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Welcome Back Old Friend

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It’s been a long ten years, and oh how you have grown…

A few days ago, I welcomed back into my life the Mac. It was time for a laptop upgrade (what does it say when you have worn half the lettering off your keyboard?) and I was ready for a change. Like most, I wasn’t that excited about a laptop with Vista on it. And my existing laptop–an IBM ThinkPad which I absolutely admire–was starting to show it’s processor age as well as strange OS level behavior (like at times it wouldn’t be able to resolve DNS names which essentially made it useless online…after hours of trying to fix that, I finally just gave up and rebooted it when it occurred!). It was time to make a change for the better…for the betterment of my productivity. I bought a new PowerBook Pro.

Since I had it customized (maxed out the memory and added the larger/faster hard drive), I had to wait a few weeks for the computer to arrive. That wouldn’t have been so hard if it wasn’t for the fact that the software I ordered with the Mac (Parallels and MS Office) kept arriving at my door in separate boxes. Finally, I got an email saying that my new laptop had left the factory. Like a kid waiting for Christmas Eve, I kept checking back to the FedEx tracking website to keep tabs on my Mac. There is something perverse about watching the delivery progress of something built half way around the world:


Then, the same day I’m to leave for a business trip, I see that my Mac has been loaded on the truck. Oh, the pressure! I don’t have to leave for the airport until Noon, if the laptop arrives at 10am, do I have time to get it functional so I can take it on my trip? I sure was going to try!

So after about an hour and half (I had a half hour interuption to deal with a work issue), I had the Mac booted up for the first time, configured, installed my needed software, and connected to my mail account to start syncing my mail. I don’t think I would have been able to do that with a PC. In the end, I wanted time to get re-aquanted with my old friend (my first laptop was a PowerBook 510 which I bought 12 years ago and replaced 10 years ago). And what better time than on a 4 hour plane ride? So I ended up packing up both laptops and headed off to the airport. So, seven hours after it left FedEx’s Oakland facility, the MacBook Pro was back within sight of it’s arrival point.

I brought the ThinkPad along as a backup and to transfer over my work documents. That night at my hotel, I set up a peer to peer wireless network between the two machines, connected the Mac to my shared documents folder on the ThinkPad, and copied over all my files in an hour. I have tried many times to get a peer to peer wireless network to work between two Windows laptops and was never successful. Worked first time with the Mac.

I plan on documenting my experiences transition from the PC back to the Mac over the course of the next few weeks. And I’ll start off by stating a few of my first impressions:

  • Apple definitely has the entire user experience down! From unpacking the laptop from it’s briefcase like box, to the bare essentials presented to you when you remove the styrofoam. The laptop itself even came in a nice protective sleeve. It is quite an experience.
  • The small usability things that Apple focuses on do make a huge difference. Something as simple as a well designed power supply seems so trivial, until you have one. I was expecting to have to buy a second power supply–I have 5 for my ThinkPad and they are strategically placed around my entire house–but the design with the unfolding prongs which can be replaced with a longer power cable is ideal. I leave the power cable plugged in at my desk at home, and just take the brick and the unfolding prongs on the road.
  • The lack of the Intel Inside sticker was something that I completely overlook until I saw this article today.
  • The fact that the machine comes out of sleep mode in under 5 seconds is amazing. I was getting jealous stares from other windows users on the plane tonight as I opened the laptop and started typing within 5 seconds! It’s shocking how much time you loose waiting for the windows machines to come back to life. I does take longer for the Mac to go to sleep, about 20 seconds. I think that is due to the 4 Gigs of RAM in my machine that have to be written to disk (I used a 2 Gig model that did go to sleep faster). Regardless, this is still about half the time or less that it took my Windows XP machine to go to sleep…and about 20-30x faster than waking an XP machine up!
  • So far, I have not encountered any issues with any of my documents from the PC. Since I have office installed (needed that so I could connect to my companies exchange server for email), all the docs that I have needed opened right up. I’ll be watching this closely over the next few days.
  • It has taken a few extra moments here and there to figure out how to do something that was second nature to me on a PC…like right clicking on a mis-spelled word to fix it! But, after a few seconds of experimenting with the FN, CTRL, and OPTION keys on the keyboard, I figured out the right combination to replace the right click action on the PC. There are a few things that I already think will take me time to get used to, like the lack of a dedicated page up, page down, and backspace key.

All in all, I’m glad I spent the extra money and moved back to a Mac. Cool factor aside, I can tell already that I am able to be more productive with this machine. The learning curve isn’t that great. And I doubt my previous experience has much to do with that since a lot has changed in the past 10 years. I’ll continue documenting my experiences here on the blog over the next few weeks.

I used to roll my eyes back a bit when I heard other people say it, but it’s true.. the Mac OS just works. What a novel thought!

Stop Me – Something Cool from Microsoft?

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When you think about the “cool companies” in the technology space that are working on “cool things”, Microsoft is usually not the name that first jumps to everyone’s mind. And yet, yesterday I learned about something Microsoft is working on that made me say “Wow, that’s cool”.

My colleague William Henry mentioned Microsoft Surface in a recent blog posting; I hadn’t heard of Surface before and checked it out based on William’s recommendation. The concept behind it was quite impressive and I agree with William that this is the type of thing that I would expect ot see from Apple, not Microsoft.

Image an entire table top (about the size of a coffee table) that is a touch sensitive computer screen. What ever gets displayed on the screen can be interacted with in a iPhone sort of way. If there are photos on the screen, they look like a bunch of photos just tossed on a table. Grab one and it moves to the top of the stack; drag your fingers at opposite corners and resize the photo; grab a corner drag in a half circle to rotate the photo to show to your friend sitting on the oppose side of the table; touching the photo and flicking your finger tosses the photo aside.

Now take that same table and integrate it via bluetooth with you cell phone, iPod (of course on the Surface website they use that Microsoft music player…), camera, or other portable device of choice. Lay the device on the table, and the table now displays options for interfacing with the device and accessing data on the device. If it’s a camera, the photos display as in the example above. If its an iPod…er…music player, songs are displayed from your collection as well as from the phone. Dragging the songs from your collection to the music player transfers the songs.

The other example Microsoft gives is in a restaurant where your menu is displayed on the table. After you order via Surface, the table changes into some hip night club psychedelic screen savers. Or, as more apt to happen in our modern age, it might start displaying advertisements.

The concept of Surface is intriguing and has a lot of potential behind it, some that aren’t even imagined yet. It completely removes the interface device aspect of working with a computer. The interaction has the potential to be much more humanistic and nature. Has the potential. There are some aspects about Surface that are a bit ahead of their time. Like how quickly photos could be transfered from a phone to the Surface via wireless connection (it takes me many minutes to transfer my photos to my computer today via a high speed USB port). Not to mention the interoperability issues with all the different phone, camera manufacturers.

If Surface ever becomes a reality, the key to it’s success will depend on the development community. The iPhone has been out for just about two weeks now, and there are already a rush of new software applications coming out for it. Someone was smart enough to have a iPhone developer boot camp the weekend after the phone was released (sad thing is that it appears that Apple wasn’t smart enough to sponsor or get involved in it). This type of network around Surface would be sure to generate some really amazing things. Of course, when it is actually released.

To really appreciate Surface, you gotta check out the demo movies on the Surface website. Regardless of how real the technology is right now, the concept is killer. After the last movie, I got bit by the sci-fi aspect that Surface could have. How about placing a stack of documents on it, having them get absorbed into the surface and digitized. Then send those documents to another Surface user half way around the world only to have the stack emerge from that Surface so the receiver can pick them up and walk away. Might be a bit too Star Trek for now, but we’re getting there.

Side Box: Actually two really cool things from Microsoft. The other that has recently come out of Microsoft in conjunction with some research conducted at University of Washington is Photosynth. This is an amazing fast and unique way to interact with photos and view associated photos as they relate to the real world. You are given a 3-D view of something and can zoom in and out of photos of that thing taken from different angles. The killer aspect is that those photos could all be from a public archive like Flickr and taken by different people. The best way to understand Photosynth is to watch a killer demo of this from TED2007 and play around with a demo from Microsoft Labs.

Technology Protectionism

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Dictionary.com defines protectionism as such:

pro·tec·tion·ism [pruh–tek-shuh-niz-uhm] –noun

1. Economics. the theory, practice, or system of fostering or developing domestic industries by protecting them from foreign competition through duties or quotas imposed on importations.
…

This is the phrase that came to my mind a few days ago when I read the article about Microsoft’s Linux Support Subscriptions. Microsoft and Novel have teamed up and are brandishing the Microsoft patents at the technology community in an effort to stem the incoming tide of the open source community and fear of possible outgoing tide of revenue. Novel has struck a deal with Microsoft to have Microsoft bless the SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (essentially saying that SLES has no unlicensed Microsoft technology in it…any Microsoft-ish technology that is there is now licensed). Microsoft is also hinting (not so subtly) that they might sue anyone who may have unlicensed Microsoft IP (or something that might look like Microsoft IP) in their open source projects. This then causes a ripple effect to commercial providers who may include open source components in their products (like Apple’s OS X) and the business who use these open source and commercial products. (sniff, sniff…do I smell SCO in the air?)

As a business person, I’m a strong proponent of IP protection and patent law. But eventually in a complicated soup like the technology industry, where stuff has to work together and interoperate, there needs to be some consideration of the best interest of the customer. Throw the open source ingredient into the pot and you get technology vendors who don’t believe or understand the open source movement looking for ways to protect their interests (i.e., revenue streams).

This is nothing new in the wider economic sense. All you have to do is do a Google news search for protectionism. You get examples ranging from the US government’s protectionism of the US Ports to the EU’s protectionism of sportswear imported into the union. The underlying goal of each of these examples is to protect one group form changes that are occurring in the larger world. There are lots of social and economic reasons that can be given for why the protectionism is needed, but the real reason is anchored in the fact that it’s hard for people to change. And in today’s change accelerating world, it’s only getting more and more difficult.

The technology field has been going through it’s own core changes for the past five to six years. The over spending of the bubble years led to the cost cutting and maturity of the use of IT within business. Large IT “deals” started to decline; programmers who were lured into the cycle of self-destructive levels of work and productivity for the false hopes of quick wealth started to turn their energies to the altruistic endeavor of open source development; businesses started to see real value and security in the open source projects.

A technology company is no different than a person…change is hard. Many companies fail because they either don’t change when they need to or early enough, or they don’t change fast enough. Then look at the biggest, they can delay the change through the use of their legal armies. Figure out a way to use the legal system against those that are causing the change. Boost your own declining revenue streams by instilling fear in your customers (all customers love vendors for doing that…ever hear of a license audit?). The move by Microsoft and Novell is nothing more than technology protectionism.

So Microsoft is scared. Windows Vista hasn’t been going as smoothly as they need it to. All of the cool features it was supposed to have have almost all disappeared due to technical difficulties of implementing them in the hodgepodge of legacy code. Apple’s computer and OS popularity has grown. Deja vu with the Firefox browser’s popularity continuing to grow. Another 800 pound gorilla by the name of Google has been invading it’s part of the jungle for a while now. How is the company going to keep or grown it’s 28% profit margin in order to keep another 800 pound gorilla (the street) happy? Release the IP lawyers.

An so business start to protect their own self interests and pay into the protectionism scheme. Of course these business need to save face themselves, so they change the name of the scheme 180 degrees from protectionism to interoperability. Wouldn’t you do the same if you had a well funded ($34B) army of lawyers marching toward you?

I just don’t buy this spin that this deal is about making Linux and Windows more interoperable. If that was the case, there are open standards that Linux has supported from it’s inception that Microsoft could start to fully support (interoperability is about more than just two companies products). This is all about Microsoft protectionism. I think the pressure that Microsoft is feeling is greater than what the general press is talking about (personal opinion). Rather than trying to inovate their way out problems they face with the changing technology marketplace, they are taking the protectionism route. Beat up on the marketplace by threatening to sue unless they buy a Linux License from Microsoft.

I’m calling shenanigans on this use of the De Tocqueville model.