What’s more, building a computer based on a mobile OS throws out one of the biggest advances Apple has made in recent years: the ability to run Windows programs natively. And that means that none of your Windows software will work. For that matter, your Mac apps won’t run, either.
The battle between MacOS and Windows reminds me of watching partisans debate the merits of the latest American and Russian fighter planes. The Cold War is over, and the drones now rule the skies. I’ve often found myself in the thick of OS arguments, and they are real and important to people like me who care about the utility and functionality of the computers we use daily. But these conflicts are products of an era that is on its way out. Over the next few years Apple will face a far different struggle, as it races to define how everyday people will use cloud computing. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon won’t be sitting on their asses either.
Apple is already moving fast. Look at the iPod and the iPhone. The primary job of the OS in both devices is to get out of the way. The real stars of the show are iTunes and the App Store. While iTunes is a good piece of client software, its real mojo derives from its ability to get the content you want from the cloud to your device. And the direct integration between the App Store and the iPod/iPhone shows that the iTunes middleman won’t be around forever.
Apple has shown a willingness to set fire to its ships in order to conquer new territories. The iPod mini was a runaway success when Apple killed it in favor of the nano. The company has successfully pushed to make laptops the center of gravity for the Macintosh lineup, and the MacBook has been a huge hit. But it wouldn’t surprise me if Apple put the hatchet to its baseline notebook, bringing in the tablet as its replacement.
Yes, there will be plenty of users who need raw CPU power for apps like Aperture, Final Cut, Photoshop, and so on. Yes, some business apps also require a lot of juice. Apple has plenty of spiffy Macs to sell you if you need to run Mac and Windows apps. But if you use email, a web browser, and MS Office to get your news, communicate with people, work on documents, crunch numbers, and manage your multimedia library, increasingly the real heavy lifting for all of those activities takes place in the cloud. As for MS Office, the bullseye on Microsoft’s bag is big and red. Google and other players have shown that for many if not most documents, the bloated Office pig is unnecessary. Apple has been honing iWork for years. It’s not a stretch to envision MobileMe-synchable versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote running on the tablet.
Now imagine purchasing these and other apps from the Tablet Store. The iPhone App Store has been a staggering success as a software distribution platform, and controlling software distribution has been a big part of Apple’s success in the 2000s. Why wouldn’t Apple leverage the distribution power of an App Store for the tablet? And as more and more apps rely on the cloud, why wouldn’t developers continue to follow the money? Apple receives over 10,000 App Store submissions per week. There are a lot of iPhone developers out there, no matter how you slice the numbers. If Apple makes developing for the tablet only a minor adjustment for iPhone developers, the number of iPhone/tablet developers could soon dwarf the number of Mac developers.
As the hardware power of the tablet increases and Apple’s integration of device and cloud continues, the Mac may come to be seen as something of a relic, powerful but dated, a muscle car in an electric car era. Will it be 5 years from now when the last Mac rolls off the assembly line? Will it be 10 years? Whenever it comes, I expect the Mac’s demise will come at the hands of its maker, not at the hands of competitors.
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz was smart to enter into a search deal with Microsoft. Many observers seem to believe that Microsoft pulled a fast one on the ailing Web pioneer. Make no mistake, Yahoo is in trouble. That’s exactly why they need to focus on their core competency.
Search has never been Yahoo’s competitive advantage, and no matter how hard they’ve worked to catch up to Google, they haven’t had the muscle for it. Microsoft, on the other hand, has been trying for years to take down Google in search. In Bing they finally have a search product that isn’t embarrassing by comparison to Google. Leveraging Microsoft search technology will help Yahoo keep its customers happy without draining resources at Yahoo that should be directed at doing what they do best.
Microsoft has failed time and time again on the human side of the Web. Content is just not their bag. Social applications are not their bag. Yahoo does both of these quite well. Google’s mathematical, reductionist, relentlessly quantified search is not the only route to money. Bartz gets this.
Mark your calendars and come back in a year to taunt me if I’m wrong on this one. I definitely seem to be outnumbered, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the wisdom of the crowds prevailed. Still, I think that by shedding old baggage, a leaner, more capable Yahoo could emerge.
I like Google Analytics. It’s a solid, useful application that when used properly can provide a wealth of useful, actionable information. But the way Google uses green in comparison graphs bothers me.
Here’s how Google displays a traffic comparison. The blue line represents the current time period, while the green line represents the prior period.
Green represents both a time period and a traffic increase
This may seem incredibly picayune, but I frequently find myself looking twice or three times at the graph, trying to determine whether green represents the current time series or the time series it is being compared against. Why? Because green is used to delineate the prior time series, and it is also used to indicate an increase in traffic.
In this instance I see the 11.3% and get confused, because although there is an increase of 11.3%, the number is shown in green, which makes me look at the prior time series, rather than the current time series. Yes, I’m smart enough to eventually figure out that the traffic represented by the blue line is the traffic that has gone up by 11.3%, but it is confusing.
If I could, I’d change the green to a different color, something like this:
Gold rather than green for the prior time series
Presto, no more confusion. Green now unequivocally represents an increase in traffic. Red represents a decrease in traffic. Blue represents the current time series, and gold represents the prior time series.
Since its public unveiling at Google I/O, Google Wave has generated tremendous buzz. The newest Google project is a blend of instant messaging, email, and collaborative document creation. It is an ambitious undertaking, and grokking it fully takes some time. This video of Google Wave’s unveiling is over an hour long.
It is a video worth watching, because it shows the breadth of Google’s vision. I am reminded of the early days of the Web, when explaining technology we now take for granted required lots of metaphors, hand gestures, and labored explanation. Then, as now, the best way to explain a new technology is to show it in action.
What is most impressive about Google Wave is its scope. While the application itself garners the most attention, the real power lies in the foundation. Protocols are the vehicles by which messaging on the Internet takes place. For example, HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) is used by web servers. SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is used to send email. The Google Wave Federation Protocol is an extension of an existing protocol called XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) Core. Google’s intention is to make this protocol the foundation of a new class of messaging systems, and their patent license is explicitly designed to keep competing users of the protocol honest (my italics):
Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, Google and its affiliates hereby grant to you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this License) patent license for patents necessarily infringed by implementation of this specification. If you institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the implementation of the specification constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses for the specification granted to you under this License shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.
A set of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) sit on top of the Google Wave Federation Protocol. They allow developers to build new features into Google Wave applications and extend Google Wave functionality to other apps. This is where the magic happens. Google, as powerful as it is, doesn’t have an infinite supply of developers. They also can’t anticipate all the things end users might want from Google Wave. But an army of motivated third-party developers will take the APIs and create all kinds of interesting and useful new services, the way they have with Google Maps and APIs from Amazon, eBay, Netflix, and other savvy companies.
Many tech observers are making the mistake of focusing on the latest web applications, rather than on the APIs. Twitter is perhaps the best example of this: A minority of Twitter traffic moves through the Twitter website. Dozens of Twitter clients and mashups account for the majority. Because Twitter made the API available early in the game, it captured developer mindshare. A thousand flowers bloomed, and now Twitter is on desktops, laptops, Blackberry handhelds, Android devices, and iPhones.
Email has become unwieldy, particularly in business settings. Instant messaging is hampered by conflicting standards and limited extensibility. Document collaboration systems are fast improving, but they require initial intention; a Google Wave can effortlessly morph from conversation into document. The Google dev team also paid attention to making Google Wave play well with existing technologies. Developers and end users won’t have to shift over to Google Wave wholesale in order to start benefiting from it.
I expect to see a broad range of Google Wave applications not long after its official launch. Some of them will incorporate all or most of the platform’s capabilities. Others will be more lean and focused. There will even be Google Wave applications that provide interface polish and capabilities the Google Wave team hadn’t even considered. And that’s exactly why Google Wave will be a success.
The adulation of Google long ago reached fever pitch. I’d say it may have even peaked. But never one to undersell the wonders of technology, Wired this month published an article by Steven Levy which explains the auction mechanism behind Google’s phenomenally successful advertising platform. It is truly a wondrous vehicle for moving money into the Bank of Google.
But Google is also tremendously reliant on advertising. Imagine a world in which Google doesn’t dominate the online marketplace. Or, if you want to get really radical, imagine an alternate reality in which online advertising is no longer the only big game in town for companies seeking online exposure. There are already signs that while online advertising is a moneymaking machine for Google, despite the brilliant algorithms and economic efficiency, it has weaknesses.
A recent New York Times story highlights the nervousness some companies and investors feel about ad-supported revenue models. OpenTable recently went public. The company relies on referral payments from restaurants, rather than advertising. To pull in revenue, companies like Wetpaint and Pandora are trying a variety of methods beyond advertising.
I expect this trend to increase as the effectiveness of ads continues to diminish. No matter how effective the targeting and placement of an individual ad, the gestalt effect of being overwhelmed with text ads, banner ads, Flash ads, et. al. is that users become immune to them. The lowest allowable ROI is different for each advertiser, but if all boats are sinking, more than a few Google advertisers may jump.
This represents a threat to Google, and an opportunity for a new breed of intermediary that can match content providers with companies that are currently using web ads to market their products and services.
I asked a few friends, all of whom are very computer-literate. Some use Macs, some use Windows, and some use both plus Linux. Just to be clear, I was asking my friends about this not out of curiosity alone. I’ve been working with Bob Cagle of Open Field Software [now CEO of productOps], producers of Ella for Spam Control to help make his website more attractive to potential customers. I wanted to gain some insights into the state of the spam problem as of December, 2005. Here are some of their responses:
A friend who works for an organization that provides IT services to nonprofit organizations writes:
[Our] spam filtering is fairly bad. A lot of mail that should
be rejected at the server level is passed on to clients. Maybe it’s
just me since I get a lot of spam. I think they have gotten better in
the past two years but they’re still not doing a great job of handling
it.
Personally my email host is doing a pretty good job of filtering spam.
I get a few alarming false positives, but with diligent application of
the whitelist I’m able to avoid that. I still have to review my spam
folder on a daily basis to avoid problems and there is a ton of mail
in there.
I feel like the only mail service I have used that has really
excellent spam filtering is GMail. Unfortunately I cannot yet use
GMail with a personal domain name.
I believe there are excellent anti-spam tools out there, but they are
not well understood by smaller organizations. I’m consistently
horrified by what people put up with as part of their daily routine in
some organizations. They think manually deleting massive amounts of
email filth is just a normal part of their daily existence and there’s
nothing they can do about it. Yikes.
This friend [Spence, also now with productOps] runs an elaborate digital design office out of his home:
Spam? What Spam?
I have spamassasin set to “balanced” on the server, greylisting enabled and virus checking enabled(server side). Here at the farm, I use Thunderbird’s spam filter.
I see virtually no spam at all,… now does that mean people are failing to connect with me? Possibly, but if they’re really interested, they can call me from my number on the website…
So,… Yes, I see MUCH LESS spam nowadays than I did even a year ago,… it would be nice if [Ella, a client-side spam filter] ran on Thunderbird too, I’d disable the iron gate on my server and see whats really getting blocked… I guess if I had a ton of time and interest, I could parse the (currently 20 megabyte) spam text file that gets deleted every month,… but I gotta learn CSS this week.
This friend works for a large organization:
I have three accounts monitored daily. The work account uses something called ASG and it catches at least 80% on any given day and probably 95% over a month. Some people who shop online a lot at work have more, I have heard, but the tool seems pretty good. I don’t know what my home ISP’s account uses, but I never get much. Having a small local ISP may help. Microsoft Outlook applies a second layer spam filter that is hilarious. Monday it calls the TicketMaster email a spam, Tuesday it lets it through. Spam filter, Now with the Alzhiemer’s Algorithm. Gmail, which is a well known address is, as [he] said, amazing. I have had a Gmail account for a ~ year and a half, never gotten a spam. Lotsa creepy ads in the sidebar, never a spam.
My experience with GMail has been different. I only use my GMail account for things like online purchasing, subscribing to some newsletters, and so on. Basically it’s a throw-away account. But I get an awful lot of spam in that account – on the order of 30 or so a day, about 10 of which get through. The Mail.app software on my Mac receives about 10 spam messages per day for three POP addresses and usually correctly identifies all of them. Sometimes, perhaps three or four times per week, a spam message makes it through.
So spam is much less of a hassle for some of us than it used to be. Then again, the sample audience I’ve been discussing this with consists of people who use computers to make a living. They’re not exactly a representative sample of the overall computer-using public.
Still, it’s fairly obvious that the Gatesian dream of eradicating spam hasn’t yet come to pass. There are solutions. Some people doubtless use Gmail with excellent results. Others rely on server-side filtering tools like Spam Assassin and don’t worry too much about false positives (messages that are flagged as spam even when they’re legitimate messages). Open Field Software’s client-side spam filter for Outlook and Outlook Express makes a lot of Windows users happy, judging by the email Bob receives. I get great results with Apple Mail filtering.
As we turn the corner on 2005 and head into 2006, it seems there is no silver bullet, no system that has slain the spam menace. There are many different approaches to dealing with spam, ways to turn it into an only occasional nuisance. Curiously none of them are coming from Microsoft. To be fair, spam is a big problem. It’s likely too big for one entity to conquer, even if that entity is Microsoft. Still, the next time I hear someone from Microsoft make bold claims about eliminating spam, I won’t hold my breath.
Now that we’re approaching 2009, I don’t hear much about spam from most of my friends who work in the technology world. But I wonder if this is a representative sample, and whether there is still a lot of frustration out there about spam.
Google’s new web browser is built on WebKit, the open source underpinnings that hold up Safari. Right now Safari is the third most used browser (6%), behind IE (72%) and Firefox (20%). But if Chrome picks up any steam, those few web developers who still persist in not testing against WebKit when building their apps will be forced to do so. This will in turn make make it easier for Safari users, who still have to occasionally turn to other browsers for some stubborn web apps.
WebKit continues to advance, spurred on by the success of Safari on iPhone. Now Google rolls out a WebKit-based browser (ironically for Windows only at the moment). Browser War 2.0 is heating up.
