Apple and Microsoft Desktop OSes: Two Models, One Winner

When Apple and Microsoft contemplated software for a new world in which tablets were taking over much of the work once done on traditional PCs, it quickly became clear that they were following very different paths. Microsoft opted for an approach that would unify the user experience of tablets and PCs. Apple chose to keep the software environments, and the user experience they produced, distinct.

Early on, I was skeptical about Microsoft’s decision. Today, as the post-iPad, post-Surface versions of Windows and Mac OS X move into their second generation, there is little doubt that Apple was right. Windows 8 is a critical and, so far, a business flop whose problems may be mitigated but are unlikely to be solved by the forthcoming Windows 8.1. Apple, meanwhile, is readying the promising OS X Mavericks (named for a famous surf break in Half Moon Bay.)

Apple’s philosophy is to introduce successful features from its iOS mobile software into OS X when its makes sense while keeping the overall experience of using a Mac very different from the iPad. So Mavericks will gain an enhanced approach to real-time notifications that borrows heavily from iOS. And it will share with iOS a cloud-based system for storing and managing passwords across devices.

When Apple injected a heavy dose of iOS thinking into Mountain Lion, the version of OS X introduced last year, many Mac fans publicly fretted that Apple was on its way to dumbing down the Mac, that OS X would become indistinguishable from iOS. Mavericks, which will ship in the fall, makes it clear this is not going to happen. [pullquote]Today, as the post-iPad, post-Surface versions of Windows and Mac OS X move into their second generation, there is little doubt that Apple was right.[/pullquote]

The late Steve Jobs introduced the iPad in 2010 with a simple metaphor: PCs, whether Windows or Mac, were trucks while the iPad was a car. Most people want cars, though trucks are indispensable for certain kinds of work. Mavericks is designed for the needs of the truckers of the computing world (Apple also unveiled a new 18-wheeler, a long-overdue and radical redesign of its high-end Mac Pro.)

For example, the sort of users who find traditional PCs indispensable are likely to have lots and lots of files and documents, arranged in intricate hierarchies of folders. Mavericks introduces two new power-user tools to help simplify management. One is a new browser-style tabbed interface that makes it easier to examine and rearrange files and folders without opening multiple Finder windows. The second lets you tag files with keywords (shown in the screenshot at top), which facilitates search and ad hoc grouping of files based on this metadata regardless of what folders they reside in.

Apple’s renewed commitment to OS X and the Mac heightens the challenges facing Microsoft. Windows 8.1 is due out in a public preview version at the end of June. Based on what Microsoft has revealed, 8.1 includes some concessions to traditional PC users, including the option of booting directly to the Desktop and a slightly easier way of finding and launching applications from the Desktop environment. At the same time, it will reduce the needs of tablet users and others who favor the new, for lack of a better name, Metro environment from dropping into Desktop. But it fails to change Windows 8’s fundamental flaw: It is a two-headed beast that both PC and tablet users find unsatisfactory.

If Windows 8 fails to recover from its early swoon, it will be a much more serious threat to Microsoft’s future, especially as a consumer operating system, than was its previous flop, Vista. There were a lot of little things wrong with it that annoyed users in a variety of ways, but in many ways it was a large improvement over Windows XP. The problems were fixable without major changes to the underlying OS, and they were fixed in the successful Windows 7 release. The flaws of Windows 8 start with the mistaken idea that a single OS can succeed on both traditional PCs and tablets. Repairing this misconception requires going back to the drawing board, which would not only be a monumental admission of failure but would probably require a couple years of development work. So I expect Microsoft will instead try to muddle through as best it can.

This has serious implications for the marketplace. Sales of PCs as a whole are shrinking and there doesn’t seem to be anything on the horizon that will reverse this trend. But sales of Windows PCs are falling much faster than Macs. For example, in the quarter ended March 30, IDC estimated that worldwide Windows PC shipments dropped 13.9% from the year-ago quarter, which Apple reported its Mac sales were flat. This means that Apple’s market share is growing. And Apple, with its dominance of the high end of the PC market, is continuing to rake in the profits, while makers of Windows PCs are struggling and increasingly contemplating a post-PC world.

The Second Most Important Failed OS

There’s little doubt that NeXTSTEP was the most important failed operating system. Though it went down with the overpriced and underpowered NeXT computer, it evolved into Mac OS X when NeXT was acquired by Apple and NeXTSTEP architect Avie Tevanian went there with Steve Jobs.

But honors for second place should go to WebOS, the operating system developed for the Palm Pre. Struggling Palm never had the resources to develop WebOS to its potential. Acquirer Hewlett-Packard had big ambitions, but corporate turmoil caused abandonment of the project before it got off the ground.

But while WebOS may be dead (LG now owns whatever is left of it), it influence lives on. iOS 7, announced by Apple today, shows more than a few traces of WebOS, especially in the user interface for multitasking apps, where a user can scroll through cards representing running apps and flick away cards to kill apps that aren’t needed. Google Now, which uses somewhat similar gestures to look through and dismiss notifications also shows lingering WebOS influence.

Software comes and software goes, but good ideas have a way of living on.

My Windows 8 Wishlist

In a couple of weeks, Microsoft is expected to release a preview version of Windows 8.1. Preliminary indications are that ti will be a relatively modest overhaul of the radically new Windows 8 user interface. My suspicion is that it will prove tings, but not enough to solve the serious usability issues of the UI–or the be both more precise and put my finger on the problem–Windows 8’s two disparate UIs. Here’s what I hope Microsoft will do with the final version of 8.1. (As usual, I will refer to the two UIs as Metro and Desktop.)

Fix Metro control panels. The original version of Windows 8 requires going to Desktop for all but the most rudimentary system functions. What Microsoft has shown of 8.1 suggests considerable improvement in the number of settings you can modify without leaving Metro, but still not nearly enough. I would like to see a Metro version of any control panel required for normal user operation of a PC (I’d exempt a few of the more advanced and arcane ones, such as the Services panel.) If you are working in touch, you should be able to do everything important in touch, and Desktop control panels don’t allow that.

Persistent charms. If you can make the taskbar persistent in Desktop, why not the charms bar in both Metro and Desktop. The charms don’t take very much real estate. Why not give users the option of access without that awkward swipe-from-the-side gesture?

Universal app search in Desktop. If start typing on the Metro Start page, you automatically begin a search for apps. Typing in any empty area of the Desktop should have the same effect. This, by itself, should eliminate most of the pining for the legacy Start button. (Contrary to many reports, the current version of 8.1 does not bring back the Start button. It just provides easy access to the Metro Start page.)

Unify Internet Explorer. Windows 8 includes two browsers. They are both called IE 10, but are in fact completely separate, with independent bookmarks, histories, and preferences. It is necessary to have two different browser front ends to match the two UIs, but they should share their data. At the same time, your choice of a default browser in Desktop should not affect the behavior of the Metro browser.

Let Desktop be Desktop Default file associations cause some very odd behavior in Desktop. Double click on a photo in Desktop, for example, and it opens in the Metro Photos app. This leads to the jumping-between-UIs behavior in Windows 8 that drives many users, myself included, nuts. There’s a common thread to most of these suggestions. From a user interface point of view, Windows 8 is two operating systems bolted together. That is baked into the architecture of the system and is not going to change. But it should be possible to pick one or the other, for the current session or forever, and stay in it.

Desktop is a fine, time-tested UI for large displays, keyboards, and mice. Metro is a good touch interface for smaller displays. But with Windows 8 today, and with what appears to be only modest improvement in 8.1, it is impossible for users to live in one or the other. And I believe that, no such relatively minor quibbles as the loss of the Start button lie at the heart of the cool user response to the OS.

 

 

Sorting Through a Flood of Leaks

It now appears there may have been less than met the eye to reports about the National Security Agency’s PRISM program for obtaining information on users from a variety of top internet players including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, and Apple. Detailed stories by Claire Cain Miller in The New York Times and Declan McCullagh on Cnet describe a process by which the companies worked out an arrangement with NSA for an efficient, and secret, response to request for information.

The PRISM story, broken nearly simultaneously by Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian and Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras in The Washington Postseemed a bit off from the beginning. It was impossible to square the stories with the  fervent denials of the companies involved. It now appears that the stories, based on a deck of PowerPoint slides describing PRISM, may have overstated the cased and that the slides themselves may have exaggerated NSA’s capabilities. It wouldn’t be the first time a PowerPoint presentation stretched the truth a bit, and the slides that were published has a distinct marketing tone to them.

But there are now two big questions here. One is what is really going on with government access to internet records, phone records, and who knows what else. The other is who or what is behind a flood of leaks of classified documents. Today, for the third time in four days, Greenwald (with Ewan MacAskill) published a leaked classified document, a presidential order requesting what amount to cyber war plans. One of the toughest jobs a journalist faces is trying to figure out the motives of a leaker; if you are being used, it’s good to know for what purpose. Leaks, unless they are authorized (which is sometimes the case), entail great risk to the leaker and I believe something other than public-spiritedness is usually behind them.

If the Obama’s administration had hoped to stop leaks by coming down hard on leakers, the strategy clearly is not working. But there is a curious coincidence in the timing and content of these particular leaks. The come as Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in the U.S. for talks with President Obama about, among other things, charges of official Chinese intrusions into government and corporate computer systems in the U.S.

It’s more than a little mind-bending to figure out what to make of all of this.

 

 

What the Government Knows About Your Phone Calls

A remarkable story by Glenn Greenwald in the British daily The Guardian yesterday revealed a secret court order requiring Verizon Communications to give the National Security Agency information about every telephone call, international or domestic, made to or from phone numbers in the U.S. So just what information does this really give the government about our activities?

How broad is the order? Technically, it is quite narrow, covering only Verizon Business Services (a unit of the former MCI Communications) for a period of three months. But it seems reasonable to assume the government has obtained a great many other such orders covering all wireless and wireline carriers and that they are regularly renewed every three months. The order does not suggest that the request was pursuant to any particular investigation. So the safest assumption seems to be that the government monitors every call, and has been doing so for years.

Just what does the NSA get? Everything except the actual contents of the calls (which would require a much more strictly controlled wiretap order.) The order requests “telephony metadata” which it defines as “comprehensive communications routing information, including but not limited to session identifying information (e.g., originating and terminating telephone number, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, International Mobile station Equipment Identity (IMEI) number, etc.), trunk identifier, telephone calling card numbers, and time and duration of call.”

How did this come to light? It has been suspected for a long time that the government was collecting this information, but this is the first definitive proof. Someone clearly got a copy of the court order to Greenwald, a U.S.citizen living in Brazil who has long been a vocal critical of government surveillance efforts. The leaker acted at considerable peril to him or herself. The order says “no person shall disclose to any other person that the FBI or NSA has sought or obtained tangible things under this Order.” At a minimum, that means someone risked contempt of court. But the order is also marked “TOP SECRET/SI/NOFORN,” which brings into play much stricter laws governing disclosure of classified information.

Is this legal? It would seem so. The basic authority for this sort of surveillance is Section 210 of the Patriot Act. The Justice Dept.’s interpretation of sweeping powers during both the Bush and Obama Administrations has been controversial, but the government has succeeded in avoiding limits. Partly, this is due to a Catch 22 in which the government has blocked lawsuits from proceeding by claiming they would endanger “state secrets.” The key fact is that the turning over of records was ordered by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court as required by the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (the word “foreign”in those names no longer seems to have much meaning.) If a court, even a secret one, says it’s OK, it’s OK until a higher court says otherwise.

Might the government be monitoring the contents of all phone calls? Not legally and maybe not feasibly. The monitoring of calls within the U.S. requires a warrant that can only be issued on probable cause, and even then may only be recorded if the subject of the call is relevant to an investigation  Rules governing international calls are murkier and more complex and there is a good chance they are monitored. Legal requirements aside, it’s not clear that even the NSA has the computer capacity to monitor the contents of every call, and amount of data many orders of magnitude greater than the text metadata. But the truth is that we do not know the scope of the NSA’s capabilities.

 

The Rebirth of U.S. Manufacturing

“The age of labor arbitrage is over,” General Electric CEO Jeff Imelt declared at the D11 conference last week.

Signs that he is right are all around us. Today, Lenovo–a Chinese company owned partly by the Chinese government–opened its first U.S. plant in Whittset, NC., (photo) where it will make ThinkPads, commercial desktops, and servers for the North American market. Motorola announced at the same D11 conference that it will manufacture its new Moto X phone in Texas. Apple also plans to return Mac manufacturing to the U.S. at a Texas facility.

What is happening is simple. For the past 25 years or so, multinational manufacturers have chased low labor costs around the world. For a long time, China seemed like the promised land with a seemingly unlimited supply of cheap workers and and business-friendly–that is to say, extremely lax, labor and environmental standards. But a funny thing happened. The supply of qualified labor turned out to be finite after all and rates are rising. And china belatedly realized that its environment, especially the air, could only absorb so much pollution before it began poisoning its people. Growth had to slow.

At the same time, advances in robotic manufacturing mean that the labor content of electronic devices is plunging making labor costs less and less of a factor in deciding where to build. But logistics costs, especially the cost of air or ocean shipping, are going up. That’s an argument to source manufacturing closer to markets. A great deal of high-tech manufacturing will remain in china, in large part because the Chinese have developed and exquisitely well tuned supply chain to keep plants stocked with components while minimizing inventory. But some will move, in many cases, to Mexico or the U.S.

The decline of labor input helps explain why a rebirth of U.S. manufacturing will not produce a surge in U.S. manufacturing employment.  Many of the U.S. manufacturing jobs that have disappeared since the 1970s did move to China, they just vanished. And the production is coming back precisely because not much expensive labor is required. The Lenovo plant. for example, will only employ 115 production workers.

Still, growth in manufacturing is a boon for the economy. The jobs it does produce tend to be better than old factory jobs, though they also require higher skills. And factories produce a lot of secondary employment–everything from construction workers to cooks and waitstaff to transport workers.

 

Learning To Love the Chromebook (and Succeeding)

I have been a skeptic about Chromebooks since Google announced them. What could you really do on a pseudo-laptop whose only native application was the Chrome browser and which depended on an internet connection for most of its functionality. But I avoided sharing my opinion because I had never used on for more than a few minutes.

Now I have remedied that situation and you can count me as a convert. For the past cuple of weeks I have been spending a lot of time with a Chromebook. Not the drool-worthy $1,299 Google Pixel but a humble $250 Acer c710 with an 11.6” non-touch display, 4 GB of RAM, a 1.1 GHz dual-core Intel Celeron, and an almost pathetically old-fashioned rotating hard drive.

A Chromebook is far more restricted than a regular laptop of even a tablet. Without the ability to load standard applications, you must make do with web apps, which are limited both in scope and in functionality. But it is a good 80% or 90% solution, perfectly acceptable for the great bulk of what most people want to do most of the time. The applications and the operating system are both lightweight, so that performance feels snappy despite the modest specs.

Most important for those of use who live in a world where we are disconnected at least some of the time, the key Google apps, especially Docs, work offline. A Gmail add-on, officially still in beta testing, lets you read, edit, and reply to email messages offline.[pullquote]The Chromebook is very good at what it does well, and for a large number of people, it would be a more than adequate replacement for a conventional PC.[/pullquote]

I wrote this post mostly on the Chromebook, much of the time offline. The WordPress editor is not offline-friendly, so I composed in Google Docs, then copied and pasted into WordPress. The image was downloaded from the Web, saved as a local copy, and uploaded to WordPress. In terms of the apps I used, the experience was much like working on an iPad (or an Android tablet) except for the convenience, for writing, of working on a laptop form factor.

I used the image I found as-is. Chrome features a very limited built-in picture editor. Anything more sophisticated would have required using one of a number of on-line picture editors, such as Pixlr. Though it requires a live internet connection, it’s fine for occasional use and designed to be familiar to a Photoshop user. (Oddly, Google does not offer a Chrome version of its own Picasa photo tool.)

But I would n’t want to use the Chromebook to process a large number of images from my camera. It can’t handle the RAW format I like to use on by DSLR and there is nothing–at least that I know of–like Adobe Lightroom for batch processing of photos. And even with a fast internet connection, moving a large number of multi-megabyte photos to and from web servers will get tired quickly.

Similarly, I really wouldn’t want to do much audio or video editing on the Chromebook. I have too much invested in my familiar tools (Apple FinalCut and Adobe Audition) for these complicated chores, and any complicated video editing would be a tedious chore on the low-powered C710.

But this is all a little like complaining that a good bicycle isn’t a Lexus. A Chromebook cannot do everything that a Windows PC or a Mac (of even a Linux PC) can do. It can’t even do everything that a tablet can do. For one thing, the selection of games is very limited though there is, of course, Angry Birds. But it is very good at it does well, and for a large number of people, it would be a more than adequate replacement for a conventional PC.

 

Apple’s Insularity Could Get Dangerous

It started with a question I asked Apple CEO Tim Cook during his presentation Tuesday at the D11 conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. Noting that Microsoft and Google offered cloud solutions that provided access to a wide variety of platforms, I asked Cook whether it was time for Apple to broaden its iCloud service to facilitate sharing for customers who are likely to own both Apple and non-Apple gear.

Cook didn’t bite. But Donald Leka, CEO of TransMedia, whose Glide service has provided cloud-based file sharing for a wide variety of devices since before anyone talked about the cloud, jumped in. In a press release announcing the release of a new Glide iPhone app that provides access to Dropbox, Microsoft SkyDrive, and Google Drive accounts, Glide said:

“Consumers really don’t care that much what platform they are on, where their files are stored, or what the file types and file formats are,” said TransMedia Chairman and CEO, Donald Leka. “They simply want to be able to easily access and share a family photo, a letter to a friend, a favorite song or show.”

This drew an email response from a representative from Apple Worldwide Developer Relations (shared with me by Leka):

…We believe the best press releases for a product launch concentrate on that product. Your release is ostensibly for the launch of your iPhone app, but the copy actually references other apps on other platforms more often than it mentions the one being launched.  We think the customers, bloggers, and media who follow app launches are usually quite parochial — quite focused on specific platforms — so we counsel developers to craft press releases tailored to each individual platform.

And that brings me to my final point: the tone of your release and your product positioning is at odds with not just our primary marketing messaging, but the entire reason Apple exists. To wit, you are quoted in the press release as saying “Consumers really don’t care that much what platform they are on…”  Our drive, our passion, our singular focus on creating the best products we can make is rooted in the fundamental belief that customers really do care about the products in which they invest their time, money, and energy.  We strive to make the best products we can because we believe the right product will change a customer’s life.  And customers do indeed care about things that change their lives.

Our experience is that customers are interested in apps that help them get more from their iPhone, that give their cherished, chosen device exciting new functionality that fits their mobile lifestyle.  I’d encourage you to recast your messaging in this positive, affirmative way.

I suspect Apple’s customers are a lot less parochial than Apple is, or than Apple thinks they are. These days, it’s not unusual for someone to own an Android phone, an iPad, and a Windows laptop–and want to share information among all of them. I’m sure Apple prefers that they switch to an iPhone and a Mac, but that’s not the world we live in. By failing to accommodate their desires and instead to promote a closed, Apple-only ecosystem, Apple could be building big trouble for itself.

Trying To Love Windows 8

I’ve been using Windows 8 in one form or another for well over a year and I keep hoping that it will become as comfortable as every other version I have used, going back nearly a quarter century to Windows 3.0. I hoped the final version would be better than the various previews. It was, but not enough. I hoped that using it on a new system with a touchpad designed for Win 8’s new gestures. Again, better but only a bit. Even a touch display was not enough to overcome my frustration and sense of foreignness.

Over the past few weeks, I have been using Windows 8 particularly intensely in an effort to discover the sources of my unhappiness. I have used both a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Touch with a 14” touch screen and the Hewlett-Packard Envy X2, a clever design with an 11.6” touch display that can detach to become a sleek tablet. ((The Envy X2 delivers a very light, thin package with excellent battery life—7 hours for the tablet and 12 hours with the keyboard and its auxiliary battery attached. But you pay a price in performance; the 1.8 GHz Atom processor struggles to keep up with the demands of Windows 8 and response was often sluggish.)) I’ve come to the conclusion that there are three basic issues.

One is the two-headed nature of Windows 8: It keeps forcing you to switch back and forth between its touch-centric Modern (or Metro) user interface and the traditional Windows Desktop. In an effort to create an operating system that worked with both conventional PCs and tablets, Microsoft came up with a hybrid that doesn’t feel right on either. The second is the difficulty of discovering features and functions. And third is the painful lack of apps designed for the new UI. Time and the release of a new version, codenamed Blue, in coming months, should erase these problems, but are unlikely to solve them. There are a lot of good things about the Modern UI, though I have come to the conclusion that Microsoft’s much-promoted live tiles really aren’t worth the space they occupy; I would rather just have more apps on my home screen. The interface is a bit clumsy used with a mouse or a touchpad, but works very well with touch. The problem is that you just can’t stay in Modern. Many common tasks require the use of Desktop, including most utilities and the great majority of control panels. For example, trying to troubleshoot any sort of wireless connection problem requires opening the Desktop Network and Sharing Center control panel. Even requesting help on the Modern PC Settings screen brings up a Desktop help window. And Desktop windows, with their tiny controls, do not work at all well with touch.

It’s an enduring mystery how Microsoft failed to see that this would be a massive problem that makes Windows 8 very difficult to use without a keyboard and pointing device. And, of course, the lack truly touch-optimized versions of Word, Outlook, Excel, and PowerPoint make Microsoft’s claim that only Windows 8 tablets can run Office an empty boast. The double-headed nature of Win 8 also gets badly in the way of discoverability. Modern adds maximize screen real estate by hiding nearly all of the “chrome”—the buttons and controls that make things happen. On all applications, Modern or Desktop as swipe from the right edge of the screen or touchpad–on the HP, this worked consistently only on the screen ((That wasn’t the only issue I had with the Envy’s Synaptics touchpad. Tapping the touchpad often brought up the right-click context menu for no apparent reason.))–brings up the system-level “charms”: search, share, start, devices, and settings.

In many, but not all, Modern apps, a swipe from the bottom of the screen brings up app-specific charms, such as what you would expect to be the most common menu items in the Mail app. The system charms work in inconsistent ways that take a lot of getting used to. For example, if you start typing with the Start screen open, the search charm opens for a search of apps. But if you type on an empty Desktop, nothing at all happens. And since there is no Start menu, you have to open the search charm manually to choose application if its icon is not on the desktop or in the task bar. If you are in the Mail app, the Search charm lets you search through all your messages and ctrl-F opens a new message window. In Internet Explorer, the search charm opens a Web search (though you can accomplish exactly the same thing by typing in the address bar) and you must use ctrl-F to search through the content of a page. Of course, that’s only in the Modern version of IE. In the completely separate Desktop IE (different bookmarks, different history, different preferences) the search charm activates the app search—as best as I can tell, system charms never work within Desktop apps. I could go on, but I think you get the picture. All of this wouldn’t be so bad if there were more and better Modern apps so that you didn’t have to switch between the two UIs so often. But the build in Mail app lacks basic features, such as saved searches or smart folders, that we have taken for granted in mail programs for more than a decade and there are so far no third-party alternatives. This forces you to use Outlook or another Desktop mail application.

There are also serious UI consistency problems with third-part Desktop apps. A two-finger swipe down on the touchpad should cause text to move down on the screen, as it does if you touch the display directly. But in Google Chrome, it moves txt up, as you would expect in older versions of Windows. At least when Apple switched the scroll direction in OS X Lion to make it work the way people had come to expect on iPads and iPhones, it managed to make the change work for everything. More than eight months after Windows 8 shipped, there’s still no official Modern Facebook app. You can use Facebook in IE, of course, but Facebook serves you a standard version that is not optimized for touch. This renders Facebook all but unusable without a keyboard and mouse. In general, few websites recognize Modern IE as a touch browser that requires differently configured pages. I hope that Blue, which is supposed to be out in a preview version at the end of June, addresses the worst of these problems. Windows 8 As it exists just plain makes you work too hard to be even a little lovable.

Next week: Trying To Love a Google Chromebook.

The Perils of Market Share

If you’re on this site, you probably know we have had a lively debate going on for the past couple of days about the meaning and value of market share in the smartphone market. I thought it might be valuable to fire up the time machine and go back to look at some past winners in PC market share.

Let’s take a look at 1996, the first full year of Windows 95 availability and pretty much the peak of Windows PC dominance. The worldwide market share leader, according to Gartner data dredged up by Wikipedia, was Compaq, at 10%. In fact, Compaq led every year between 1996 and 200 with its share peaking just short of 14% in 1998. IBM held second place at 8.6%. Packard Bell NEC was third at 6%. Apple was a close fourth at 5.9%. And HOP rounded out the top five.

What has happened to each of these players? Compaq was acquired by HP in 2002 in a deal from which the company has never quite recovered. (HP has been entrenched at No. 1 for the past six mostly profitless years.) IBM sold its PC business to Lenovo which, after several years of struggle, today is the only big PC player whose sales volume is growing. Packard-Bell ended up as an entry-level brand for Acer in Europe while NEC is a small player in Asian markets. And Apple, which nearly died in 1997, now dominantes very profitable high-end computer sales, especially in the U.S., though it has never returned to the worldwide top five.  Dell, which dominated the business in the early 2000s, entered the top five in 1997 and Acer first made it in 2005.

Whatever hardware market share is good for, it doesn’t seem to translate into long-term dominance. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Apple vs. Android: The Open Factor

Judging by the comments on John Kirk’s post “Android’s Market Share Is Literally a Joke,” we are well into another operating system religious war. As is always the case in religious wars, it’s tough to make sense of the the arguments. As Harry McCracken notes at Time Techland, we can’t agree who is winning because we can’t agree on what “winning” means.

Advocates often argue that victory for Android is inevitable because Google’s platform is more open and open always triumphs over closed. That proposition is debatable at best. But the arguments is muddled by the confusion of several different concepts of openness. I’m going to try to at least clarify the terms of the debate. There are at least three concepts of open clamoring for our attention; I am going to call them open hardware, open software, and open systems.

Open hardware. In the beginning, all personal computers had an open architecture. The first really popular PC, the Apple ][, followed the design of earlier CP/M-based systems and included slots for hardware add-ins. (One of the more successful of these was the Microsoft SoftCard, which let the Apple ][ run CP/M programs.) In 1984, the Mac came along in a sealed box. There’s a widely held, but almost certainly incorrect, view that Apple lost the first OS war to Microsoft because Macs were closed and IBM PCs and later clones from Compaq and many others allowed modification. This may have been a small factor but much more important was the fact that IBM and others marketed to business, and business, not the rest of us, was buying most of the hardware. Besides, by the time that Apple lost decisively to Windows in the mid-1990s, Macs too had gone to an open architecture. Apple even tried the Microsoft approach of licensing Mac OS to third-party hardware makers. It didn’t work.

Today, this argument is almost entirely moot. Lots of people still buy open Windows boxes (more than you probably think), but hardly any of them ever open them up. Laptops and Apple’s iMac and Mac mini are about as closed as the original Mac. And phones and tablets make hardware modification impossible. The hardware openness argument is strictly of historical interest.

Open software. Google makes Android code available, license and royalty free ((Just because Google gives away Android doesn’t necessarily mean that you are free to use it without licenses or royalties. In particular, Microsoft claims patents on a number of aspects of Android and nearly all tier one Android OEMs except Motorola are paying license fees to Microsoft.)), to anyone who wants to use it. Sort of. If you want to use the Android logo and have access to Google services such as Maps and Google Now, to have to agree to play by Google’s rules. As a result, there are two distinct forms of android out there, official Android licensed by Google and used on all the brand-name phones, and Android Open Source Project devices, including the Amazon Kindle Fire and a gazillion no-name Asian phones.

There are fierce sectarian disputes within the “free and open source software” community over just how free and open code must be to qualify, to the point where the Free Software Foundation’s Richard M. Stallman has denounced Ubuntu, a leading Linux distribution, as “spyware.” A lot of code these days mixes open- and closed-source components. Both iOS and Mac OS are based on an open-source BSD kernel, but the higher level of the OS are proprietary. Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome browsers are both based on the Apple-developed open-source WebKit. Even Windows contains many open-source components.

Fundamentally, open- and closed-source are two different models of software development. Both have their proponents and arguments in their favor and there is no reason to believe that either is inherently superior to the other, But the bottom line is that except for those swayed by religious arguments, whether a given piece of code is open source or not makes no difference to users.

Open systems. Here we get to a real difference. Apple’s iOS ecosystem is tightly controlled. The iPhone and iPad are both tightly locked down devices. Unless you have “jailbroken” your device, a warranty-voiding software modification, an iPad or iPhone can only load software through Apple’s iTunes App Store. And software sold through the App Store must meet a long list of Apple requirements, ranging from those designed to protect the system from malware to those designed to protect the user from pornography to those intended to protect Apple from some kinds of competition. iOS users implicitly accept a tradeoff: Apple makes a lot of choices for them, and in exchange, they get software that is very unlikely to mess up their device or infect it with malware.

Android is a very different world. Google imposes minimal supervision on apps sold through the Google Play store, and a simple change of one setting on any Android device lets the user install software from any source. Many Android phones let users replace the manufacturer’s firmware, a way to get around the sluggishness of OEMs in distributing Android updates but no way to enhance stability or security.

This sort of openness is extremely important to a relatively small group of enthusiasts who really want to dig deep into their devices and who will accept some inconvenience and risk to gain more freedom. They definitely should by Android products. But I suspect that there aren;t enough of them to explain more than, at most, a couple points of share. The great bulk of Android buyers are choosing on other criteria: screen size, price, or what the guy in the phone store happens to be pushing.

The only aspect of openness that really seems to matter to the bulk of buyers is that Android devices come in a wide variety of sizes and designs. With iPhone, you have the choice of the 4/4S or the 5, while Android comes in a wise variety of sizes and designs. The fact that Android is increasingly synonymous with Samsung reduces the choice somewhat, but Samsung seems determined to offer a product for every market niche.

 

 

 

Apple and the Washington Shakedown

Columnist Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner has a good article on Apple’s problems in Washington, well worth reading is you want to learn something about how the capital really works.

In the popular view of political corruption, lobbyists and PACs shower politicians with money, expecting to buy influence. In reality, the flow runs nearly entirely the other way. Members of Congress spend an inordinate share of their waking hours on the phone, trying to extract contributions from often grudging donors, often with the  not very veiled threat that those who fail to pony up will not find important doors open. Ever wonder why the House and Senate floors are usually empty during “debate”? The members are often at their nearby off-site hideaways, dialing for dollars (Congressional rules prohibit fundraising in the Capitol or in House and Senate office buildings.)

Much of the tech industry refused to join in for a long time, but most of the big companies are now regulars n the lobbying and check-writing circuit. Apple remains a significant holdout.

That’s probably not the reason the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee chose to grill Tim Cook about Apple’s offshore tax avoidance rather than some other multinational CEO. The Senators knew that Apple gets good play in the media. But the treatment of Cook might have been  bit gentler if Apple played the political game with more enthusiasm.

Why Microsoft Can Win the Living Room

As Ben Bajarin pointed out in his post here yesterday, Microsoft’s Xbox One is a whole lot more than a game console. Of course, the Xbox has long been the leading edge of Microsoft’s effort to dominate digital home entertainment. But a combination of clever new hardware and Microsoft’s unique positioning with respect to the entertainment industry could propel it to victory–and reverse in faltering fortunes in consumer businesses.

Of course, the hardware still has a lot to prove. The ultimate goal of the digital living room is a single box that can deliver all your entertainment desires. On paper, at least, the Xbox One comes closer than anything we have seen before. But features on paper, or even in a demo, are one thing and real life is another. Even Google TV looked sort of good in a demo before flopping with consumers.

The biggest challenge facing the Xbox One is the promised integration with cable set top boxes. Success will depend on the new Xbox’s ability to control the set top box through an easily set up HDMI connection. It needs to banish the cable box to irrelevancy for everything except accessing and decoding content, ultimately becoming your DVR and your gateway to video on demand. That would make it a huge breakthrough. But if it needs IR blasters to control cable, it will go the way of Google TV. Microsoft is so far silent on which boxes from which cable operators the Xbox will integrate with.

It also remains to be seen how well the gesture and voice control will work to replace traditional remotes or controllers. Again, these are technologies that often demo better than they work, but successful elimination of the need to use hardware to control the box would also be a huge step forward.

So it looks like Microsoft will have a hardware edge when the Xbox One ships “later this year.” The real challenge is to build on what already appears to be a slim lead in the availability of content. Here Microsoft can built on two advantages. One is that it has been a technology partner of both studios and and cable and satellite operators for years. For example, AT&T U-verse service runs on Mediaroom IPTV technology developed by Microsoft (the division was recently sold to Ericsson.)[pullquote]If Apple ever announces that unicorn of tech unicorns, an Apple television, it will have to get over a bar that has been raised by Microsoft. It’s been a long time since we could say that about any product.[/pullquote]

But a more important reason, and an odd one given Microsoft’s history as the big bully of the tech industry, is that Microsoft is the company that Hollywood is not afraid of. Microsoft’s leading rivals in the living room are Apple, Amazon, and Google (Sony could claw back into contention, but it has fallen a long way behind.) Each of these competitors inspires fear and loathing in the studios. Apple is the company that ate the music business. Amazon is the company that seems to destroy value in every market it enters–good for consumers, but torture for producers. And Google is a company whose ambitious are scarily unbounded. Apple and Google TV effort has been hobbled by lack of cooperation from content owners and distributors’ Google so far has restricted itself to selling and streaming downloads to other companies’ devices, though it is rumored to be contemplating a set top box of its own. In this company, Microsoft can position itself as an honest broker, a neutral player with no dog in the fight.

The only entertainment content deal that Microsoft announced at the Xbox launch was an exclusive with the National Football League that will bring a lot of “second screen” content, such as stats and highlights, while watching a game on your Xbox. But there was no word about making the games available outside of the NFL’s existing deals with CBS, Fox, NBC, and ESPN. (Microsoft will also get branding on the hoods of replay stations; let’s hope that works out better for them than Motorola branding on coaches’ intercom systems.)

In the end, it is Microsoft’s ability to strike content deals with studios, networks, and sports leagues and getting cable operators to support deep integration of Xbox with their services that will determine success in the living room. At a minimum, though, it seems that if Apple ever announces that unicorn of tech unicorns, an Apple television, it will have to get over a bar that has been raised by Microsoft. It’s been a long time since we could say that about any product.

 

Trouble in the Cloud: Lessons from AP and Bloomberg

Its been a bad week for the cloud. Businesses of all sizes are under a lot of pressure to save money by moving IT operations into the cloud. for many companies, it can be a lot cheaper and more efficient to pay someone else to manage your email, storage, and servers  and provide other IT services than to do it yourself. But the disclosure of of phone surveillance of the Associated Press by the U.S. Justice Dept. and snooping on customer activities by Bloomberg News reporters, neither of which has anything obvious to do with cloud computing, might give you some pause about trusting your data to a third party.

The issue isn’t security, and least not in the conventional sense of protecting your data and operations from malicious hackers and other no-goodniks. In truth, most service providers are better at that sort of security than businesses from whom IT and IT security are not core competencies. The problem is the amount of control you surrender when a third party hold your information.

In the AP case, the government subpoenaed call records for 20 phone lines used by AP reporters and editors, apparently as part of an investigation of leaks about the disruption of a terrorist plot in Yemen. I’ll leave it to others to discuss the legality and the First Amendment implications of DOJ’s actions. But the implications for privacy are disturbing.

The government was able to obtain the phone records by issuing subpoenas to carriers–and neither the government nor the carriers bothered to inform the AP of the request. The news service found out only because regulations require eventual, after-the-fact notification–but only for news organizations. If you are any other sort of business, you might never find out about the surveillance.[pullquote]If you control the data, you can make your own choices, including going to jail to protect it. If a third party has it, the choice is theirs, not yours.[/pullquote]

Phone records are always highly vulnerable. You don’t have the options of operating your own telephone system. And telephone carriers have a history of giving up call records, and sometimes a lot more, to the government on the slightest provocation. But what about e-mail? Here things get murky. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act which covers email, was written in 1986, in the MCI Mail era. Under the government’s interpretation of it, mail stored on third-party servers that is more than 180 days old or that has been opened can be obtained without a subpoena. That interpretation is currently tied up in several law suits. But the government could also subpoena current mail records and there is no requirement that you be notified.

AP was lucky. It apparently hosts its own email, so there is no way the government could read it without a direct request to AP, which it then could have fought. There’s hardly a guarantee of success, but at least it would have known what was going on. If you control the data, you can make your own choices, including going to jail to protect it. If a third party has it, the choice is theirs, not yours. (Twitter has an admirable policy of notifying users of government data requests; most other service providers do not.)

You have equally little control over data stored on third-party servers. And the Obama Administration is pushing for new rules requiring internet service providers to retain more data on customer activities and to keep it for longer. The more you outsource, the more data you have out there under third-party control.

I’m not arguing against cloud computing or outsourcing of services. The benefits may very well outweigh the risks. But businesses (and individuals, for that matter) should be aware of just what those risks are.

The Bloomberg case exposes a completely different risk. Using third-party services necessarily exposes a lot of your information to the service provider. Even if you use the best security practices and encrypt all of your data both in flight and at rest, you traffic is moving over their networks and, as any good intelligence analyst will tell you, you can learn a great deal just from traffic analysis.

The standard Bloomberg contract, like the one obtained by Quartz, contained language allowing Bloomberg to monitor customer use of the system “solely for operational reasons.” Such language is typical in service provider contracts and is usually interpreted to mean that monitoring is allowed to the extent technically necessary to provide the service. But whether it is a rogue employee or, as appears to be the case with Bloomberg, a matter of policy, it is all but impossible to prevent the misuse of customer data. All you can do in the end is choose your vendors carefully and trust them.

 

 

Bloomberg, the Internet, and Trust

We’ve just begun to see the fallout from Bloombgerg LP that, in the word of CEO Dan Doctoroff, “Bloomberg News reporters had access to limited customer relationship management data through their use of the Bloomberg terminal.” In blunter words, Bloomberg reporters were using their access to terminal log information to spy on customers’ activities. Considering that Bloomberg’s customers are the titans of Wall St. and government and that they are typically paying $20,000 per terminal per year, I expect the consequences to be nasty.

But the issues go well beyond Bloomberg. The internet, and society in general, operates as a network of trust that demands that certain lines never be crossed. Email providers have access, at a minimum, of extensive information on who you are exchanging mail with and often to the contents of the messages as well; you assume, without even thinking about it, that your email host is not selling the information to your competitors. You mobile phone service also has extensive records about both who you have called and where you have been. You assume these records also stay private. Bloomberg crossed that line. There are good technical reasons why the company–or any service provider–needs to collect log data that can reveal a good bit about client activity. And there are good legal and ethical reasons why that information must remain tightly restricted.

Breaches have, of course, occurred in the past. When I worked for BusinessWeek, we had a leak of market-moving information. employees of one of our printers were selling advance copies of an Wall Street column to traders. It turned out that one editorial employee was using the same information to trade on his own; both the printers and the editor went to jail. The electronics age makes this sort of thing both easier to do and harder to stop.

What remains to be seen in the Bloomberg case is just how widespread the practice was, exactly what information reporters had access to, what senior executives knew about it, and how long it went on. The initial damage will be to Bloomberg, but this episode (along with mounting reports of extensive government snooping on citizens) further weakens the delicate fabric of trust that lets the economy and society work.

 

 

Can Microsoft Compete in a Post-PC World?

Microsoft says it sold 100 million licenses for Windows 8 in the six months it was on sale. Not spectacular, but not bad either. But for Windows RT, Widows 8’s tablet-friendly little brother, things haven’t been so hot. Microsoft hasn’t given out numbers, but IDC estimates sales of Microsoft’s Surface RT at a bit over a million for October through March. It seems likely that combined sales of OEM RT products–all four of them–were even lower. By contrast, Apple is selling nearly 1.5 million iPads a week.

The failure of Windows RT–and it is getting very hard to call it anything else–leaves Microsoft in a terrible bind, as least a s a seller of consumer products. The post-PC era is upon us, not in the sense that traditional PCs are going way, but that they are no longer the center of the computing world, either in most people’s usage, in mindshare, or in sales. We’ve just entered this new era and it should be possible for a company with Microsoft’s resources to recover. But the first step in recovery is recognizing that you have a problem, and Microsoft doesn’t seem to quite be there yet. Consider Board Chairman Bill Gates’ comments on CNBC:

Windows 8 really  is revolutionary in that it takes the benefits of the tablet and the benefits of the PC and it’s able to support both of those. On Surface and Surface Pro, you have the portability of the tablet but the richness in terms of the keyboard and Microsoft Office…. A lot of [iPad] users are frustrated. They can’t type, they can’t create documents, they don’t have Office there. We’re providing them something with the benefits they’ve seen that have made that a big category without giving up the benefits of the PC.

In other words, what people want is more mobile versions of traditional PCs, and that’s what Microsoft is determined to give them. The problem is that this is a serious misreading of why customers are flocking to tablets. Mobility is, of course, an important attribute of the tablet. But so–and here is where Gates and Microsoft go wrong–simplicity. The iPad has limitations which users accept in exchange for wonderful simplicity and great ease of use. Tablets, and especially, the iPad, have the shallowest learning curve in the history of computing. Their software does not break. The process of updating their software is simple automatic. They don’t run Office but, while this may come as a surprise to Gates, many people do not see that as a disadvantage. They are, as my colleague Ben Bajarin would put it, a great example of “good enough” computing.

So what can Microsoft do about this? I have always thought the company made a strategic mistake when it decided to adapt desktop Windows to tablets rather than follow Apple’s lead by using an enhanced version of Windows Phone. It ended up compromising both the desktop and the tablet experience (based on the reports we’ve been hearing lately, such as this from ZDnet’s Mary Jo Foley, the upcoming “Blue” update to Windows is designed more to address Windows 8’s shortcomings as a desktop OS than to rescue Windows RT.[pullquote]I have always thought the company made a strategic mistake when it decided to adapt desktop Windows to tablets rather than follow Apple’s lead by using an enhanced version of Windows Phone.[/pullquote]

Windows 8/RT was a radical step for Microsoft, but in the end it just didn’t go far enough to succeed on tablets while perhaps going too far to win friends on the desktop. A true tablet OS simply would not have a Desktop mode that depends on a keyboard and mouse for usability, and Windows RT regularly requires going into Desktop for critical tasks (we can only hope that Blue will fix this.) The vaunted availability of Office is no advantage at all for most users because the Desktop Office apps simply don’t work well on a tablet. True touch versions of Office applications are reportedly in the works, but they are not expected before late 2014.

OEMs disappointed with Windows RT are building Windows 8 tablets. The most PC-like of these may succeed as sort of Ultra-ultrabooks, Windows 8 is fundamentally unsuited to a pure tablet. It requires too much process, too much battery power, too much storage, and too much keyboard. The same OEMs, even those most loyal to Microsoft, are also hedging their bets with Android.

That may well be too late. iOS 7, expected this fall, is likely to be a major enhancement of the iPad and we may see iOS 8 before the Windows tablet software upgrade is complete. Android tablet software still lags; the operating system has not made nearly as much progress on tablets as on phones. But Google and its partners will get it right sooner or later, and probably before Microsoft.

None of this means that Microsoft is going away. It’s back-end software powers most enterprise computing and its clients continue to have a vital place in business. For some business users, Gates might even be right about tablets: they need Office worse than they need the elegance and simplicty of an iPad. But with the mass of consumers, for whom a conventional PC is more likely to be a place where they store stuff rather than do stuff, Microsoft is in real trouble with no easy way out.

 

 

Windows 8: Hardware Innovation Is Outpacing the Software

Aspire R7 photo (Acer)

 

Windows 8 hasn’t spurred a boom in PC sales, but it certainly is inspiring some unusual hardware designs. The problem, though, is that no one seems able to quite master Windows’ touch and keyboard-plus-mouse dual personality.

Acer is the latest to try with the Aspire R7, a striking departure from a company not particularly know for adventurous design. Aimed at what the company calls the “duality of touch and typing,” the R7 is a convertible 15.6″ notebook with a unique “Ezel” hinge that allows the screen to move from a conventional laptop position to horizontal to reversed (for presentations.) It also can lie flat in a slate configuration, but at 5.3 lb. (2.4 kg) it’s unlikely to see a lot of tablet use.

I can see uses for both the horizontal and the reversed positions. It’s the more conventional arrangement that is, in fact, the oddest. The most strikingly unconventional thing about the R7 is the layout of the keyboard deck. The keyboard itself is placed at the very front of the deck, with a large touchpad above it. Yes, you read that correctly. The touchpad is above to top row of keys.

Photo of Aspire R7 (Acer) The display can be set up in two positions. In one (photo top), the bottom end of the screen sits just above the  top of the keyboard, covering the touchpad and looking a bit like a gigantic version of an iPad sitting in a keyboard case. In the other (photo left), the screen opens like a conventional clamshell. I spent a little time using the R7 in both configurations. The screen-forward setup is more convenient for touchscreen use since the display is closer to your hand position on the keys. But in my experience with Windows 8 so far, the limited availability and frequently poor quality of “Modern” (or Metro) apps means I spend most of my time using legacy desktop applications, And since these are not built for touch, they generally don’t work very well without a mouse or touchpad.

In alternative setup, the strange location of the touchpad is a real problem. When I am working in a typing application, I typically use my thumbs for most simple touchpad maneuvers, which lets me control the mouse without moving my hands from the keyboard. There’s no similar simple stretch available to reach the R7 touchpad. Furthermore, most of us now have 15 years practice with below-the-keyboard pointing devices and will spend a lot of time on the R7 poking at empty space. I hope to spend some more time with the R7 soon; perhaps the discomfort of using that oddly placed touchpad will go away quickly.

Microsoft could make this problem mostly go away by fully touch enabling Windows and key Windows applications. Maybe the Windows Blue update due in the fall will help, but there are depressing reports that a fully touch-ready Office won’t arrive until the fall of 2014.

Aspire P3 (Acer)The Acer Aspire P3 takes a different approach to the duality problem. Though billed as a convertible Ultrabook, its design is much more like a Microsoft Surface Pro, a Core i5-powered tablet with a detachable Bluetooth keyboard. But in a sad concession to reality, it offers one thing the Surface doesn’t: A built-in stylus holder on the tablet.

Tom Wheeler and the FCC: The Challenges Ahead

President Obama announces the nomination of Thomas Wheeler (right)

Thomas Wheeler has been influencing  communications policy in Washington for a long time, but always from the sidelines. He ran what was then the National Cable Television Association and then the Cellular Telephone Industry Association until he was driven out in House Majority Leader Tom De Lay’s purge of Democrats at trade associations. He was a top advisor for Vice President Al Gore and a key member of President Obama’s 2008 transition team. Now he is about to move to center stage as Obama’s pick to head the Federal Communications Commission.

If you want to get a sense of the trouble the FCC has had adjusting to the new era of communications technology, just try to find something on its web site. Its biggest problem is that its most important activities are covered by the 1996 Telecommunications Act, a seriously flawed law when it was written and one that has not aged at all well. Every time the FCC has tried to push the boundaries of the law, whatever party didn’t like the result sued and, most of the time, won. Yet, there is little hope for new legislation from a Congress that cannot seem to do anything (though the Senate is likely to confirm Wheeler, who has bipartisan backing, without too much trouble.)

In this terrible political and legal environment, the FCC faces two enormous challenges over the next few years. One is finding enough wireless capacity to satisfy the rapidly growing demand for wireless data. The low-hanging fruit has all been picked and the painful progress of incentive auctions to free TV spectrum shows how difficult it will be to reassign chunks of airwaves. The FCCwill have to persuade spectrum holders, many of the civilian or military government agencies, to share nicely and will have to promote the technologies needed to make spectrum sharing work.

The FCC must also grapple with the dull, complex, and extremely important issue of how to retire the nation’s public switched telephone network. This network, a relic of the old monopoly Bell System today operated mostly by Verizon Communications and AT&T, is an engineering marvel that has outlived its usefulness. AT&T has gotten the ball rolling by petitioning the FCC to replace traditional PSTN service with internet-based IP telephony. But a business and regulatory structure built up over the past 125 years, with many billions invested, is not so easily disassembled. A huge part of the regulatory structure that governs communications is based on the PSTN, and even as telephony moves to wireless and IP-based communications, we depend on the old networks in many ways. It’s a system that was built with deep government involvement and the government will have to be deeply involved in its retirement.

Wheeler looks like a good choice to lead the FCC during this difficult period. He combines solid technical knowledge of the issues with the political skills that has often been lacking in FCC commissioners. The fact that his nomination has won praise from sources as disparate as top AT&T lobbyist Jim Cicconi and Public Knowledge’s Harold Feld suggests that he at least starts with a reservoir of good will, though it probably won;t survive his first major decision.

 

Windows vs. Mac In Schools: All the Wrong Reasons

The Maine Department of Education announced earlier this week that it was switching from Apple Macintoshes to Hewlett-Packard Windows PCs as the technology behind the Maine Learning Technology Initiative. Macs had been used exclusively since the program was started by then-Governor and now Senator Angus King in 2002.

I don’t think it makes a lot of difference whether Maine uses Macs or PCs in its schools. My guess is the state will pay a little less up-front and spending a bit more over the life of the machines because Windows software tends to be somewhat more expensive to maintain. But Maine made its decision for the worst possible reason, one that leads me to wonder if they have any idea of why information technology should be in schools in the first place.

Said Gov. Paul LePage (R):

It is important that our students are using technology that they will see and use in the workplace. The laptops use an operating system that is commonly used in the workplace in Maine. These laptops will provide students with the opportunity to enhance their learning and give them experience on the same technology and software they will see in their future careers.*

As the physicist Wolfgang Pauli said, that’s not even wrong. This argument didn’t make sense 15 years ago, when the differences between Windows and   Mac OS was much greater than it is today and Macs’ market share was much lower. It makes even less at a time a user proficient in one OS can master the the with maybe an hour of training.

But it is much worse if Maine thinks the reason to have computers in schools (and, yes, they really should be thinking about tablets, too) is to teach students how to use specific pieces of hardware and software. Students’ computers should be windows into a boundless sea of information. They should be tools in science class. And students should be learning the principles of programming, not so they can all grow up to be software developers but so that they learn something of what makes today;s most important technology tick–and perhaps learn a bit about the importance of the precise, logical thinking that programming demands.

Gov. LePage seem to see PCs as little more than the modern equivalent of the rows of typewriters in classrooms for vocational typing and the purpose of computers in schools as training students to get jobs typing in word or scheduling appointments in Outlook. The four-year contract is a nice win for HP, but it may be a tragedy for Maine students.

*–The HP Probook 4400s will ship with Windows 8, making LePage’s argument even more lame ,since the new OS has been largely shunned (so far) by business and is far more different from the Windows XP and Windows 7 versions used in business than is Mac OS X. But an HP spokesman notes that Maine schools have the option of downgrading to Windows 7.

Startup Highlight: Curious Tackles Informal Learning

The world of online education is buzzing with talks of MOOCs–massive open online courses–that many see as the future of higher education. MOOCs certainly have a place, though I’m not quite sure yet of just what it is. But there is no question that the web has both a massive supply of and demand for more informal educational opportunities. There are thousands of educational video on YouTube, but except for such well known sources as Khan Academy, they can be tough to find and tougher to assess.

Curious.com, a Menlo Park startup launched today, A big problem, wants to get the teachers and the students together and to help would-be web educations make some money in the process. The brainchild of Justin Kitch, who founded Homestead.com and later sold it to Intuit, is starting with about 500 curated lessons covering everything from beer making (photo) to exercise, from art appreciation to HTML coding. For the most part, the lessons stay away from traditional curricular areas, though there is the seemingly inevitable calculus tutorial and favor of more lifestyle and hobby-related content. “Our goal is a better way to deliver online education,” says Kitch. “Curious is a platform and a marketplace for teachers of anything.”

In contrast to many of the instructional videos found on YouTube, a considerable amount of care has gone into the quality of the Curious videos. While the quality of the ones I watched varies, even the worst were pretty good. The player features in-lesson quizzes: The instructor can insert questions into the video timeline. The video pauses and a question pops up on the screen. These can be a help in maintaining engagement or in student self-assessment.

One goal of curious is to provide the informality of YouTube, including the ability to start a course at any time, with something a bit more structures. “We did a lot of research onto how people learn online,” says Kitch. “The research shows you have 90 seconds before you lose someone. The idea is tyo provide a better educational experience than YouTube. YouTube gives a great educational experience, but not instruction.

Some of the lessons are free, but most cost between one and three “Curious coins.” New users start with 20 coins and additional units cost $1. The basic business model is a revenue share between Curious and the instructors.

The big test here is whether customers will part with their money in a world in which courses taught by professors from Stanford, Harvard, and MIT are available free. Succeeding in those formal courses, however, requires a heavy commitment of time over six to ten weeks, which explains why typically more than 90% of the students who enroll fail to complete the course. Curious offers lighter, smaller bites and just might succeed.

 

 

Why Internet Sales Taxes Are Inevitable

Later today, the U.S. Senate will consider, and probably pass, a bill that allows states to collect sales taxes on online purchases shipped from other states. Though its fate in the rabidly anti-tax House is uncertain, sooner or later this bill or something like it will become law. And it’s about time.

The taxation of online, and earlier, mail order, sales has long been a mess. In 1992, the Supreme Court said that states could only tax the sales of companies that had a physical presence (or “nexus”) within their jurisdiction. The court recognized this would cause a lot of problems and more or less begged Congress to fix them, a pleas that has gone unanswered for two decades.

Beyond general anti-tax sentiment, two arguments were raised against allowing states to impose taxes. One is that complying with the crazy quilt of state and local sales tax rules and rates was simply too complicated for sellers. The second, which arose with the birth of 0online commerce in the late 1990s, was that taxation could kill a promising new form of business in its cradle.

The first argument is still being made, most vociferously by eBay. But it no longer makes much sense. A database can quickly tell a merchant whether a given product shipped to a given address is subject to tax and at what rate. And at a time when Amazon.com is threatening to devour traditional retailing, the argument for infant-industry protection is ridiculous.

Indeed, it is the success of Amazon and other online sellers that make new tax rules inevitable. As long as out-of-state sales consisted mainly of Land’s End polo shirts and L.L. Bean duck boots, the loss of taxes was annoying to states, but tolerable. No more. I’m probably ahead of most shoppers, but if it’s not something I have to check out physically, if I don’t have to try it on for fit, and if it isn’t perishable, I buy it online. Yesterday, I received four separate shipments from Amazon (one of them actually a book, albeit a used volume I would have had great trouble finding in a store.) With shoppers flocking online, states can no longer forgo the revenue.

The Senate bill would let the jurisdiction where the buyer lives collect the taxes. Adam Thierer of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center favors an alternative system where taxes would be collected by the seller’s state. This does have the advantage of being considerably simpler for sellers, since they would only have to pay taxes to their home jurisdictions and would only have to follow one set of rules. But I fear it would lead to large-scale gaming of the system, with sellers rushing to establish headquarters in the few states, such as Oregon and New Hampshire, that do not impose sales taxes. (Thierer argues that competition among states to attract business with lower rates would be a good thing.)

The complexity of having to distribute tax collections to hundreds of state and local governments is a legitimate complaint about the coming system. But I suspect the ingenuity of American business  will spring to the rescue  with the development of services that will handle the chore for you. Come to think of it, who would be better able to use its cloud computing expertise and vast knowledge of state and local tax regulations to provide such a service than Amazon?

 

 

FileMaker Can Settle the iPad Productivity Argument

Filemaker screenshot Of all the endless arguments that roil the tech world, there is none I find more tiresome than the endless debate over whether the iPad can be used for “real work.” My iPad has been an indispensable part of my working toolkit since I bought one on the day the original model shipped in 2010. Over time I have learned what it does well and what it is not so good at, but I have never doubted that this go-anywhere tablet made me a lot more productive. For those who still need convincing, however, the results of a new survey from FileMaker should help. Of course, there’s something more than a little self-serving about FileMaker promoting its success on iPads and iPhones–the database management software is owned by Apple. But the survey of 499 customers –I’m surprised they couldn’t find one more to make it an even 500–sheds some interesting light on how tablets are being used in business.

The most striking finding is the extent to which devices are being used from within an organization’s home network rather than out in the field. (The survey unfortunately does not distinguish between iPhone and iPad use, but a Filemaker spokesperson says the majority of the respondents used iPads. Certainly, the Filemaker Go mobile app is more comfortable on a tablet, as pictured above, than on a phone.) Those survey said that 59% of the time they connect to databases over a local area network rather than over the internet or a virtual private network. Unsurprisingly, just over half said the mobile database was being used to replace pen-and-paper processes and that the most popular taks were CRM, inventory, and invoicing, quotes, orders and estimates. It’s a bit ironic that the iPad is pulling off the original mission that Microsoft saw for the Windows Tablet PC when it released it to general disinterest a decade ago.

It’s hardly surprising that the iPad is succeeding where the Tablet PC failed. Tablet PCs were either laptops that converted to a slate-like configuration with a tricky hinge or a few pure slates that were far bigger and heavier than today’s tablets. Battery life fell far short of the all-day usage we have come to expect and the resistive single-touch displays had severe limitations. Worse yet, except for a few applications aimed at verticals such as health care and some customer line-of-business apps, Tablet PC users had to peck with their fingers or styluses at software that was designed for a mouse and keyboard.

FileMaker, by contrast, is a nice example of how Apple uses its software to drive its hardware business. The FileMaker Pro server and desktop versions run on both Mac and Windows (it’s Apple’s only paid Windows software product, but the FileMaker Go mobile gap is for iOS only.) But a key is they way apple made it extremely simple to deploy a FileMaker Pro application to iOS devices. It takes some database and form design skill to put together a decent FileMaker Pro app on the desktop, but once that is done, creation of a FileMaker Go touch-ready mobile version is a matter of pushing a couple of buttons. FileMaker Go apps are not free-standing iOS apps–you must have the fileMaker Go application installed. But they behave like apps and connect automatically and securely to the server or desktop database. You can use the app to read, edit, and create records and you can take advantage of the special abilities of mobile devices, for example, using the iPad or iPhone camera to fill a photo field.

It’s true that tablets are less than ideal for what are regarded as classic productivity applications. Writing or editing large or complex documents is somewhere between difficult and impossible. The display size renders tablets near-useless for any but the smallest spreadsheets.  An iPad is great for viewing a slide presentation, but terrible for creating one. At the same time, however, some imaginative software, such as the FileMaker Pro/Go combo, enables new uses of mobile devices, increasing the productivity of workers away from their desks (if they have desks to begin with) and sometimes replacing much more expensive and more limited specialized devices.

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As a side note, the illustration at the top of this article is an example of a simple little database I created to catalog artworks in my house. I can go around the house to create the records  and snap pictures of the art (by the way, the first use I have ever found for an iPad camera.) Later I can fill in data I don;t have in my head from filed records.