Chris Blanc: Play and Projects: Blog

Microsoft’s Bill Gates spills some new strategy:

We’re hard at work, I would say, on the next version, which we call Windows 7. I’m very excited about the work being done there. The ability to be lower power, take less memory, be more efficient, and have lots more connections up to the mobile phone, so those scenarios connect up well to make it a great platform for the best gaming that can be done, to connect up to the thing being done out on the Internet, so that, for example, if you have two personal computers, that your files automatically are synchronized between them, and so you don’t have a lot of work to move that data back and forth. ^{^}

And:

Microsoft is set to announce Tuesday that it is launching a “public preview” program for two server products based on its Windows Server 2008 operating system.

The products, one aimed at small business and the other at midsize firms, combine the server operating system with Exchange Server and other software into a bundle designed to cost less and be easier to install than acquiring the products separately. ^{^}

Microsoft is going to push Server 2008 instead of Vista toward business, while refining Windows 7 as a dual attack: sharing of data across multiple devices, not SaaS, and making a light and fast operating system because, among other reasons, portable devices like the Asus Eee PC are redefining how we use computers, watch television, and communicate.

They are listening to their customers in Redmond, and have come up with a mature strategy.

When the company brain trust repairs to the Ballmer Bunker to chew over its next big idea, post-Yahoo, I’ve got a suggestion: how about doing something to deal with e-mail and its discontents? Something grand–like bringing Microsoft Outlook into the 21st century. I don’t mean a tweak here and there; I’m talking about a top-to-bottom overhaul.

The product debuted in 1997 and has improved very little since. Given the absence of real competition for most of the last decade, you shouldn’t be surprised at the glacial pace of improvement. ^{^}

John C. Dvorak refers to himself as a “cranky geek,” but the word he’s really looking for is cynical. Cynicism means you know that people are out in the world acting selfishly, and you see the results, and then realize it’s very little — another two hundred person hours, another 10% of budget and time — that separates the mediocre standard products we have now from ones that are actually a joy to use like the applications that inspire people to go into computing.

I agree with the authors above that Microsoft Outlook is a piece of junk, although it has some surprisingly flexible features, and that its interface is as god-awful as Windows 3.1. However, I have to ask: why is it so hard for humanity to produce good versions of its most basic software needs, like browsers, email clients, even internet forums and blogs?

I haven’t yet found an email client on Windows that I like. Pegasus I can respect, but there are parts of its interface that are so brick-stupid it’s impossible not to scorn it and some point, and although it functions well in most cases, under heavy load in some areas it snaps like a twig. Thunderbird? Junk. Opera’s built-in mail? OK, with some glaring oversights. Eudora? Mostly, except it has always been feeble like most Macintosh software. It’ll do OK if you have very basic needs, but put it under pressure and it doesn’t even make it to twig strength.

The same could be said of browsers. Opera is all-around the best, but even it collapses when Flash plugins tax it. Firefox is good, but often has inexplicable problems and seems to crash quite a bit, a good deal more than IE and much, much more than Opera. IE… well, Microsoft had a good five years without competition and did nothing impressive, and now it’s fairly big and some of its standards interpretations are weird. Safari? Who needs Safari? It’s like a Firefox clone with bad JavaScript.

I could go on, but you see the point. The everyday apps are the ones that people assume have no glory, so they get ignored. If they’re not ignored, the high competition means no one is going to jump into the fray and try to shave off some percentage of a massive userbase. Let’s not forget that Firefox inherited Netscape’s userbase, and Opera has forged a might 1.69% after ten years of existence. Uh, yeah.

I wish the Open Source community would tackle more of these fights, because what needs to be done is clear. Outlook could be replaced by a program that took Eudora’s approach to interface, Pegasus’ approach to file formats and data handling, and Lotus Notes’ approach to calendaring and encrypted, revisioned mail. It really isn’t that hard. Just go through what exists, pick the best features, find a way to make them work together, and then code something as light and fast as possible. The users would benefit.

The old, Google model: lots of little servers in a network designed for redundancy in case of failure.

The new old IBM model: a few centralized servers, but they’re more efficient and reliable and engineered to not only not waste cycles, but to last for decades. However, they’re designing them around an old mainframe strength — internal bandwidth speed — and using it as the basis for a new mainframe computing based heavily on flexible parallelism, or “cell” computing.

“We have been running multitenancy [running multiple customers on a single machine with a single application instance] for decades and decades,” he told me.

“It’s a mainframe model where things run together but in isolation. The issue is whether the machines will bear up under the load of diverse work or will they grind down and you’ll need to provision another machine. You need reliability, security, auditing, privacy, data integrity, automation and full isolation. You need to have a lot of layers in the environment.”

In 2000, IBM resurrected the mainframe by bringing Linux and WebSphere to the platform and lowering the price of entry, according to William Zeitler, senior vice president of IBM’s Systems & Technology Group. “You can build out a thousand smaller servers that need to be connected to ports and a fabric. You end up with a complexity crisis that has to be rationalized,” Zeitler said. ^{^}

The more small servers you have talking to each other, the more the communication becomes complex. Like in CPUs, the real question is how fast can they move information, not how fast they can calculate. Calculation speed is the model of old personal computing, from the early 1980s. Now we’re talking about moving massive amounts of data around and avoiding latency and internal correction that slow the process down.

A UC Berkeley paper [PDF] recently submitted to the IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium manages to highlight two common and seemingly unrelated themes that have come up a number of times over the past few years in my reporting on the high-performance computing (HPC) space: 1) IBM’s Cell is really good at HPC workloads when you invest the time to write custom code for it, and 2) Intel’s Xeon platform is perennially bandwidth starved and not very power-efficient. ^{^}

IBM’s solution: Use processors that emphasize moving information between each other and working collaboratively, like the Cell. Build a few giant boxes and over-engineer them so they’re reliable and efficient. This is in contrast to the PC/server market, where a new design comes out every six months and is under-engineered to avoid introducing potential conflicts and to get it out the door on time. They also have found out that these products are nice and green, since it’s easier to constrain efficiency on a few specialty designs than impose it on general purpose ones.

International Business Machines Corp (IBM.N) on Wednesday launched tools to reduce computer energy consumption as IBM hopes to boost its business of selling power-saving technologies.

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“Energy efficiency has become a critical business metric, like product reliability and customer satisfaction,” William Zeitler, head of IBM’s systems and technology group, said in an interview with Reuters. ^{^}

After having seen too many servers fail over the past few years, and having heard service technicians refer to two-year-old machines as “antiques,” I think this is a positive possibility. We’ve reached a possibly temporary plateau in processor power; programmers are still finding ways to take advantage of multiple cores, and it’s likely we’ll need to redesign how we write code and operating systems. Then again, the mainframe guys have been doing it all along.

“[Bill Gates] made an unbelievable contribution,” said Andreessen, while speaking at a keynote with John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. “It’s hard to conceive what this industry would look like today if Microsoft hadn’t standardized the OS . . . I think the industry would be much smaller if that hadn’t have happened.” ^{^}

People love to hate whoever’s on top. At first it was Microsoft, now it’s Google, and soon it will be Apple.

Each generation has a series of platforms that allow people to be creative with technology without re-inventing the wheel. For the 1970s, this was UNIX. For the 1980s, it was DOS and Novell. For the 1990s, it was Windows.

These platforms don’t have to be perfect, and can’t be, because they are designed to accomodate roles and not be optimized for perfect performance. It’s possible they could get better, but so far indications are that desktop machines and server operating systems are different animals.

Without Windows/DOS we might all still be carrying around disks full of converter programs so we could share files.

Windows/DOS standardized the consumer interface to the internet and is as much a part of it as UNIX and HTTP. It’s hard for people to see that, because they hate the big guy.

There’s a sort of mental health hypochondria in which one asks, at wit’s end, What is wrong with me? and means it. It’s an overreaction in most cases, but you hear it a lot when people are fundamentally frustrated, and at their breaking point, and assume that if it hasn’t worked, there’s something so fundamentally wrong with them there is “no way” they can complete it.

This arbitrary cutoff point for inductive thinking about possible solutions also happens to computer companies, writers and users, when they confront something so fundamentally frustrating they don’t know how to take out their anger and frustration upon it. That thing is Microsoft, with which 65,000 employees, is entrenched in the same corporate culture that is also slowing Apple and Google, although slower, because they’re smaller. Get it? The bigger a company gets, the more layers of management you have, and the more people game the system. It’s a size issue.

Legitimate reasons to be frustrated with Microsoft:

(Author’s note: I don’t claim to have social graces better than those of a drunken camel.)

As people get frustrated with Microsoft and buy Apple, they’re not reflecting a sense of faith in Apple as much as they are suggesting that the Windows ecosystem is fundamentally broken. In order to do this, they need to ignore the core audience that Windows serves, and how important it is to them to have backward compatibility.

When Apple first talked about upgrading their aging and incompetent OS 9, pundits said they had two choices: unleash something new, and run older stuff in emulation or virtualization, or keep building on and running the risk of being like Windows, which is a lot of really excellent code, some mediocre corporate bloat^TM code, and a ton of legacy code that makes it not only giant but slow. On the plus side, you can run programs from 1983 and have them interact easily with your current apps.

IBM, formerly the king of the PC business, keeps selling mainframes for the same reason. Data portability is a beast. It’s expensive to move your data to a new system, and easy to keep the combination that has been working for you in working order. Apple never had to deal with this problem. Linux has barely had to, but the BSD team has had to consider it to a greater degree.

I will never buy Apple products because Apple is bad psychology, but I admire the simplicity of their design. Every task relates to the user. Packaging is simple. Options are reduced. The problem is that while this works well for the home user, where 90% of the people are doing the same few tasks, it breaks down in the world of business where customization and compatibility are necessary. Still, there’s a lot Microsoft can learn from Apple.

One is that they need to manage public opinion better.

For example, in the “blogosphere,” it is widely regarded as truth that Microsoft Windows Vista is a complete failure. But back in reality, not only do many people use it, but many of them like it. But public opinion sways people, and if they hear other children in the schoolyard saying that Windows is too difficult and they’re buying a Mac, they will follow suit. Yes, Mr. Ballmer, you can call them pathetic sheep, and you might be right, but it’s the reality of the situation.

The Houston Chronicle’s Dwight Silverman offers an interesting insight here:

But let me tell you: Vista on an SDD with no junkware running in the background is a revelation. It’s snappy and even faster than a clean install of Windows XP on a traditional drive. While Dell has made great strides in reducing its junkware load, even its cleanest machines still have some. ^{^}

He’s echoing the sentiments of Ed Bott, who writes with convincing literacy of the human-computer equation:

At first glance, Jeremy’s machine is Exhibit A in the case against Windows Vista. As Jeremy documented in a series of posts, this gorgeous machine was ugly in action: slow to start, sluggish when performing everyday tasks, crash-prone, and overloaded with annoying and unwanted software.

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blew away all traces of the old installation and set up a pristine copy of Windows Vista Business, with up-to-date drivers and zero crapware. The initial results were eye-opening and impressive. After my makeover, this machine was every bit as fast as its specs said it should have been. ^{^}

Silverman had originally suggested that the windows ecosystem is broken:

This is a tremendous issue, because it is the ecosystem surrounding Windows — the vendors that make hardware that rely on it and the software developers who make programs that run on it — that has driven Microsoft’s success. The ecosystem has become horribly complex over time, to the point that it’s collapsing of its own weight, out of whack, out of balance.

Windows, although a proprietary operating system, is the hub of an open computing system. Anyone can build a computer that runs it, using off the shelf parts. Any hardware vendor can make components for it. And software vendors have access to the Windows Application Programming Interface, or API, and can write programs that run on it.

This open system has worked well so far; it’s what has driven the growth of the personal computing industry for decades. The ability for anyone to enter the market has driven prices down and innovation up, and consumers have benefited. It’s why Windows has a market share that dwarfs those of all other operating systems. ^{^}

Silverman points out two broken aspects: software compatibility, and hardware compatibility. I’d like to point out a few more:

All of these are easy to fix with some decisive leadership, which has been lacking since Gates has known he will be retiring soon. That’s easily fixed: find a leader who can be arbitrary like Apple’s Steve Jobs, and let him or her loose on the company. Also, look at an intelligent licensing model, and keep in mind that while people loved Windows XP, most people were happiest with Windows 2000 because of these principles:

Apple has violated these principles with recent releases of OS X. Being neurotic, they can’t resist gunking up a good thing, which puts them into the same bloated category as Microsoft and its suppliers. I guess it’s true that the bigger a company gets, the less responsive to obvious reality it becomes.

You probably didn’t, but I always did wonder about this. The answer is provided by our homies at Pipe International, who provide us with an informative illustration:

It’s a big thick plastic thing with a core of steel wires, and right at the very center, some tiny fluff of fiber optic cable that carries the signal.

Rather than making their users more mobile, some laptops are merely weighing them down–and causing traffic jams in airport security.

Intel (nasdaq: INTC – news – people ) and Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT – news – people ) finally get it. The two companies are pushing for a new class of machines that combine the power of a personal computer and the portability of a personal digital assistant. ^{^}

Nice to see a mainstream source I respect noting what I noted some time ago.

I’d compare the UMPC to the T-1000, however, and I’d point out that what we’re seeing is the convergence of cell phones (which have become computers) and computers, with the new device favoring the form factor of the former. Light, cheap, massively portable. Laptop computers on the other hand are like slim desktops with smaller parts.

The computer market has shown no signs of radical growth. People keep upgrading, but they’re less inspired. The future is an expandable desktop at home, network aware gadgets scattered through your life, and a dynabook style micro-laptop for basic tasks on the road. It’s a better future than having all of us enslaved to bulky technology.

Now if Web 2.0 software would only follow the same path…

Trends are an odd thing. Something gains momentum, we watch it happen, and then we participate and assume it will have the same effect everywhere forever. But then it doesn’t, because life runs in cycles to ensure that data, energy and attention spans stay in motion. Google seems to be going through the same.

Someone asked me the other day if the reason so many people were leaving Google was the increasingly corporate climate in the company. I said, no, I didn’t think so. I thought it was just the right time for many of them. They were vested, or had gotten that career boost, and it was time to move on, because the business model was waning and as a result, the company is trying to squeeze more blood out of stones through more bureaucracy. That’s how the cycle goes in tech start-ups.

Some writing on the wall persists, though.

The report shows that spending by search advertisers on Yahoo grew a robust 57 percent while spending on Google grew only at about half that rate. That meant Google’s total share of search ad dollars declined slightly to 70.4 percent, while Yahoo’s rose to 24.2 percent. Microsoft’s declined slightly to 5.4 percent. ^{^}

As blogged about before, internet advertising is changing from per-click to per-customer. Advertisers want to be selling to a person or “type” of person, not a random clicker. As a result, Yahoo and Microsoft — who have deeper fingers in different services than Google does, despite the success of GMail — are rising while Google is having to struggle to compete.

Google’s (GOOG) US paid-click growth in March was as bad as in February–up only 2.7%–rounding out a violent deceleration in Q1, says Comscore (per Mark Mahaney at Citi). In all of Q1, Google’s US paid clicks rose only 2% year-over-year versus 25% in Q4 and 48% in Q3. ^{^}

Every great business opportunity only exists for a certain amount of time before it is superseded by the technologies it helped seed. The steam plough begat the car, the adding machine the computer, and now, the search engine and ad business is giving way to the target sales business. Remember how in 1998 people were talking about intelligent agents, little bots that help us shop by knowing what we want and at what prices, and niche marketing? It took some time for the market to catch up, but we’re nearly there.

What this means for Google: it’s time to get fleet-footed with that sea change. We can now surmise that Google’s great SaaS hype was a last-ditch attempt to have enough services to learn more about users and their demographic inclinations. We already know that Google knows a lot about us, but is weak on seeing what we buy at eCommerce sites; maybe they were hoping for an end-run around that. Google needs to not think Google has jumped the shark, but they need to know that Google business model 1.0 leapt over that beast late last year and is now heading for the sunset.

As companies have wanted to track online behavior, they have found some ways around this. Any single Web page you see may have information drawn from several Web servers, each of which gets to put its own cookie on your computer and to check if it has left a cookie there before. Increasingly, advertising networks, like AOL’s Advertising.com, place invisible, one-pixel-square images on Web pages of sites they work with, in order to use cookies to keep track of which users have visited the network’s sites and under what circumstances. But this is still fragmented information. Advertising.com only can build a file of behavior on sites that choose to enable its invisible cookie.

Phorm gets around these restrictions by piggybacking its cookies on the backs of those left by other sites. Phorm installs equipment at the I.S.P. that intercepts the user’s browser when it visits a Web site for the first time. It redirects the browser to Phorm’s own site. That way it can place and read its own cookie with a Phorm identification number. It then appends this number onto the cookie of the other site, say Google or Yahoo. It does this without the permission of that other site. ^{^}

While we were all getting a bit worried about the NSA’s snooping of our internet traffic, suddenly the oldest and more probable threat rises up to meet us. As advertisers find out they were advertising to the wrong demographic, and that Google’s miracle may have been built on as much adsense hot air as anything else, they’re looking for ways to track users and filter out the ones who do not have the required disposable income. In other words, it’s no longer 1996, and we can’t assume that the people with internet access are the upper middle classes any longer.

The truth is that finding elite consumers is about to become a real manic pursuit:

Incomes, on average, have declined by 2.5% among the bottom fifth of families since the late 1990s, while inching up by just 1.3% for those in the middle fifth of households, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute, two liberal think tanks.

The wealthiest slice of Americans, however, saw their incomes rise by 9%.

The average income of the bottom fifth of families was $18,116; the middle fifth, $50,434; and the wealthiest fifth, $132,131. ^{^}

Looking at this practically, in an age of increasing gasoline and housing costs, as well as future environmental costs and across-the-board increases in cost of living, a family earning under $100,000 a year is going to have to scrimp and save to experience the lifestyle they have had up until now. It’s as if the bill just came due from years of cheap gasoline inflating our lifestyles. Is it possible that we never left the Dust Bowl days behind?

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) for the year before February 2008 rose by 4.5 percent^{^}, while wages rose by 3.3 percent^{^}. That’s a net loss of just over one percent, which means that $100 today bought what $98.50 or so did a year or two ago. Add to that inflation and other costs, and life is getting more expensive.

According to statistics with the U.S. Department of Labor, Americans are paying 20 percent more for bread than they did in 2005 and nearly twice the price for a dozen eggs.

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Karrer said produce that once went for $1 per pound now fetches $1.99, a hike he sees in grocery stores all over the valley. ^{^}

What this means is that for most Americans, the future includes a lot more saving if they want to avoid living in debt. That in turn means that spending will decrease, except for those whose incomes rose 9%. They are going to be the target market for any luxury goods, a nebulous category that includes both luxuries and pricier versions of otherwise mediocre goods (would you eat a $5 pizza?).

Advertising tracking is in our future. I don’t like what I read about it, however, because this information produces a brilliant scatter diagram showing the activities of a human being. Who looked up what address on Google maps? He viewed the record for what kind of book at the library? He visited a site selling music or books associated with the anarchist movement? “Better get a warrant, Lou. This guy sounds like bad news.” That’s how in innocence these technologies can become dangerous.