Voice Over IP

VoIP experienced tremendous growth in 2004 but it was just the beginning. This year, much more will happen in that space.

Cable providers will start deploying VoIP services on their networks and phone companies will start bundling VoIP services with their DSL offering as a way to compete. By year end, all major broadband providers, whether they are offering services over cable or DSL lines, will have a VoIP service bundled with their access service.

Unable to compete with the larger telcos, some smaller players in the market will merge on order to lower their cost per subscriber by bringing their infrastructures together. Also, independent VoIP companies will sign peering agreement with each other in order to bypass traditional telcos and lower the cost of connectivity from one independent VoIP company to another.

Further pressure will be put on all players on the American market as overseas companies will start targeting U.S. customers. Before year-end, at least one company will offer an unlimited calling to several countries plan. Other plans will provide unlimited calling to each continent. This will start putting pressure on established government monopolies in several countries, especially in Europe.

VoIP will also experience strong growth within the enterprise, with companies looking to open-source solutions like Asterisk to replace their PBX infrastructure with a lower cost alternative.

As all this happens, equipment will not only become cheaper but will also become much easier to use and install. Along with it, new sets will come out, with cordless VoIP offerings becoming much more common. Competition in this space will be on features available in new handsets.

With substantial portions of the phone network switching to VoIP, video telephony will start taking hold. However, the price of equipment will still be too high for those services to experience the kind of growth other sectors in the VoIP market will experience.

Entertainment Convergence

The convergence of the computer and other entertainment forms (television, radio, gaming, mobile phones) will continue, further blurring the lines in the convergence world.

With broadband now being the major way to access the Internet in the United States, Internet usage for new forms of entertainment will grow. Along with it, however, will be a continuing challenge to the established media order.

The challenges faced by the music industry with the introduction of Napster will now be the new reality for the movie and television industry. Five years ago, I started seeing the phenomenon emerge and believe the four step process of the digital asset dance will be full blown for the MPAA this year. The MPAA will spend part of the year suing companies and users for downloading movies. However, they are also better prepared that the music industry in that they are already offering legal download services like MovieLink.

While litigation will be one of the ways convergence appears on the front page, many providers will find a way to mine this new world for new dollars. Expect some companies to start offering legal download of television programs for a fee. As the Internet becomes the standard telecommunication infrastructure, content will start getting carried more heavily. Phone companies will start using this to offer bundle TV services with their DSL offering as a way to compete with the cable TV companies that have invaded the telecom turf. Before year end, at least one traditional telco will offer TV over IP. All that content will be protected by DRM systems, getting people more and more used to having less and less rights over the content they receive.

Meanwhile, on the wireless end, the introduction of more powerful mobile phones and the introduction of faster mobile phone networks will also play out in the favor of content producers. As voice traffic revenues continue to decrease, expect mobile phone companies to push data services such as downloadable movies and downloadable music more heavily. By year, MP3 will be the standard format for cellphones and Apple will offer a mobile phone version of the iTunes music store, allowing users to download music from the store and customize their phone with the latest hits.

On the non-Internet end of things, video on demand will continue the strong growth it experienced in 2004 and more programming will be offered in HDTV format, prompting an increase in sales of televisions and tuners that can receive those signals. Meanwhile, radio will follow the path taken by cable television in the early 80s. As satellite radio takes hold as the new “edgier” alternative to traditional radio, people will get more used to the idea of paying for radio. However, they will also require that those services be offered over the Internet as well as over the proprietary networks like XM and Sirius.

But not all content will be coming from big corporations. The grassroots will also play a key role in the distribution of online media in 2005. While podcasting has been the domain of a few geeks in 2004, easier to use tool will bring the phenomenon to the forefront and expect more audio services to be available from regular users. Following on the tail of this phenomenon will be an increase in videocasting from individuals. Much of it will be disappointing but a few gems will emerge, creating new stars who will emerge from the Internet and move on to more traditional media, based on the fame of their online offerings.

Business

Mergers and acquisitions will dominate the software world this year, as more companies realize that the only way into the enterprise is through a complete set of offerings. Expect several multi-billion dollar mergers and/or acquisition. In my mind, McAfee will be acquired or merge with either Symantec or CA; SAP will be acquired by Microsoft; Business Objects will be acquired by Oracle. As holds true for such precise predictions, none of this will actually happen the way I predicted it.

In late 2004, IBM left the personal computer business, selling its unit to Lenovo, a Chinese manufacturer. Expect the same to happen to at least one other PC vendor this year as the margins on personal computers continue to decrease, turning them into commodities.

Apple

Apple, which to date has resisted the price pressures other computer manufacturers have experienced, will introduce a cheaper version of their Macintosh. This, however, will not stem the continuing loss of market share they are experiencing. As Linux continues to grow, the Apple story in the computer business becomes more and more difficult and the company will increasingly rely on the consumer device business as its savior, building a new economy around the success of the iPod and iTunes music store.

The company will not, however, release a video player this year. Among some of the new features I would envision coming from Apple are:

• A flash-based iPod, which will be even smaller than the iPod mini and will be in the $100-$150 price range
• A partnership with a phone company to create a phone that will be able to download music from a special version of the iTunes music store and play MP3 ringtones
• An iPod with audio recording built-in
• A portable camera with iPod-like features
• A new way to send pictures from the iPod directly to printer via Airport express

While it focuses on the music business, Apple will not spend much time updating its laptop business. Adoption will drop in that part of the business as PC vendors start selling sub-$500 laptop PCs, making the iBook look expensive by comparison. Apple will try to enter the low cost market but not with a laptop: they will introduce a mac without monitor for under $500, offering integration with the iPod, and plugs to attach the computer to a television as its major features.

On the software end, the company will introduce a Word Processor and Spreadsheet program. They will release them, along with Keynote, as a complete package named iWork which will be aimed at students and small businesses. The package will be available for free on new computers.

Development

Blogs and RSS will continue their growth and will move strongly within the enterprise space. Adoption of RSS will continue its explosive growth but crest in 2005 as users start trying to find ways to cope with the information overload. New components in RSS readers will attempt to help organize RSS feeds but those basic efforts will initially fail and discussions will be set towards the end of the year as to the effective way to organize large amounts of data.

Weblogs and content management systems will start covering some of the same ground and enterprise will start using weblogs internally at the departmental level. Meanwhile, external employee weblogs will start becoming the focus of more litigations as corporation try to retain their intellectual property and fight the kind of transparency that comes from having employees talk openly on the web. Internal rules and regulations will be set in how employees can use blogs.

Meanwhile, in the development world, Service Oriented Architectures will continue being the approach to delivering next generation services. SOA will grow largely internally but some companies will start exposing some web services via XML to their partners. A new set of interesting new applications will come out as a result of those exposures.

Security and trust will continue to be big subjects and I suspect that trust will become an even bigger one with new standards emerging around the concept but no general agreement as to the best implementation.

Open source software will continue its strong growth, getting into more and more specialized fields. With the delays in delivery of Microsoft’s next operating system, Linux will continue to grow but complaints about price will start to arise. While the open source movement has offered free software, there will continue to be an increase in the price of supported version of the software.

Personal

I’ll promise to update the blog more often, will do OK for a little while and will then fall back into my regular pattern of a couple of updates a week. Or not… Either way, only the new year will tell.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 2005 Predictions. 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.

Good/Bad Practice

In this first step, we would highlight good and bad usability issues with major open source products. However, part of this requires an effort in terms of figuring out quick wins in terms of fixes vs. things that may take longer to fix. The idea here is to highlight some of the basic best practices that open source users might consider.

Guidelines

This is probably going to be tricky but what I’d like to see arise out of discussion is the possibility of creating a document (or set of documents) that could help open source developers get a better understanding of usability issues. This might help in educating the community as to what to think of when creating new tools.

Communication

This is another difficult point to address but there needs to be good communication as to what can be done to fix a problem. And, moving forward, communication regarding successful implementation of more usable features in an open source product. If, every time a new version of open source software comes out, it shows improvements in terms of making it easier for people to use, we should try to highlight that. The best and worst issues list will go some of the way but we need to define a clear communication strategy to tout the ease of use of open source products in front of the press and of potential users. This will allow to get over the mental barrier that open source products are generally difficult to use.

This is just a start and I hope it will kick off discussions on the list. In the meantime, why not subscribe to the list!

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: Goals. 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.

Today, it was announced that the Redmond company had send out version of its IIS 4.0 server with a backdoor.

At the height of its war with Netscape, Microsoft engineers included a secret backdoor password using the phrase

Netscape engineers are weenies!

into version of IIS. As a result, Anyone writing a script that would access the dvwssr.dll file, which is used for Windows 98 extensions, in IIS could open access to Web site management files and possibly credit card information and user passwords.

This is high irresponsibility on the part of Microsoft engineers and should be condemned, especially since Microsoft is trying to push its IIS platform as the way to serve pages on the Internet. Thousands of companies have bought into the Microsoft line and are using the server both for intranets and Internet sites and one can foresee a potential class action lawsuit against the company following this incident.

While Microsoft announced that it would find the guilty parties and fire them, it tried to downplay the potential effects of that security hole. Interestingly, however, most of the web hosting providers have turned on the FrontPage 98 extensions that are at fault. In other words, Microsoft either doesn’t know what it’s talking about or is lying about the threat. Either way, it doesn’t look good for the company.

This could also add oil to the fire that is the DOJ antitrust law suit.

The words about Netscape are going to hurt it more. It may have been seen as a funny prank at the time but has the potential of being a bigger problem for the company.

One can expect Microsoft to use this as a way to push upgrades to Windows 2000 but Microsoft’s change of license on Windows 2000 make this an unlikely route for some of the smaller players. (Windows 2000 requires to buy an extra $2000 license for serving web pages, on top of paying the premium that was already customary for the server.)

Either way it tries to play this, Microsoft looks like it’s going to loose more customers to Linux, which is not only free but also appears to be more secure.

Interestingly enough, this event could also be another argument in favor of open source software. In the open source software environment, a trick like that would have been quickly eliminated.

Will Microsoft open-source Windows NT? Highly unlikely but when it comes to something like IIS, it could be a way for them to reign in their own developers and increase marketshares in the web server business. As Microsoft is in the business of selling Operating Systems, it might want to consider this course of action. The open sourcing of IIS would not affect its profit line (IIS is given away for free by the company already) and might insure Microsoft creates a stronger product that could better compete with Apache, currently the market leader and an open sourced package itself.

How would this work? Look at Mozilla as a potential example of how Microsoft could go about it.

First, make the source code available to anyone. Then take in comments and changes and include them into a package. Create a supported version (ie. The official IIS version) and allow other developers to create variance on it.

The bottom line: in this scenario, Microsoft would retain and probably increase its market share in a market it covets: mid to high range web servers. Furthermore, it would do so by opening up a dialogue with the Internet development community, therefore restoring some of its lost luster.

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