Strategic Position

Google lives on the web. Most of its application need a web layer in order to operate and, if it were to find itself in a position where the access to their application where to be compromised through the equivalent of a strategic man in the middle type of attack, their business would die off. So, if Microsoft, which currently still controls around 70 percent of the web browser market, were to decided to change their code to impact how Google applications function, Google would be in deep deep trouble.

Because Google realizes that the browser is sort of their achilles heel, they had to make a play into that space. The first thing they did was help the creation of an alternate offerings, by giving large subsidies to Microsoft competitors like Apple and the Mozilla foundation, largely dolled out as revenue for traffic generation through the search box. See, one of the thing not too many consumers are told about is that the search box in Safari or in Firefox are actually paid placements: Every time a user uses that box to perform a search, a little bit of revenue goes back to the browser creator. So that’s great because it allows those alternative browsers to develop and, as long as Google is people’s preferred choice anyways, no one is complaining.

Of course, there are certain issues with the arrangement: a lot of the people who have installed Safari or Firefox don’t like online ads and some developers were happy to provide tools allowing those users to remove ads from web pages. Google wasn’t too thrilled about that but it found the issue mostly OK as long as the arrangement didn’t hurt its advertising cash cow too much.

But over time, this model created a problem. The feature was tested by consumers who, having seen too much of their screen real estate polluted by ever larger ads, liked what they saw. And, as ads became smarter and started to target users individually, it spooked consumers. Being able to block certain ads became a product differentiator and started to cause some problems to Microsoft.

So, with IE8, Microsoft is starting to claim that it will help users and one of the trial baloons it has been floating is that the user may have more control over what ads they can see and possibly may be able to block some ads.

For Google, that’s not too happy a development: the idea of being able to provide free products is based on the fact that Google is really and advertising company with a side business in search. And if the advertising is blocked, then Google’s whole business model falls apart.

So now, Google needs to regain some level of control. For many years, it’s been going after bits and pieces of the Microsoft empire: a little bit of the office suite over here (Google Apps), a little bit of the enterprise space this way (Google Appliances), a little extra screen real estate (Google Widgets), an alternate application distribution network (Google Pack)… but the premise behind most of their offerings was that life was now in the “network cloud” (basically recalling Scott McNealy’s old “The Network is the Computer” concept with 2.0 flavor).

With Chrome, Google is now trying to bypass most of Windows. There’s still a few things that Windows will be allowed to do for now (connecting to the Internet, managing the communication layer) but it seems that this is the farthest Google has gone into addressing Microsoft head on. In the mid-1990s, Marc Andreesen, then at Netscape, said he wanted to relegate Windows to being just a set of basic libraries and, with this offering,  Google is trying very hard to do so though I am sure you’ll never hear them say so.

Will it work? I don’t know. At first glance, I’d say that their challenge will be to get the software installed on a lot of machine. For all their past efforts, it looks like it may take a while. Once they have gotten Google Chrome installed, the next thing will be to move up to a default setting. That will be another challenge.

What I suspect is that the company will soon offer a customizable version to cable and phone companies to ensure that they choose Chrome over Internet Explorer. And one thing I’m pretty sure about is that whatever happens, Google will ensure that ad blocking software will not work on Chrome.

Memory Management: Marketing or Truth?

One of the things that leaves me scratching my head is whether the memory management Google claims as an important piece of its offering is actually based more on marketing messages than reality. Buried in the developer’s menu is an item that supposedly offers a view into the memory and CPU usage of Google’s new browser. Yes, the browser feels fast so it’s clear that there are a number of improvements there but what is that costing in terms of memory. Here’s what the browser reports:

What you’re seeing here is the browser running two plain HTML pages and an instance of a richer web-based application (Google Reader, which, according to this, accounts for 40Mb of memory space used). Where I get a little puzzled is when I looked at what Microsoft reported through its task manager:

The same 5 processes appear (but since Windows only knows them as running as chrome, it can’t identifty which is which but the numbers are very different: Chrome reports an aggregate memory use of 96,300K while Windows reports an aggregate memory use of 121,544K or 25,244K more. To be very honest, I don’t know which number is correct but, with only 3 tabs open (and the tabs I have on here are the minimum I have open at any time), I don’t find it very reassuring to see this type of gap appear. Will it get worse as I add more tab? I don’t know but it’s something worth investigating.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Google unveils web-based OS. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Of course, day one is always amusing. First, it’s clear that the security claims are not fully justified. And moving from the confines of the OSX world, which is generally like a meticulously cleaned up suburban neighborhood into the wilds known as the world of Windows was bound to test some of Apple’s mettle when it comes to security. But that’s really besides the point: the software is not a full released version and one can hope that it will be improved upon further down the line (then again, hope springs eternal.)

But all this is really besides the point. In order to see what is happening, one must start thinking about why would Apple think about a new browser today.

The first popular line is that it works as a good environment for developing applications for the iPhone, now that Steve Jobs has stated that this would be the only way developers can currently develop for that new device. GigaOm believes that AJAX will change the way mobile devices applications are developed. I’m not sure I share Om’s enthusiasm for that approach: for starters, the system sports WiFi and EDGE but no higher speed wireless network. So, unless you’re near a WiFi hotspot (and I’m sure one was available for Steve Jobs’ presentation), you may find responsiveness sluggish. Small amounts of data are OK when running on an EDGE network but the startup for a new AJAX-powered application will probably be on the slower side. However, having denied access to the core system on the iPhone to developers (as it did for the iPod), Apple had to toss them a bone and Safari was that bone. That bone is called Safari.

The next challenge for Apple was that, while a lot of developers use OSX, the majority of development is still not happening on their platform. In fact, more energy is expanded in the web development community to making sure that something works with the Firefox browser than is to make sure that it works with the Safari browser. By now swinging the tantalizing carrot of iPhone coolness, Apple is making sure that more developers ensure their sites work with Safari. From that sense, it avoids future problems with some of their mac users being unhappy with the fact that some sites don’t work on Safari, blaming Apple for it instead of the site’s developers, and it creates a new platform for itself: develop something on Safari and it will run on macs, windows, and the iPhone.

Apple is basically pushing Safari as a new platform, borrowing a strategy that was first highlighted by Marc Andreesen almost 15 years ago: back in the day, Marc stated that he wanted Netscape to replace windows or just turn it into a set of basic components with everything running into the browser. Of course, this was at a time when you were lucky if you had a 56k modem so it didn’t make much sense then. In a world where bandwidth is high enough, applications can now resides largely on the network so Apple pushing Safari as a new platform could make some degree of sense.

The next step to think of is that while an application may make sense in terms of running fully online, even Google has seen some of the limitations of that model. Their offering of the Google Gears showed that they are interested in moving some of their application to an environment where a network connection is not required 100 percent of the time.

So Apple’s strategy would require a way for Apple to ensure that things can be installed locally within Windows. This is where something that was not mentioned by the folks at Apple is showing up when you install Safari:

Now that’s very interesting. Why would Apple be so interested in installing those two pieces of software on your computer? After all, they are not necessary for developing applications for the iPhone. But before going into speculations as to why they are there, let me explain what those two applications do:

• Bonjour, according to Wikipedia, is “Apple’s implementation of ZeroConf,” a technology that allows inexpert users to connect computers, networked printers, and other items together and expect them to work automatically.
• Software update, also according to Wikipedia, installs the latest version of Apple software on a computer. It was first introduced on the Windows platform as part of iTunes.

The presence of those two packages higlights that Apple is not just interested in the desktop but wants to play within a wider environment:

One can assume that Bonjour might be embedded in the iPhone and AppleTV as well as future version of the iPod. This would basically hit right at the heart of Microsoft’s strategy of creating a distributed environment where the Xbox, Windows Media Center, and other Windows powered devices are all interconnected. Apple would now enter that world and get all their stuff also connected on Microsoft’s turf.

The presence of software update, while not fully mined yet, could be equivalent to Google Pack, which also happens to include the Google Updater, which Google describes as follows:

The Google Updater is the program that downloads and installs all the software in the Google Pack. You can use the Google Updater to monitor the status of your installation, run software that’s been installed, or uninstall software. A Google Updater icon will appear in your system tray and will display notifications when new software is available.

With that in place, the windows desktop is increasingly looking as a new battleground. On one site you’ve got the incumbent, with Windows Update, then you have the new claimants to the throne in the form of Google and Apple. Right now, Apple is actually starting to push new products with the Apple Software Update: installing the new Safari software on a virgin machine (ie. one without any Apple software update) yielded the following Software Update Window:

So I install a browser and the next thing Apple is telling me is that I should really consider installing iTunes and Quicktime. What next? This is obviously a good delivery vehicle for Apple to push more software down the lines.

So they’re developing their own eco-system right on top of Windows. In a way, one could think that they are basically taking the same approach as Microsoft did with the Office platform: Develop on someone else’s turf but also optimize for your own.

It’s a brilliant strategic move and one that could eventually yield to much more software coming from Apple to the Windows platform.

So why would Apple care about Windows?

Well, beyond the basic point that there are more Windows users than there are mac users is the fact that Apple is working on setting up new ecosystems for itself. The iPod was the first obvious move in that direction and they are betting that the iPhone will be a similar winner for them. Earlier this year, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, he also dropped the word computer from the name of the company. Apple’s future is not in the computer space (and it is appears the company is running out of new ideas for its operating system as the new OS features presented in yesterday’s keynote were incremental at best) but in the consumer electronics space. They hope to control what’s in your hands (iPod, iPhone), what’s on your screen (iTV, iTunes) and how you access the content. By having control to the access point, Apple can then influence the pricing models in the delivery of media and ensure they take their own percentage along the way: it’s something that worked for them in the music space, something they’re working on in the video space, and I suspect something they’ll eventually look into in the software space.

Apple wants to control the points of entry and charge a fee for access to them (further highlighting that point is this blog entry by Larry Dignan at ZDnet, which highlights that Apple is getting some nice revenue from Google and Yahoo). All and all, Apple could eventually succeed on grounds that Microsoft once wanted to claim as its own: to become the tollbooth to the Internet and the new world of media.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Safari: Apple’s New Platform?. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

It’s a very smart move on the part of Apple, which highlighted the change in the way the company is operating by changing its name from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple, Inc. , reflecting the fact that they are no longer just a computer company.There were a few interesting items of interest, though.

For starters, no mention of how the phone will sync up with a computer. Are we to assume that it’s Mac Only or will it synchronize with computers running Windows too? If so, does that mean that a new set of applications will be available to Windows users to sync their address book, calendar and email with systems like Outlook or will the device require to manage those things specifically using Apple applications on Windows?

The other thing that was interesting is the announcement that the phone will run on quad-band GSM and will be using EDGE network. This means that the phone will get decent but not great data service. Perfect for email and light web browsing but not quite fast enough for video streaming. However, the introduction of WiFi in the device, which many other companies have avoided for fear of losing battery capacity, could take care of that.

The other interesting thing is that the operating system on this device is OSX. This seems to point out to two possible issues: First, what does that mean for PortalPlayer, which has traditionally provided Apple with the operating system (embedded on a chip) for the iPod? The second question is what does it mean in general: What Apple has introduced is basically a mac in a small form factor, which could easily compete with the UMPC specifications introduced by Microsoft. It’s pretty clear that Apple has a lot of plans in the future for that device but they didn’t say much about the significance of OSX, providing it almost as an aside (and what does it mean for the next version of OSX, which was not mentioned during this keynote at all, a surprising omission in itself.)

Who loses?

Judging from the reaction on the stock market, it’s pretty obvious to see who loses: Palm (makers of the Treo), RIM (makers of the Blackberry), and Motorola and Nokia will obviously not be thrilled with the entrance of Apple in this market. The exclusive deal with AT&T (ooops, sorry, Cingular) will also have a negative impact on Verizon, Sprint, and T-mobile as Verizon will see a number of users switching to them in order to get their hands on this device (in informal discussion with a number of fellow geeks, the disadvantages of moving to Cingular were far outweighted by the coolness of this device).

Let’s take a quick look at specs and see how the difference devices fare against this new entrant:

So looking at it, this phone is pretty expensive (you pay for the Apple premium) but packs a lot more features than other phones in the same category. It’s got a better camera, more memory and a larger screen as well as WiFi. It’s talk time (for the category) is actually pretty good (only bested by Nokia’s E-62) and it is a little heavier than the competition. For a first entry in the market, I’d say that Apple has a winner on its hands.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The iPhone is here. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

How Search Engines Work

Before I get into details as to why I think this web accelerator is a major search move by Google, I first need to educate some of my readers as to the basics of search and some of the issues relating to creating a good search product. If you already know about search indexing, you can skip to the next section.

Search engines are basically acting as not only giant card catalogs, similar to the ones you can find in a library but also as giant libraries in and off themselves. When you type a word in a search box, what happens next includes a number of different steps that allow to look through a giant index, which is basically an image of all the pages the search engine knows about.

The way those indexes are created is through programs that are known as spiders (sometimes also referred to as web-robots or crawlers). Those programs are independent pieces of software that go and basically surf the web at very high speed, making copies of everything they encounter and comparing what they find to what other spiders are found. That giant set of pages copied by spiders is called an index (it is also sometimes referred to as a collection). They run around the clock and their sole job is to get more pages and ensure that the pages they’ve gotten in the past still exist and that they have not changed (if they have changed, the spider will “re-index” the page, ie. delete the previous one from the index and put the new version in its place).

Size Matters

The idea is a surprisingly simple one and was first introduced in the early days of the web. At the time, creating an index of all the pages on the web was relatively easy, largely due to the fact that there were not that many pages and that not that many people were creating them (I actually enjoy surprising newbies by telling them that I once saw the whole web, every single pages on it. What I omit until later in the story is that I did this in 1993, at a time when you could count the number of web servers without hitting 100 and when you could actually see the whole web in only a few hours.)

The amazing thing is that, although the number of web sites (and hence the number of web pages) has exploded, the basic technology to build a search index has not evolved that much. The concepts are basically the same today as they were in 1994–1995 but the web is now much, much larger.

How large, you wonder? Well, a good indicator would be to take a look at the bottom of the Google home page for a number. As of this writing, that number stands at 8,058,044,651. That’s over 8 billion pages, a very large number and one that folks at Google are appropriately proud of.

There’s only one little issue with that number. It’s on the low side. In fact, it’s estimated that it represents less than one percent of the actual number of pages on the web. In 2001, that number was estimated at over 500 billion pages in what is called the Deep Web, a part of the web that has not been indexed by search engines yet. With the growth of weblogs, which are generated tons of content on a daily basis, and the connection of more systems like books, satellite maps, etc… to the web, you can only imagine that the number has grown.

Let’s pause for a moment and assume that only as many pages were created between 2001 and now as were created in the previous four years, at the high of the dotcom boom. This means that there would be over a trillion web pages on the Internet. Now that gets to be a much more interesting number.

You Call THIS Fresh?!?

So we know that Google has a problem in finding a lot of the pages that already exist on the Internet. But that’s nothing compared to the other problem Google has.

Imagine an index with 1 million pages. If you assume that a spider can index that one million pages in a day, the content on those pages is refreshed daily, meaning that the index has a new version of the pages only once a day. Now try to do the same with 8 billion pages and it becomes a pretty complicated problem. Google has solved some of that problem by basically deciding that some sites have a higher worth than others. As a results, sites which are known to refresh their content on a regular basis get more attention from Google than sites that do not.

With the explosion of weblogs, however, a new breed of sites has created a problem for Google. For starters, there are a lot of them, and most of them refresh their content regularly, in some cases more than once a day. This makes the job of producing relevant indexes almost impossible for Google, turning their search engine into something more akin to a library, the kind of place that you use when you are looking for a reference, than an up to date source.

Not only that but, if Google is to also index the deep web, keeping track of all the changes across all the web becomes impossible… Impossible, that is, if you are using crawlers.

So we now know that the crawlers are no longer the right option when it comes to keeping fresh information within a proper search engine index. Looking at this, Google needs to do something radical. On the one hand, they can try to build a system that will get the most up to date information through notification from the sites that are updating content. This is where services like Technorati and Feedster come in, getting updates from RSS feeds and thus building indexes with more recent information than Google’s.

On the other hand, they could look at increasing the number of crawlers they are using. We know that Google has a lot of machines but trying to scale to the point where they can monitor a trillion pages via crawl would require a lot more power than that.

Enters Web Accelerator!

Spreading the Load

In the late 90s, distributing computing took hold as a concept. Projects like SETI@home and Folding@Home have shown the way in terms of harnessing the power of millions of computers to solve processor-intensive kinds of problems. Google started looking at this with the roll out of their toolbar with a feature called Google Compute.

Now let’s move forward. What if you could get information as to what pages are new and what pages are changes by just observing where people are surfing? This is the space that the accelerator occupies. Sitting neatly between your web browser and the Google architecture is a mini proxy that keeps checking if it can find a way to give you pages at a faster rate from the Google index than it does from the actual existing site. Along the way, Google finds out what pages are missing from its index (and gets a chance to add them) and what pages in its index are not up to date.

Imagine a million people downloading the Google Web Accelerator and all of a sudden, you have an infrastructure that finds out about a lot of pages very quickly.

Microsoft and Yahoo! are already in competition with Google in the search space. In order to maintain its leadership, Google needs to not only provide an index that is larger than its competitors but also more up to date. With this accelerator, they can do that and only one of its competitor can ever hope to match the feature: Microsoft.

The webmaster FAQ points the accelerator does not cover pages which are secure (nicely bypassing security issues) nor large media files. I suspect that we will see that change in the future, with the addition of images coming first.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Google Accelerates Search. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

For my readers who are not familiar with the concept, a podcast is essentially an audio file that is distributed via a syndication feed like RSS. Mosts podcasts are encoded in MP3 format and, for the most part, podcasts have been the equivalent of audio blogs. The initial concept behind them came in a dinner at Katz’s deli in New York (fall of 2000) when Adam Curry and I urged Dave Winer, who was then the only person keeping RSS on life support, to provide a way with RSS to distribute data other than text. Adam had written an article talking about the last yard issue in terms of delivering content in the home (realize this is before BitTorrent was popular.) From there, Dave added the enclosure item to the format and things were quiet for a long time. Last summer, Adam introduced iPodder, a program that simplified the creation of what he called podcast, with the idea that they would be distributed to the iPod. Since then, the idea has gone from being the domain of a few geeks to becoming a mainstream effort.

Today’s announcement about the creation of KYOU shows that the idea is now going mainstream and I expect podcasting to make the cover of many business magazines in the months to come, replacing blogs as the new new thing. While the station is small, it’s an interesting experiment in using consumer generated data to create new programming. In a way, this is the next evolution in media, going from tightly programmed shows (Sitcoms, TV dramas, etc…) to shows leaving room for more individual reactions (“reality” TV shows) to programming with no varnish whatsoever.

The one thing that fascinates me about this progress is the elapsed time between introduction and mainstream adoption for such technology. The web browser took half a decade before being adopted by the mainstream; E-commerce went from geek street to main street in a couple of years; but podcasting has gone from zero to hero in under a year. I was recently surprised when I heard podcasts being casually mentioned on my local radio station. With today’s announcement, this is the second time I’m surprised by the rapid adoption for this new technology.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Podcast Acceleration. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Certain software companies have been suffering from the advance of modularity in software design. The main one, to date, has been Microsoft with its Windows software platform. In the mid-nineties, Microsoft decided to integrate a number of Internet components tightly with its operating systems offering. The two most critical ones of those components have been a web server (IIS) and a web browser (Internet Explorer). Leaving aside discussions relating to the antitrust issues this kind of integration has raised, the integration of those tools with the operating system have left openings for alternative approaches that were more modular.

On the server end, IIS has been the subject of many attacks by hackers. Because it is hooked deeply into the operating system, an attack against the web server can have an impact that goes much further that the web front-end. In most cases, the attacks succeeded not only in taking machines down but also turning them into zombie armies that could then turn around and attack other servers. In 2001, the Code Red virus successfully infected hundreds of thousands of machines in less than 24 hours. Subsequent viruses built on this approach and have been responsible for some of the largest attacks against Internet systems to date. The news that the system had built in back-doors only furthered the issue, presenting an opening for other software developers.

The open source movement exploited this by presenting an alternative with Linux and Apache. The Linux operating system, which is modular by design, can be fined tuned and services can be included or not depending on how one wants to shape their system. A web server like Apache can be included in the OS but doesn’t have to be. Because of this modular approach, Apache (which runs on a number of different operating systems) has gained the high ground in terms of marketshare. The Apache project focused on delivering modular components, which represent a tool-set for most web-based application.

The same is true on the desktop end. While Microsoft decided to tightly integrate its web browser with the operating system, making it easier to create lock-in for that platform, the approach backfired when hackers developed viruses and trojans that exploited flaws in the browser software to get to the operating system. It was only a matter of time before users started getting annoyed by the number of attacks and looking at alternative. They found one in the Mozilla foundation, a group of open source developers who created a modular Internet product suite. Because the Mozilla products were built in a modular fashion, the first attack was responded to in less than a week. This quick turnaround in fixing the bug was due to the way the code is implemented: because it is modular, it was much easier to fix and because it does not communicate deeply with the operating system, it represents less of a risk than Internet Explorer and has been recommended by security experts like CERT.

While the browser and web server represent applications that are bundled with an operating system, some people are looking to go much further by modularizing the operating system itself. When broken down to its smaller components, an operating system can almost become device-independent, providing interactions between different components to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its part. Future operating systems will be able to evolve across multiple devices, whether they are computers, mobile phones, televisions, or other devices we have not imagined yet.

This kind of distributed system already exists but in a limited fashion. Some organizations have used Linux to create supercomputers by connecting multiple small machines. The power given to those allows to greatly reduce the overall cost of building very large machines. Similarly, one of the largest web-based application, Google, uses tens of thousands of machines which interact with each other as a single system.

The lesson in this approach is that a modular approach always wins over an integrated one because it reduces costs and increases scalability, thus ensuring greater flexibility. While one can never predict changing markets and future developments, a modular approach is always more flexible and easier to evolve over time.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Modular by Design — Software. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

I can’t get no… satisfaction

As much as we’d like it to, users are not using our software because of love for developers. They are using it to accomplish a task. How satisfied they are with usability of the software package they use is an important consideration that can take them from using your system to using a competitor’s.

The basic concept of user satisfaction rests in the fact that users want systems to be intuitive. They want a program to work in the way they think. However, as we learned earlier, users come in different shapes. What satisfies one user may not be what satisfies another one. What is intuitive to a programmer is not necessarily intuitive to an average user.

As a result, it is impossible to satisfy all users all the time but it is possible to satisfy most user most of the time. In a way, the satisfaction of a user is directly correlated to the other concepts we have explored throughout this series so far (learnability, efficiency, memorability, and error handling): if a system is easy to learn, can be used efficiently, has features the user can remember, and provides easy error messages, a user will be satisfied with the overall experience.

Looks

However, going beyond those critical factors is also a level of graphical design. You can design the best application in the world in terms of usability but, if the interface looks ugly, the user will shriek every time he or she uses the system.

This is generally an issue in the open source community as most programmers are not designers (and the inverse is true) so most open source projects have fully functional UIs that are spartan in their appearance. This is not a bad thing in and of itself but leaves non-programmers with the feeling that those application are less polished. As a result, this lowers the user satisfaction in those system and also lowers the acceptance of open source software.

A way to solve this is for programmers to enter into a partnership with designers and usability people. The usability person comes in and helps on the other factors we covered in the series. The designer provides that last coat of paint that make the application look better. The challenge in working with those people, however, is that a lot of the discussion should happen early in the project so that the underlying structure is in place to allow for look revisions.

Another item to watch out for is designers that get carried away. One must ensure that the application is not so heavenly laden with a heavy set of eye candy that it calls more attention to the look than to the rest of the application. A UI expert once told me that his job was to make sure that no one ever saw what he was doing. A good user interface does not call attention to itself but makes the user feel that it has that polish.

Feel

Another issue with heavy UI is that it sometimes hobble performance. However, it is possible to increase the satisfaction of a user by diverting his or her attention when using the application. Such diversion must be transparent so that users do not catch on, similar to the sleight of hand pulled by magicians, getting you to focus on one thing while they are doing something completely different. For example, much has been made about how speedy Apple’s web browser, Safari, is. But truth be told, it is only marginally so. The way the Apple programmers made it feel faster was by painting the first window more quickly, which give the impression that the application is more responsive. By comparison, the Mozilla browser feels like it’s taking longer to load because it first shows a logo, before displaying the application. The difference between the two is that, in the case of Mozilla, the user has to wait an extra few seconds to see the browser window. As a result, it “feels” slower. Granted, other improvement to the Safari browser make it run faster but, for the large part, most of the speed improvements on the Mac OSX platform have been in making applications look and feel like they are moving faster.

Who’s my user

Before concentrating on those issues, however, one must figure out who are the users of the system: are they technically proficient or not? What age group do they fall in? How do they use the software? What other software do they use? This is where the concept of personas, which I will cover in more details later, comes in. Before designing your program, figure out what types of users are going to use it.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Usability 101: Satisfaction. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The main challenge comes from the fact that most software developers are too knowledgeable to really create easy to use system. As a result, new features are created daily for open source tools but little attention is being paid to making the overall tools easy to use. The challenge is that simple interfaces are hard to design and largely present a challenge that is woefully underappreciated. A good interface is one that is so in tune with user expectations that it becomes essentially invisible.

As a result, the balance in product development always happens between fewer features with an easier to use interface vs. large feature set with increased complexity. Weblog tools seem to manage a careful balance between the two but are unfortunately tied to a particular model, based on entries and list of entries. More complex sites, with different sections and other functionality do not fall well within that mold.

Let me go through an example to get a better idea of what I mean. The site that I am trying to create is for an organization. Most of the people in that organization are people with little to moderate computing experience. They know how to use a browser, they know how to type text into a form. That’s basically the level of knowledge that the system has to meet. However, the system should allow for a number of extra functionality such as the ability to create a set of navigations for a site, the ability to create new pages within that site, and some basic workflow components to divide between contributors (who may create content), editors (who authorize that content to be published and can create/edit/delete sections), and administrators (who will take care of adding new features, creating, editing and deleting users, and look and feel). There needs to be functionality to also allow members of the reading community to do some commenting on stories posted, and for editors to create polls.

So far, it seems like an easy thing to build. However, when one scratches the surface, complexity sets in. How does one get notified that content needs to be updated? How does a story make it to the site? How does the site look and feel change? Using tools like Slash or PHPnuke seemed like a good idea initially but they lock a site into a particular look and feel that can only be changed with a lot of hand-wringing development. Furthermore, the complexity of organization is something that the user community could not wrap their minds around.

As a result, I’ve discovered that simplicity was much more complex. What we, as programmers, expect a user to do is very different from how users expect a system to react. From there, a big disconnect arises. We know that there is only so much you can stuff on a screen. In terms of interface design, the best systems are generally systems that appear to provide less options to the user. For example, the success of web browser arise from the fact that their interface is relatively simple: an entry field (where you type the URL), some basic navigation (go forward, go back, reload, stop, and home) and a content window. By comparison, Microsoft Word has no less than 23 choices on its “standard” menu. I would hazard a guess that most people do not use most of the functions on this menu and that they therefore should be hidden.

In Don’t Make Me Think, Steve Krug points out that proper web design should ensure that users don’t have to think about where to look in order to find the information they need. This is a pretty major step in development that shows that users should be able to intuitively use a system. However, designing such a system is a very complicated endeavor.

Over a year ago, Matthew Thomas pointed out some of the usability issues presented to the open source community. A cursory look at open source applications since then has shown little progress on the simplicity front. As a result, I have started a Yahoo Group entitled Usability Bazaar (with apologies to Eric Raymond for stealing his line.) Please feel free to join in. Together, we might be able to start focusing on those issues and developing open source software that people other than us geeks will use.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Usability Bazaar. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

While XHTML 2 is indeed a departure from the existing standards instead of being an evolution, it is important to realize that some of the things the workgroup is trying to do is fix old issues and help improve the overall development of the web. While I agree with Zeldman’s assertion that IMG should be deprecated in this version instead of being completely tossed out, I believe that the tag should never have been in HTML in the first place. The argument for an OBJECT tag date back to the early days of the web (circa 1993) when things broke down into two camps: one that wanted a quick and dirty way to show images on the web (the IMG crowd) and the other that looked forward and wanted any type of media to be embedded in a page (the OBJECT crowd). We are now paying for the decisions that were made back then and, much like tables are still in use for layout on most sites instead of being replaced by CSS, we will continue to see IMG tags in code for a very long time.

The next assumption by the anti-XHTML 2 crowd is that XHTML 2 won’t be supported by browsers for a long time to come. However, because browsers have now evolved to the point where properly formatted text can be presented, most modern browsers can already display XHTML 2 without any problems (for an example, just check Sjoerd Visscher’s weblog), as long as a proper DTD is pointed to. This means that once XHTML 2 makes it to recommendation level, then all modern browsers will be able to exploit it. However, I suspect there will be a slow uptake (as there has already been a slow one on the existing XHTML implementation) largely because a lot of developers do not want to have to deal with the rigorousness of XHTML (making sure all tags are closed, making sure not improper characters are inputted, etc…)

The first step in making sure that XHTML 2 will move forward is in ensuring that the browser vendors fix their implementations to conform to the standard. Microsoft’s implementation of the OBJECT is broken and needs to be fixed. It does not meet the standard so it is their responsibility to fix it. The same is true of other browsers that do not render it properly. In the long run, the success or failure of XHTML 2.0 will be based more on whether those things are fixed than on what people feel is right and, much like the fights over improper CSS nowadays, this kind of thing will only happen once the development community pressures browser vendors into fixing their code.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Much Ado About XHTML 2. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Right now, this page is served to you either in HTML or RSS. Those are two different languages. One, HTML, is understood by your web browser. The way text is bolded, for example, is that I put in a little tag that told the browser to bold this word. The browser reads the tag and presents it appropriately. The other, RSS, is understood by what we call RSS readers. Those are programs that you use to subscribe to a channel. A channel is something that you would receive every day. That way, you don’t have to go and check the site to see if it’s been updated. Your program goes and gets the information. RSS is an XML-based language. What it means is that there is a lot of information in that channel that is there just for the benefit of that channel, to allow to present only the newest news to you.

A couple of years ago, Tim Berners-Lee, the man who created the web, looked at his creation and realized that there was a jumble of pages and that, in order to make sense of it, we needed to give things a little more structure. So RDF was born. What it is, basically, is a way to organize the whole web so that computers could talk to each other without humans in between. This has potential uses and here’s an example I thought up: The smart calendar.

Joe and I are working on a joint project. Joe is in London and I am in New York. I want to arrange a face to face meeting with Joe. Right now, I either call, email, or contact Joe in some way and we figure out a time when we can meet face to face, then agree on a city in which to meet, then make the necessary travel arrangements. What if I went to my calendar, typed in meet face to face with Joe, and my calendar and Joe’s started discussing when the best time and place would be? My calendar would check my availability and Joe’s. It then would check if any of us has any travel plans in each other’s city. Based on those, The two calendars discover that I have a trip to Paris set for next Tuesday to Thursday. As a result, the calendar would recommend that I go to London to meet with Joe on Friday. If both Joe and I agree to this, my computer would then go to the travel reservation system, check prices and flight times, book a flight from Paris to London on Thursday Night, cancel my Friday morning flight from Paris to New York, book a flight from London to New York on Friday Night, cancel my hotel stay in Paris on Thursday night, book a Thursday night hotel stay in a company approved establishment near Joe’s office, and notify Bob (who’s also in London and with whom I had scheduled a conference call) that we can meet face to face when I’m in London instead of doing it on the phone.

Usually, this would have taken several discussions, a whole slew of new flight and hotel reservation changes, and a lot of wasted time. Using a semantic engine, all this would be automated. A lot of computers would have talked together (first mine and Joe’s agreed on time and place, then my computer talked to the travel company with which I had my flight and changed that reservation, then my computer talked to a number of airline companies to see who had the best price on a flight from London to New York, then my computer talked to the hotel reservation system in Paris and canceled one night, then my computer talked to the company computer to see what hotels it approved near Joe’s office. It then talked to computers in the several hotels in London to find a room with my preferences and within my price range. Having done so, my computer talked to Bob’s computer to tell him to change the appointment from a phone conference to a face to face meeting. Bob’s computer talked to a computer in his building to book a conference room. Having done all this, the hotel and airline computers then talked to my company’s accounting systems to agree on billing) because they all talked similar languages (or could point to a translator who would explain how they could. THAT is a practical example that would save money (finding the lowest price on airlines and hotels, reducing the number of trips) and increase productivity (saving time spent on certain tasks) thus allowing me to spend more time on money-making tasks.

All this is still a long way away but if the dream of a semantic web is realized, it will become reality.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Geeks to English. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

At the same time, the World Wide Web Consortium has introduced the P3P, a new standard to facilitate the distribution of a web site’s privacy policy.

Implementing P3P, users could choose to visit only Web sites that promise not to track their movements or to collect personal information. Or they could decide to go to Web sites that collect personal information, like their name and address, but only if that company promises not to share that information with anyone else. The browser will take care of notifying them of each site’s policy and let them decide whether they want to opt in or out. With Microsoft and Netscape being involved in those efforts, expect the next iteration of web browsers to be P3P-compliant.

The CDT has endorsed P3P as a step in the right direction. While it stops short of saying that it is the be all end all of privacy, the CDT praised P3P as an “important opportunity to make progress in building greater privacy protections in the Web experience of the average user.”

The CDT warns, however, that P3P will not insure that companies follow privacy policy nor will it ensure data safety in countries where no data privacy law has been enabled. More critics have said that P3P was not the appropriate answer because it created a default where companies could grab any data and users had to opt out of that gathering. This, to certain consumer privacy advocates, is bad because they believe that most people will not bother with opting out (studies on opting out of any kind of data gathering have shown few people polled bothered to do so, thus giving more control to corporations). In other words, while concerns around the issue are high, most people don’t want to have to deal with it and calls for increased protection are starting to pop up on Main Street as well as in congress.

The Federal Trade Commission, which up until recently had a laissez-faire attitude towards such data gathering has now recommended that Congress enact legislation to ensure a minimum level of privacy protection for online consumers, establishing basic standards of practice for the collection of information online. The recommendation includes four basic areas of protection:

• Notice: Web sites would be required to post a privacy notice telling consumers what data they gather, how they collect it, how they plan to use it and who has access to it.
• Choice: users should have the right to decide how their information would be used beyond a transaction.
• Access: Web sites would be forced to give consumer a chance to access the information that has been gathered about them and make modifications including deletions and corrections.
• Security: Web sites would be required to take steps to protect the privacy of users in order to ensure that data would not leak out unknowingly to other sources.

These suggestions mirror the 1998 European Directive on Data Protection, which was enacted to control the use of personal information gathered on European citizens. It has already been put into law by eight of the fifteen European Union countries. Originally, the European directive does not allow American companies to gather any data on European consumers because there is a lack of protection for personal data in the United States. However, discussions between the European Union and the US department of commerce are currently under way to allow American companies some protection. Passage of the FTC recommendation into law would insure compliance and alignment between European law and American law, which would facilitate global e-commerce.

However, there are a number of issues to look at. The FTC suggestions came as the result of a recent study the commission did, which showed that only 20% of the sites they surveyed did not fail in at least one of those four areas.

I would recommend to the readers of this newsletter that they examine their own internal policy on data gathering in order to comply with such rule. I may not be a rabid consumer data privacy advocate but I believe that these rules make sense for several reasons. Our business, as Internet builders and managers, is to ensure the highest level of customer services on our web site. Data protection is a new area of customer service that we need to concern ourselves with (the FTC is a political organization and I’m sure that they have some internal pollster telling them that consumers want to see their data protected). Web sites who pioneer data protection and develop strong rules internally will benefit greatly as consumers will feel more comfortable in their dealings with them. Beyond that, data protection is one of the fundamental pillars on which expansion into foreign markets lies. When I was working at Boo.com, one of the things that we worked on diligently was compliance with the many European data laws. As a result, we ended up following the European Directive on data gathering relatively quickly (however, I was surprised to see that Boo had allegedly sold its customers list to FashionMall as part of its divestiture, leaving a huge question mark on the legality of the matter).

As a quick reference point, here are a few questions that web site operators should ask themselves:

• Do we have a privacy policy and is it posted?
• Does it provide information on every piece of data we collect? (for example, a number of privacy policies do not cover use of cookies, server logs, or emails send to an address on the site)
• Do we give consumers a chance to opt-out of that data gathering? If not, can we? If so, do we provide the necessary tools to do so (web-forms or email address)?
• Do we give users a chance to correct personal information we have gathered about them and select whether they want us to use it in the future? Do we cover every scenario under which that personal information will be used?
• Have we audited our site to make sure that the information is stored securely?

Let me address each of those points in more details.

Privacy policies

: the first thing in drafting a privacy policy is to involve the lawyers (I know that may sound stupid but I know of a couple of corporate web sites where that job was left up to the webmaster). While the lawyers are involved, however, a good privacy policy should be easy to understand so skip a lot of the legalese and explain your policy in plain English (think of it as a marketing piece: the message you are sending here is “we understand your concerns about privacy and here is how we are answering them”).

Opting out or correcting data

: Most web sites keep the consumer data in a separate database or set of database tables. As part of good netizen behavior, companies should create a user name and password for every user who decides to give them data. Among some of the tools you would provide to that user are: a form where the data they have submitted is listed and where they can make corrections. Furthermore, a second page should be offered to allow users to opt out of different marketing options (for example, a user could choose to opt into receiving snail mail special offers but not email ones). However, as part of these opt-out options, you should add some value to your data. If a consumer is willing to give you their snail mail address for marketing purpose, you could offer them certain special discounts on products. This could include discounts within your own store as well as on other web sites (example: imagine your online electronics store wants to share data about users who have recently bought a stereo system with a web site that offers music CDs for sale. As a way to entice customers to agree to your selling their name to another web site, they could receive a discount on CDs on that other web site).

Data audit

: The recent news about hotmail passing email addresses in the URL field showed that user data can sometimes leak out without your planning on it. Instead of passing such precise identifier, user a customer ID in the URL field. That ID remains unknown to outside web sites but allows you to personalize the user’s experience. A check of all the personalization features on your site should reveal such problems. Fix them before the news goes out. I had noticed the email address in a URL problem with Hotmail and sent them an email about three weeks ago but never heard back from them. Last week, I read about it on the front page of Cnet’s News.com. I’m not sure of whether my email went to the wrong person at Hotmail or to a mailbox that did not get read much but my feeling about seeing this pop up on the front page of a leading tech news site made me feel that data handling at Hotmail was sloppy at best.

Either way you handle it, the data privacy debate will not stop. You can choose to bury your head in the sand but ultimately, it will have to be dealt with. Why not lead the charge and ensure that you are in compliance before you are forced to do so?

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The Privacy Police Strikes. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Priced at $300 for the modem and a $40 monthly rate for unlimited access, the service is still not cheap but it is starting to approach the reasonable area once you realize how much you can do with it.

The basic software package comes with some of the same clips that are available on the Palm VII and a few extra programs like a full mail package which allows you to connect to your POP3 server. However, I decided to get rid of that piece of software once I discovered Ptelnet, a small telnet client for the palm. This allows me to access a Unix server on which I not only have an email client but also a Usenet client, as well as a web browser (lynx) and an FTP client.

As a result, this telnet client works as the perfect on the road kit.

For more graphically oriented pages, I use Proxiweb, a full web browser that allows me to surf web pages directly from my pilot. The proxinet server converts the pages in a format that is easily readable by the pilot.

Of course, one of the main attraction of a wireless pilot is quick access to relevant information. Using Palm computing’s proprietary tools, several companies have developed PQAs that allow users to quickly check certain pages. Amazon.com, for example, allows you to order directly from your pilot, Ebay allows you to track your auctions in progress, and Etrade allows you to trade stocks. However, those are not the applications I found myself using the most.

I’ve discovered that the most interesting ones tend to be the information PQAs. For example, I can now check flight delays at the airport (perfect for travelers), track FedEx packages, get directions using mapquest, or grab headlines from a variety of sources including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today.

On the more techno-centric end, one can also grab headlines from Slashdot, news.com, and ZDNN. I find myself reading from my connected Palm when I am waiting for a meeting, in transit in a cab, or waiting for a plane at the airport. It’s the perfect way to stay productive wherever I am.

Palm computing knows that in order to keep its lead, it needs to offer tools for developers. As a result, they have introduced a small program that allows developers to create PQAs. The process is relatively quick (put together a few small HTML pages, trim a few images, check your links to make sure that they show up properly on the Palm.) However, one tricky part is creating web server pages that will display properly on the Palm.

I’d like to urge developers to do as much as possible to separate content from presentation when they create pages. In the case of TNL.net, the site is templatize according to one’s browser. So if someone comes in with a Palm (the user agent tag includes the word Elaine so you can clearly get it filtered), I serve up a less graphic intensive template.

This has allowed me to develop a little application allowing people to read this newsletter from their wireless Palm.

As an increasing amount of wireless device start to pop up, separating content and presentation will be increasingly important. The sites that do so already will gain an essential edge in this next section of the market while others will remain far far behind, stuck in legacy HTML code. If you don’t do that separation right now, you will find yourself in tougher and tougher a situation as the amount of content on your site keeps increasing.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Going wireless with the Palm V. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

I regret to announce the end of my efforts to mediate the Microsoft antitrust case

said Judge Posner in a statement released on Saturday, April 1st.

But it wasn’t.

After 4 months of discussions, any chance for a settlement between Microsoft and the US government seems to have ended fruitlessly. Many magazines, newspapers and web sites have been pointing out the fact that Judge Posner did not thank the states for their work in his brief statement. As a result, many believe that the states’ demands were largely responsible for the breakdown of the talks.

But the question remains as to what was the content of those talks. While most of the 20 drafts that were put together by the DOJ and Microsoft were kept a secret, word has leaked out regarding the content of some of those drafts. It includes:

• Uniform pricing structures that would disable Microsoft from offering preferential rebates and creating bundles for some partners.
• A provision forbidding Microsoft from striking exclusive contracts with other companies (for example, as it did with AOL, giving it an icon in Windows in exchange for packaging IE)
• Full disclosure of all the API to all Microsoft software, giving away what has long been believed to be a Microsoft advantage as it was supposedly allowing Microsoft internal programmers to develop software that better integrated with the Windows OS.
• Box manufacturers would be given source code to Windows and allowed to modify it at their will. They would be able to add and remove new features to it, such as, for example, changing the web browser. Microsoft would not be responsible for supporting those modified versions of windows.

Meanwhile, the 19 states involved in the negotiations would not go for anything less that a full break-up of Microsoft into several Baby Bills.

However, when you look at it closely, the proposal of the 19 states may be a bit shortsighted.

By creating a set of Baby Bills, we might end up with not one but several monopolies: One in the OS space (Windows has over 90% penetration in the consumer market), one in the application space (Office has more than 90% market share in the office suite market on both the PC and the Mac), and potentially in the Internet space (Internet Explorer has now supplanted Netscape Navigator as the browser with the largest market share).

However, while this case has become the computer equivalent of afternoon soap operas, with people tracking its every move, whatever happens this week when Judge Jackson presents a ruling that will most probably be unfavorable to Microsoft, may have little influence on the computer industry.

First of all, Microsoft will most probably appeal the ruling, going all the way to the supreme court and thus delaying its final impact for at least another year.

For starters, a lot of the battle is around Microsoft Windows and its larger implications in terms of helping Microsoft control the Internet. However, the landscape has dramatically changed since the DOJ and 20 states filed their case against Microsoft. The case was originally kicked off by Netscape as a salvo against Microsoft in the browser battle. Since then, Netscape has become a unit of the new behemoth in the Internet industry: America Online. AOL, which recently announced it would acquire Time-Warner, was playing both side of the fence. On the one hand, they are Netscape’s owners, and on the other, they are bundling IE as part of their client (of course, this allows them to also have an icon in Microsoft Windows, which has been in large part responsible for their success in customer growth).

At the time, Microsoft did have an inferior browser and was loosing in the marketplace. However, with the release of IE 4.0, and subsequent release of their 5.0 client, they started to gain market shares. Netscape was not happy about that. On the one hand, Microsoft was going faster than they were in terms of releasing new products. And, on the other hand, Microsoft was working on developing a version that would run better on four platforms: Windows, Macintosh, Solaris and HPUX. Meanwhile, Netscape was trying to support their browser on no less than 18 different platforms.

The interesting thing was that Netscape was complaining that Microsoft was going to compete with them. Yet, they were making it clear that they were out to:

replace Windows

and when they lost went to the DOJ to complain about Microsoft making their browser available for free even though they had adopted the same tactic long before Microsoft did.

Netscape’s failure was in the marketplace but since resentment of Microsoft’s success has always been a good thing to bet on, it played the legal card and got the proceeding started.

Meanwhile, Microsoft pushed more and more products out but failed to capture significant market shares in some critical Internet areas.

First, it attacked the online service business. AOL became the top online service, beating out Microsoft’s own MSN, even though MSN was bundled with Windows (this interesting little fact seems to show that bundling software with Windows is no guarantee that it will win out in the end.)

Realizing that it was loosing on that end, Microsoft decided to recast MSN as a portal but that decision was made too late and Yahoo! became the top search engine, followed by AOL’s own site.

On the server end, Microsoft is still trailing the free Apache server for the top position by a very large margin (Apache has a 60% market share, while Microsoft’s IIS has a 20% one). It’s efforts to cast its back-office suite of tools as the Internet suite of choice seems to have gone about as badly, with Microsoft trailing Oracle in the database space. Furthermore, some of Microsoft’s efforts to capitalize on their windows platform (remember ActiveX anyone?) have been received with less than enthusiasm by the development community… and let’s not forget Linux. While Microsoft was trying to make a big push against Solaris on the server end, the Linux crowd started going after the mid-size server market. As a result, Microsoft has not participated in the growth that other server-end operating systems have seen in the past few years. Linux has taken most of that growth away from Microsoft, representing a major threat to Windows NT. Linux has now become such a threat to Microsoft that the company is now breaking its own rule of never mentioning some other company’s software in presentations.

In new markets, Microsoft has also seen some very strong competition. While it has been moderately successful in the convergence space with WebTV (a company it bought for $420 million), the battle is just starting and AOL will soon be able to bring the power of its 22 million strong user base to the party, giving Microsoft’s some new headaches (WebTV has about 1 million users).

On the wireless end, Microsoft’s attempt to push Windows-CE against the PalmOS has been rebuffed and Palm computing has been very smart in licensing its operating system to cell phone vendors and other partners, creating a new platform Microsoft has to battle.

Last but not least, Microsoft is now trying to enter the gaming console market (with their X-box, promised for a Christmas 2001 release) and is thus entering another market in which it has little or no market shares.

When you look at this, you may say, well, why would anyone care about Microsoft’s dominance. It seems to be waning, right?

Well, yes and no. While the market is currently showing a company that’s fighting a war on multiple fronts, it’s also a company that has successfully managed to buy itself a seat at the telecom table (Microsoft now has investments in AT&T, Comcast, Nextel, and Qwest), as well as some other infrastructure plays (Akamai, Concetric Networks, Tut Systems).

What’s happened really, over the last few years, is that Microsoft stopped being a pure software company. Sure, it still sells software but its main business over the past few years has been as an investment firm. When you look at it this way, its dominance may somewhat make sense, much like Kleiner Perkins’ does.

As a result, I’m afraid a breakup could represent a major problem for our industry. For starters, look at the suggestion that’s been the most often floated: one company doing windows, another doing applications, and another doing Internet stuff. If you go with that breakup, you still have a dominant player in the OS market, a dominant player in the applications market (remember, this group would get MS Office) and a weak Internet company.

Most of Microsoft’s problems have stemmed from the fact that it has grown too big for its own good. For starters, it is now in so many markets that it is hard to figure out whether it really does wield as much power as it used to. Second, it is such a big organization that I seriously doubt programmers talk to each others as much as they should. However, if you were to break it up as more than three companies, you could get somewhere.

Let’s say we were to follow the logic of Microsoft as a VC firm. If we do so, it’s market cap is really not so huge, considering the number of companies it holds. It is, after all, a VC with over 200 companies in its portfolio.

Either way, the battle will go on and sometimes this week, a ruling will be issued but in the long run, I seriously doubt that anything that happens this week will have any lasting effect on the computer industry. Microsoft will win out or loose out in the marketplace, regardless of the outcome of this trial.

We’re living in too dynamic a marketplace for it all to make sense. In the end, however, we will all regret that case ever happening because it will set a precedent as to whether the government can get involved into IT affairs. It may be the only lasting effect we will all be forced to feel.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title MS-DOJ Talks Falter: So What?. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.