Business

Synacor, Inc.'s Zimbra Open Source Support and Zimbra Suite Plus

James Gray — Mon, 14 Nov 2016 15:17:35 +0000

Zimbra Collaboration Suite is a successful open-source collaboration application that includes email, calendaring, file sharing, chat and video chat. Zimbra's developer, Synacor, Inc., recently released two new Zimbra-related offerings, namely Zimbra Open Source Support (ZOSS) and Zimbra Suite Plus.

The first offering, ZOSS, is a new global program for the 400+ million Zimbra users that takes Zimbra Open Source Edition deployments to the business-ready level. Private and secure, ZOSS offers support to users worldwide in their local language, during their business hours and by experts who understand their business needs and culture.

The second offering, Zimbra Suite Plus, has been upgraded with a palette of new features. This modular add-on that extends Zimbra Server's capabilities on Zimbra Open Source or Network Edition now offers new and innovative tools, such as Zimbra Backup Plus, Admin Plus, HSM Plus and Mobile Plus.

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Pancaking the Pyramid Economy

Doc Searls — Thu, 03 Nov 2016 11:33:46 +0000

by Doc Searls

In 1937, Ronald Coase gave economics something new: a theory for why companies should exist. Oddly, this hadn't come up before. His paper was called "The Nature of the Firm". He wrote it at age 27, as a class assignment in grad school. He based it on a talk he gave at 22. It has since earned him a Nobel prize.

Says The Economist:

Mr Coase argued that firms make economic sense because they can reduce or eliminate the "transaction cost" of going to the market by doing things in-house. It is easier to co-ordinate decisions. At the time, when communications were poor and economies of scale could be vast, this justified keeping a lot of things inside a big firm, so car-makers often owned engine-makers and other suppliers.

In that same piece (a 2013 obituary for Coase), The Economist adds:

Mr Coase's theory of the firm would suggest that firms ought to be in retreat at the moment, because technology is lowering transaction costs: why go to the bother of organising things under one roof when the internet lowers the cost of going to the market?

Could be that Coase has an answer for that one too. In a 2012 interview with Russ Roberts on the EconTalk podcast, when Coase was 102 years old, he said, "It's not possible to study how things are dealt with without realizing the importance of the stupidity of human behavior."

Perhaps that's why Hugh MacLeod (aka @gapingvoid) in 2004 produced the cartoon shown in Figure 1 outlining his own model for the firm.

Figure 1. Cartoon by Hugh MacLeod (aka @gapingvoid) from 2004 that outlines his own model of the firm.

That same year, Hugh and I brainstormed the future of business for a (now gone) open-source company we both consulted. As happens with Hugh, this generated lots of great illustrations. Figure 2 shows Hugh's drawing of a company like the one above, embodying what he called "egology".

Figure 2. Hugh MacLeod's drawing of a company embodying "egology" from 2004.

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How Can We Get Business to Care about Freedom, Openness and Interoperability?

Doc Searls — Wed, 03 Dec 2014 22:13:00 +0000

by Doc Searls

They use our stuff. Why not our values too?

At this point in history, arguments for using Linux, FOSS (free and open-source software) and the Internet make themselves. Yet the virtues behind those things—freedom, openness, compatibility, interoperability, substitutability—still tend to be ignored by commercial builders of new stuff.

For example, US health care, like pretty much every business category, is full of Linux and FOSS, and is to some degree connected on the Net. Yet, it remains a vast feudal system of suppliers that nearly all work to lock doctors, hospitals and labs into dependency on closed, proprietary, incompatible, non-interoperable and non-substitutable systems. I've witnessed these up close as a patient. In one case, diagnostic scans by one machine and software system couldn't be read by computers with software designed to read the output of a different company's scans. In another case, records kept by one specialty failed to inform another specialty in the same hospital. The first one gave me a case of pancreatitis, and the second one gave my mother a fatal stroke.

We are seeing the same thing start to happen already with the Internet of Things (IoT), about which Bruce Sterling has written a brilliant essay titled The Epic Struggle of The Internet of Things. "The first thing to understand about the 'Internet of Things'", he says, "is that it's not about Things on the Internet. It's a code term that powerful stakeholders have settled on for their own purposes. They like the slogan 'Internet of Things' because it sounds peaceable and progressive. It disguises the epic struggle over power, money and influence that is about to ensue. There is genuine Internet technology involved in the 'Internet of Things'. However, the legacy Internet of yesterday is a shrinking part of what is at stake now."

It's actually worse than that:

An Internet of Things is not a consumer society. It's a materialized network society. It's like a Google or Facebook writ large on the landscape.

Google and Facebook don't have "users" or "customers". Instead, they have participants under machine surveillance, whose activities are algorithmically combined within Big Data silos. They don't need the reader to be the hero. He's not some rational, autonomous, economic actor who decides to encourage the Internet of Things with his purchasing dollars. They're much better off when those decisions are not his to make.

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