Chrome vs. Firefox: Fighting Over 20%

Last week I wrote about my view that it would be a long time before Google's new Chrome browser would be important to me as a developer, because few users would adopt it quickly. The day after launch people got quite excited about the market share numbers Chrome was achieving. But Chrome's usage, as anyone with a brain could have predicted, has fallen back, as the tire kickers go back to their regularly scheduled programming.

And so now its time to think about what Chrome really will mean to the marketplace. The first thing is that I don't see how Chrome makes much of a difference to Internet Explorer users. I am sure Google can get a few of them, but most Chrome users will be more pioneering Firefox users. This caps Chrome's upper number around 20%. Of course to achieve 20% almost all Firefox users would need to defect, which of course will never happen.

More importantly, competing with Firefox is going to be really, really difficult, just based on the merits.

Why? Extensions.

Apple, Adobe, Google, and others have chosen WebKit as their HTML display engine over FireFox's Gecko because it is smaller, easier to understand, and has been faster. But Gecko is purpose-built, from the ground up, to do extensions. No one else has'em. The competitors have traded flexibility for performance. But for much of the cutting edge Firefox using crowd, extensions are really, really important.

To be clear, I am not saying it is impossible to get extensions into WebKit. I have no familiarity at all with the WebKit source code or architecture. But I strongly suspect it ain't trivial, otherwise they would have done it already. And if they do get extensions into WebKit, will WebKit, and therefore Chrome retain any performance benefits over Firefox.

Of course, presuming that Chrome/WebKit does get a mechanism for extensions, it then has to compete with years of Gecko based extensions. Many people will not switch until *their* extensions are available. And in the intervening period, don't believe that Firefox won't continue to get better. Already Firefox is testing the insanely fast Javascript engine called TraceMonkey.

Indeed this raising of the bar is, I suspect, Google's real end goal with Chrome. World browser domination is a pipe dream, but if Chrome can move the market forward and introduce code and ideas that make the world a better place to run web applications, I suspect Google will very happily claim victory.

A Modern Day Eliza Channeling Abraham Lincoln

I love this idea.

Many of you will know the *very* old concept of Eliza, the chat bot that responds to questions as if almost human. It seemed very cool in the 70's, but it has lost a bit of shine in the intervening 30 years or so.

But a new company called Virsona intends to bring it back, better and stronger. The idea of Virsona is that you can take the collective writings of a person and it will generate a chat bot that will respond as they would. This is a powerful and fun concept.

Today they only have one chat bot up, which is for Abraham Lincoln, but it performs very well.

This was a bit of my conversation with President Lincoln:

Abraham Lincoln: Hello, let's talk.

You: how are you

Abraham Lincoln: How are you?

You: I am fine

Abraham Lincoln: Pleased to hear it.

You: How old are you?

Abraham Lincoln: I was 56 years old when I was assassinated.

You: why do you wear a beard

Abraham Lincoln: No not always , silly question.

You: What did you do for a living before you were president

Abraham Lincoln: Before entering politics I worked as a Clerk,in Military Service, a Lawyer and a Store Owner.

You: what was your best speech

Abraham Lincoln: Short answer is for political reasons. To expand on that, in spite of the fact that the Battle of Gettysburg was a Union victory, it was also the bloodiest battle of the war and dealt a blow to my war efforts and the public''s ongoing support for the war. At the dedication of the Soldiers'' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on 19 November, in my now iconic speech, I referred to the events of the Civil War and described the ceremony at Gettysburg as an opportunity not only to dedicate the grounds of a cemetery, but also to consecrate the living in the struggle to ensure that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." I asked, what would these men who died for this cause want us to do--quit now or finish the job?

The one question I have is how good it will really be. Would it be able to really do a good job taking all of my blog posts and creating a Hank chat bot?! If so, I think there is a really broad market for this. Several months ago I interviewed the team at Hakia, and learned a bit about their natural language capabilities. It is my gut impression that Hakia could do something like this as well and I think it would be another really interesting market for them.

One thing that struck me is that Virsona is at the TechCrunch50 Demo Pit. They were, apparently, not good enough to make the main stage. So apparently, Ashton Kutcher's Blah Girls is more compelling.

Anyway, if Versona is as good as they seem to be, and their technology works beyond Abe Lincoln, I think they really have something and I look forward to seeing how their product unfolds.

Shortcut To Internet Millions!

I was feeling kinda crappy over the weekend, and so I was laying in bed bored. For the first time in many months I turned on the TV and channel surfed. I stumbled upon a guy by the name of Jeff Paul, who is hawking a product called “Shortcuts to Internet Millions”

Ok, some of you will think I am stealing a line from Ted Dziuba, but I don’t care.

Fuck Me.

We all must be real idiots over here in our little corners reading TechMeme, Hacker News, and such, looking for pearls of wisdom on how to do our business just a little bit better. How silly when all we really need to be doing is studying Jeff Paul's techniques. According to Jeff, if you spend $39.95 with him, all of the challenges of Internet entrepreneurship will melt away. Here are the highlights of Jeff’s system:

• Sign up today and be in business tomorrow
• Easy as sending email
• 10 Free web businesses
• No computer skills necessary

Ain’t that great! No computer skills necessary!

The amazing thing to me is that this guy is obviously making enough money to pay for a national TV campaign. Perhaps I shouldn’t be, but it really is viscerally shocking to me that there are enough people dumb enough to believe that you can really give some guy $39.95 and start making hundreds of thousands of dollars with no skills.

In many respects the Internet is indeed the great equalizer. It gives us all access to the same incredible pools of information. But what this kind of cynical campaign and product shows is that there are still plenty of people who really know nothing about even the basics of what the Internet is about. And among them there is a gullible group ripe for exploitation, that is responsive to this kind of insanity. Indeed Jeff Paul is capitalizing on the oft-quoted P.T. Barnum phrase that there is a sucker born every minute.

I know it is naïve but it is still disturbing to me.

Scoble Says "Everything Sucks". A Bit Over The Top But Not Untrue

Over the weekend, Robert Scoble got a bunch of people pissed off by suggesting that all the companies demoing at DemoFall 08, or at least all the companies' websites, suck. Now I do have at least some experience with analyzing suckage, and so I thought I would jump in here.

Now it is unlikely that I would say that every company at Demo or TechCrunch50 sucks. As others have correctly stated, entrepreneurship is hard, and my answer to things done by little guys sucking is generally (though not always) to ignore it rather than call it out. I figure calling out big or really well funded companies or really rich people is OK. Startups, and particularly smaller companies have it harder. Scoble didn't quite call out individual companies but it came pretty close given the small pool he pointed at.

That said, he makes a valid point about the websites.

Now I have not looked at all the websites, but I looked at quite a few. I specifically didn't look at all of them so that I would not be saying that all of them sucked. But most that I saw did. Unfortunately, this is a generic malady, and not a unique reflection on the Demo companies.

The purpose of this piece is not to talk about startups in particular, but to look at the larger issue of why so many websites, all the way from startups to larger companies do suck. Now to be clear I am not talking about the companies' products or services actually sucking. Though, just based on common sense and the basic odds of success, most things do suck, but that is not my point here. What I am talking about is the issue of getting the brochure-ware right. It seems to me that too many companies can't seem to describe even really compelling products or services effectively.

As I see it there are generally four categories of of web brochure suckage.

• MBA Speak - This is perhaps my greatest pet peeve. Its where the company tries to baffle me with a whole bunch of wonky b-school terms that end up meaning absolutely nothing. It is as if going to business school *reduces* one's ability to communicate.
• Geek Speak - This is geeks thinking they are talking to geeks. The problem is that even geeks don't generally want to hear geek speak when they are trying to understand the basics of why they should spend more than five seconds on a website.
• No Speak - Here, companies think their product is so cool they expect you to sit through a ten minute video, or try the product out to figure out what it is about. This company thinks their product is so cool that descriptions and salesmanship are not even necessary. I am not against videos, but before I am willing to commit to a video you need to sell me that it is worth my time. I will *never* try a demo unless I am already sold that the idea is cool.
• Weak Speak - This is where the person writing the copy has limited writing skills and just can't convey the essence of the product effectively. I am most sympathetic to this category because writing is hard, and describing a new concept effectively can be harder still. Still, if you have worked hard developing your product, it makes sense to work hard at describing it, or to at least to pay someone who can describe it.

And so there you have it. If your company's website sucks, the malady is fixable. But the first step is ending the denial. I hope this helps.

One Of The Coolest Homepages I've Seen

Last week my friend David Rose's company Angelsoft launched a new homepage for their website and I have to say it is one of the coolest homepages I have ever seen.

To summarize, Angelsoft is a platform that almost every angel investor group, and many VCs use to manage deal flow. It is an automated system that allows an entrepreneur to submit information to one or many early stage investors in one application process. Its a very cool idea that I think one day could make early stage private equity a much more fluid market.

But today I am not focusing on the company, but on the homepage. I hope to do a more in depth review of Angelsoft, but for today, my focus is just skin deep.

Go check out the page and then come back.

I'll wait here...

Welcome back.

The thing that is cool to me is the idea of seeing in real time, in a really visual way what is going on at the site.

I am reminded of a story I heard many years ago about the launch of Amazon. Jeff Bezos installed a bell in their office so that every time something was sold on the site the bell rung. As I recall the story, every time the bell rung was incredibly exciting. And of course we all know the sound of the bell became more and more frequent. Giving Amazon's employees a visceral sense of what is going on at the site must have been quite motivating.

I personally love the idea of feedback into what a service is doing. Exposing information in this kind of a way is like giving a site a pulse -- of bringing it to life. And so with the addition of the living map (if you haven't looked I you'll just have to guess at what I am talking about), Angelsoft really brings their site to life.

Congratulations David.

Redefining The Operating System

Several days ago, Michael Arrington at TechCrunch wrote an effusive article about the importance of The new Google Chrome browser. Specifically, Arrington made the claim that Chrome was the new Web operating system. Arrington was attacked by several people who not only disagreed with the notion, but attacked him for being an idiot because, in essence, an OS is something that has drivers and talks to hardware. The argument was that Arrington is not a techie and revealed his tech idiocy by making such a dumb statement.

Well I am a techie, and as I see it, Arrington is more right than wrong and his attackers are being pedantic, narrow, and silly.

Arrington’s critics are really making a language argument. It is a bit like saying you can’t call the file surface in a windowing operating systems a “desktop” because a desk is a thing that you sit at that is made out of wood, metal, or some such material. Clearly a computer does not have an actual “desktop”.

Silly, right?

Here’s the thing. The *meaning* of OS has changed from what it used to mean in the minds of users and even techies. Human language is a living thing, and terms grow, or shrink over time to match the needs and characteristics of the tools and the environment.

The term "operating system" long ago evolved beyond the narrow scope that is being defined by Arrington’s critics. Today most people think of an OS as being an environment that applications run in and that provides a bunch of end user services. In the early days of computing, operating systems were much more limited.

In fact in the early days application developers rarely even interacted with the OS. Programming languages had built-in functions for things like writing to disk, or to the printer or screen, and so it was the job of the programming language to support those functions by interfacing to the OS which provided access to the actual hardware through drivers. For the application writer, this was the unseen magic under the hood.

Today application writers write directly to the OS, and the programming language is just expected not to get in the way. And so a more intuitive definition of the operating system in today’s world would probably be the collection of services that an application sits on top of that enable that application.

And so, in the Internet age, the concept of a cloud OS or web OS being something that makes an emergent class of applications possible seems totally reasonable to me.

Now some of you will think I am reversing my position from yesterday. I am not. I do not think Chrome matters to me as a developer for the next year or two because it will have tiny market share and I don’t think supporting any of its special features will drive user adoption for my product in the near term.

But that said, the idea of something that does not operate at the driver level as being a new “OS” is a totally reasonable concept. In my mind the web browser has been heading this way for a long time, and so I am not so sure Chrome is the level of revelation that Michael is suggesting. But his basic framework is most certainly reasonable.

Who cares about Chrome. IE6 Has 25% Market Share

At my company, Kloudshare, a big part of what we are developing involves pushing boundaries of what browsers are expected to do. Generally speaking this is the case industry wide as the web browser is becoming more and more a real application delivery system.

Google understands this issue and has apparently been focused on some of the more glaring weaknesses of the current crop of browsers. As such, they have decided to launch a new browser called Chrome, to try to bring browsers into the 21st century.

This has the blogosphere all excited. Everyone is writing about the features of the new browser, and its strategic significance. The product sounds great, but I can only get but so excited.

Why?

Because as a developer, Chrome seems to me to be little more than pissing in the wind.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer controls around 75% of the browser market, and that’s not the bad news. The bad news is that Internet Explorer version 6 has 25% of the market.

IE 6 launched in August of 2001.When IE 6 Launched the attacks of 9/11 hadn’t happened yet. We were in the middle of the 1.0 tech bubble. In fact, if I had had kids when IE 6 was introduced they would be in second grade this year.

And yet 25% of the market is still using it. I’m not sure, but I believe it still comes on XP installation disks. In any case the fact that Microsoft has nothing in place to induce a higher upgrade rate is damn near criminal.

And so I must contrast all of the breathless excitement over chrome with the fact that the browser with #2 market share is so bad in 2008 terms it is just barely capable of delivering modern experiences. And even to do that, *lots* of engineering goes into supporting this trailing edge of the browser market.

I’d love to see a study of how much time is wasted developing special case crap for IE 6. I suspect if you added it all up we could solve world hunger or something.

All I know is that for me, as a writer, Chrome is a fun story -- as a developer, not so much. As a developer, Chrome is very much a story for the next decade and has nothing to do with my 2008 or even 2009 challenges. In fact it will be a cause for celebration if I care at all even in 2010.

The bottom line is Microsoft has been fighting the browser wars with spitballs and plastic knives and they are still beating Firefox handily. So Chrome, from a business perspective, for the foreseeable future, is totally irrelevant.

Former Cisco CTO Judy Estrin Says Tech is Lame

Friday is a no blog day for me, but sometimes you have something you have to say. Today the New York Times has an article about a new book written by Judy Estrin, former CTO of Cisco. Here is an excerpt from the article.

Ms. Estrin traces Silicon Valley’s troubles to the tech boom. She said that’s when entrepreneurs and venture capitalists started focusing more on starting companies to turn around and sell them and less on building successful companies for the long term.

“Starting in 1998, there was such a shift in Silicon Valley toward chasing money and short-term returns,” she said.

Part of the reason, she said, was that Cisco and other fast-growing big companies started acquiring start-ups with innovative technologies instead of developing new ideas internally. Entrepreneurs began founding companies with the goal of selling to a big tech company, and venture investors encouraged that.

Ms. Estrin acknowledged that innovative ideas still appear all over Silicon Valley. But, she said, the technologies at the root of new products like Apple’s iPod or the Facebook social networking service were actually developed several decades ago. If entrepreneurs do not continue to develop groundbreaking technology, she said, the valley will be in dire straits in another decade. She compared the situation to a tree that appears to be growing well, but whose roots are rotting underground.

 Yup.

The problem is driven by an investment community too fixated on short term results. For example, what does it say when VCs will not generally invest in companies unless they have finished technologies ready for market? It says that only companies that can raise enough money from friends and family, or only companies that can self fund can get launched. This is small money. And little money can't generally fund hard stuff.

Hard does not always equal better, but real innovation is usually not cheap.

But what is worse, in this tech economy, real innovation is not respected. It used to be that if you talked about changing the world, people took notice. Now if you say such things with a straight face, you will be laughed out of the VC conference room. It seems almost silly to aspire to do something so great that it really moves the bar. And in fact, it is true that when most people today say such things, it is little more than hyperbole. The problem is that in the current environment there is little place for actually trying to *do* such things. There is little money for it, but more importantly, there is little patience even for the concept.

In fact, in our elevator pitch, fast money, thin veneer, social networking tech econonmy, real innovation is a dirty word. And I have no idea what to do about it.

A Great Blogging Month

As many of you have, I suspect, noticed, I am no longer blogging on Fridays. My schedule had been five days a week and now its down to four days a week. But I decided today to not write an article (which I am now writing) because so many people are away today and I have already had such a great month in terms of traffic, and most importantly, its nice to have an additional excuse to take a day off. That led me to the thought that I should do a "state of the blog" post, which this is.

I started this blog on January 2nd 2008. My goal was to get maybe a few hundred readers. I really had no idea anyone at all would be interested in anything I had to say.  The growth of the audience has been, and continues to be far ahead of my expectations. A few statistics for the first 8 months of this year:

• The growth has been steady, and, unless the Internet shuts down, 50,000+ visitors for August.
• 1398 feed subscribers.
• Technorati say authority is 399 which puts means an overall rank of 8990, or in their top 10k blogs
  
• The blog regularly hits Hacker News and occasionally hits Reddit.
• Its been linked to by ReadWriteWeb,  GigaOM and lots of other great blogs.
  
• It is regularly syndicated at Silicon Alley Insider and CenterNetworks .
• It occasionally hits TechMeme, though not yet their leaderboard.
  

The bottom line is this blog, which I started as a lark with a silly, ironic, tongue-in-cheek name has become a relevant, if not huge part of the discussion. I want to thank you, my loyal readers, for hanging out here.

Mousers vs. Keyboardists

Since the dawn of the graphical user interface there has been tension between those that favor the mouse and those that favor the keyboard. I am reminded of this as I explored the new experimental Firefox plugin from Mozilla Labs called Ubiquity.

Ubiquity was designed by human interface designer Aza Raskin, who is also the son of Jef Raskin also a famed user interface designer who was one of the early leaders/managers of the Macintosh project at Apple. This is only relevant because Jef’s work after Apple was very keyboard focused, and ubiquity reminds me of much of the gestalt of that work. The point is that Jef, who has since passed, and now son Aza have a high regard for the value of keyboard input.

The idea behind Ubiquity is that you hit a command key sequence like “ alt + space” and it opens up an overlay window where you can type commands. The commands input system is really smart. It provides lots of help like suggesting what commands are available based on the first few characters you type. You can also do operations on selected text. For example you can select an address and type “map this” and it will, in the ubiquity window, show you a Google map with that address marked.

But this piece is not a review of Ubiquity. In short, Ubiquity is a very interesting idea. I want to like it, and I may yet get to that point, but I have to admit am not quite there yet. This article, though, is really about the some of the thinking I have done about the role of the keyboard in human interface, which playing with Ubiquity got me thinking about.

Let’s start with this: keyboardists and mousers are different.

I am not a keyboardist.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am a fairly fast typist. But my problem is I can’t remember commands. Putting a keyboard command in my head is like putting sand in a sieve. The reason I love graphical interfaces is because I can’t remember shit. I wish I could, because I am sure I would be much more efficient. Keyboards are much faster than mice and GUIs. The problem is when you are staring at a keyboard you have to remember what to do. A GUI is for me a giant cheat sheet.

The thing is I think most people have brains that are similarly not wired for memorizing lots of commands without lots of effort. And so I am at least thankful that I am not alone.

At Kloudshare, I am a mouser. My associate, Will, is a keyboardist. I use Eclipse for development. He uses EMACS. He will never use Eclipse. I will never use EMACS. EMACS is for people that can remember lots of stuff. Eclipse is for people that need hand rails. Will has a much better memory for such things than me.

And so, bringing this back to Ubiquity, I see that Aza is trying to bring the benefits of keyboards to the keyboard allergic masses. He does not do a bad job at all, and I am going to give it a shot. But I must say I am skeptical this kind of design philosophy can go mainstream. If I am right, there are many more mousers than keyboardists and no matter how hard you try, you just can never convert people from one group to the other.

Arrington's Great Kindle Idea, and Why Android Should Have Done It Too

This morning Mike Arrington wrote a great advice piece to Amazon on the Kindle.

The gist of Mike's argument is that Amazon should offer Kindle up as an operating system and reference design. This would allow third parties to create Kindle compatible devices in the same way that Dell, for example, makes PCs compatible with Windows. This would create an ecosystem around the product which would be incredibly powerful. And at the same time, Amazon would still be doing what it really wants to do, which is to sell books. By offering their own product which they should continue to sell, they get to work out all the kinks without any meddling third party companies telling it what to do. But by opening up the platform, they really get to have their control cake and to eat their large marketplace cake too.

Interestingly, this is really what Google should be doing with Android. Google is indeed licensing the Android OS to third party phone manufacturers, but by not creating and controling an initial reference design they are leaving important pieces of the design to third parties, in a field (mobile phones) where important design elements can be critical.

Anyway, getting back to Kindle, I have been a fan of the product concept but I do believe it will be very hard for Amazon to build up the kind of market that they really need and should have with such a device without getting some help. I hope they take Mike's advice.

Mom's Verizon FIOS Install Took 11 Hours

My mom lives in Manhattan. Verizon just installed its FIOS Internet, TV, and telephone service in her building. Last Friday she got it installed in her apartment. The installers arrived at 9:20am. They finished at 8:15pm. For those of you a bit math challenged, that’s 10 hours and 55 minutes. Or one could just say it’s a long F’ing time.

I love FIOS, or I guess I should say I love the *idea* of FIOS since I don’t have it yet and I haven’t been over to her apartment to check it out. But anything like 11 hours per install in Manhattan is a killer to the bottom line, which has me concerned. Perhaps more importantly, it’s a killer to Verizon’s potential rate of installs, which delays my ability to ditch Time Warner. I certainly hope it’s not the norm.

And so the question of the day is for FIOS customers. For those of you specifically in Manhattan, and then in other urban areas, and then in suburban areas, how long has your FIOS install taken?

Music & Religion

There is a rumor that has been circulating that Apple is going to be introducing a music subscription service like Rhapsody. I don't know if it is true, but hope that it is. I love music subscription services, and am a current subscriber to Rhapsody, but I would switch to Apple in a minute so I could use my neat iPod with it.

But what triggered me wanting to write about this was not the rumor, but the reaction to the rumor by certain quarters. Specifically, whenever you read about subscription services, you always read vehement and angry comments from people that don't like the idea of subscriptions. It is certainly fine to not want it for yourself. But what is odd to me is the anger that said people have at the idea that I might want something different.

It's fascinating that this response always comes from the "free" music crowd, and yet I am confident, if they had a magic wand, they would make such services illegal, or so socially or politically unacceptable that they would not be offered.

This vehemence strikes me as strange because clearly I should have the right to buy something the way I want and a vendor should have the right to sell it to me in the way that s/he wants.

In short, it strikes me that the free music crowd is really more a religious movement than one based in logic and reason. It is very similar to the way that certain fundamentalist religious groups demonize people for different beliefs. Here the free music community demonizes subscription services because, by definition, subscriptions must use DRM, which is "evil". And the irrational zealous passion brought to bear is exactly analogous to the behavior of every out of control religious group in human history. Ok, they haven't gotten to burning people at the stake, but you know what I mean.

The point is, even if you have the wacky view that all music or intellectual property should be free, the idea that you should consider business and interaction models, and technologies like DRM that don't match your world view to be "evil", is, to me, bizarre. This is particularly true when the DRM *enables* a, compelling, at least for some, business model such as subscriptions.

As I see it, this movement would be more appropriately lead by a religious figure like Pat Robertson, or John Hagee, or Richard Stallman, or... oh wait, it is!

Overblown Semantic Web Community References To a "Thinking" Web

I love many of the ideas behind the semantic web even if I think most of the tools and products targeting the space are not polished enough, or useable enough or quite ready for prime time.

But one meme that drives me crazy is the idea that when we get to the semantic web, it will think for us. Some even have taken to calling it the "thinking" web. The problem with this kind of talk is that it sets expectations *way* too high.

Certainly the semantic web will be smarter than Web 2.0.  But we must be careful about our language and our expectations. I wrote the other day about the future of the web being about serendipity, and I think this is important. Serendipity implies a situation where you are unexpectedly happy to find some useful information or connection. But when you start talking about a web that "thinks" you are talking about a web that you *expect* to able to give you useful and correct answers.

It is really all about expectations, and designing user interfaces, and developing messaging that under promises and over delivers. Because doing the reverse is fatal.

Unfortunately I fear there are people talking about a "thinking" web  because they want more attention, and what better way to get it than evoking some HAL like future. But this kind of talk that gets expectations way out of wack with what is actually possible, and really hurts the process. And the truth is there are perhaps more pedestrian sounding, and yet incredibly useful benefits to the underlying ideas of the semantic web. The semantic web world doesn't need to blow smoke up people's butts to be impressive. In fact such smoke blowing either does, or will soon come to sound overblown and desperate.

Dell May Be Signaling New Type of Innovation WIth Lattitude-On

I have always thought it was at best foolish, and at worst irresponsible for companies like Dell, HP, and through the course of history, their smaller rivals, to rely exclusively on shrink-wrapped software from Microsoft to create their user experience.

For years, the big PC players have essentially offered no differentiators at all beyond price, sales channel, and support. In other words they abdicated almost all product development to Microsoft and Intel. As a result, Apple has had to itself the playing field of PC innovation, while everyone else on the PC side played me too.

Last week, Dell made an announcement that in my mind has not gotten nearly enough attention, and that suggests a change may be afoot. They announced a new laptop called the Latitude-On.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is a big deal.

The basic idea of the new Latitude is that the machine will have a second ARM based processor and Linux operating system along side the standard Intel processor and Windows OS. This machine within a machine will provide a super fast, lightweight, battery friendly environment for doing things like email, web browsing, and perhaps other communications tasks. It will be “instant on”, so you will always be able to get to your basic functionality, and yet you will get a battery life measured in days and not hours when in this mode.

And while the Latitude’s specific feature set does indeed sound enticing, what is really striking to me is the level of innovation involved here for a non-Apple PC vendor. This is a radical sea change for an industry that for at least a decade and probably more like 15 years, has done almost nothing innovative at all. Innovation in the PC industry has meant little more than going to the mailbox to download the next reference design or software update from Microsoft and Intel.

While, to be sure, this is no signal that Dell is about to become the next Apple, this kind of thinking puts Dell well ahead of their other PC compatible competitors. Dell certainly did not invent the instant on concept, but being willing to do something that does not come from MicroTel is a big step for a company that still really won't even buy chips from Intel competitor AMD.

Of course to really excel at this type of innovation requires a different type of organizational DNA than any of these companies have had. Doing software is very different than doing hardware. And doing integrated software is very different from typical desktop software. But while the challenge is great, the risks of continuing to add essentially no value add at all are far greater.

And so, while this is indeed an exciting signal from Dell, I will be very curious to see if this is just a one-off, or if this is indeed a realization of the necessity to innovate beyond the narrow template of the old school PC mindset.

Playing Whack-a-Mole With Arrington, Masnick, And The Free Music Crowd

Ok, I get that anger at the music business = page views. But it is, nevertheless, frustrating to listen to people make arguments that are internally inconsistent.

I feel like I am playing Whack–a–Mole because the arguments are so squishy. There are intellectually honest arguments for why free music is inevitable, like saying that you can’t stop people from stealing and so you have to get whatever little scraps you can. Too bad.

But that is not what you hear from the thought leaders like Mike Arrington from TechCrunch and Mike Masnick from TechDirt and others who offer advice and argue positions that are not consistent with themselves or with basic laws of business or self preservation.

This weekend, Arrington wrote again, as he has before, that music should be free.

Specifically, the article is about the royalty rate the record companies charge for playing radio music, and the statement by internet radio service Pandora that they will go under if the rate is not reduced. Specifically, Arrington Says:

For now the labels want to squeeze more revenue out of Pandora and others. But when these companies start to go under and the bird in the hand disappears, they may regret their overly aggressive negotiating stance. It’s time for the labels to die, and anything that cuts off another revenue stream is at least partially good. I’m reluctantly willing to sacrifice Pandora if it quickens the inevitable march of recorded music towards free. Let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that.

Ok, so the nub of it is Mike longs for the “inevitable” day when music is free. And the label’s current stance is overly aggressive. But if music will inevitably be free and that is what Mike is pushing for, then why would anyone who actually wants to make a living from music listen to Mike? He seems to be arguing that the labels (and indirectly musicians) are dumb for charging too much. But his entire thought process is driven by the basic notion that *any* price is too high for music.

Its hard to take business advice from a guy who thinks you oughtn’t be in business at all.

From there, we move to Mike Masnick from Blog and Internet consultancy TechDirt, who recently took Warner Music to task for their stance regarding music royalties for the hit game Guitar Hero. Honestly, this argument is even worse than Arrington’s.

Masnick regularly argues that the music business should be making money other ways than selling “shiny discs”. And yet in the Guitar Hero case, Warner wants a greater royalty for using their music in the wildly popular video game. So here, it sounds like Warner is taking Masnick’s advice, right?

But not so fast.

Again Masnick chides the Warner. He criticizes the company for their argument that they need to make a greater royalty on the use of their music in the video game. His argument is that Guitar Hero is great marketing for Warner Music to sell, err… shiny discs.

Ok, so, according to Masnick, its not smart or proper, or good or whatever to depend on selling music in the traditional way. And its also not proper to demand substantial licensing fees from a big profitable video game franchise, even when that franchise is entirely based around music. This demand is improper because said game franchise is helping sell those silly shiny discs. So each identifiable revenue stream should be forsaken because it is “marketing” for all the other supposed revenue streams.

You can see how this could get problematic.

At least between Arrington and Masnick, Arrington is more honest. He wants people to stop selling music at any price. If I were a musician or a label I wouldn’t take his advice, but though he seems in some way to be offering advice to the industry, he at least doesn’t hide his conflicting agenda.

On the other hand, Masnick, *says* he’s not against selling music, but when you look at his arguments, he really doesn’t leave much on the table. If you can’t charge a billion dollar company who can you charge? The bottom line is Masnick wants to be seen as a business advisor since TechDirt is a consultancy. But he also wants to pander to the free music crowd, perhaps because that brings page views. Unfortunately these two positions don’t always mix, and so illogical, “whackamolian” arguments, like this one often ensue.

Ru Roh! Adobe Screwed By EcmaScript Standards Agreement

Yesterday it was announced that The EcmaScript language standards body has killed the draft version, called 4.0 that was the basis of all of Adobe’s Flash related language technologies for the last several years. In the Adobe world, EcmaScript 4.0 was also know by the name ActionScript. And while this certainly does not make any of Adobe’s work any less valuable than it was, it is indeed a strategic black eye for Adobe.

Here’s the background.

Adobe’s Flash platform is all based around a programming language called ActionScript 3. Over the years as Adobe has moved from ActionScript 1, it has taken great pains to move the language forward in a standards compliant way. This strategy was important to mute complaints from some that Flash was attempting to re-implement the web in a proprietary fashion.

To gain the credibility of standards compliance, Adobe hitched it’s wagon to a proposed new language called from the standards committee called EcmaScript 4.0. Although the standard is called EcmaScript, it is really just the officially sanctioned name for JavaScript. And, for lots of reasons, Adobe wanted to be able to say they had, in essence, the early version of the next generation of JavaScript embedded in Flash.

Adobe provided support to the standards body in helping to define the standard, and most importantly, in creating an open source virtual machine called Tamarin that would run EcmaScript 4.0. But they did all of this before the standard was officially sanctioned. EcmaScipt 4.0 was nothing more than a draft proposal. But Adobe needed to make this bet because they needed a better language than the early ActionScript was, and the existing template, JavaScript, hadn’t moved substantively forward in years.

And so Adobe released Tamarin, the EcmaScript 4.0/ActionScript 3.0 running virtual machine, and a raft of products based it. These included Flash 8 and 9 and Flex, a bunch of applications written in the new language such as Acrobat Connect their conferencing platform, BuzzWord their word processor, and many others. In fact The Adobe CEO has stated they are moving their entire application suite in the next 10 years to the Flash platform, so this language spec is serious stuff.

Unfortunately, while the technology of EcmaScript 4.0/ActionScript 3.0/Tamarin is compelling, the politics sucked.

Adobe and Microsoft are bitter rivals, and the last thing Microsoft would be willing to accept is wide-spread adoption of a language that is strategically critical to a competitor. If EcmaScript was accepted, Tamarin would have been the gold standard virtual machine. Microsoft would have needed to build their own compatible VM – a long painful process – or they would have had to (insert “gulp” sound) adopt Tamarin. The battles over the standard were nasty, personal, and public. But unfortunately for Adobe, control over Internet Explorer is a much better bargaining chip than control over Flash. And Microsoft was insistent that they would never support EcmaScript 4.0.

And so this meant EcmaScript 4.0 was stillborn. It was dead even before it’s head began to crown, because it was a win that Microsoft could not bequeath upon its bitter rival. While the fighting over the EcmaScript spec has been going on for at least a year, it always seemed clear to me that this would happen. It really could be no other way.

In essence, Adobe has shown up to the prom, but its date has stood it up. ActionScript is now not based on any standard. It is its own, proprietary, albeit open source language. Adobe is on its own island as the rest of the industry moved to some watered down version of what it could have been. I understand why this was necessary. Brenan Eich, the father of JavaScript and the primary person driving the standard certainly didn’t want it this way. But Microsoft was never going to support 4.0.

And so the interesting question is what will Adobe do now. The technology they have is no less impressive today than it was a few days ago. But they are now totally on their own, which wasn’t exactly the plan.

This is indeed one hell of a chess game.

Is The iPhone Sexist?

For those of you who have been following along, my mom was seduced by Steve Jobs' iPhone. This was and is an astonishing thing, since my mom is very far away from being a techie.

On the day of the iPhone launch, she waited in line at an AT&T store (and I waited with her) to get her new phone.

My mom loves her phone, but one issue came up which triggered an interesting thought.  She had a hard time using the phone initially because of her fingernails.

My mom does not have big garish fingernails, but they were longer than any man's fingernails, extending perhaps a quarter or a half inch beyond her fingertips. The problem is that the iPhone screen requires touch by skin. the tip of a fingernail will not work. This is a problem because it means that the angle that your finger touches the screen at is such that the you end up making contact with the screen with a very large imprecise area of your finger. In short, my mom kept missing the intended screen  buttons.

Now in reality, my mom clipped her nails and everything was fine. But I guess my question is whether that is a reasonable expectation in the product design. Were there any women on the product team? We're there any *girly* women on the product team -- women that like the idea of painted fingernails that extend a bit beyond the fingertip?

I am sure many of you will say that is the price of technology. But I myself wonder if there were some equivalent male focused impediment if it would have been considered acceptable.

I am not sure that this is the perfect example, but this whole episode just got me thinking about design issues for men vs women. How many other, perhaps more subtle issues like this are there that I and other product designers/developers don't think about? It is indeed striking that such a basic issue for the iPhone, as far as I can tell, really has not been discussed at all. Will most of my male readers, or readers in general, argue that such issues are irrelevant?