What Apple Knows That Facebook Doesn’t.

Business week has an interesting article on the economics of platforms. Interesting, but flawed. They compare two platforms (Facebook, and Apple’s mobile platform). The argument goes roughly as follows: Apple is using it’s platform to create a new market by being open and Facebook is using traditional methods of using the market as a control point. Apple is creating an open market and Facebook is making an open market more closed. The author even goes as far as to associate the keywords good and evil here.

The article is flawed because in fact Apple is not creating an open market. They have been removing applications that don’t fit their business model (e.g. anything VOIP related) and are still keeping people from writing about the APIs because NDA has not been lifted yet. Apple is acting as a dictator here. That it is a mostly benevolent one doesn’t matter. It doesn’t sound very open to me in any case. Or very new.

Sure, their platform is pretty nice and their online shop pretty usable. That’s definitely disruptive to the mobile industry, which is not used to good quality platforms and well designed use-cases such as online shops for applications. However, there’s a pretty big market for mobile applications and most people writing for the iphone don’t do so exclusively and instead target multiple mobile platforms. You can download several VOIP applications for S60 or mobile windows and other platforms, as well as numerous games, productivity apps, etc. Then there is J2ME of course with a few billion phones in the market right now. You might say it is crappy but it has a huge reach. Incidentally, Apple also blocks components from their shop that would enable people to run J2ME applications since an open source Java platform has in fact been ported long before Apple even ‘opened’ up their platform. That’s right, a good old case of reverse engineering. Apple’s platform is quite unique in the sense that people were developing for it long before Apple decided to hand out developer kits.

Facebook indeed is also not very open but they were first to a market that they created, which is pretty big by now. As a viral way of spreading new services to users it is pretty much unrivaled so far. It is Google that has created a competition for more openness with their Open Social platform, which is in many ways similar but has open specifications and may be implemented freely by other social networks. Both Google and Facebook have a very similar centralized identity model that is designed to lock users into their mutual platforms (Google Friends Connect & Facebook Connect). Google is maybe being somewhat more smart about it but they are after the same things here: making sure trafic flows through their services so that they can sell ads.

So, Facebook’s model is advertisement driven and Apple’s business is operator driven. Apple makes most of their money from deals with operators who subsidize iphones and give Apple a share of the subscription revenue. That’s brilliant business and Apple protects it by removing any application from their shop that has conflicting interests with this revenue stream.

However, the key point of the article that the platform serves as a market creation tool is interesting. Apple managed to create an impressive amount of revenue (relative to their tiny market share of the overall mobile market) and Facebook has managed to create a huge market for Facebook applications. Both are being challenged by competitors who have no choice to be more open.

Interestingly, Google is competing on both fronts and can be seen as the primary threat to both Apple and Facebook’s platforms. Google could end up opening up the mobile market for real because it is not protecting any financial interests there but instead are trying to spawn a mobile internet market. Android is designed from the ground up to do just that. It needs to be good enough for developers, users and operators and Google has worked hard to balance interests enough so as to not alienate any of these.

All three are fighting for the favours of developers. Developers, developers, developers! (throws chair across the room & jumps like a monkey). That too is not new although Microsoft seems to have forgotten about them lately.

Last weekend I ordered X-plane version 9. I bought version 8 early 2006 and since then I haven’t looked back. Sure, MS Flight Simulator looks great but the flying sucks. Laminar consistently delivers with new features and bug fixes. Version 8 got its last major update (8.64) about half a year ago and since then they have been beta testing version 9. While I could have bought it earlier, I waited until they released it.

A few days ago the package with 6 double layer DVDs was delivered. Installation was not so smooth as I complained about here. But I managed to sort it out and have a working X-plane 9 now. I installed the European and US scenery. The 6 DVDs of world wide scenery is really nice and detailed but consists only of automatically computed landscapes from various databases. Europe now also includes the part I live in (Finland) which was too far north for version 8. However, I prefer to fly southern Europe, where the landscape is a bit more varied.

There are cities, forests, roads, airports, coastlines, etc. where they should be (and in surprising amount of detail) but the simulator lacks custom content like the massive amount of content that comes with Microsoft Flight simulator. To fix that, I installed the excellent Corsica scenery, which is one of the many third party scenery packages available and one of the first ones to be upgraded for version 9. This adds a nice level of realism. Flying in from Nice (another scenery package, warning horrible HTML layout) with the new Cirrus jet was pretty cool and surprisingly easy given that the Cirrus was new to me. According to the product announcement, this plane was actually created by Cirrus themselves and presumably tuned to their specifications and needs. Also, the 3D cockpit is pretty cool and much more user friendly on a PC than the average very complicated panel coming with a X-plane jet.

Technically, version 9 includes lots of improvements to the scenery rendering and simulation. The changes are outlined in great detail in the product announcement page by Laminar owner and founder, Austin Meyer. I have little to add here except to say that it mostly works and delivers as advertised. Don’t expect to max out any of the rendering settings, they have been designed such that this is not possible with any hardware available now. In fact they just raised the bar for future hardware. If you can get your hands on a NVIdia with a few GB of video ram, X-plane will probably find a use for every byte of it. The good news is that it still looks pretty good with object detail not set to “TOTALLY INSANE” (Austin Meyer loves his capitals). In case you are wondering, I have a three year old AMD 4400+ with 2GB and a NVidia 7800 GT. Anything similar or better will run X-plane just fine.

Part of the attraction of X-plane is that it is a niche product build by some dedicated people who know what they are doing and are totally focused on doing it. Considering that they have a very small programmer team and not much other people working for them, it is pretty amazing what they manage to deliver. They have to be smart and efficient about a lot of things. So their UI is totally custom and a bit wacky. But it works. The included planes are so so but there are plenty of free ones available to fix that (and some better ones for a small fee). With all these nice freeware planes out there (e.g. on x-plane.org), you have to wonder why the selection bundled with X-plane is so weak. Most of the planes don’t have 3D cockpits and quite a few even lack textures.

However, at the core of X-plane is an excellent and extremely detailed simulation of just about anything that flies and everything that makes it fly. I mean, they are worrying about the accuracy of the voltage in electrical systems here and how that behaves under different failure scenarios. The attention to detail is just amazing. This is a simulator made by absolute flight sim geeks for flight sim geeks. It has lots of rough edges but it does its core job extremely well and is arguably the best all round flight simulator available today.

There is a nice article on Ars discussing Microsoft’s business practices regarding windows and how they appear to be not quite working lately. It used to be that your PC came with windows whereas nowadays you have to select from a around five different versions and Microsoft is rumored to go to an even more modular and subscription based model. The general idea is to be able to squeeze out as much revenue out of the market as possible. On paper it sounds good (for MS that is).

Rather than buying an overpriced OS with everything and the kitchen sink you buy what you need. There’s a huge differences between what businesses and some individuals are willing to spend and the typical home user that just wants a browser + skype + the sims. Typically the latter group ends up buying the cheapo version and the former group ends up buying the everything and the kitchen sink version. The problem is that there is unmonetized value in the latter in the sense that some owners of the  cheapo versions might be interested in getting access to some of those features in the expensive version but not in all of them.

Now to the obvious problem with the discussed solution. By selling cheapo versions with most of the value removed and factored out into separate chunks you have to pay for, you dilute the overall value of the OS. So instead of buying an OS that can do X, Y, and Z out of the box you are buying an OS that can’t do X, Y, and Z out of the box. Marketing an OS that can’t do stuff is a lot harder than trying to sell stuff that can do things.  Worse they are opening the market to third parties that might do something similar to X, Y, and Z for a better price, or in some cases for free (beer & speech). Or even worse to companies selling an alternative OS with X, Y, and Z.

That in a nutshell is what is discussed in the Ars article and why Apple Mac OS X marketshare is approaching double digit percentages. I’ve been giving it some serious thought lately and I’m also noticing the spike in Safari users in my web site statistics.

Anyway, the reason for this write up is that the article overlooks an important argument here that I believe is relevant for more markets than just operating systems. In general, the tie between OS and features such as photo galleries, online backups, or TV UIs is artificial. Microsoft only adds features like this to make the overall OS more valuable. That is, they are looking to improve the value of the OS, not the photo gallery. However, ongoing and inevitable commoditization of software actually shifts value to new features. Especially when bundled with online subscriptions, things like online photo galleries can be quite good business. For example, Flickr has many paying subscribers.

Naturally MS is interested in markets like this (which is why they are interested in Yahoo). However, the tie-in to the OS constrains the market. Why would you not want to sell these services to Apple users? Why would you not want to sell this service to Sony Playstation owners? Why would you want to want to artificially limit who can access your service just to boost sales of your OS? As long as you were trying to artificially (and apparently for MS illegally) boost value of your core OS, bundling was a valid strategy. However, as soon as your value shifts, that becomes a brake on market growth. The OS market has commoditized to the point where you can get things like Ubuntu for free, which for the low end market is about as good as what you get with the cheapo version of Vista (see my various reviews of Ubuntu for why I’m not ready to claim better yet).

So the difference between MS and Google who is eating their lunch in the services arena is that the latter is not handicapped by 20 years of Windows legacy and can freely innovate and grow marketshare without having to worry about maintaining a revenue stream from legacy software. Google doesn’t have to sell OS licenses and so they give away software on all platforms to draw more users to their services which is where they make their money.

Naturally, Google has a lot of software engineers that are working round the clock to create more value for them. Where possible Google actively collaborates with the open source community because they know that while they won’t make any money from commodities like browsers, file systems and other important software components, they do depend on those things working as good as possible and keep evolving in the right direction. Few people appreciate this but this and not ads is why Google sponsors Firefox. It’s a brilliant strategy and it is forcing their main competitor to keep investing in internet explorer rather than being able to shift resources to directly competing with Google. 50 million $ is pocket money if it is making your main competitor crap their pants and waste resources on keeping up with you in a market where you are not even trying to make money.

You might have noticed that I have carefully avoided discussing Google and Microsoft’s mobile service strategies and also noticed that yours truly is working for Nokia. Well, my readers ought to be smart enough to figure out what I’m trying to say here aren’t you ?

It seems JanRain is finally readying the final version of OpenID 2.0. There’s a great overview of some concerns that I mostly share on readwriteweb.com. Together with another recent standard (OAuth), OpenID 2.0 could be a huge step forward for web security and privacy.

Lets start with what OpenID is about and why, generally, it is a good idea. The situation right now on the web is that:

• Pretty much every web site has its own identity solution. This means that users have to keep track of dozens of accounts. Generally users have only one or two email addresses so in practice that means most these accounts are actually tied to 1 email account. Imagine someone steals your gmail password and starts scanning your mail for all those nice account activation mails you’ve been getting for years. Hint: “mail me my password”, “reset my password”. In short, the current situation has a lot of security risks. It’s basically all the downsides of a centralized identity solution without any of the advantages. There are many valid concerns about using OpenID related to e.g. phishing. However, what most people overlook is that the current situation is much worse and also that many OpenID providers actually address the concerns by implementing various technical solutions and security practices. For example myopenid.com and verisign employ very sophisticated technologies that you won’t find on many websites where you would happily provide your credit card number. There is no technical reason whatsoever why openid providers can’t use the same or better authentication mechanisms that you probably use with your bank already.
• While technically some websites could work together on identity, very few do and the ones that do tend to have very strong business ties (e.g. banks, local governments, etc. This means that in most cases, reusable identity is only usable on a handful of partner sites. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are great examples. They each have partner programs that allows externals to authenticate people with them. Only problem: almost nobody seems to do that. So reality check: OpenID is the only widespread single sign on solution on the web. There is nothing else. All the other stuff is hopelessly locked into commercial verticals. Microsoft has been trying for years to get their password solution to do what OpenID is doing today. They failed miserably so far.
• Web sites are increasingly dependent on each other. Mashups started as an informal thing where site A used an API from site B and did something nice with it. Now these interactions are getting much more complex. The amount of sites involved in typical mashups is increasing and the amount of privacy sensitive data flying around in these mashups is also increasing. A very negative pattern that I’ve seen on several sites is the “please provide your gmail/hotmail/yahoo user password and we’ll import your friends” type feature. Do you really want to share your years of private email conversations with a startup run in a garage in California? Of course not! This is not a solution but a cheap hack. The reality is that something like OpenID + OAuth is really needed because right now many users are putting themselves in danger by happily providing their username and passwords.
• Social networks like Facebook authenticate people for the many little apps that plug into them. So far Facebook is the most successful here. Facebook provides a nice glimpse of what OpenID makes possible on a much larger scale but it is still a centralized vertical. I am on Facebook and generally like what I see there but I’m not really comfortable with the notion that they are the web from now on (which seems to be implied in their centralized business model). Recent scares with their overly aggressive advertisement schemes shows that they can’t really be trusted.

OpenID is not a complete solution for the above problems and it is important to realize that is by design: it tries to solve only one problem and tries to solve it well. But generally it is a vast improvement over what is used today. Additionally, it can be complemented with protocols like OAuth which are about delegating permissions from one site to another on your behalf. OpenID and OAuth are very well integrated with the web architecture in the sense that they are not monolithic identity solutions but modular solutions designed to be combined with other modular solutions. This modular nature is essential because it allows for very diverse combinations of technology. This in turn allows different sites to implement the security they need but in a compatible way. For example, for some sites allowing any OpenID provider would be a bad idea. So, implement whitelisting and work with a set of OpenID providers you trust (e.g. Verisign).

OpenID and OAuth provide a very decent base level of protection that is not available from any other widely used technology currently. The closest thing to it is the Liberty Alliance/SAML/Microsoft family of identity products. These are designed for and applied exclusively in enterprise security products. You find them in banks and financial institutions; travel agencies, etc. These are also used on the web but invariably only to build verticals. Both Google and Microsoft use technologies like this to power their identity solutions. In fact, many OpenID identity providers also use these technolgies. For example, Microsoft is rumoured to OpenID enable their solution and several members of the Liberty Alliance (e.g. Sun) have been experimenting with OpenID as well. They are not mutually exclusive technologies.

It gets better though. Many OpenID providers are employing really advanced anti phishing technologies. Currently you and your cryptographically weak password are just sitting ducks for Russian/Nigerian/Whatever scammers. Even if you think your password is good, it probably isn’t. OpenID doesn’t specify how to authenticate. Consequently, OpenID providers are competing on usability and anti phishing features. For example, Verisign and myopenid.com employ techniques that makes them vastly more secure than most websites out there, including some where you make financial transactions. There has been a lot of criticism on openid and this has been picked up by those that implement it.

So now on to OpenID 2.0. This version is quite important because it is the result of many companies discussing what should be in there for a very long time. In some respects there are a few regrettable compromises and maybe not all of the spec is that good of an idea (e.g. .name support). But generally it is a vast improvement over OpenID 1.1 which is what is in use currently and which is technically flawed in several ways that 2.0 fixes. The reason 2.0 is important is because many companies have been holding off OpenID support until it was ready.

The hope/expectation is that those companies will start enabling OpenID logins for their sites over the next few months. The concern expressed here is that this may not actually happen and that in fact OpenID hype seems past its glory already. Looking at how few sites I can actually sign into with my OpenID today, I’d have to agree. As of yet, no major website has adopted OpenID. Sure there are plenty of identity providers that support OpenID but very few relying parties that accept identities from those providers. Most of the OpenID sites out there are simple blogs, startups web 2.0 type stuff, etc. The problem seems to be that everybody is waiting for everybody else and also that everybody is afraid of giving up control over their little clusters of users.

So ironically, even though there are many millions of openids out there, most of their owners don’t use them (or even are aware of having one). Pretty soon openid will be the authentication system with the most users on this planet (if not already) and people don’t even know about it. Even the largest web sites have no more than something like a hundred million users (which is a lot). Several of those sites are already openid identity providers (e.g. AOL).

The reason I hope OpenID does get some adoption is because if it isn’t it will take a very long term for something similar to emerge. This means that the current very undesirable situation is prolonged for a very long time. In my view a vast improvement is needed over the current situation and besides OpenID, there seems to be very little in terms of solutions that can realistically be used today.

The reason I am posting this is because over the past few months me and my colleagues have been struggling with how to do security in decentralized smart spaces. If you check my publications web site, you will see several recent workshop papers that provide a high level overview of what we are building. Most of these papers are pretty quiet on security so far even though obviously security and privacy is a huge concern in a world where user devices use each others services and mash them up with commercial services in both the local network and internet. Well, the solution we are applying in our research platform is a mix of OpenID, OAuth and some rather cool add-ons that we have invented to those. Unfortunately I can’t detail too much about our solutions yet except that I am very excited about them. Over the next year, we should be able to push out more information into the public.

I just installed Flock – The Social Web Browser. Right now I’m trying out the blog editor included with it to write this little review. To cut the review short, I’m planning uninstalling it after publishing this post.

Lets just start by saying that this feels like a nice bunch of concepts and potentially useful Firefox extensions but not as a drop in Firefox replacement. Besides, the default theme feels rather amateurish and I already miss my dozen Firefox extensions. And while I am pleased that it supports Facebook, I find the lack of support for much else a bit disappointing. For example, I’m also on Linked in; phib; claimid. I have several openid logins; I use several Google services, including reader, gmail and calendar. All of these are unsupported by the self proclaimed social web browser. Hell, it doesn’t even integrate webmail from e.g. google, yahoo or microsoft (I have accounts with all three). You can find an overview of social networking sites I use on my blog: http://blog.jillesvangurp.com/my-other-sites/. Most of the stuff there is unsupported by Flock.

An exception seems del.icio.us. However, the extension functionality I get in Firefox is much better than the bundled del.icio.us support in Flock which is rather useless. Similarly, the blog editor is nice but nothing I can’t get using several Firefox extensions. I suppose the facebook sidebar is nice, but again there is also a firefox extension for that.

A rather novel feature seems to be the media bar. However, in its current incarnation it is limited to harvesting media from just a handful of popular sites like facebook (again), youtube and flickr. That’s nice but not all that useful to me.

So overall I have a bit mixed feelings. On one hand, this feels like a polished product, on the other hand there’s not much that I can’t get installing a few Firefox extensions. With Firefox 3 around the corner, I’m not planning to use Flock 1.0 based on the old Firefox without most of the extensions I can’t do without. Nevertheless, there’s some good ideas that I would like to see adopted in the form of Firefox extensions.

Tags: flock, firefox, social networking, review

• VIDEO: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates
  If you are remotely interested in computers, watch this. Take the time to watch all of it.
  (tags: apple microsoft billgates stevejobs)

• DeWitt Clinton » Blog Archive » What a day!
  what a day indeed
  (tags: openid microsoft cardspace apple drm fairplay)

• ongoing · SOA and WCF
  Very interesting blogpost on how the WS-* stack is breaking down with some nice pointers to cricism by several high level peopl
  (tags: webservice web20 rest)
• Eleven Emerging Ideas for SOA Architects in 2007
  And another interesting article on SOA’s
  (tags: webservices soa web2.0)

It’s only two days ago that I bought myself a Lacie Porsche 0.5 TB usb drive. Yesterday evening, after a reboot caused by an apple security update weird shit started to happen. Basically windows informed me that “you have 3 days to activate windows”. WTF! So I dutifully click the activate now only to watch a product key being generated and the dialog closing itself, rather than letting me review the screen and opting for a internet or telephone based activation. After that it informed me that I had three more days to activate. Very weird and disturbing news! A few reboots and BSODs later (which had now also started to appear on pretty much every reboot), I took a deep breath and decided that the machine was foobarred and I needed to reinstall windows. I suspect the root cause of my problems was a reset a while back which resulted in a corrupt registry and repeated attempts by windows to repair it before booting normally. I thought the problem was fixed but apparently the damage was more extensive than I originally thought.

Considering I had a few more days to reactivat, which despite my attempts I could not do, I decided to back up everything I could think off. I.e. I have about 100 GB left on the external drive, bought it just in time . Copying that amount takes shitloads of time. Basically most of the backup ran overnight with the assistence of the cygwin port of rsync. After re-installing windows earlier this evening (which activated fine, to my surprise), I got to work reinstalling everything (I have a few dozen applications I just need to have) and moving back all my data. Some interesting things:

• Luckily I thought of backing up my c:\drivers dir in which I stored various system level drivers for my motherboard and other stuff that I downloaded when I installed the machine a year ago. This included the essential driver for the lan, without which I would have had no network after the install and no way to get the driver on the machine (or to activate it). Pfew.
• I reapplied the itunes migrate library procedure I described last year (and which still gets me loads of hits on the blog). It still works and my library, including playlists, ratings and playcounts imported fine in my new itunes install. Would be nice if Apple was a bit more supportive of recovering your stuff in a new install.
• After installing firefox 2, I copied back my old profile folder and firefox launched as if nothing had happened. Bookmarks, cookies, passwords, extensions all there . Since I practically live in this thing, that pleased me a lot.
• Then I reinstalled gaim and copied back the .gaim directory to my user directory. Launched it and it just worked. Great!
• Same with jedit.
• Then I installed steam, logged in and ran the restore back up tool that was created along with the 13GB backup. Seems to work fine and I’m glad that I don’t have to wait a few weeks for the download to finnish. Ok the restore was not fast either but it got the job done.

Lesson learned: backups are important. I had the opportunity to create them when it turned out I needed them. But I should have been backing up more regularly. A more catostrophic event would have caused me dataloss and much more annoyance.

So a big thank you to Bill Gates et al. for wasting my precious spare times with their rude and offensive activation crap. Fucking assholes! I’m a paying customer and very pissed. I will remember this waste of my time and genuine disregard for my rights when making any future microsoft purchasing decisions. And yes, that probably means lost revenue for you guys in Redmond. I’ve adopted opensource for most of my desktop apps by now. There’s only two reasons for me to boot windows on my PC: games and photoshop. I understand the latter is now supported by wine and I’m much less active with gaming than I used to be. Everything else I use either runs on linux or has great alternatives. But for the moment, I’ll keep using windows because I’m lazy.

• Windows Administration: Inside the Windows Vista Kernel: Part 1 — TechNet Magazine, February 2007
  Interesting info on some kernel level improvements. Most of it sounds like I could use it on my XP laptop.
  (tags: vista kernel sysinternals)

It’s now a few days after my previous post on the vista delay. The rumour machine on the Vista delays is now rolling. A few days ago this wild claim about 60% of vista being in need of a rewrite started circulating. Inacurate of course but it woke up some people. Now this blogpost on a blog about Microsoft (fequented by many of their employees) made it to slashdot. Regardless of the accuracy of any statements in that post, this is a PR disaster. Lots of people (the entire IT industry, stockholders) read slashdot.

There’s lots of interesting details in the comments on that post that suggest that MS has at least these problems:

• Management is clueless and generally out of touch with development progress. Claims on release dates are totally disconnected from software development planning. Release dates announced in press releases are wishful thinking at best. This is one of the reasons the date slips so often.
• Middle management is worse. Either they have failed to communicate down when to release or up when their people tell them release is actually impossible. Either way, they have failed doing what middle management is supposed to do: implement corporate strategy and communicate up when that strategy is not working as expected.
• Software engineers within MS are extremely frustrated with this. Enough to voice their opinions on a public blog. A lot needs to happen before I start criticizing my employer in public. I know where the money comes from. Really, I’d probably leave long before it would get to this point. So, I interpret this as MS having a few extremely frustrated employees that might very well represent a large silently disgruntled majority. Steve Ballmer seems to be rather impopular in his own company right now (never mind his external image).
• The best MS software engineers are leaving MS and are replaced with being people of lesser quality because MS now has to compete in the job market. I remember a few years ago that MS could cherry pick from the job market. Now the cherries are leaving. Really, if your best people are leaving and you have billions in cash to fix whatever problem is causing them to leave, you are doing something wrong (like not fixing the problem).
• Microsoft employees are spilling stock influencing information on public blogs. Opennes is one thing but this is an out of control situation. Regardless of whether they are right, these people are doing a lot of damage.

It’s probably not as bad as the comments suggest but bad enough for MS, if only for all the negative PR. Anyway, I might be revisiting the predictions I made in my previous post. I have a feeling some of them might prove to be correct in a few months already. Very amusing

Ouch, Forbes unleashes some criticism on Microsoft. Well deserved IMHO. I don’t see the result of six years of development by thousands of software engineers reflected in the currently marketed featureset.

A few small predictions:

• Vista and office 2007 (or whatever it is called) are going to go into history as the two releases that reversed the growth trend in microsoft marketshare. I expect both products to do worse than their predecessors. First of all, businesses won’t touch either until forced by licensing conditions. Second of all, some businesses might opt for alternatives this time. Particularly Novell seems to be well positioned this time. Also Google will push some lightweight services into the market before the Vista release that are remarkably well suited for adoption in small businesses.
• I expect this to have consequences for the current leadership. Specifically, I expect Steve & Bill to be pushed to the side lines after this.
• I expect this to be the last major revision of windows this decade. They may think they are going to do another release before 2010 but reality will catch up with them. In fact, I expect that Vista will be the last time they can justify the insane R&D budget to the shareholders. Six years of development resulting in replacement purchases only is going to be a tough sell to shareholders.
• Clearly after six years of development, Microsoft stands empty handed. The shares are due for a downward correction. Things are not going well for Microsoft and they are underperforming.
• This is not the last delay for Vista. They are hoping it will be ready but their development process is the reason it is being delayed so they can’t actually know right now that they will have a release in 365 days. My guess is that they won’t.
• Customer feedback on the yet to be announced additional beta will cause them to drop more features from Vista. Particularly the userinterface is going to get some heavy criticism (performance, general uglyness) and negative publicity. Something will need to be done about it. After dropping the features, they will move to release candidate status which may last quite a bit longer than they are now planning for.

Over the years I’ve encountered, and resolved many annoying software issues with Microsoft. This one surely counts as one of the more annoying ones.

The problem is that my previous PC had a beautiful suspend to ram feature, which basically means that whenever you put the machine in stand by mode the system turns of almost completely except for a bit of power to keep the memory going. The technical term for this is ACPI S3 mode. My new PC however, suspends using ACPI S1 mode which means it goes stand by with the harddisk still spinning and the fans still blowing, not my idea of stand by. Naturally this was something I wanted fixed really badly. So I enabled the feature in the bios, set all the power options in windows as they should be and …. no success.

My mistake was to assume that this is a hardware/bios problem. So I kept checking the asrock site for bios updates and browsed through their FAQ, double checked bios settings drivers, etc.. Since this isn’t a problem with their hardware, bios or drivers after all, no solution was found this way. Next stop was google, but I still had the asrock keyword as part of the query so nothing useful came out of that. Then I just gave up and for the past few months I’ve been shutting down the pc completely.

This morning I googled for “force s3 standby” and ended up on this site. I learned a things here:

• My system supporst S3 just fine, I checked using this sleeper tool.
• Users with completely different hardware are experiencing the exact same issue (and are equally frustrated).
• There’s a registry hack you can do but it doesn’t do much good on its own.
• There’s lots of useless advice on enabling/disabling wake up from standby options on usb devices (my mouse and keyboard are ps/2!).
• There’s a tool called dumppo which supposedly does something useful.

Ok, the next google query concerned dumppo, which got me here. It appears that this is a Microsoft provided (but totally undocumented) utility that you can use to check and change the ACPI settings. Sure enough my “Min sleep state” was set to S1. The reason? I installed windows XP before I enabled suspend to ram in the bios. Doh! Apparently the ACPI settings are determined forever during setup and no functionality to fix this is included with the OS. After the installation you’re screwed no matter what you toggle in any control panel, bios or other screen. Windows XP just keeps insisting that S1 is the way to do standby.

Dumppo (download from microsoft) apparently is the only way out (short of reinstalling XP). A simple “dumppo.exe admin minsleep=s3″ on the command line fixes the problem. Of course this wisdom is not officially documented anywhere on the Microsoft site. There must be millions of users out there that are unable to suspend to ram because of this. Basically all computers sold in the past few years are technically capable of suspend to ram. Many of them have the option disabled in the bios by default.

Anyway, problem solved . Just one of these issues ordinary users will never ever figure out. I must have solved hundreds of these issues over the years.

From a very interesting article by Martin Fowler:

I’ve had the opportunity to spend a little time with Intentional Software and several of my colleagues at ThoughtWorks have worked closely with Intentional over the last year or so. As a result I’ve had the opportunity to peek behind the Intentional curtain – although I’m restricted in how much I can say about what I saw there. Fortunately they intend to start opening up about their work over the next year or so.

Whoohoo! I’ve been following the developments around this company for a few years now. Charles Simonyi is mostly known for being one of the influential architects at Microsoft responsible for creating and popularizing such things as WYSIWYG editing, Excell and the Hungarian notation. Simply put, the guy is brilliant. A brilliant guy with a vision: intentional programming/software. Working for Microsoft from the beginning, he is one of their richer Microsoft millionnaires/billionaires ™. A few years ago he quit his job at Microsoft to start his own company called Intentional Software. Before that he published a few articles on intentional programming which, frankly, include some ideas that are way beyond the imagination of the average C/C++/Java/C#/whatever programmer. While these guys fight over such petty things as syntax, he made it a first class entity in his programming environment. Intentional programming is all about translating intentions to working code. If doing C++ style templates is your intention, define them in the core constructs provided by the intentional programming environment and write them.
But what am I doing, trying to summarize Martin Fowler’s excellent article into one paragraph. Go read his article. It will take you some time but it will be time well spent.

I’ve been a long time fan of Martin Fowler. I should check his site more often.

The coming paradigm shift in TV broadcasting
The coming paradigm shift in TV broadcasting

This article comments on Apple’s latest move to offer video content through their iTunes and how this is a logical and inevitable move with some far ranging effects.

In this blog post I abstract from this and apply it to the whole telecommunications, media and IT industry. Some things are about to change in this economically important sector.

It’s understandable they put up a fight. The telecommunications sector is built on the notion that exchanging information (in any form) costs money. The media industry is built on the notion that media needs to be distributed (physically) and that they can charge dollars for that. And finally the IT industry is used to steady income from license fees from software. All these industries may lose a lot of revenue if the rules are changed.

And that’s what’s going on. Apple just changed the rules for the Media industry. This will have a snowball effect. Right now if you want to watch something (movie, the news, tv series, documentary) you need to turn to one of the industry controlled and closely guarded media: cinema, a tv channel, a dvd, etc. Each of these things is a source of revenue to the industry and you pay directly or indirectly for it in all sorts of ways. There’s nothing against that in principle they offer access to scarce resources and people pay a market price for access.

Their problem is that Apple just made these resources a lot less scarce. Distribution through the internet of content is cheap and will become even cheaper. Technology will gradually erode the cost to close to 0$. There’s plenty of bandwidth available and an increasing amount of people has what I call a critical amount of bandwith: enough bandwidth to make streaming high definition audio and video feasible & desirable.

Apple is tapping into this by letting their users access content over the internet through their iTunes store and by providing the necessary hardware and software to them. That’s a small change and not at all revolutionary. But it will teach people an important lesson: hey I can watch desperate housewives (one of the offerings used to commercialize the new itunes ability) whenever I want, wherever I want and I don’t need to buy the dvd, I don’t need to turn on the tv on a specific time and I don’t need to watch the commercial blocks. The next steps are obvious and imminent: why store the desperate housewives episode on an ipod when you can just stream it? Mobile networks will soon mature enough to reach the same critical bandwidth as home users are currently enjoying on their home networks.

That means that anytime, anywhere you can start streaming anything to your mobile phone, your pda, your ipod, your tv that anyone bothers to put online. Inevitably this will replace all existing forms of content distributions. Why tune to a channel to view some program when you can just start streaming the program whenever you want, skip to any part you want and pause it whenever you want, etc?

Apple just gave the industry a little reality check, just like they did when they kick started online music sales a few years ago: if the industry doesn’t move, somebody else will. Over the next few months, one after the other media company will either join apple or similar iniatives from e.g. microsoft. Once this happens the pressure will be on and the market will do its work. Better content leads to more online revenue, at the cost of traditional revenue. The huge gap between cost of content production and content distribution and the market price (which is obscene) will start to come under pressure as well. At some point in the near future the market model will change from paid downloads to paid streams (subscription, per view, etc).

This will put an end to tv networks as we know them. They are content distributers and we don’t need them anymore.

The same is going on in the telecommunications sector where revenue used to come from telephony and related services. IP telephony has eliminated the need for paid telephone services since it works just fine over a modest internet connection. If you have umts phone, it is technically possible to use the internet for IP telephony so why exactly are we paying 30 cents per minute for a local phone call? Some mobile networks already offer fixed price bandwidth (expensive though). The operators on these networks get their revenue from a number of services, all of which with the exception of the network connection are technically possible with already available software packages that use the connection. People think it’s normal to pay 25 cent for the delivery of a 160 character message to a cell phone (SMS). If those two cellphones are umts phones and run msn, icq, aim, jabber or any of the other IM network clients you can send unlimited messages to anyone freely. Surprisingly few people have figured this out but they will. These changes are already happening and will kill much of the telecom industry as we know it. A mobile phone is nothing else than a general purpose computer with a umts modem or similar wireless connection and some general purpose software. The form factor is irrelevant.

Which brings us to the software industry because nothing of the above requires software with a pricetag greater than 0$. All of the services mentioned above can be implemented using existing, open source software. In fact oss developers have already done most of the work and created OSS media centers, video & audio codecs, communication software, real time operating systems and any other kind of software component you could possibly need to implement any of the services mentioned in this document. It’s just a matter of putting together the components.

So what remains is bandwidth, hardware and intellectual property. Any revenue not coming directly from these, will vaporize in the next few decades. The remaining revenue will still be sizable but probably less than the industry is used today. 50$ for a dvd now is considered normal today. I’d be surprised and disappointed if I was unable to watch star wars III on my mobile phone anywhere, anytime for over 5$ in about ten years. And no way am I going to watch that shit ten times.

My impression is that the whole proces will be slow thanks to the industry resisting any form of progress. It will take some outsiders, like Apple, to change the rules gradually. These outsiders exist and are already changing the rules.