500 words into the future
Unapologetically opinionated views on technology, in the office and out
Monday 8 February 2010, 2:08 PM
Did Microsoft stifle tablets and leave the iPad the market?
Dick Brass says so and he thinks he should know; he was the vice president of emerging technologies and launched the Tablet PC in 2002. What does he think went wrong? He blames infighting, he blames PC manufacturers, he blames other divisions for not doing enough to support him so he could make the tablet PC successful - though he doesn't go into what he did or didn't do to deal with the endemic internal politics (that's hardly exclusive to Microsoft; every company that's not run by a dictator has this to a greater or lesser degree). Certainly Tablet PCs are still a curiosity. Simon and I have had tablets as our main notebooks since they came out; I reviewed every single tablet in the 2001 launch, we both bought the HP TC1000 as soon as it was available and since then we've toted tablets from Motion, IBM/Lenovo, Toshiba and - most often - HP. But every time I use one with a pen, someone asks me what it is and how it works. I sometimes feel like the only marketing there is for tablet PC! So do I agree with Dick Brass? No, but...
Microsoft's Frank Shaw points at OneNote to say that the tablet was given lots of love. Yes, but...
I am a huge OneNote fan; I use it every day, it's one of the reasons I'm still chained to Windows Mobile as my main phone (I'm thinking a lot about this as I move from one WinMo phone to another - I have to have a full keyboard, a OneNote client, a real browser that does all Web sites and full Exchange sync and WinMo is the only platform with *all* of those (if you know of another, tell me!)), I have 7 years of notes in there, and while I'm sure I still don't know all the features, I've been nagging the OneNote team for the last few years to bring the spell checking and autocorrect features up to the level Word was at 5 years ago (and Replace All is a 20-year-old feature that's missing, for heavens sake!). Plus I can routinely refer to OneNote as Office's hidden treasure and not have anyone ever disagree with me.
OneNote was written from scratch, driven not from Microsoft Research - although their research on handwriting recognition underpins it - but by one product manager, Chris Pratley (formerly Mr Word, now at Office Labs and behind Ribbon Hero and other interesting training ideas). I backed him into a corner in my enthusiasm, asking for more features and changes - some of them made it in to the first and second release, but OneNote has never had the resources to do everything the team and the users want. Suggest a feature that every OneNote fan says yes to and the team will say 'lovely idea, if only we had the resources'. That's because OneNote hasn't taken over the world - possibly because it's hard to explain to people just how useful it is, probably because for a long time you only got it on a tablet PC or in an expensive version of Office. This time it's in everything so sometime around June the world can look at a product I've been living in for 7 years and either embrace it or wonder why Microsoft didn't do this 7 years ago...
The tablet did get support at Microsoft - internally, for developing the OS and the superb and only-getting-better handwriting recognition (stop me at a conference and try it before you dismiss it), and externally for getting the OEMs on board (and it probably got that support because Bill Gates was such a tablet proponent). But that didn't translate into sales, because of the price of the tablet PCs - or because the marketplace wasn't ready for tablets because the balance of what you did on a PC 7 years ago was more about typing stuff than about looking at stuff. Microsoft didn't stifle tablets; everyone stifled tablets…
Does that mean Brass is wrong? Yes, but... He has identified a huge frustration with Microsoft; all of these smart people, all of these smart ideas - and how many of them ever make a difference to what we do on computers? Adoption is part of the problem (we could all have been using the Remove What I Don't Want In This Photo tool for years if Microsoft Picture It! had sold well enough not to get cancelled). But Microsoft's inability to take those ideas and make them into products in the first place has frustrated those of us who've seen research products that never get into products and researchers who've given up and left Microsoft. The ideas that get picked to become products are sponsored by someone high enough up inside Microsoft to be able to push through the support they need. I don't think that's any different from any other company; I think there are just so many good ideas at Microsoft that there aren't enough visionaries in management to support them - and yes, powerful internal teams do get to say 'we make a substantial proportion of the company profits and we don't want to change things for this unproven upstart'.
Over the last four years I've met half a dozen people who've said their job is to take those great ideas and make them actual products; and more ideas are getting out. Remove background in Office 2010, the Sidewinder x4 keyboard - they're both original Microsoft ideas and successful developments (and you can hear the frustration when the Microsoft hardware team says they announced their home-grown capacitive mouse a month before Apple's). Surface isn't a mainstream product, but it's creeping into commercial environments.
That's only a handful of ideas-made-real and neither are on the scale expected of the iPad. And as Frank Shaw says; "what matters is innovation at scale, not just innovation at speed". Yes, but...
Yes, innovating at scale is important; but people expect innovation at speed as well now - they expect a new Facebook, a new Twitter, the next big thing every 18-24 months. Internet time is 6 months, not 3 years. It may not be feasible for one company to do, and both Brass and Shaw ignore major Microsoft developments like SharePoint, the in-house development of the technologies bought in as FAST and Dynamics and other not-so-shiny business tools that won't make headlines in a mainstream paper. This argument is specifically a question of mainstream, mass-market innovation. And yes, there is a large proportion of that audience that doesn't always like innovation; witness the cries to go back to toolbars in Office or the XP interface in Vista (although I notice that there are far fewer complaints about the Windows 7 interface, so it may be less not liking change and more not liking change until what you get is done well) and the way umpteen enterprises still can't wean themselves off IE6.
Microsoft has to deal with the way internal politics holds it back without running after every bright idea anyone has. Turning Courier from a concept video to a prototype would be a start. Getting the Office Web apps out and updating the Windows Live apps. Delivering on Windows Mobile while the three screens plus cloud promise still resonates for people. And yes, I'd like better tablet hardware and better tablet apps for Windows 7 - but it's the hardware manufacturers, the developers and ultimately the market that makes those happen. What Apple can do that Microsoft has never managed is to make the market in the first place.
-Mary
Microsoft's Frank Shaw points at OneNote to say that the tablet was given lots of love. Yes, but...
I am a huge OneNote fan; I use it every day, it's one of the reasons I'm still chained to Windows Mobile as my main phone (I'm thinking a lot about this as I move from one WinMo phone to another - I have to have a full keyboard, a OneNote client, a real browser that does all Web sites and full Exchange sync and WinMo is the only platform with *all* of those (if you know of another, tell me!)), I have 7 years of notes in there, and while I'm sure I still don't know all the features, I've been nagging the OneNote team for the last few years to bring the spell checking and autocorrect features up to the level Word was at 5 years ago (and Replace All is a 20-year-old feature that's missing, for heavens sake!). Plus I can routinely refer to OneNote as Office's hidden treasure and not have anyone ever disagree with me.
OneNote was written from scratch, driven not from Microsoft Research - although their research on handwriting recognition underpins it - but by one product manager, Chris Pratley (formerly Mr Word, now at Office Labs and behind Ribbon Hero and other interesting training ideas). I backed him into a corner in my enthusiasm, asking for more features and changes - some of them made it in to the first and second release, but OneNote has never had the resources to do everything the team and the users want. Suggest a feature that every OneNote fan says yes to and the team will say 'lovely idea, if only we had the resources'. That's because OneNote hasn't taken over the world - possibly because it's hard to explain to people just how useful it is, probably because for a long time you only got it on a tablet PC or in an expensive version of Office. This time it's in everything so sometime around June the world can look at a product I've been living in for 7 years and either embrace it or wonder why Microsoft didn't do this 7 years ago...
The tablet did get support at Microsoft - internally, for developing the OS and the superb and only-getting-better handwriting recognition (stop me at a conference and try it before you dismiss it), and externally for getting the OEMs on board (and it probably got that support because Bill Gates was such a tablet proponent). But that didn't translate into sales, because of the price of the tablet PCs - or because the marketplace wasn't ready for tablets because the balance of what you did on a PC 7 years ago was more about typing stuff than about looking at stuff. Microsoft didn't stifle tablets; everyone stifled tablets…
Does that mean Brass is wrong? Yes, but... He has identified a huge frustration with Microsoft; all of these smart people, all of these smart ideas - and how many of them ever make a difference to what we do on computers? Adoption is part of the problem (we could all have been using the Remove What I Don't Want In This Photo tool for years if Microsoft Picture It! had sold well enough not to get cancelled). But Microsoft's inability to take those ideas and make them into products in the first place has frustrated those of us who've seen research products that never get into products and researchers who've given up and left Microsoft. The ideas that get picked to become products are sponsored by someone high enough up inside Microsoft to be able to push through the support they need. I don't think that's any different from any other company; I think there are just so many good ideas at Microsoft that there aren't enough visionaries in management to support them - and yes, powerful internal teams do get to say 'we make a substantial proportion of the company profits and we don't want to change things for this unproven upstart'.
Over the last four years I've met half a dozen people who've said their job is to take those great ideas and make them actual products; and more ideas are getting out. Remove background in Office 2010, the Sidewinder x4 keyboard - they're both original Microsoft ideas and successful developments (and you can hear the frustration when the Microsoft hardware team says they announced their home-grown capacitive mouse a month before Apple's). Surface isn't a mainstream product, but it's creeping into commercial environments.
That's only a handful of ideas-made-real and neither are on the scale expected of the iPad. And as Frank Shaw says; "what matters is innovation at scale, not just innovation at speed". Yes, but...
Yes, innovating at scale is important; but people expect innovation at speed as well now - they expect a new Facebook, a new Twitter, the next big thing every 18-24 months. Internet time is 6 months, not 3 years. It may not be feasible for one company to do, and both Brass and Shaw ignore major Microsoft developments like SharePoint, the in-house development of the technologies bought in as FAST and Dynamics and other not-so-shiny business tools that won't make headlines in a mainstream paper. This argument is specifically a question of mainstream, mass-market innovation. And yes, there is a large proportion of that audience that doesn't always like innovation; witness the cries to go back to toolbars in Office or the XP interface in Vista (although I notice that there are far fewer complaints about the Windows 7 interface, so it may be less not liking change and more not liking change until what you get is done well) and the way umpteen enterprises still can't wean themselves off IE6.
Microsoft has to deal with the way internal politics holds it back without running after every bright idea anyone has. Turning Courier from a concept video to a prototype would be a start. Getting the Office Web apps out and updating the Windows Live apps. Delivering on Windows Mobile while the three screens plus cloud promise still resonates for people. And yes, I'd like better tablet hardware and better tablet apps for Windows 7 - but it's the hardware manufacturers, the developers and ultimately the market that makes those happen. What Apple can do that Microsoft has never managed is to make the market in the first place.
-Mary
Thursday 4 February 2010, 9:55 PM
Touch Me Somewhere Else For A Change
Multi-touch isn’t just for tablets. It’s soon going to be everywhere, as the underlying technologies (whether resistive, capacitive or optical) solve many complex user interface problems. Take the humble keyboard for example.
You’d think it was a simple piece of work, and something that couldn’t be made any better. However gamers and CAD users will tell you something quite different. It turns out that there’s a problem with the matrix of connections that connect each keyswitch together. Press too many at once and the keyboard controller can’t detect which keys are pressed. That’s why there’s anti-ghosting controls in your keyboard, tools that block certain key combinations from occurring. That complex combination of keys you need to finish a CAD model or to take down a gang of zombies? Sorry. It’s impossible. And what’s more annoying, different keyboards have different matrix layouts, and different key combinations locked out by anti-ghosting – even the wonderful classic IBM microswitch keyboards.
Microsoft’s new Sidewinder X4 takes a very different approach to keyboard design. Instead of the traditional matrix of switches, the keypad underlay is an array of resistive touch sensors. Touch any number of them, and the controller can determine the order in which they were pressed – using the same techniques used to work with multi-touch onscreen keyboards. Now it’s possible to handle full 10-finger key combinations. Imagine that in AutoCAD. Or in World of Warcraft.
We were able to look inside to see the printed array of resistive touch elements. They're the little black bars, and Microsoft Hardware had to do a lot of work to develop a technique for printing them on the keyboard's flexible circuit board (and still managed to keep the Sidewinder's cost under $60).
Talking to the keyboard’s designers at CES 2010, we got a picture of just how they see this type of touch sensor powered keyboard being used. A batch of prototypes had been made up and sent out to various universities, to see just what their students would come up with. The results were nothing short of spectacular. One of our favourites was an application that turned an ordinary keyboard into one for the disabled, handling multikey presses (perhaps with a tennis ball on a manipulator) and determining user intent (much like extended T9 on a modern mobile phone) to determine what’s actually being typed.
The Sidewinder wasn’t the only intriguing touch application at CES 2010.
Implementing a table-based touch system like Microsoft’s Surface is expensive, complicated and takes up a lot of space. Cambridge-based Light Blue Optics has turned touch tables inside out, with a lightweight, extremely portable touch projector.
You’ve probably seen those red laser-projected keyboards. They’re a neat idea, but not really much use when trying to deliver whole applications. Light Blue Optics have taken laser projection, made it full colour, and using a holographic lens, have simplified the process of projecting an image on any surface at any angle. The resulting Light Touch projector mixes a small computer with a projector, as well as a set of optical sensors.
Using cameras to detect hand position, the Light Touch can project all manner of interactive screens, from web browsers to games to menus. It’s surprisingly intuitive to use, and working with a touch screen on a flat surface is actually quite natural and comfortable – and like Surface it’s surprisingly social.
It's easy to imaging the Light Touch in shops, with a touch-driven catalogue, or in restaurants, projecting a dynamically generated menu.
With a hefty amount of VC funding and support from several major IT companies, we’re optimistic for Light Blue Optics’ success. And it’s always good to cheer for a British company...
--Simon
You’d think it was a simple piece of work, and something that couldn’t be made any better. However gamers and CAD users will tell you something quite different. It turns out that there’s a problem with the matrix of connections that connect each keyswitch together. Press too many at once and the keyboard controller can’t detect which keys are pressed. That’s why there’s anti-ghosting controls in your keyboard, tools that block certain key combinations from occurring. That complex combination of keys you need to finish a CAD model or to take down a gang of zombies? Sorry. It’s impossible. And what’s more annoying, different keyboards have different matrix layouts, and different key combinations locked out by anti-ghosting – even the wonderful classic IBM microswitch keyboards.
Microsoft’s new Sidewinder X4 takes a very different approach to keyboard design. Instead of the traditional matrix of switches, the keypad underlay is an array of resistive touch sensors. Touch any number of them, and the controller can determine the order in which they were pressed – using the same techniques used to work with multi-touch onscreen keyboards. Now it’s possible to handle full 10-finger key combinations. Imagine that in AutoCAD. Or in World of Warcraft.
We were able to look inside to see the printed array of resistive touch elements. They're the little black bars, and Microsoft Hardware had to do a lot of work to develop a technique for printing them on the keyboard's flexible circuit board (and still managed to keep the Sidewinder's cost under $60).
Talking to the keyboard’s designers at CES 2010, we got a picture of just how they see this type of touch sensor powered keyboard being used. A batch of prototypes had been made up and sent out to various universities, to see just what their students would come up with. The results were nothing short of spectacular. One of our favourites was an application that turned an ordinary keyboard into one for the disabled, handling multikey presses (perhaps with a tennis ball on a manipulator) and determining user intent (much like extended T9 on a modern mobile phone) to determine what’s actually being typed.
The Sidewinder wasn’t the only intriguing touch application at CES 2010.
Implementing a table-based touch system like Microsoft’s Surface is expensive, complicated and takes up a lot of space. Cambridge-based Light Blue Optics has turned touch tables inside out, with a lightweight, extremely portable touch projector.
You’ve probably seen those red laser-projected keyboards. They’re a neat idea, but not really much use when trying to deliver whole applications. Light Blue Optics have taken laser projection, made it full colour, and using a holographic lens, have simplified the process of projecting an image on any surface at any angle. The resulting Light Touch projector mixes a small computer with a projector, as well as a set of optical sensors.
Using cameras to detect hand position, the Light Touch can project all manner of interactive screens, from web browsers to games to menus. It’s surprisingly intuitive to use, and working with a touch screen on a flat surface is actually quite natural and comfortable – and like Surface it’s surprisingly social.
It's easy to imaging the Light Touch in shops, with a touch-driven catalogue, or in restaurants, projecting a dynamically generated menu.
With a hefty amount of VC funding and support from several major IT companies, we’re optimistic for Light Blue Optics’ success. And it’s always good to cheer for a British company...
--Simon
Monday 1 February 2010, 6:43 PM
Flash Fried?
The biggest problem with the Adobe/Apple Flash spat is that it’s being fought on the wrong ground.
Flash isn’t just about video on web pages, or animated adverts, or even about plugins versus HTML 5. As soon as you get into talking about those things, Adobe is bound to come off worst. After all, we all love open standards, and above all, we all love the open web. We don’t want to load extra applications to watch video, and we don’t want to have garish adverts thrust at us while we trying to read the news.
If you look at it in those terms, then Apple’s right to not put Flash on the iPhone and the iPad. Why burden users with code they don’t need? Web standards do everything the iPhone’s users want, and if they don’t, well, there’s an app for that.
The trouble is: that’s Flash nearly five years ago.
The FLV video format (and all the codecs it wraps) were what turned things around for Flash, dragging it out of a morass of skip-intro site-branding animations. It made Flash the platform of choice for web video – and gave birth to services like the BBC iPlayer and Hulu.
Yes, you can deliver video browsers that support HTML 5's new <VIDEO> tag, but there’s enough confusion over which codecs are supported to make it almost impossible to handle successfully. Even web standards proponents like Daring Fireball’s John Gruber have problems. The philosophical wrangle between open source browsers and their commercial competitors over the patent-encumbered H.264 implemention leaves sites that want to deliver video directly to the browser needing to encode video twice – and also unsure over just how target browsers handle image buffering.
The real strength of Flash is as a rich internet application platform. You can build complex JavaScript collaboration applications like Google’s Wave (if you take advantage of features like Gears’ worker threads). But not every browser supports Gears. And not everyone wants to download megabytes of obfuscated JavaScript.
Adobe’s Flex changed Flash completely. It turned a timeline driven animation platform into an enterprise-ready development environment. If you want a nice, stateful user interface for an application, you can quickly build it in Flex using Eclipse-based development tools, alongside any Java or .NET back end, before exporting it as either Flash or as a standalone application using Adobe’s cross-platform AIR runtime.
Flex is a powerful tool, with all the features you’d expect for a platform that requires enterprise connectivity. Adobe’s Flash Data Services (also available as the open-source Blaze DS) give you binary connectivity from Flash front-ends to application servers, line of business applications, and databases.
Frankly I can't really see an HTML 5 application delivering something like Morgan Stanley's Matrix trading platform. Designed to help partner companies execute foreign exchange trades, Matrix simplifies a business process that requires a lot of information. Brokerage traders use Matrix to get access to both historical and real time data, along with notes and video blogs from Morgan Stanley's own foreign exchange team. There's even a set of collaboration tools that allow traders to directly contact Morgan Stanley staff.
And that's where the real battlefield lies. Video (and <VIDEO>) is just a distraction (and Adobe's already moved to open most of its video player platform). The real issue is the apps. Adobe has unveiled its own in-Flash app store, allowing developers to monetise both Flash and AIR applications. With Flash in the browser offering developers an end-run around the Apple app-store and giving Adobe a revenue stream rather than Apple, it's unsurprising that Apple's not letting Flash applications run on the iPhone - while letting cross-compiled native applications written in Flash sell in its App Store...
I've got an iPhone, and I've spent quite a bit of money on casual games through the App Store. They're games I've been playing for free on my PC, thanks to sites like PopCap. That's money Microsoft and Apple don't see - so is it any wonder that Apple is so down on Flash? Cash is king, and the iPhone (and the iPad) App Store is a definite money maker. Interpreted code like Flash would skip around the Apple paywall, and that's not what Cupertino wants. That 30% of every transaction has turned into a very attractive revenue stream, and it's not something that Apple intends to hand over to anyone.
That's before we go into any of the other issues, like the stability or not of Flash (I've not had it crash my Mac, ever, though I do use Chrome rather than Safari), or it's suitability for mobile (I'll be looking forward to seeing what Adobe has to say about that in a fortnight at the Mobile World Congress).
--Simon
Flash isn’t just about video on web pages, or animated adverts, or even about plugins versus HTML 5. As soon as you get into talking about those things, Adobe is bound to come off worst. After all, we all love open standards, and above all, we all love the open web. We don’t want to load extra applications to watch video, and we don’t want to have garish adverts thrust at us while we trying to read the news.
If you look at it in those terms, then Apple’s right to not put Flash on the iPhone and the iPad. Why burden users with code they don’t need? Web standards do everything the iPhone’s users want, and if they don’t, well, there’s an app for that.
The trouble is: that’s Flash nearly five years ago.
The FLV video format (and all the codecs it wraps) were what turned things around for Flash, dragging it out of a morass of skip-intro site-branding animations. It made Flash the platform of choice for web video – and gave birth to services like the BBC iPlayer and Hulu.
Yes, you can deliver video browsers that support HTML 5's new <VIDEO> tag, but there’s enough confusion over which codecs are supported to make it almost impossible to handle successfully. Even web standards proponents like Daring Fireball’s John Gruber have problems. The philosophical wrangle between open source browsers and their commercial competitors over the patent-encumbered H.264 implemention leaves sites that want to deliver video directly to the browser needing to encode video twice – and also unsure over just how target browsers handle image buffering.
The real strength of Flash is as a rich internet application platform. You can build complex JavaScript collaboration applications like Google’s Wave (if you take advantage of features like Gears’ worker threads). But not every browser supports Gears. And not everyone wants to download megabytes of obfuscated JavaScript.
Adobe’s Flex changed Flash completely. It turned a timeline driven animation platform into an enterprise-ready development environment. If you want a nice, stateful user interface for an application, you can quickly build it in Flex using Eclipse-based development tools, alongside any Java or .NET back end, before exporting it as either Flash or as a standalone application using Adobe’s cross-platform AIR runtime.
Flex is a powerful tool, with all the features you’d expect for a platform that requires enterprise connectivity. Adobe’s Flash Data Services (also available as the open-source Blaze DS) give you binary connectivity from Flash front-ends to application servers, line of business applications, and databases.
Frankly I can't really see an HTML 5 application delivering something like Morgan Stanley's Matrix trading platform. Designed to help partner companies execute foreign exchange trades, Matrix simplifies a business process that requires a lot of information. Brokerage traders use Matrix to get access to both historical and real time data, along with notes and video blogs from Morgan Stanley's own foreign exchange team. There's even a set of collaboration tools that allow traders to directly contact Morgan Stanley staff.
And that's where the real battlefield lies. Video (and <VIDEO>) is just a distraction (and Adobe's already moved to open most of its video player platform). The real issue is the apps. Adobe has unveiled its own in-Flash app store, allowing developers to monetise both Flash and AIR applications. With Flash in the browser offering developers an end-run around the Apple app-store and giving Adobe a revenue stream rather than Apple, it's unsurprising that Apple's not letting Flash applications run on the iPhone - while letting cross-compiled native applications written in Flash sell in its App Store...
I've got an iPhone, and I've spent quite a bit of money on casual games through the App Store. They're games I've been playing for free on my PC, thanks to sites like PopCap. That's money Microsoft and Apple don't see - so is it any wonder that Apple is so down on Flash? Cash is king, and the iPhone (and the iPad) App Store is a definite money maker. Interpreted code like Flash would skip around the Apple paywall, and that's not what Cupertino wants. That 30% of every transaction has turned into a very attractive revenue stream, and it's not something that Apple intends to hand over to anyone.
That's before we go into any of the other issues, like the stability or not of Flash (I've not had it crash my Mac, ever, though I do use Chrome rather than Safari), or it's suitability for mobile (I'll be looking forward to seeing what Adobe has to say about that in a fortnight at the Mobile World Congress).
--Simon
Friday 29 January 2010, 11:42 AM
My Phone: just one of the reasons I hope Microsoft saves Windows Mobile
I've been a fan of Windows Mobile since the first clunky SPV: I have a huge Outlook address book and being able to have all those numbers on my phone automatically, and read my email? That's been awesome for so many years that I can't imagine living without it. Being able to set to-do flags on my mobile email and file it into folders? Had that so long I'm actually more wishing I could set categories and pick dates for the flags than appreciating it. Being able to get updates for my handset - usually officially but always through XDA Developers? Invaluable and I wish I could get the same fast updates for my BlackBerry.
My favourite mobile browser, Skyfire, is only on WinMo and Symbian (and I am *not* about to switch to Symbian with it's 'how about cancel?' default for all commands); my favourite navigation software still has slightly more features on Windows Mobile than iPhone or Android - which confuses me every time I try to use CoPilot on iPhone. There's a better OneNote Mobile and Evernote on iPhone than on Windows Mobile, but I can't type at my usual hyperspeed on a touch keyboard (not even on a Storm 2).
And this morning I saw a funny stalker story about a guy creeping out a thief to get his iPhone back using the MobileMe service; I get that free with Microsoft MyPhone (the location, not the creeping out).
This is where MyPhone says my phone is right now (for reasons of not inviting the burglars, I'm not zooming in to the street!).
It's not building level, because I haven't had GPS switched on recently, but I'm not paying a MobileMe subscription for the service either (I can pay when I want to lock, wipe, ring or pinpoint the phone rather than just check if I left it at a friend's house).
So I'm really hoping Microsoft can rescue Windows Mobile from the doldrums of opinion and developer disinterest this year. It's gone from being ahead of its time (smartphone apps when smartphone users didn't install more than one app) to looking dated as much because it's had features for so long as because the interface has been around for so long. Recent releases have felt like tinkering even when they've added significant features like HTML email. And when we ask a neat mobile tool developer like Callspark (unified social, private and public address book) or Xobni (personal data mining coming to BlackBerry very soon) if they'll do a version for Windows Mobile, they don't say 9% of the market isn't enough - they say they're not going to develop for Windows Mobile while the platform is in flux. That means the longer Microsoft clutches the secret of WinMo's future to its chest, the further it falls behind.
Windows Vista didn't kill Windows - because Windows 7 turned out to be so good. Windows Mobile 7 being so late could easily kill Windows Mobile if it disappoints because the ecosystem isn't strong enough to give WinMo the same second chance. I hope a recent rumour that WinMo might move into Steven Sinosfsky's Windows team is true; he can't raise the dead, and Windows Live still needs some more attention to revive it (no CardSpace support yet? A unified installer that tries to spam me with apps I already said I didn't want, another toolbar and a search default bait and switch? Good thing Windows Live Photo Gallery is so good). But someone at Microsoft needs to stand up and make Windows Mobile credible before everyone forgets that it's actually pretty good and all the developers go elsewhere.
-Mary
My favourite mobile browser, Skyfire, is only on WinMo and Symbian (and I am *not* about to switch to Symbian with it's 'how about cancel?' default for all commands); my favourite navigation software still has slightly more features on Windows Mobile than iPhone or Android - which confuses me every time I try to use CoPilot on iPhone. There's a better OneNote Mobile and Evernote on iPhone than on Windows Mobile, but I can't type at my usual hyperspeed on a touch keyboard (not even on a Storm 2).
And this morning I saw a funny stalker story about a guy creeping out a thief to get his iPhone back using the MobileMe service; I get that free with Microsoft MyPhone (the location, not the creeping out).
This is where MyPhone says my phone is right now (for reasons of not inviting the burglars, I'm not zooming in to the street!).
It's not building level, because I haven't had GPS switched on recently, but I'm not paying a MobileMe subscription for the service either (I can pay when I want to lock, wipe, ring or pinpoint the phone rather than just check if I left it at a friend's house).So I'm really hoping Microsoft can rescue Windows Mobile from the doldrums of opinion and developer disinterest this year. It's gone from being ahead of its time (smartphone apps when smartphone users didn't install more than one app) to looking dated as much because it's had features for so long as because the interface has been around for so long. Recent releases have felt like tinkering even when they've added significant features like HTML email. And when we ask a neat mobile tool developer like Callspark (unified social, private and public address book) or Xobni (personal data mining coming to BlackBerry very soon) if they'll do a version for Windows Mobile, they don't say 9% of the market isn't enough - they say they're not going to develop for Windows Mobile while the platform is in flux. That means the longer Microsoft clutches the secret of WinMo's future to its chest, the further it falls behind.
Windows Vista didn't kill Windows - because Windows 7 turned out to be so good. Windows Mobile 7 being so late could easily kill Windows Mobile if it disappoints because the ecosystem isn't strong enough to give WinMo the same second chance. I hope a recent rumour that WinMo might move into Steven Sinosfsky's Windows team is true; he can't raise the dead, and Windows Live still needs some more attention to revive it (no CardSpace support yet? A unified installer that tries to spam me with apps I already said I didn't want, another toolbar and a search default bait and switch? Good thing Windows Live Photo Gallery is so good). But someone at Microsoft needs to stand up and make Windows Mobile credible before everyone forgets that it's actually pretty good and all the developers go elsewhere.
-Mary
Monday 25 January 2010, 8:10 AM
Net neutrality or protection racket?
If peer to peer traffic is clogging the Internet and slowing down Skype calls, why not mark it as lower priority and do the download overnight? The software updates and Word of Warcraft files that use P2P quite legally aren't hugely urgent and that kind of 'when you’re not busy' bandwidth usage is how Microsoft makes Windows Update polite (the Background Internet Transfer Service doesn't work quite like P2P but some of the principles are similar).
The problem with that, Skyfire CEO Jeff Glueck commented when he was demonstrating the new Symbian version of his mobile browser to us is that it's the thin end of the wedge. "Our perspective as a startup is that some proposals being floated around for Quality of Service are quite radical and potentially threatening to the open democratic process," he said.
Glueck was invited to testify at the FCC hearings on net neutrality in Boston and he thinks that the proposals to charge Internet services more for lower latency when there’s network congestion will play in favour of incumbents with deep pockets.
Because the big sites are popular, but they're far from being all people want on the Internet - he knows that from what pages Skyfire users visit. "The long tail for Skyfire just continues to amaze me," says Glueck; "We always think if there's some density in the number of people watching the same site, can we create efficiency by caching it? But it really isn't the same sites people visit - other than Google search. It's just tens of thousands of sites with two or three visitors each."
”Telcos and cable companies are eager to start creating toll roads and steerage class on the Internet, but these rules could make it hard to ever see the next eBay, YouTube or Facebook. The NBCs and Foxes, and now Google, will just kill innovation and buy priority access for all their content. Those of us who require live access to a server and aren't file downloads that run overnight will be restricted to steerage class unless we pay protection money. We do believe there is a tragedy of the commons on mobile; something has to change but don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater - don’t throw out the open Internet.”
-Mary
The problem with that, Skyfire CEO Jeff Glueck commented when he was demonstrating the new Symbian version of his mobile browser to us is that it's the thin end of the wedge. "Our perspective as a startup is that some proposals being floated around for Quality of Service are quite radical and potentially threatening to the open democratic process," he said.
Glueck was invited to testify at the FCC hearings on net neutrality in Boston and he thinks that the proposals to charge Internet services more for lower latency when there’s network congestion will play in favour of incumbents with deep pockets.
Because the big sites are popular, but they're far from being all people want on the Internet - he knows that from what pages Skyfire users visit. "The long tail for Skyfire just continues to amaze me," says Glueck; "We always think if there's some density in the number of people watching the same site, can we create efficiency by caching it? But it really isn't the same sites people visit - other than Google search. It's just tens of thousands of sites with two or three visitors each."
”Telcos and cable companies are eager to start creating toll roads and steerage class on the Internet, but these rules could make it hard to ever see the next eBay, YouTube or Facebook. The NBCs and Foxes, and now Google, will just kill innovation and buy priority access for all their content. Those of us who require live access to a server and aren't file downloads that run overnight will be restricted to steerage class unless we pay protection money. We do believe there is a tragedy of the commons on mobile; something has to change but don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater - don’t throw out the open Internet.”
-Mary
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