Keep an Open Eye

Everybody keeps telling me that the mobile phone race is over - Apple has won the top tier and Microsoft-machines will clean-up on the low end. May be not.

First, Nokia is open-sourcing Symbian with a consortia of manufacturers and major mobile phone services. With a good operating system going open more developers will be attracted and the minimal price versus $15/phone from Microsoft is right for margin thin mobile manufactures. Next Google’s Android does the same Open Source and offers iPhone like features but Linux as the base and an already open App Store that does not gouge 30% off the top like Apple. Finally, the darn RIM guys keep one-upping Apple and Microsoft in terms of hardware and software.

Like the Stock Market Correcting in 1929 Fashion

Like the Stock Markets currently correcting in 1929 fashion - this is no phoney war. There is a real war going on for the mobile phone market. The mobile phone will become the Swiss Army Knife of daily electronic communication, calculation and collaboration. Too many players see this like the late 1970’s and early 1980’s when PCs came on the scene and displaced mini-computers and mainframes as the main source of computing interface with users both home and business. Mobile devices are doing the Deja Vu Scene again. Literally Client/Server computing back then evolved rapidly - with Client going before Server in terms of innovation and market importance. And of course Moore’s Law helped a doubling in all things electronics in terms of capacity, speed, and reliability every 15-18 months. And the big monopolist then, IBM, was unable to control the ball game. Ditto for now, the big monopolist, Microsoft, is Zuning in on a jit above mediocrity because its software return on equity does not allow it to take the beating that this market, already well down the opportunity cost curves demands. So take a look at what is happening here as the PC race all over, just adjust for whose the big players.

HP has seen the light and is pre-installing the Windows XP downgrade from Windows Vista. And coincidentally, Microsoft has extended the downgrade privileges to OEM vendors of Vista for 6 months. Hmmm is Microsoft finally acceding to market demands and XPs 40% speed/performance lead ??? Is the Windows XP include the latest Service Pack 3 ??? Is DELL doing this ???

Stay tuned….

Meanwhile this says a lot about what Redmond and Palo Alto really think about Vista’s performance and also about the real possibility of Regime Change in the Justice Department.

Information in covering the Cloud Computing has spoken about how Cloud Computing was leading to the consumerization of IT (see their September 8 2008 issue etc). Even after reading I was not sure what Information Week meant by consumerization of IT let alone whether this would be a successful endeavor. However, after attending Word Camp 2008 in Toronto, I got a much better idea of what consumerization of IT might mean. Let me postulate some of the key ideas:
1)Consumerization of IT means developing, adapting and modifying IT apps and services is out-distributed to the various consumers and users. Of course this is already done by major vendors in a number of ways:
a) user accessible configuration files, settings and start-up procedures;
b) templates, includes and divergent styling as well as data sources;
c) user selectable and customizable add-ons, extensions, and plugins a la Adobe Photoshop, Quark Express extensions , Java Beans, etc;
d) macros, batch processing and scripting languages allow further customization and user extension of features.
2) Publication of open APIs so that users can add:
a) more complete and speed performant features not possible with a scripting language;
b) integrate or (have integrated ) the app with other systems and programs more tightly;
c) buy third party extensions from a cotery of developers as in the case of SalesForce.com or iPhone and iPod App shops.
3) Consumerization means users contributing to the documentation and the supporting forums associated with the apps they work with and sharing them in blogs and wikis over the Web;
4)Consumerization reaches its greatest potential with Open Source software as users can contribute directly to the development, securing, and aiding in the direction and development of Open Source software. This is being done today in many forms and ways - and Word Press is a great example.

Word Press : Example of Consumerization

There was a sculpture at this weekend’s Nuit Blanche in Toronto that was so cleverly puckish it was bewitching. Immediately when I saw it I broke-out laughing so raucously that I flatly embarrassed my Nuit Blanche companion. Now in my defense I can say that we had just been discussing how both MacOS and Windows Vista were becoming so bloated and barnacled with spurious “features” which dragged down overall performance and made working on the 2 most popular OS even more complex and tedious. Stephen argued that artists and designers had little to choose from. So I noted that there were a lot of great online photo editing tools on the Web right now that were fast approaching the ease of use and features of say a Photoshop 5 (Adobe’s current Photoshop CS4 is roughly version 9). I made the point that with GIMP, Blender and a host of 2d+3D apps in Linux linked with virtual machines for the essential Mac and Windows graphics packages, designers could get the best from all OS worlds. Stephen said that was the hell he had to go through now.

But Stephen also mentioned the new Windows Cloud OS might provide a hospitable environ for just such graphics tools. And as I previously could not help wondering if this was answer to the Microsoft web conundrum. That little puzzle is what all those Microsoft $600Million per data centers were going to run given that the Windows 2008 Server used for Microsoft’s own site is slower than 56% of all sites tracked by Alexa. Then Stephen said he had seen a video of Steve Ballmer getting excited while “leaking” info on Windows Cloud OS. He said “you know how excited Steve can get”. So I had promised to reserve judgment, investigate a bit more about this Cloud OS; but also had insisted that this sounded like some airhead notion.

Then we walked into OCAD’s Useless Beauty exhibition.

And there was an Airhead suddenly right before us .. and the dome-head looked so much like Steve when he gets excited about a favorite topic, zooming bellicose all over the stage, sweating profusely, and almost steaming through ears, nose, and mouth….. It certainly tickled my funny bone. As it turns out, Windows Cloud OS is no airhead idea.

Microsoft has a big Web problem. Its latest Windows software (even when tuned to the MAX as Microsoft.com certainly is) slows down Web Service such that Microsoft.com is slower than 56% of all websites tracked by Alexa (well over 50,000 and all the big boys are in the mix). Windows Server is also one of the most expensive for initial if not also ongoing costs. And its browser, IE8, trails all the rest of the pack by wide margins in speed, size of code, size and install time, features, extensions, and most importantly standards compliance. Web developers now spend 20-40% of their time making sure that apps can be downgraded and otherwise hacked to work in IE6, IE7 or IE8.

But the biggest problem is that IT shops large and small are finding that the silos of information and the barriers to integration are largely Microsoft Windows-made. Sure there are a lot of incompatible non-Microsoft databases and a whole bailliwick of ERP, BI, SCM and hundreds of types office documents and objects which add barriers to quick cross integration. But there is a reason Redmond has needed, because of its mantra of everything runs best in Windows[only], to tout its integration efforts.

So the Cloud is IT’s escape hatch from Redmond hegemony. And in response, Windows Cloud OS, with Dave Cutlers help (he of Windows NT which made Windows in 1990’s acceptable to Business) will fence off the the Web Cloud enough to make Windows Vista survive long enough so that Microsoft can finally get Windows right. Righttttttttttttttt…..

On the day after Labor Day I got a browser surprise. During my Windows XP updates (I always select user customized over the default because Redmond gives me stuff I don’t want unlike on my Linux notebook), Microsoft offered me a chance to try the IE8 beta. But to my surprise (and no control) the updater ripped out IE7 and replaced it with the IE8 beta. Now I didn’t want this because I use IE as a compatibility test browser and I wanted both IE7 and IE8 beta for that purpose. Now I had to scrounge around and find a latest copy of IE7 that doesn’t want to takeover the IE world on my machine. So that is what I spent too much of the weekend trying to do. Thanks Redmond.

Google Chrome beta browser versus Microsoft IE8 beta browser

Surprise 2, Google announced on September 2 their Chrome browser. Oh … Google is no longer working with Mozilla? But still funding them until 2011. In fact the Chrome browser uses Apple’s Webkit not Mozilla’s Gecko display engine. Hmmm. And there is no support for add-ons including notably Adobe’s Flash player. Hmmm. And it runs in only one language - English. And it runs in only one major operating system - Windows XP and Vista. And Chrome lacks a full set of utilities like add-ons, plugins, themes, bookmark management, etc. hmmm, Hmmm, and HMMM.

Now why all this hmmmrumphing ? Because back in 1998 Microsoft pledged to the Web community and organizations that its rapidly expanding in popularity IE browser would a)stop engaging in a non-compatible browser war with Netscape and b)fully implement the HTML, CSS, DOM, JavaScript and other W3C/Web standards. 10 Years later the Web Community is still waiting for part b). From 2000 until IE7 was introduced 2006, Microsoft stopped all development on W3C and other Web features. So when a major corporation promises Web standards and compliance I am greatly suspect. Google is not even doing that regarding a)schedules to complete missing features and b)priorities for new features. So I am still from Missouri on Chrome. So I have finally done my own tests and read what others have done.

CSS Browser Tests

So I thought one of the best ways to test the new browsers would be to see how well the two did on the CSS tests suites provided by W3C. As the IT world moves to the Cloud, conformance to these and other Web standards are becoming crucial. A lot of development software from vendors large and small from IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, Sun and many others depend on compliance with W3C and and other Web Standards. In addition end user organizations like Amazon, eBay, Fedex, SEC, UPS, WalMart and hundreds of others are now using the Internet Cloud as primary IT resources. They too are looking for rock solid Web standards adherence by browser suppliers. Besides this CSS Test Suite would be a good exercise because IE8 has had 10 years to meet CSS standards (most of the tests are at least 2-4 years old) compared to Google’s first kick at the browser cat.

Other tests show decided speed, expandability, usability advantages to Chrome ( and Firefox in many cases):
TechRadar - says Chrome and Firefox easily surpass IE8 latest beta, giving nod to Firefox.
MSNBC - rates Chrome faster than IE8, gives Chrome good UI marks as well.
LifeHacker - gives top marks to Firefox, Chrome, Firefox for speed, CSS times, and Memory usage - IE8 trails
Scalar Motion - does install, import settings, speed, and usability tests and ranks Firefox, Chrome and IE8 trailing
Slashdot - has its 728 comments and they are rated from good to worse.
In general, almost all observers place IE8 well behind both Chrome and Firefox while eWeek’s Jim Rapoza sees Opera as the best and most innovative of browsers. I have to agree on Opera’s innovations but Chrome and Firefox 3 put a new emphasis on delivering speed and efficient memory use as Cloud and Web applications become much bigger and heavily CSS+JavaScripted - and Chrome has a decided advantage over IE8 in both cases(but still runs second to Firefox 3.1).

Now here are the results from one of over a dozen test suites on CSS in various contexts provided by W3C. This first suite tests selectors and cascading rules conformance at the very heart of CSS usability with 176 different test pages. Chrome failed on 16 or 9% of the 176 tests while IE8 failed on 77 or 44% of the tests. In addition during the tests I discovered that Chrome does the mouse wheel backwards to all other browsers while IE8 was notably slower (about 3 times longer wait than Chrome) for about 15-25% of the tests. I then tried some of the alternative test harneses (9 in total) provided by W3C including XHTML, XLINK, and HTML iFrame. The results were substantially the same except for XLINK where IE8 failed nearly every test.

So what can we conclude from these tests. First, that Chrome indeed is very fast - close to the same as Firefox 3, the fastest browser now available. Chrome also dominated CSS compliance being faster and four times more likely to get the Web page right than IE8. As CSS and other standards get pushed to the limits by Web developers it is good to know that there will be at least 4 browser vendors that take these standards seriously. The travesty is that 10 years later, Microsoft still does not.

Microsoft on Web Standards

Here is sampling of Microsoft statements on Web Standards:
April 2000 commitment to Web Standards - “most standards-compliant browsing technology shipping today”
December 2006 interview prior to Mix07 and IE7 Booster show - Bill Gates “We’ve done the Mea Culpa . . . that yes, we should have kept the browser innovation curve to be a more continuous curve. Believe me, we wish that we’d done that differently. Dean’s group is getting more resources, and so you’ll actually see us not only going back to the state of what we were innovating before but actually innovating at faster speeds than we were before. A lot of that has to do with implementing standards. It also has to do with doing user interface things that make our browser a cool browser and ultimately preferable for people to use.”
December 2007 Dean Hachamovitch, IE8 project leader, pats himself and IE8 on the back for ACID2 test compliance - this is a small target, red herring test; not near the rigour of the W3C CSS tests.
March 2008 Microsoft pledges again to expands support for Web Standards - this statement is 5 months prior to the release of IE8 beta which fails 44% of the CSS tests. Go over to the DOM and JavaScript and things are no better as Microsoft still has not deprecated their proprietary extensions or moved to major standards in both areas.

If IE8 were a competitor’s product, Microsoft executives, PR, and domain experts would be absolutely savaging it. They would be as dismissive of IE8 as they were of OS/2. They would be telling the IT community that “after 10 years of trying, this IE8 browser still hasn’t made the grade”.And that would not be the worst of it. For Microsoft development tools and applications have an even worse record of Web standards support where proprietary extensions and exclusive Windows/Microsoft process/routines are the norm.

Hence Chrome may not be the browser you want to upgrade to(see security bugs here). Firefox, Opera and Safari are still better and more feature complete; so make Google deliver on its vague promises. But Chrome certainly does show exactly how deficient Microsoft is on delivering Web standards. On Google’s first try, they get Web standards 4 times better than Microsoft. And the problem is not just Redmond’s errant support for Web standards but in the long run, its negativity towards the Web Platform in general. CTO Ray Ozzie may be there in Redmond to advocate for the Web, but he is outvoted by CSO Craig Mundie and CEO Steve Ballmer and of course, the Chairman, who really sees the Web as an incursion on his dominant desktop monopolies and his company’s ability to create an IT client-server hegemony.

About a year ago, David Pogue, advanced the argument that the programmibility of the iPhone gave it a distinct competitive advantage over all other mobile phones including ones powered by Microsoft Windows Mobile and Nokia’s Symbian. One of the key advantages that David cited was the multi-touch UI of iPhone and the ability to harness it uniquely at Apple.

But Apple may have poisoned that advantage in 3 ways. First, it dictates what prices can be charged at its App Store and takes at least 30% of the action for all App Store sales. Second, Apple does not permit Flash apps and is well behind on Java platform updates, two rival technologies for the mobile phone which both have strong tools and substantial mobile phones developer communities. Last, but not least, Apple makes the process of signing up for Apple Mobile development an exercise in serf-subservience …. okay acknowledgement of the greatness and benevolence of Steve Jobs … okay okay the Kim Jong Il of obscurity as to why you have to sign up this way other than any other for indenture to Apple.

Now read here in a report by Infoworld’s Neil McCallister, it is an excellent appraisal of the features of the two development environs. Then consider that Flash and Java also have strong development tools that both deliver rich media apps NOW. Then consider the following - is this the prelude to the big RAIA battles upcoming between Flash, Java, and the Microsoft VM??? The battle will be what presentation layer will be used preferentially on most apps because it provides the easiest write once run anywhere approach to development of online and offline apps that can run on any device that uses a CPU chip.

This is an important battle because the vendor that controls the Presentation Layer will have a decided advantage in controlling a broad range of markets and even determining what tools and integration software gets used on Servers and their associated storage/database and messaging/networking layers. Expect a battle Royale with bloody slugfests comparable to any of the latest James Bond movies or Presidential TV campaigns.

I have been reading in the Business press (try Business Week September 22nd 2008 edition or any recent issue of Harvard Business Review) that the US industry needs to get back to innovation. That may be true of the oligarchs like the Oil and Gas or the Auto Industry (GM is going hat in hand asking for bailout subsidies on its new car the Volt - which may provoke a reVolt on Main Street already saddled with helping out their favorite Wall Street Bankers). But the IT industry seems to be batting two for two on recent announcements.

I have already highlighted Google’s Android Phone just below.

However, let me say that I was skeptical about Adobe’s New Suite of Products. I just did not think that Adobe could pull off so many improvements all together across all of their product lines. But I was wrong - especially for the core programs. Adobe Flash CS4, Photoshop CS4 Extended, OnLocation CS4 and Premier Pro CS4 are all must have, ground breaking updates for the designers and artists working in their respective fields. Adobe After Effects CS4, Contribute CS4, Dreamweaver CS4, Illustrator CS4, and SoundBooth CS4 have solid updates with a few real grab you features and enhancements. There are some clunkers with Fireworks, Illustrator, InDesign and Bridge (given what Photoshop Lightroom does, this program needs to be pared down and then merged with Version Cue and OnLocation)laeding the parade.

This also means that among the Adobe Suites of CS4 programs, Production Premium is the one to get . Adobe has finally lavished attention on its long suffering designer/stylist base. CS4 can be called the Return of Design. And its shows. This makes the Production Premium Suite with programs such as After Effects, Premiere Pro, PhotoShop Extended, Flash, OnLocation, and SoundBooth offering not only great designer features but also improved integration among the tools. On the other side of the ledger it appears that Web Premium Suite and Design Standard Suite offer the least bang for the buck.

But the prices for the Suites are all very attractive. For Web Designers who now need to be able to do Video, Photo and Web design and editing, the only missing ingredient in the Production Premium Suite is Dreamweaver . Perhaps such users may want to upgrade to the Master Collection for a price of $1199 . However, note that the jury is still out on how well the critical new Photoshop 2D +3D layering and object features work; but Photoshop’s new Object Property editing, Adjustment panel, Mask panel, Content-aware Scaling, and enhanced Object blending and Object alignment are strong features on their own.

So congratulations are due to Adobe for a very impressive and innovative launch of a largely robust upgrade to its complete product line and in a record 17-18 months. Now if we could just get the auto-industry thinking innovation - I know GM has a hybrid in every technological color, but can they be produced to sell? In contrast Adobe Suites should do very well indeed.

A lot of phone reviewers are poo-oohing the Google Android as first seen on the Dreem from T-Mobile. I thought “Wow could Google be making a big “going down in flames” mistake?” Then I heard the news commentary from Microsoft which said spokesmen for Redmond said “their phone was a growing player.” Hmmm - if Redmond has to comment that they are a player … maybe Android is better than I have heard. Then I heard the price, a hundred bucks eighty - hmmm competitive. And then I saw the story behind the screen shot at the left - the first Android Killer App a Compass System that takes advantage of Google City Maps in a most nifty/"handy” way.

Thats it.

Google is in the mobile phone ball game, and in a big way! Thank heavens - no real competition for iPhone is not what the mobile phone market needs. Now Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Nokia can have a good monster competition - and unlike the recent action on Wall Street, Main Streeters will be the better for it.