Every cloud has a silver lining. There’s a common opinion that the adoption of Open Source will only increase if the world’s economies continue to weaken. [O'Reilly Radar, Red Hat's Jim Whitehurst]

Colleague Piere Fricke has written a piece for Network World on Open Source SOA – that’s Simple Open and Affordable – not just Service Oriented Architecture.

According to the Linux Foundation – Fedora 9 (the OS of choice for yours truly) would cost $10.8 billion to develop from scratch; and the Linux kernel alone would cost $1.4 billion. The summary of the report is that “Collaborative development creates enourmous economic value”. No shit Sherlock. I wonder how much money Linux or OSS in general has actually saved companies in the last 17 years.

Still, it’s early days. I’ve only watched onw “HD” movie from iTunes (Michael Clayton) – and the experience was good; but only slightly better than watching the same “HD” movie from TimeWarner. I’ve purchased one TV series (the original 2nd series of Scooby-Do – for my 3yr old Jack) – the experience was good – better than the DVD experience. But what’s really nice is the audio and image viewing. Pictures from my Nikon D40 look absolutely stunning on a 42″ plasma – I mean really stunning – I’m now of the opinion that it’s the only way they should be viewed. I have the ATV set up to play tunes and use my images as a slideshow – they we’re downloaded from Photoshop running on a Windoze machine. I can honestly say – I’ve been listening to more tunes and viewing more old photo’s than I have done in years – because ATV makes it so convenient. One touch I like is the ability to control your ATV from your iTunes laptop / desktop. For example – a coupe of times I’ve been listening to something in my office on the little tinny MBP speakers – and decided to crank the volume up a bit by directing the output to the main house audio – nice.

It will be interesting to see where Apple take the ATV – remember this is only the second rev. I think the market is still wide open for home media systems – I think Apple are starting with a huge lead with iTunes and iPods – but I’m not sure I fancy their chances taking on the telcos and the cable companies – but hey – it’s about time someone did. Let’s just hope they don’t turn (more) evil in the process.

It’s hard not to like the iPhone and even though it has its flaws and shortcomings – it’s easy to forgive them; because the iPhone is so nice. IMO, Apple have completely nailed the consumer user experience – this was always a core competence and they’ve really grown it into a sustained advantage. I think the iPhone has really set a new bar for consumer usability (and eye-candy).

OK, with the caveat that I’m only a couple of hours into dedicated bonding with my iPhone – here are the limitations I’ve noticed :

• Poor integration between mail and calendar – I can’t click on a date / time in a mail and create a calendar entry like I can in OS/X Mail.app. Can’t link a calendar entry with an email. I think the assumption is that you use your {desk | lap}top for heavy-duty mail / calendar management.
• I can’t cut and paste between Apps. (surely their must be a way). This really hurts because there seems to be little integration between apps. right now.
• The Google Maps location awareness is interesting but not really practical – knowing where you are (broadly) is only useful if you’re really lost / drunk. If you are reliant on a GPS unit (I use TomTom on my Treo) – you still will be. I’m going to strip-down my deactivated Treo and continue to use it as a GPS until I manage to drop-kick it / boil it to death or until TomTom / Magellan / Someone ports their app to the iPhone (first decent attempt gets my money).
• Battery life – while the eye-candy is nice; you have to pay the piper. Just cary a charger with you. Electricity is everywhere.
• The notes app on the iPhone doesn’t have an OS/X counterpart to synch with – so (unless you’re a really fast iPhone typist) – it’s less useful than it could be. If you store your OS/X Mail.app notes on an IMAP server – you’ll be able to access the notes on your iPhone as they are just stored as plain old mails. This isn’t ideal but it’s better than a poke in the eye.
• A PDF viewer would be nice – given the IPhone’s support for WiFi and WiFi’s near ubiquity – I’d be a lot more inclined to download and view large email attachments.

Here’s what’s right :

• Overall ease of use / user experience modulo the “no cut and paste” bug mentioned above.
• Size and wight – it’s still pretty heavy but it’s slim and sleek design makes it much easier to pocket then the Treo.
• It uses the same adapter / cables / charger as your iPod so you can re-use them. I used to despise Palm for changing the adapters with every minor release.
• The image quality is impressive – most noticeable when you’re watching a movie. If the battery would hold out – I could actually imagine this being a better movie-viewing option than a laptop – especially when you’re wedged into seat 54F for 9 hours.
• Handling the network (eg. switching between WiFi and Edge just works and is largely invisible. Just like it should be.
• Reliability – so far I haven’t had to reboot – with my Treo it was a weekly occurrence. Let’s see if the iPhone suffers the same problem as the Treo when we start running poorly behaved third party apps.

Here’s where I’m as yet undecided :

• Keyboard – I think the virtual keyboard is nicely done and I’ll always give up a lot for a decent sized screen – but my poor fingers need retraining.
• No video camera – seems an odd omission; though I’ll probably only miss it once or twice a year.
• I’m worried that the iPhone won’t take a beating (like a Treo can) and I don’t want to compromise the slick design with a protective case. Only time will tell if my worries are well founded.

I’m sure I’ll post more as I discover more.

The news that Apple won’t prevent anyone developing a VOIP app. is pretty good – that might even get me back to using Skype again (or whoever beats them to it).

I really hope the developers go nuts with the iPhone – we’ve been on the cusp of the next generation of location aware, nomadic, personal applications for at least the last decade – hopefuly Apple’s brand and current halo will be enough to finally get us there. The Kleiner-Perkins iPhone fund should help and the App Store could be interesting.
FWIW – Gizmodo has a decent roundup of what was actually announced last week.