The Bloor Perspective: IBM's branding nous, MS security lapses and government open source opportunities

You would have thought everyone knows IBM and what it does. You may be right, but that is not enough for Big Blue. They want to make sure you know what they do and who they are doing it with.

Intel started it all with 'Intel Inside' stickers adorning every PC with Pentium processors. With other chip manufacturers like AMD chomping at its heels the silicon king decided a bit of extra publicity would not go amiss.

The use of the IBM logo - a light blue flag that when pulled back reveals the three letters IBM - is purely voluntary amongst OEMs. Unlike the Intel campaign, there are no financial inducements, only the opportunity for other manufacturers to enhance their own brand image.

The first taker is Nintendo, the Japanese gaming console manufacturer, who will be displaying the IBM logo on its new GameCube. The machine, due for a US launch in time for Christmas, uses the IBM and Motorola PowerPC processor at its heart.

The campaign is cleverly double-pronged. On one hand it demonstrates to OEMs the degree of IBM's involvement in technology, on the other hand it puts the IBM name in front of consumers, such as the 18 to 25 year age group that will be buying the GameCubes, who may not be so aware of IBM capabilities.

The question is though, where will it all stop? Will every electronic device start to look like a Formula One car emblazoned with sponsor logos?

Microsoft and security

Microsoft has not had much luck with the security of its services recently.

The latest security threat has again been targeted at Hotmail users. Root Core, a group of hackers, claim to have discovered a simple loophole in Hotmail security that has enabled them to read a user's email. The process simply involves guessing a few numbers that identified a user's email box.

With the correct guess, the emails became visible. While Microsoft claims, quite correctly, that it would take thousands of guesses to obtain a valid combination of numbers, it is the sheer simplicity of this latest hack that is of most concern.

Most of Microsoft's security loopholes share a common theme. They are simple and easily corrected, but the real question is why are they there? For now users appear to be giving Microsoft the benefit of the doubt. A recent survey has shown that more online consumers distrust AOL than Microsoft and in reverse more consumers trust Microsoft than AOL. Indeed, Microsoft appears to be currently winning the consumer battle with AOL as it received higher consumer satisfaction ratings.

It remains to be seen just how secure Microsoft's new Windows XP will be. Those users who are eagerly awaiting the release of the new operating system will be keen to use the embedded features such as Microsoft Messaging. It is this new functionality that will play a key role in the ongoing battle for users with AOL. Microsoft must hope that they have battened down all the hatches with Windows XP.

Why doesn't the government back open source?

Open source is not well understood as a business model and is mistakenly thought by some not to have a business model. But it does have one, and this is it, roughly:

A number of individuals usually from different organisations choose to collaborate in building a software product and agree to share the fruits of their labour with each other. Thus they are the developers and they also represent eventual users. It is possible that the application they build may have no compelling use outside those immediately involved in the project. Even if it does, none of the individuals involved may wish to go into the software business to market the software, and none of the organisations involved wish to prevent further sharing of the software. So they make it available for free to anyone else who may be able to use it. They may also make the source code available.

This software model predates the founding of the open source movement, having been the basis of a fair amount of shareware in the 1980s. What the open source movement did to enhance the model was to formalise the arrangement by making all sharers of the source code abide by a legal agreement to share the fruits of their additional work and to prevent any downstream commercial exploitation of the source code.

The benefits are less expensive software and the cost is the time it took for those who collaborate in building or supporting the software. What surprises many people is that this kind of arrangement has given rise to a number of very good software products of which the Linux OS and the Apache web server are flagships.

We should particularly expect governments to be enthusiastic about such products and about the whole concept of open source. Here is why: