on microsoft.com,” Microsoft said in a statement. “Customers who visit Windows Update can choose to install Service Pack 1. Any system that Windows Update determines has a driver known to not upgrade successfully will not be offered SP1.”

That said, many are still pointing to the release of
Windows Vista Service Pack 1 as a key sign to businesses that the product is ready to be taken seriously.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Adobe Systems thinks we can do better with the quality of digital video images. It is also developing a way to search on the audio within video clips.

Adobe will demonstrate the feature on a version of its Soundbooth audio-editing product under development and on Premiere Pro.

The group’s hope is to have a specification ready sometime this year and to submit it to a standards body to encourage broader industry adoption, he said.

Adobe will show a preview of technology that will create a text transcription of the audio within a video clip at editing time.

The transcription information will be stored in XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform), another format developed by Adobe.

“We keep saying that metadata is the most important thing happening in our industry and we want to prove it,” said Hayhurst.

In other announcements, Adobe will announce that it is now natively supporting Sony’s XDCAM EX tapeless video file format in its
Creative Suite 3 video-editing tools.

The company intends to support the feature in the next major release of its video work-flow software. There was a two-year gap between the releases of Creative Suite 3 and 2, so the next major version is likely to come some time in 2009.

For example, a person could search a CNET video review for a product name and a specific feature, such as camera zoom.

Adobe intends to support the format in future versions of its video work-flow products, like After Effects and Premiere Pro.

And it is adding support for H.264 standard, high-definition video format on its Flash encoding software. It added support for H.264 for Flash video playback last year.

For editors, this will allow them to more quickly find passages within a clip based on a text read-out of the audio. The output of the video-editing software will also include that transcribed information.

At the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show 2008 in Las Vegas this week, Adobe will announce a joint initiative to develop a specification that it hopes will eventually lead to a file format for higher image quality.

Video to text
Separately, Adobe will give a preview at NAB 2008 of technology that automatically transcribes the audio track of a video file.

Initially, the specification will only affect “high-end Hollywood and top-end indie” filmmakers because equipment that supports this format would be the most sophisticated and expensive available. But eventually, this format could be used more broadly.

The effort is called CinemaDNG, named after the DNG (Digital Negative) raw digital still image format designed by Adobe. The company is working with others in the industry including camera makers and software developers, said Simon Hayhurst, senior product manager for dynamic media at Adobe.

Creating a common standard will help accelerate adoption of higher quality imaging, he said.

“It lays the foundation for the correct way that you want to do cinema in the future,” said Hayhurst.

The advantage of the specification will not only be better resolution, but it will also give more image control to cinematographers and editors. The format can be useful for archiving films which could be reissued with a different look as well.

“You want enough space to innovate but have commonality so that you are implementing technology when there is a genuine need for it to be different,” Hayhurst said.

As a result, viewers of a Web video will be able to search on terms to find a specific location within a video.