Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

some predictions for 2007 in terms of various businesses whose stock ticker i keep track of: Google - This year will show a massive slowdown for this company...unless they declare a change in direction. At the moment, people consider Google to be synonymous with the Internet along with Yahoo. However, last year saw them moving more towards web applications bent towards small businesses. In my estimation, Google needs to change their business model from being a pure search company to a software company. In that manner, they can continue to grow. However, in terms of actual profitable products, they are a one trick pony in that advertisement makes up the bulk of their revenue (along with partnerships in my estimation). While they might eat up some of Microsoft and Yahoo's share, I'm having a serious amount of doubts whether their web applications like word processing and spreadsheets will contribute to their bottom end....unless the design is to purely detract from Microsoft's hegemony on the desktop. Yahoo - They made some noise recently with the conference call and their COO leaving. However, despite all the high level talks, what remains to be seen in a concrete plan of action. Consolidation of the various brands as well as narrowing their focus. They want to be the Internet and they want to be media. Yet, they offer a variety of products that attempt to compete against rivals like Google. What are they though? Until they clearly define themselves, they will remain confused and confuse people with their sense of identity. Their products will be used, but they will not achieve complete dominance in any single market. Toyota - This company just knows who they are and create great products. Their hard work will pay off in 2007 and send a monstrous warning to the American auto manufacturers to get off their lazy asses and put more effort into research and optimization rather than luxury. Toyota along with Honda are Japan's chief pride and joys and hopefully both companies will continue to be innovative and environmentally conscious with their success. Redhat - They made a very good acquisition in picking up JBoss. Prior to that, they had three lines of business: the Redhat linux OS, support and some software development/consulting (which would be certain customizations for people with large contracts). They expanded their software side to become a complete enterprise stack from OS to application server. However, I have two major issues with them at the moment: 1) they need to put more effort in the stabilization of Fedora, despite the fact that Fedora is community supported; 2) they need to mature the way JBoss handles its community. Ubuntu had made monstrous waves in the past year as one of the best alternative, community supported OSes in town while Fedora threw out releases, which were down, imo, without real rhyme nor reason. Fedora's recent release of 6 was just a more mature release of 5, but I saw nothing critical that made me want to pursue it. For me, stabilizing the drivers and software are more critical than tossing a whole new fryer into the mix with the Java suite mixed in now. Hopefully, the community will continue to work on those issues of stability and compatibility. With Vista coming up, Linux has a great shot of making inroads as Vista's DRM controls will certainly leave a horrible taste in future users' mouths. With JBoss, the one thing they need to do is remove their arrogance. I like the product, but I've never seen good vibes in the way the company treats their community. Hopefully, Redhat's acquisition will tame some of the members (notably Fleury) and embrace the average user as well as improve some of the more impressive software pieces (e.g. JBoss IDE for Eclipse). With Ruby on Rails and other frameworks gaining wide acceptance, J2EE and Java need to improve through handling the community in a very cordial manner. An open source flagship like Redhat in turn needs to cultivate JBoss in such a manner.