A bit of history

In order to understand the importance of the current shift, one needs to study a bit of history. Since the dawn of the personal computer era, applications have been written and running largely on the user’s desktop. In the mid-90s, Sun Microsystems co-founder John Gage started claiming that “the network is the computer.” Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, the leading browser company at the time, was claiming that Netscape would “reduce Windows to a set of poorly debugged device drivers.”

However, due to limitation in terms of bandwidth and computer power, this vision didn’t come to be until well into our current decade. Today, individuals still mostly use Windows, even if most use it primarily to launch their web browser.

In more recent times, the availability of always-on, higher speed internet access, has allowed companies like Google to start offering more powerful websites, which took on features of full-fledged software applications. Leveraging technology that first saw the light of day in the 1990s (Flash was born in 1995 and XMLhttp, which powers AJAX applications was created by Microsoft in 1999), those applications started offering compelling competitors to existing products.

One the leader in that revolution has been Google. First with the release of Gmail and then with the release of Google Apps, the company has been working on offering online version of tools like email, word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation software. Leveraging its establish power in the advertising space, Google has figured that, by offering document and email management features to its users for free, it could create extra advertising inventory that it could then resell.

So Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Apps were born. Since they were consumer focused products, presenting them as products “in progress”, complete with a beta stamp and an advertising-based model. Jeff Jarvis warrants that such act was not only bourne out of humility but also as a  call to collaborate. This week, however, the company decided to shed the beta logo for most of its applications.

With its direct language to IT manager and its message emerging from the enterprise group, Google is making it clear that this announcement is not targeted at the consumer space. In a sign of growing business maturity (most software company attempt to appeal to the enterprise space as they get older and need to develop more predictable financial groundings), the company is now trying to appeal to the enterprise space, aiming its offerings towards a space that has traditionally been controlled by Microsoft (with its Office Suite) and, to a lesser extent, IBM (with its Lotus division offerings).

Poorly debugged device drivers?

But Google realizes that much of what it does is dependent on the continued goodwill of the different operating system providers and browser suppliers. Were it not for web browsers or operating systems, Google could not exist. Last year, the company started reducing that dependency by introducing its own web browser, named Chrome. Chrome was actually quite interesting in terms of browser development as it was the first browser to treat each window session as a separate application, ensuring that if one web page failed, the other tabs would not. This could be seen as something not completely unlike the way an operating system (or kernel, etc) doles out memory and CPU power to each of the applications it deals with and orchestrate who gets what.

The unstated strategic goal of the Chrome browser is to help reduce the dominance of Internet Explorer in the online space while providing Google with more of a say in terms of where web standards were heading (I’m sure some people will try to debate that point but, if Chrome is not intended as an Internet Explorer competitor, why is the only “official” version of the browser a Windows one, with no such offering on OSX or Linux?)

Chrome is not only an attack on Microsoft’s browser dominance in the web space but also an attempt at ensuring that neither Microsoft NOR Adobe get control of the future of web applications. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt knows how trying to fight Microsoft can distract a company from very real threats by other unexpected contenders: he did come from Sun Microsystems and Novell before joining Google and saw, first-hand, how those two companies saw their focus on unseating Microsoft’s dominance in their respective areas blinded them to the threat that Linux came to be to both of them, ultimately dooming each of the companies’ efforts without Microsoft having to do too much.

So, as a veteran of the OS wars, Schmidt is now being careful in balancing its entry in the space. On one hand, he doesn’t want to offend existing partners like Apple and the open source community. On the other hand, he needs to ensure that his company’s offerings are actually going to appeal to hardware vendors. The OS will ultimately be little more than the minimum required to make the Chrome browser run. That means it will include an IP stack, some basic drivers to interact with the keyboard and screen (or a way for companies to offer those) and a UI that will be a full screen version of the Chrome web browser.

The description of the OS, as stated in the press release, describe it as such:

Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web… without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files… Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates.

Put quite simply, this is a web browser with the basics to make it run online and offline (the offline components probably being based on Google Gears (already built into the Chrome browser) or some HTML 5 offline approach). Users will not really store much on their computer but everything will be sitting on Google’s servers, accessible from anywhere. Operating system upgrades will happen automatically in the background and everything will run in the browser. For those people expecting to run Firefox (or any other application) on this thing, sorry… it won’t happen.

Google’s view is that everything will run online and all data will be stored online. In technical terms, this is called sending information into “the cloud.”

However, there’s the question of how to plug components in there. I suspect that Google will lean heavily on its partners to release any device related drivers through the equivalent of an online application store, similar to the app store on the iphone, where Google controls the experience in terms of what gets installed on the user’s desktop and can recall or upgrade an install if needs be. The idea being that the hardware device does not need much power as most everything is coming from the web.

Developers will not be allowed to develop anything that runs on the machine itself:

For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser

With these few words, Google is taking the same approach as Apple first did when itintroduced the iPhone: don’t look to us to provide you with any SDK, the web is the platform. Build your application using HTML 5 and all will be OK. This basically means that right now, Google either has no intention to provide an SDK or will keep it accessible only to select partners who want to integrate with their OS. They will first provide access to the device makers and then, over time, will create an SDK and an app store that they may even be willing to share with partners by white-labeling that store to sweeten the deal for any partner willing to install the OS.

The reason I suspect this would be part of the strategy is that pricing will not be a heavy deciding factor in whether partners will adopt the new OS and Google desperately needs the new OS to be implemented as widely as possible.

Many have said that cost was a large part of their strategy but I suspect it cannot be: Consumers have already been trained to consider the operating system as a freebie or low cost tool. On the windows side, consumers see the OS as something that comes with their machine, not something they buy separately. This effectively brings the price to 0. Even Mac users, who generally tend to be more willing to pay for products offered by Apple, were grousing at pricing on OSX, forcing the company to take a deeply discounted approach when offering the next version of its operating system for about the price of dinner and a movie. And pricing has proven to be a contrarian indicator in the netbook market, as consumers decided to pay extra for the Windows XP version of devices that also offered the same hardware at a lower price point with Linux.

Interesting timing

Having established that the company is looking to get more control of its end to end experience, one big question is why do it now? Why not do this, for example, at their developer conference, as they did for Google Wave? Why announce something that will not be available in the near term?

My suspicion here is that part of the reason for this vaporwave release is that Microsoft is about to unveil a series of cloud focused initiatives at its WorldWide Partner Conference next week: those offerings will include a major push for their cloud platform, Microsoft Azure, along with announcements regarding the Gazelle project (their own browser as an OS offering), and Office 2010, a substantially revamped version of the popular suite that will move collaboration and synchronization front and center. At its core, the revamped Office suite will not only include the existing components and features of older version but its guts will have been rebuilt with some DNA acquired as part of the acquisition of Ray Ozzie’s Groove Networks and its offerings.

I suspect that Groove and Ozzie have Google shaking in its boots. Much of Google’s strategic message is that it is more collaboration friendly than Office and, by leaving one’s documents on Google’s servers, one doesn’t have to worry so much about revisions and versioning. With Office 2010, Microsoft is fixing these problems and telling corporations that while Google’s message is nice, your proprietary information will be sitting on Google’s server. How about getting the same type of functionality but keep the documents on your own servers. Because most corporate IT department tend to be paranoid when it comes to their corporate data, the Microsoft message will resonate better.

So Google is not starting to position itself in the consumer market, hoping that applications which can run in the consumer world will eventually help tear down the corporate walls (to date, few corporations have adopted Google Apps and, if Microsoft offers a competitive product, I suspect it could remain that way for at least a decade). Having to do something, they have now decided to attack a core tenet of the Microsoft empire: its windows OS division.

The battle lines are now drawing:

• Google is asserting that the world runs solely within a browser and all application logic is in the cloud; Microsoft will assert that substantial amounts of complex tasks require the power of the desktop and the cloud is there primarily as a tool for collaboration and synchronization.
• Google is asserting that desktop PCs are merely thin clients; Microsoft is asserting that desktops are still the center of the computing experience.
• Google is asserting that the net is safe enough a place to leave all your information; Microsoft is asserting its not.
• Google is asserting that developers don’t want to run applications natively on a machine; Microsoft is asserting that the tightest integration happens at the OS level.

Each company is presenting a different vision of the cloud. I can’t say which is right as both offering compelling advantages and substantial flaws but I can highlight one important feature: in the future the software you are running will be connected to the internet most of the time and still be able to work when offline. And in that future, I suspect that the notion of software as a product you buy will probably disappear, with software as a rental model becoming the emerging approach. And I also believe that this is the beginning of the cloud OS wars.

Update: As expected, Microsoft sends out its reply.

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 Cloud Wars. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Strategy: Hardware? Software? Service? Partnership?

Let’s take a look at the players in the “smart phones” market: Apple, Nokia, Microsoft, RIM (blackberry),  Linux Mobile, and Palm. Sun used to have a Java Mobile but it seems to have dropped off the market, in terms of device market share. And then, there’s the new pretender to the crown in the form of Google, with its Android OS offering.

How do they stack up in terms of Hardware? Operating System? Service Offering? Well, here goes:

A first glance at this table seems to reflect some of the player’s pre-existing biases. Microsoft is known for its software business so that’s where it put the most weight; Google is all about free software to power their services; RIM and Palm do a hardware software combo; Apple throws its weight behind a fully Apple controlled experience.

However, there are a few caveats: For example, while Microsoft is in the space primarily as a software provider, it also owns Danger Inc., makers of the Hiptop. And while Palm has its own software, many of its devices are powered by Windows Mobile.

But apart from those exception areas, it appears that strategies are organized across four business models:

• OS only: This strategy is preferred by Sun and Linux. The model here is to provide an operating system that can be used by others. For Sun, this strategy has largely failed as substantially less than 1% of all handsets around the world is powered by their OS. Linux, which really was the first open source mobile OS has captured about 4 percent of the global smart phone market to date. Microsoft is the big leader in terms of that strategy, with its Windows Mobile OS currently powering about 12 percent of all smartphones around the globe.
• Software + Service: All this leaves us with Google and their Android offering. Much of the commenting today is that the move Nokia just made was aimed at the fact that Google had an “open” operating system. But what Google is really trying to do is provide an operating system that melds OS and services. Either that or they are in the OS only camp. Either way, they are not playing in the same space as the iPhone or Nokia (see triple play below).
• Hardware + Software: This model is preferred by RIM, makers of the Blackberry, and Palm (especially with their inexpensive Palm Centro line). This strategy works best if you want your device to be focused on few use scenarios: The blackberry is first and foremost a portable email station; Palm devices are first and foremost PDAs. This orientation comes from a past where the device wasn’t initially intended as a phoe but morphed into one.
• The triple play (ie hardware/software/service): This is the strategy currently used by Apple with the iPhone: they provide the hardware, the software, and a set of services (me.com, iTunes, Software store) on a complete package.  Through recent acquisitions, Nokia has been moving in this direction: while they were traditionally a hardware player, they started adding services to their devices. With today’s announcement, they’re also getting some control over software.

So looking at this, it becomes apparent that while many are pointing to Nokia going after Google, it may not be the target. Since Nokia does service and hardware already, getting more control over its own OS is probably an important move.

Open Sourcing

I can already hear some readers snickering: Symbian’s been open-sourced so Nokia does not have control. Let me make something very clear: the gold rule (“he who’s got the gold makes the rule”) applies to Open Source as it does in other areas. While it won’t get exclusivity, Nokia, having paid $400+ million to open source Symbian will be considered “more equal than others” by the Symbian foundation, I’m sure.

But why open source? If we look at the players mentioned above, their position on open source and their market share, the picture becomes clearer:

Looking at the market share date, Nokia’s move doesn’t seem to make sense: They currently control 65 percent of the market, why would they bother? But here’s the thing: There’s this newcomer called Apple and they didn’t exist 18 months ago: they now have 7 percent of the market and are growing.

If I’m a Nokia executive and I’m looking at this data, I start worrying. So what do I do? I look at competitive advantage: initially, I try to compete with cooler devices (the Nseries) and while it stops some of the bleeding, it doesn’t appear to fully halt the competition. So I start looking at services as a way to stabilize revenue (Maps, Music, Games) but that doesn’t stick. Then I realize that my problem is the operating system: I’m stuck with that alliance of partners I have but they’re slowing me down. So I have to take over. But I can’t do that by just kicking all of them out. So I acquire and open source.

The open source move fills three strategic objectives:

• I get to keep partners still involved but get them to agree to my taking charge.
• I get other people to improve my code and/or developing FOR it, thus allowing me to counter a potential Google threat if it ever materializes.
• I get to look more “open” than Apple and will use that in my messaging

The Future: Collateral Damage Then Status Quo

Of course, while it works out great for Nokia, there is a little bit of collateral damage:

• Sun’s offering, while interesting had already sunk largely into irrelevancy so they’re no longer a player.
• Palm OS, was teetering on the edge but now it’s pretty much cooked.
• Linux, while still having teeth, will probably see its market share dwindle as its unique selling proposition (more open than others) is gone.

So that’s unfortunate but what does it do to the rest of the market. Well, in fact, it looks like today’s events wont’ have much impact: Palm, Linux and Sun represent about 5 percent of the market. With Apple at 7%, RIM at 11%, Microsoft at 12% and Nokia at 65%, it looks like the market will stay pretty consistent. The remaining 5% will be carved out by the existing players and by Google’s entry into the market. Nokia will remain at the top for now.

Potential events that could have a more disruptive effect: a Microsoft/RIM partnership (or outright acquisition) which, when integrated would give Windows Mobile a 23% market share. But short of such a move, it looks like the situation will mostly stay at status quo for the time being.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title No Changes in Mobile. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

iPhone: 3G OK but not everywhere

As expected, Apple did introduce a version of the iPhone that will run on third generation (3G) networks. Steve Jobs made a big deal about the wide availability of this new device globally, highlighting a large number of countries in which the product will soon be available.

Glossed over, however, is whether it makes much of a difference. Let’s take a look at 3G coverage offered by AT&T in the United States (I managed to get to this map from a list AT&T provides):

On this picture, the areas marked in blue are the areas where AT&T offers 3G services, as the following legend reminded me:

So while it is true that you will be able to buy a 3G iPhone in most of the US, it’s not necessarily a guarantee that you will be able to use 3G service in areas outside of major urban centers. It was not mentioned on Monday and I think I may have a good idea as to why: to say that you are offering a tool which will be available only to urbanites would have stolen some of the magic.

However, the truth of the matter is that most of the current iPhone buyers appear to live in the target areas. In my experience, while iPhone are fairly ubiquitous in the New York, Chicago, DC, and San Francisco circles I tend to run in, I haven’t seen as many of them when I go to other areas. It could be that the device is attractive to people who live in certain areas and may not be as attractive to others. I don’t know why it is but it’s just an observation.

Cost

A possible reason for the phone currently being more popular in large cities may have been price, an item that Steve Jobs also mentioned as something they needed to work on. When the iPhone was first introduced, its $599 price was seen as high compared to the rest of the market. Subsequent price cut brought the price of the phone to $399, a price that was more or less in line with what other smart phones were retailing for.

When it was first introduced, Apple dictated that customers would pay full price for the device and, on top of it, AT&T would pay Apple an extra $18 per month for every iPhone subscriber (or $432 over the 2 year contract that a subscriber would be locked in for).

When the iPhone was introduced, plans were ranging from $59.99 (for 450 minutes, 200 SMS, and 5000 night and weekend minutes) to $99.99 (for 1350 minutes, 200 SMS, and unlimited nights and weekends minutes) with no extra data charges for browsing, email etc…

So, assuming a low cost $59.99 individual plan, the 2 year outlay for an iphone user would be $1440 for subscriptio. Tack on the $399 price of the iphone and that’s $1840 over a two year period.

That’s a lot of money and Steve Jobs announced that they had heard complaints about the price, which have now resulted in this new device being available for prices ranging from $199 to $299.

The new plan, according to an AT&T press release, start at $39.99 was voice service only with an extra $30 for 3G. This means that the most basic plan is now $69.99. By the look of it, the extra $30 plan is similar to the existing PDA Personal plan they are offering (It’s unclear whether SMS is included in the plan but AT&T does not seem to provide any information as to SMS related charges).

So, over the two year life of the plan required by the contract, the cost would be $1680 for subscription. Tack on the $199 to that price and you end up with a total of $1879 over a two year period, roughly $40 more than the outlay for first generation devices.

The interesting thing here is that the price is roughly the same even though the entry point is lowered by a third. This plays to the perception that the price has been drastically lowered but the truth of the matter is that it hasn’t changed much.

Revolutionary Model?

What has changed, it seems, is the relationship between Apple and AT&T. A year and a half ago, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, it looked like AT&T had bent over backwards to ensure they would get the device. Apple was receiving kick-backs; Apple was dictating the price of the device; Apple was controlling the interface; Apple was controlling the activation (which could be done from home); You could buy an iPhone at the Apple store, go home, use iTunes to activate your phone and, apart from receiving a bill from them every months for the following two years, you didn’t really have to deal with AT&T.

Fast forward to today.

The device is heavily subsidized; AT&T keeps all the revenue from subscription; Apple still controls what’s on the phone deck; AT&T requires in-store activation.

Suddenly, the business model doesn’t seem so revolutionary. In fact, it seems that Apple is now falling in line with every other phone device manufacturer. Yes, it still has control of the interface but it seems that wireless providers are more lenient when it comes to that these days.

What I suspect is that reality has largely set in. While lofty goals of selling 10 million iPhones were mentioned, 6 million units have shipped. 6 million is a very respectable number. In fact, it’s an impressive number when you consider the price the device sold at.

The problem is that 6 million is still a long way from ensuring 10 million devices sold by then end of December. So AT&T must have mentioned that fact to Apple and told them that while it was all very nice and they still wanted exclusivity, they would have to renegotiate terms. And the negotiation brought Apple “back in the fold.”

A funny thing is that while AT&T executives were high-fiving themselves over that success, Jobs was probably looking at another portion of the market they had not discussed: software.

See, hardware is all great and fun but ultimately, it’s a sucker’s bet: there’s only so much money you can wring out of a device and margins never really increase. The previous iPhone was costing about $220 to build. This one, with a 3G chip and a GPS will probably cost a little more. Of course, it’s subsidized by AT&T (i’d suspect that AT&T pays between $100–200 per iphone) so Apple still makes some money but that’s pretty consistent. Increasing margins on such a device would be hard as it requires heavy negotiations with suppliers to get better costs for parts and reconfiguration of production lines to improve efficiencies. Those are not easy areas and investments need to be pretty heavy in order to see returns.

But then, there’s software.

Software is almost diametrically opposed in its scalability of cost (for a good understanding of the advantage, see dictionary under Microsoft ). Yet software, in itself is still pretty expensive to produce (the same is true of music or any other creative endeavor where the product can be digitized). However, imagine being able to build a marketplace where one would sell software produced by someone else. It would look like the type of marketplace one would use to sell things like music, or maybe movies, or TV shows.

Oh wait, I know, it would look like the leading marketplace for selling music. You know, the one by Amazon… uh, no, not that one. Who makes that leading marketplace? Oh yeah, Apple with the iTunes store.

Control

In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2007, Apple reportedly made $808 million in the category that includes the iTunes online store. This, largely by providing infrastructure to sell other people’s product to users of its iPod.

Now comes the iPhone as, essentially, the next generation of the iPod… and it seems that, as Apple initially strong-armed the music industry into giving it a portion of revenue it didn’t need too, Apple is now working on ensuring that it will get control over what goes on their own next generation iPhone.

Last year, when they first introduced the device, it was locked down and fully under Apple’s control. But over the year, tools appeared to break that stronghold and people started developing applications that enhanced the device for anyone who was basically willing to void warranty.

Apple saw what was happening and initially tried to fight it but the company eventually realized that attempting to fight such a trend was essentially like a game of wack-a-mole. Fun for sure, but hardly profitable and/or potentially successful. So Apple relented by providing a software development kit, a move that it hopes would bring developers back into the fold.

This plugged the issue of non-standard development and, thanks to the requirement to agree to certain terms and conditions, Apple can now dictate what applications can and can’t be created for the iPhone and it’s not the first time that Apple uses its SDK agreement to limit what applications can and can’t be built using it.

At this point, though, it still OK as Apple gives its developers ways to fill gaps that exist on the device by providing software that Apple did not provide.

And that’s where Apple’s Push Notification Service comes in. At first blush, it looks like a nice idea: instead of running all applications in the background, you just have your current application talk to that service and that service then relays information to the Apple server before passing it on to you. It “simplifies” things and saves battery juice. That’s all great, until you start thinking about the implication: Apple now knows what works and what doesn’t in terms of applications.

The company will not only know which applications are being downloaded to iPhones, since the only way to load an application legally is through the iPhone store provided by Apple, but it will now know whether the applications are actually used and what kind of usage pattern they have.

Of course, one would assume that since Apple is such a great company and so developers friendly, it will share this information in almost real time with the application developers.

Except it won’t.

The other thing this does is that it provides Apple with a central system that knows what users are doing with their iPhone. This is basically focus groups on a global scale and it’s very impressive.

Apple has essentially created for itself a device that will keep information on what applications are being used on it, how much they’re being used, and by how many users. From there, I suspect it won’t be too hard to build an interesting roadmap that seems to magically mirror the best applications.

And the developers of applications that were filling the gap created by Apple at the time? Well, it will be a problem for them to try to compete with Apple but I’m sure the company will be happy to have them develop other applications after it plundered their previous successful one.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title iPhone 2: More than meets the eye. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

At the time, I figured that this was a nice and convenient answer that really acted as more of a way to stonewall me. So it was with great surprise that I was contacted with a follow-up by John Moses, the VP of customer relations worldwide for Palm.

Not only did John apologize for my own experience but he was considerate enough to provide me with a lot of answers to questions I asked (and, in a closing to my encounter with Palm, he also provided me with a replacement unit for my Treo 680). While my faith in Palm hasn’t been restored yet, I think there is a lot to ponder in the questions and answers John provided me. Because there is a lot to digest, I am breaking this Q&A into two parts: The first one, which follows, addresses general issues around customer support and around my own experience. The second part talks about the unit replacement program and some of the decisions made there.

So without further ado, here is the Q&A, which is not edited in any way, save for light formatting to increase readability .

Q: First of all, thanks for taking the time to do this interview and alleviate some of the fears people may have after I posted my experience with Palm. The Treo 680 has been out for about a year now. As the head of Customer Relations, have you seen particularly high levels of calls relating to it as opposed to other palm devices?

A: Because of a special program we implemented and highly marketed this past year called 1–800 Free Setup Help, we have had a higher volume of calls related to the Treo 680. This Palm sponsored program — where we have also gained the support of our major carrier partners — encourages customers to call us at no charge within the first 90 days of purchase for dedicated device setup assistance. The results have been highly encouraging and we are continuing to evaluate additional programs that increase the number of interactions we have with customers so they get more out of their device.

We also strongly recommend that customers take advantage of the Treo 680 software updaters, as they do make a noticeable improvement to the performance of our devices. Customers can find these
on our website.

Q: It is my understanding that Palm works largely on second line of support for mobile phone companies they have partnerships with and works as first line of support for unlocked devices they sell. As a result, I would suspect that the number of calls for unlocked devices is probably higher. Is that the case?

A: You are right that for the majority of our phones — all of those sold through the carrier channel — we are the second level of support. Our carrier partners have extensive support capabilities and are interested in maintaining a connection with their subscriber customers — and we respect that. As a general rule, these customers are encouraged to begin support with their wireless service provider, and they will in turn escalate to us at Palm if the issue warrants additional device expertise.

There are exceptions to this, however, and customers frequently contact us directly; this most often is because they are taking advantage of our special programs including our Free Setup Help, which I mentioned before, or our MyPalm Membership, where customers can receive special benefits including a dedicated member assistance line.

For those customers who have bought unlocked devices directly from us on our website or in our stores, we certainly are committed to be their first line of support. In terms of call volume, we receive more for carrier-locked devices than unlocked ones, partly because there are just more sold, but equally so because we have a close relationship with our carrier partners which involves regular collaboration and warm transfers.

Q: Are calls for unlocked devices routed to different call centers than calls for locked (or carrier specific) devices? If that’s the case, could you explain some of the logic behind it?

A: No, support for both types of devices is provided by the same call centers, and with the same agents. Our support agents are trained on all Palm products and all customers are treated the same.

Q: Palm recently started to move phone support to a pay model (I believe it’s $19.95 per call unless it results in an exchange). Does Palm look to its phone support as a potential profit center?

A: First, customers transferred from a wireless carrier or a call with a basic inquiry will not be charged. Also, if a call results in a repair or if an agent cannot solve the issue, we would waive the fee.

Palm has always charged for phone-based technical support beyond 90 days of purchase, based on our standard support policy and warranty — this is standard industry practice for many consumer electronics manufacturers. We have just reduced (in December) the cost of post 90-day technical support (from $25 to $14.95), and when we do charge customers, the funds are used to subsidize the costs of the support infrastructure we provide.

Palm regards the relationship with its customers and support specifically, as an investment in the future, not as a profit center. We try to make Palm support valuable and affordable to customers by offering various options, including several options that are free of charge (e.g. Online Chat).

Q: Has reaction among customers to the move of phone support to a pay model been negative or positive?

A: As I mentioned before, Palm has always charged for certain phone-based support services. We have seen a positive response to our new “Expert” pay services, which certainly is evidence that customers don’t mind paying a fee for a service that they deem important and that is well executed.

Q: The level of expectations for a service one pays for is generally different than the level of expectation for something that is free. What has Palm done to ensure that the experience around paid calls is better than the previous (free) experience for customers?

A: Palm still provides many free service options, so a customer is never forced to pay for support. We also strive for and expect the best level of service for both types of calls — paid and free — as the same customer may experience both types of support options during the time they own their product and we want their interactions to always be consistent and of the highest quality.

Q: I am sure there are studies about user satisfaction across the industry as a whole. Do you have information about Palm’s standing, compared to its competitors, in terms of customer experience? Is it better? Worse? What are the main issues around it and what is Palm doing to address them?

A: I can tell you that our case satisfaction scores — those scores that rate the quality of the support given by an agent for a given service request — is either at the top or very close to the top of any comparative set you will find for true technical support on complex consumer electronics. Of course we always believe we can do better.

We have a number of teams that continually analyze everything from call center activity, to web searches, to satisfaction surveys in order to find ways we can support our customers more effectively. Thankfully, our customers take the time to give us feedback, and we take that very seriously, and we listen and apply it.

Q: Has Palm outsourced its call centers or are the overseas call center employees also Palm employees?

A: Yes, we have chosen to outsource and offshore a majority of our technical support. The technical aptitude and average tenure of the agent pools we use offshore are very high. We also supplement offshore service with onshore escalations (which should have been leveraged by the agents in your case). Interestingly, our customer and case satisfaction data over the past year show that the actual difference between our onshore and offshore agent service is marginal — a fraction of a point — so we believe that we are not compromising quality in any real way.

Q: What kind of training does a Palm call center employee customarily receive?

A: All of our agents get an average of three weeks of classroom training per year. This includes technical support training, operating system (Palm OS and WinMo) training, language and cultural skills training, customer service skills training, new product training, product refresher training, and Palm systems, procedure, and policy training. In addition, agents regularly receive intensive one-on-one coaching and mentoring using call recordings, quality monitoring and customer satisfaction surveys.

Q: In my own experience, as well as in other experiences documented online, it appears there have been many instances of Palm call center employees lying to customers. Just for the record, though I suspect the answer will be no, are Palm call center employees asked to lie to customers?

A: We invest a lot of time and energy in providing official scripts, bulletins, knowledge bases, and training that help agents to respond swiftly, professionally, and accurately to the myriad of consumer inquiries that they face each day. They are also encouraged to use our hierarchy of support to escalate calls and questions when they are not informed or positioned to answer — so there is no reason an agent should provide inaccurate information at any time.

In your case, the agent lost control of the conversation, and things were said that shouldn’t have been. These types of cases result in an investigation, and oftentimes interviews with those agents or managers involved.

Q: What would happen to an employee that is found to have lied to a customer?

A: We conduct an investigation — perhaps reading call notes, listening to calls if they’ve been recorded, interviewing agents, and so forth — to get a better idea of what really transpired. We would then follow our established guidelines for discipline, performance improvement, or dismissal.

Q: Also for the record, though I also suspect the answer will be no, does Palm CEO Ed Colligan take call center calls?

A: Ed is one of the most passionate and participatory executives you will ever come across. While I don’t believe he has ever taken a technical support call per se, he certainly will contact a customer directly, and does so all the time. He has a dedicated voicemail box where he receives customer messages that I don’t even have access to. He routinely is responding to not just voicemails but emails, faxes, and letters that come across his desk. And Ed knows the names of these customers, and he looks to me for status updates on how we have handled these cases and whether or not we have restored their trust in the Palm brand. He is zealous about this — and so am I.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Palm responds, Part 1. 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.

Mobile

Last year, I declared that video would be big in the Internet space and this year, I believe that mobile will be a major focus.

The devices

While mobile devices will continue to grow on the existing curve, adding more processing power and more memory, they will also add a number of features with are significantly different from the ones we’ve been accustomed to see on a mobile phone. Cameras will increasingly become just a tick on the feature list and location-aware devices will become more prevalent (they will sport a GPS chip).

The new features will come in 3 key areas: first, more mobile devices will be able to multi-task, allowing users to use functions on their phone while making a call at the same time. The multi-tasking will extend to wireless services too and people will be able to surf the web or use internet-based application at the same time as they are making a phone call. A key hardware change in those mobile devices will be an increase in the number of phones (and other mobile device) that not only have a GSM or CDMA chip but also sport a WiFi receiver. This will allow the devices to run across a variety of networks. I suspect (and am probably going out on a limb here as my guess is that this would be early) that some of the devices will conform to the 802.11n WiFi standard, and will use that technology as a bridge to 3G because 3G deployment in the United States will be slow.

The second big hardware innovation in mobile devices will be the presence of RFID readers and chips that will allow users to use them for person-to-person or person-to-business commerce, turning mobile devices into electronic wallets. Deployments in Near Field Communications for credit cards have already started to happen on a trial basis in cities like New York.

The third big hardware innovation in mobile devices, in my mind, will come from the fact that some devices will be DNLA certified, allowing them to exchange, photos, music and videos with other devices in your house.

The services

This year, the rise of mobile services will be powered by a sharp drop in the price of data service offerings from mobile operators, with some operators offering flat-rate all-you-can-ear services to their customers.

In the content arena, the most popular type of service will be near-CD-quality audio downloads. There may be some offerings in the streaming audio market but I suspect that those will be very limited. The second most popular content service, in the mobile space, will be mobile video, with TV and user-created content (mobile YouTube and competitors) filling that gap. Those services will be advertising supported, with revenue sharing agreement between the mobile operators and the content providers.

Map services will also enjoy some level of success. The recent introduction of Google Maps on the Treo platform can be seen as an example of that trend and location-aware device will offer richer experiences in that space, with live traffic info, weather, and maybe some advertising being part of the offerings.

However, content will not take the forefront on mobile services, which will still be dominated by communication as the primary type of application. In that space, though, regular phone service will not be the predominant form of communication. SMS and MMS will be integrated with instant messaging platforms and email, to provide a complete communication package. Expect features like the ability to send text messages to multiple parties at once to start appearing, allowing for chat-like interfaces on phones.

As a result of those changes, social networks will also start integrating mobile applications more closely this year. MySpace and other networks like it will offer integrated solutions for mobile blogging, podcasting, and vlogging, as well as integrated chat and location aware social networking services. Dating services will be another arena to go mobile with the ability to identify matches within your general area.

Wrapping up the offerings will also be limited trials in the videophone space, leveraging off new next generation 3G infrastructures. The videophone trials (and 3G in general) will still be limited offerings by the end of the year, due to the high premium charged for such services.

On the voice end, the introduction of WiFi on some mobile devices will give rise to VoIP mobile applications. If the devices sport 802.11n receivers and such infrastructure is deployed, services around that space could eclipse traditional voice traffic.

Apple

Due to the added power mobile phones now have, the iPod is threatened. Apple makes a defensive move by unveiling the Apple ecosystem, centered around use of media in general and of the Apple iTunes store in particular. With the introduction of its own offering in the mobile space (an iPod with phone functionality and not a phone with iPod functionality) and in the living room (the already pre-announced iTV components), Apple presents a strategy that allows for simple integration of all their components into a digital lifestyle offering.

In the non-media space, Apple bundles blogs and wikis with the new version of OSX and starts offering Web 2.0-like functionality on its Xserve servers, in a bid to get a spot in enterprise racks. They will also merge in social networking features in their calendaring and address book applications, allowing for a more integrated experience.

In another bid for enterprise positioning, Apple will include virtualization of other Operating Systems natively in the next version of OSX, allowing their computers to run Windows and OSX applications side by side under OSX. The feature will take some of the existing Apple bootcamp attributes and turns them into an equivalent of Parallels.

In a surprise move, Apple will also announce that it has signed a partnership with Google, which will offer the Google Apps for your domain as a replacement for the .mac service offered by Apple. The service will now be available either as a free ad-supported service, or on the same premium service offering as before without ads.

On the hardware end, Apple will endorse 802.11n as their standard for media distribution, equipping all new computers and the iTV device with receiver cards so it can leverage off the higher speeds offered by that standard. Because of its long-standing relationship with Sony, the company will also decide to side with BlueRay as their standard for next-generation disks, equipping their new laptops with drives following that standard.

Microsoft

Microsoft’s oft-delayed Windows Vista will finally be released but adoption of the new operating system will be lackluster as few of today’s computers can support it. The same will be true of the release of Microsoft Office 2007, as most users feel perfectly OK with the version of those products they have running on their desktops.

With the major release of updates to the Windows and Office platforms behind it, the company will focus efforts in other areas. In the console market, Xbox 360 will become the dominant game platform, due to slow adoption of the PS3 platform. Microsoft will innovate heavily on that platform, leveraging its positioning in the living room to offer more movies, more TV shows and other types of services around it. Meanwhile, the company will also work on a major revision of their Zune offering, offering a new version of the iPod competitors that will be better received than its predecessor. However, Zune 2.0 will not make a major dent into the iPod market. On the web end, Microsoft will consider the acquisition of either Yahoo! or AOL as a way to shore up its MSN offering and adopt a more aggressive stance in its fight for online advertising revenue.

Virtual Currencies

There will be more talk about the digitization of money this year. Microsoft will use its Microsoft points as a new form of currency that can be used not only on the Zune marketplace and the Xbox live marketplace but also as a way to pay for goods and services online with approved merchants. This will be followed by support for a payment solution (like Google Payment or Paypal) in a stake to get a stronger foothold in that space.

Google will continue pushing its Google Payment engine, moving it to an international base before year end. Meanwhile Paypal will continue expanding its lead in the space and will start offering virtual credit card numbers that will be usable on any system and tie back to Paypal on the back-end.

But the big stories in the virtual currency space will be around the rise of virtual worlds like SecondLife and others, which will see their own virtual currencies rise against the dollar. Their will be discussion about the power those virtual worlds operators have over money flows and calls for regulations of those currencies (and possible taxation of revenue made in those virtual worlds) in several countries around the world.

Virtual Worlds

Speaking of virtual worlds, there will be a continuing explosion in the growth of this phenomenon. By year end, SecondLife alone will have over 15 millions residents, but will be experience growth pains. At least one other major virtual world operators will appear in the space but most corporations will rush to SecondLife.

The initial hype that started appearing in the mainstream press about SecondLife will give way to a number of negative stories, probably talking about some of the darker aspects of the virtual world phenomenons, including gold farming, the sex trade, and gambling. Some politician will use the negative press as a way to grab headline by calling for a government inquiry in the dealings of virtual worlds operators.

While I declared 2007 the year of mobile, virtual worlds will come of close second in terms of highlights for the year. I suspect that LindenLab will surprise people by announcing that it will open up its platform and present the underlying components as a new standard for the web. The company will then start offering their grid software as a standalone application that corporations can install on their own servers if they want more control. LindenLab will also allow companies to use customized version of their thick client that could be branded with company destinations and other goodies.

Due to LindenLab’s strength in the space, many companies will consider acquiring it but many will be turned off by all the negative press and potential for government involvement.

Media

Mainstream media will continue trying to co-opt successful bloggers and will also turn its attention to successful podcasters and vloggers. New stars will emerge online, develop followings there and make the jump to mainstream media, while the reverse path will be taken by mainstream reporters and actors, who will increasingly start vlogging and podcasting (they’re already blogging).

Pressured by lower viewership in their traditional timeslots, TV stations will start posting more content online, with at least one TV station offering all its primetime slate online in and advertising supported fashion. Smaller video distributors, in the meantime, will start investigating using bittorrent for distribution of their content. Some old TV show will see its archive fully posted online and will start receiving a new stream of revenue as a result of that online appearance.

Meanwhile, ad revenue will continue to shift to web, and media will reluctantly follow. By year end, most newspapers will have combined their print and online newsrooms, and many will be cutting back on print to focus more on their online presence. As part of this shift to online, we will also see increased reliance on user generated content, with some newspapers offering blogs to their readers and encouraging active participation in making the news.

However, most of those efforts will not generate the expected returns as Google gobbles up increasing share of overall internet ad revenue, and starts expanding to audio and video. Discussion in the traditional media will start shifting to whether Google is too powerful for everyone’s good.

Death of the website/webpage

Another important shift in the media space will be the death of the concept of traditional website or web page as a result of increasing consumption of content via RSS or through distribution of widgets that can be embedded in other people’s sites. People will move away from the term web site and start talking about web properties. Because content will not necessarily be consumed in the creator’s site, there will be discussions of a new for new advertising/revenue models for such content and a need for new metrics to identify reach and audience. This will present a new opportunity for companies in the web analytics space.

As the web page is no longer seen as the best way to measure the success of a web property, the CPM will be on its last gasp as a model for selling online advertising, replaced largely by cost per click (CPC) and increasingly by cost per action (CPA) as the way to sell ads online.

Web 2.0

There will be increasing verticalisation in the web 2.0 space, with social networks, search, and web service offerings becoming more focused this year. However, this will also mean that many companies that were only single features will not be able to adapt and will die. Others will continue to be acquired for sums in the under $100 million category and few, if any, will go public.

Tagging will become more and more implicit, with less and less users actually doing the tagging and more and more tags being generated algorithmically. More applications will start looking at people’s behavior and creating the appropriate tags or making the appropriate modifications in the background.

But it’s not all doom and gloom for web 2.0 as Enterprise 2.0 becomes a reality. Use of blogs, wikis and VoIP behind the firewall commonplace at most large corporations and other technologies introduced as part of web 2.0 (AJAX, podcasting, etc…) will become more common in Global 100 corporations.

And speaking of the enterprise space, enterprise search will be huge, with Fast and/or Autonomy being acquired by Oracle, HP, or Microsoft. More focused will be paid on creating strong search solutions for the unstructured data on intranets and IBM will be a major player in the space.

Conclusion

At year end, many of those predictions will be wrong but a few will be correct. In the meantime, I’ll try to keep everyone up to date and hopefully will keep providing great content throughout the rest of the year.

I think 2007 will be another banner year and believe that we are looking at another existing set of new developments. Feel free to comment below and tell me what you think I may have missed (or point me to other prognostications, as I haven’t had time to get to my aggregator since Christmas).

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 2007 Predictions. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

In order to understand the impact, one has to understand how Microsoft used to work. In the past, Microsoft was all about protecting two key platforms: Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. As both tools represent the bread makers of the company, ensuring strong revenue while they try to go after markets, the Redmond giant was loath to do anything that could potentially help competitors in any way. As a result, they closely protected their own ecosystem and worked hard on spreading a message that essentially said that using other operating system was bad for your business.

With this announcement, we may see a new Microsoft: one that is open to the realities of the marketplace. Linux is not going away and Microsoft knows it so, instead of trying to fight it head on, the company has decided to take its embrace and extend attitude and wrap its arms around the operating system.

This is both a blessing and a potential threat to Linux vendors. Computing history shows that when Microsoft embraces a competitor, that competitor may need to start rethinking its strategy.

The first step, beyond announcing support for Linux, is creating a team focused on Linux. From their announcement:

Microsoft is committed to providing a positive customer experience when running supported Linux operating systems as guests in Virtual Server 2005 R2. Therefore, the product support model for these configurations will be consistent with existing customer support for Virtual Server products. Customers who report interoperability issues with Linux guests or virtual machine add-ins will be routed to a team that is specially trained to troubleshoot issues related to Linux guests within Virtual Server 2005 R2.

What we are seeing here is nothing short of a major revolution at Microsoft. By having some people fully dedicated to supporting Linux, the company will gain a deep competitive knowledge of what works and what doesn’t with Linux servers.

As a result of that acknowledgment, Windows is now going to evolve to better counter the threat of Linux. While Redmond was large in denial as to the power of Linux, the message is now that they are taking it heads on, using code instead of rhetoric to fight it.

Linux fans may be rejoicing at the news but I would take a more careful approach and say beware. In 1997, Microsoft carefully embraced Java. What followed was the quick death of Java as a front end technology, forcing Sun to reposition it as a back-end coding technology. While Java has thrived, Sun was forced to reposition it in order to make it thrive. Few Windows programmers switched to Java and Microsoft managed to protect its own investment in Visual Basic, building a lot of Java-like functionality in its development tools and then introducing tools that could stay competitive while integrating with Windows, thus protecting the Microsoft ecosystem.

The question that Linux developers will have to ask themselves is where the benefits of this Microsoft embrace lie. While it may look like a capitulation, it may just be a strategic shift in their offensive. By gaining a deeper understanding of the value of Linux (and, if you look at the versions of Linux they are supporting, price is not really the competitive threat they are trying to counter but features seem to be as all the supported products are paid ones) and building it in their future offerings.

It’s going to be interesting to see how this relationship evolves. I see two potentially different scenarios coming out of this:

• Microsoft increases its embrace of Linux and is genuinely interested in being more open, thus allowing them to sell products that work in a more mixed environment, which would help them get into areas in which they are weak, thus increasing potential sell of the new “good citizen” Windows version. This could stem from Microsoft’s realization that their biggest competitive threat is not coming from the outside but from the inside: existing versions of Windows may be good enough for most people so, to ensure upgrades to future version, Microsoft needs to evolve the market to an area where they play well with others.
• The other, darker, scenario, would be one where Microsoft embraces and extends Linux in the future. It would first discover what makes Linux a better sell than Windows and incorporate Linux-like functionality in their OS, thus reducing the potential threat. Once it matches features, the company would then present all the advantages of Windows in terms of installed base and use that as leverage to impede the growth of Linux.

I don’t yet know which of these scenarios the company will follow but it will be interesting to see how this develops. I hope that the first one, with Microsoft being genuine in its acknowledgment of new realities and becoming more open, is what they are shooting for but past history has told another story. Only time will tell whether they can truly move forward and become a more open company and if that happens, this moment will be seen as a historical shift not only in Microsoft history but in computing history as a whole.

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

How we got there?

Microsoft is not really a new player in the syndication space. With the release of Internet Explorer 4.0, in 1997, the Redmond giant introduced CDF, a format to push content and software to the operating system. With the craze around push deflating, CDF was pushed in the background.

While such efforts were not that successful, RSS moved stealthily towards the mainstream. As a plucky little standard, it is starting to dominate how a lot of notification is being done. So Microsoft decided, wisely, to join the RSS bandwagon.

However, old habits die hard and just embracing a standard is not enough. So Microsoft decided to extend the standard with some “enhancements” they created (known as Simple List Extensions). The fact that they are extending the standard is not something I have a problem with, even though it sounds like the old “embrace and extend” approach they took to HTML. However, what I have a problem with is what they decided to tackle.

Lists and RSS

The new proposed specification allows the ability to create lists. Yes, lists are a good idea if you want to use RSS for something other than distributing content. However, it’s a problem that’s already been solved, and one that has pained much of the RSS community. Let me explain.

In early 2000, when RSS was still in its infancy (version 0.92), a debate erupted on several mailing lists as to how RSS should evolve. The two sides to the debate were as follows:

• On one side were the hard core geeks, who believed that RSS should be reformulated as an RDF specification, tying it into the Semantic Web. Realize that, at the time, the concepts behind this were faily revolutionary: machine intelligence, etc…
• On the other side were the hard core hackers, who believed that the beauty of RSS would lie in its simplicity, and that its adoption would go along the same course as HTML if it were kept simple.

This ended up with two different formats: RSS 1.0 (which met the requirement of RDF integration) and RSS 2.0 (which met the requirement of simplicity).

Well, the irony is that it turned out both sides were correct: On the one hand, plugging RSS into a more formal structure, using things like namespaces and an orderly model could allow it to do more; on the other hand, keeping it simple allowed it to thrive.

Fast forward to today. RSS 2.0 is widely adopted, thanks to its simplicity. And Microsoft is announcing the use of extensions to create lists. RSS 1.0 also enjoys wide support (though nowhere near as wide as RSS 2.0) and supports lists natively. See the humor here: by endorsing RSS 2.0 and creating extra extensions, Microsoft has essentially added a feature that existed in RSS 1.0.

But wait! It gets better. The proponent for the RSS 2.0 specification was Dave Winer, who wrote the RSS 2.0 specifications and maintained it for a fair amount of time after that. However, Dave is pushing a new list and outline format called OPML and is pushing it as the next format he wants people to try out.

So we now have three different ways to create lists. And that’s not even considering the fact that you could use the Microformat concept and had a rel="list" to an HTML element and end up with another format.So Microsoft gets an A for embracing RSS, another A for using namespaces (instead of creating a new version of RSS) and releasing their extension under a Creative Commons license, but gets an F for poor research in terms of introducing a new format. There were a number of other useful things they could have introduced as part of this effort but just generating lists is attempting to reinvent the wheel without really providing any added value.

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

Freshness vs. Convenience vs. Value

When watching movies, I have several options. I can

• Go to the movie theater
• Wait for the movie to be available on video or DVD and rent it
• Wait for the movie to be available on video or DVD and buy it
• Wait for a movie to show up on pay-per-view and rent it
• Wait for the movie to be available online legally and download it
• Wait for the movie to show up on free TV and watch it or record it then
• Download it illegally

Those are basically all the options I have. Let’s examine what the drivers behind a particular choice my be:

• Freshness: I want access to the latest movie as soon as it’s viewable
• Convenience: I want to watch the movie where and when I decide
• Value: I want to pay a fair price for the entertainment value I get out of that movie

If we start mapping each of those against the currently available options, patterns emerge: In order to get freshness, I have to sacrifice convenience (since I have to go to the movie theater and watch the movie at a set time) and pay a value premium (since I have to pay the price of a movie ticket, which also gives me access to a larger screen, better sound, and a shared experience). In order to get convenience (download, rent, or buy), I have to give up freshness (as movies are released in theater first and available in other media later) and pay a little extra (price of rental or purchase) than I would if I waited for the movie to be free on television. Last but not least, if I want to watch the movie for free legally, I have to give up freshness (since movies are released to TV stations at the tail end of the release cycle), deal with less convenience (I either have to record the movie or watch it on the station’s time and date and, if I want the completely free option, I have to agree to watching some ads in the middle of the movie) . If I’m willing to break the law, I have to give up convenience (have to hunt down the movie on a peer to peer network, then make sure the download works properly, then check that no virus has been embedded. To add to the problem, the quality of “fresh” movies available over those free networks is generally bad, with sound and image generally being of low quality.

DRM can be good

Now imagine a system where I could get all three. A system that I would call “FairShare.” In a FairShare system, I get access to everything for the right price and with maximum convenience. If a new movie is released, I can pay a premium to have it immediately available in my house on the same day as it is available in the theater but here’s the catch: I have to pay for that extra convenience. So I may have to pay more for that movie than if I went out to see it in the theater but I get the convenience to play it at home on my own clock. How much would I pay for that convenience? Well, it depends. Part of the pricing here is the value equation: do I want to watch it alone at home or am I having a party with friends. Is this a movie I really want to see now or can it wait a week, a month, or longer. Can I haggle over the price?

That last part is important. Looking at the Ebay economy, we can now figure that there are certain price points for just about anything and that those price points, when left to the customer to decide, are generally within a standard deviation of the actual price of an item. What if there were marketplaces for movie download rights? Let’s take a highly anticipated release (the next Star Wars, for example). Some people would probably be willing to pay a high premium in order to see it at home with their friends? Just looking at the US box office returns for Episode 2, Attack of the Clones one clearly sees the importance of freshness: The movie made $110 million in its first week (bolstered by a first weekend take of $80 million), $90 million in its second week, and $31 million in its third week. That means people would have been willing to pay a premium to see the movie in week one and two but less of one in week 3.

Once the price has been set, it then only become a question of proper DRM licenses being available. For example, I use a service called Movielink. It’s got a collection of movies that can be downloaded for anywhere between 99 cents and 5 dollars. In that price range, the movies are about the cost of a video. However, I don’t have to worry about returning them and, while choice is currently limited, it’s pretty convenient. Granted, I’m not the regular user in that I already have a computer connected to my big screen television, but the convenience is worth the price.

I think I could technically make a copy of a movie I download and give it to a friend. What would happen when they run it? Well, the same thing that happened to me recently. I wanted to rewatch one of the movies I rented and had watched previously. When I went to start it, a screen popped up, asking me if I wanted to re-enable rights for 24 hours at a substantial discount (99 cents vs. the $4.99 I had previously pay for the rental). Had I rented that movie in the video store instead and wanted to go through the same experience, I would have paid for the price of a rental twice. Once I started using the service, I noticed it also altered my buying pattern. When I rented a movie I liked, I might buy it on DVD if I wanted to play it more than once. The cost of a DVD generally is between 10 and 20 dollars. However, when I started downloaded, the replay for 99 cents feature started to make the cost of buying a DVD look expensive by comparison. While I do replay movies I bought, I don’t replay them often enough to warrant a 20 dollar price point (that would be equivalent to replaying a moving I downloaded 15 times.)

What happens here is that the product is priced properly and even competitively, compared to other alternatives. In a FairShare model, those prices would vary and all movies, either still in theater or released decades ago, would be available at prices that would fluctuate based on demand. For example, movies from 1890 may not be very popular but I’m sure there are hundreds if not thousands of people around the world who might want to watch those. At a couple of dollars a piece (or local currency equivalent), that’s thousands of dollars left on the table. Multiply that by hundreds of thousands and you’re talking about potentially billions of dollars left on the table by business and potentially tens of thousands of gems that are currently unavailable to the public.

Shopping for legal music

Of course, all this works because I am dealing with a single device and a single model. However, DRM becomes evil when it is limiting and tries to tell me what to do and where I should do it (hence reducing my convenience). For this, I will bring up another example. I recently heard a music album that sounded good. Now, in the post napster, free-music-for-all, world we live in, I could have easily downloaded it from a P2P network and kept it at that. For my own enlightenment, I decided to actually look for the album (not a single track but the whole album) on one of the P2P networks, confirming a suspicion I had: Popular tracks do show up on those networks but less popular tracks from an album do not. As a result, it is impossible to get a good feeling for an artist’s work beyond the hits.

My curiosity satisfied, I decided I would go and try to buy the album from a downloadable service. Before I go any further, let me explain what I expect from tracks purchased online: I own several computers running several operating systems (OSX, several versions of Microsoft Windows, and Linux, primarily); I also own a Treo, which I use as my portable MP3 player. Why that device in particular? Because it combines my GSM phone, PDA, and MP3 player all in one and can hook up to the different operating systems I mentioned above. It’s the ultimate in choice and portability as I do not want to carry multiple single-use dedicated devices.

First stop was the iTunes music store, which frequent TNL.net readers will recognize as the target of many posts. Well, turns out that it might be a bit of an issue. Apple doesn’t seem very interested in selling music to play on non-iPod devices and as far as transferring a song to Linux, well… I guess I’ll have to wait for the Linux version of iTunes which should come out just around the same time as blizzards blowing through Hades.

Next stop, Real. After all, they made a big stink a while back about fighting Apple and protecting openness. They’ll help me, right? Looked like the Treo would work but I was annoyed to learn that you had to use the RealPlayer to play the tracks. Where was the freedom of choice in that? Why would I be forced to install their player in order to play the tracks? What if they went under and their player were no longer compatible with my operating system? In one felt swoop, they eliminated a whole bunch of stores to visit: basically, the ones that force me into using the Real player in order to play music I bought legally.

Warily, I approached, the remaining giant in the space: Microsoft. The good news was that they had a program called “Plays for Sure”. Finally, someone willing to go with a real guarantee that my music will play anywhere! The tag line, right there on the homepage said it all:

Choose your music. Choose your device. Know it’s going to work.

That sounded really great: finally my music, my Treo, my different operating systems would all work harmoniously… except for the fact that PlaysForSure is another marketing name for Windows Media Player. Basically, it’s the same deal as Real: if you use their player, and their player works on the device you want to use, it’s OK. Otherwise, you’re on your own.

I gave up on the online download sites and bought the CD, which I then ripped to MP3 tracks myself.

DRM can be evil

What happened in that case was a case of what I would consider evil DRM, where the consumer is treated as a criminal by default. Because it is assumed that I will abuse my right, the system forces me to work within a walled garden. I can either get my content from Apple on Apple devices, from Microsoft (and partners) on Microsoft powered devices, or from Real (and partners) on devices that run the RealPlayer. This is not choice, it’s entrapment. If I were to follow the same logic to the extreme, I would have to have a different television in order to watch different TV channels. In other words, the case of music downloads shows that DRM can be mis-directed. Why? Simply because of companies trying to maintain certain monopolies and force the users to do their bidding.

DRM dependencies

Looking at the two scenarios above, you might start noticing some interesting trends. First of all, DRM is situational. A single DRM strategy does not fit all offerings. Why is that?

I would venture that the reason is one of expectation. The expectation that I have of a music track are different that the expectation that I have of a movie or TV show and it is largely related to the interaction with each media type. In the case of a music track, I want something that will be portable and can move relatively quickly from one device to another; this is largely due to the fact that music is consumed on the run, and more often than not, it is consumed while doing some other activity. Movie or TV watching, however, is something that requires more involvement; it’s hard to read a book, drive, or run while watching a movie or TV show! As a result, mobility is not as essential and the need for a movie to run on multiple device is not as high. if it runs on my TV, maybe on a laptop too and can be transferred to a secondary TV, it’s OK. The universe of devices on which it needs to run is smaller and generally more tied into the net anyway, which makes the DRM interaction more seamless.

What I am trying to highlight is that while proponents and opponents of DRM solutions both see the world in black and white, they may want to start a dialogue and realize that there’s a lot of gray areas out there.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title DRM is not binary. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

I know mac users will probably flame me for this but I believe that the direct result of this is the need for Apple to start taking a serious look at more of a cross-platform approach. Before you send me irate emails, however, realize that I am a mac user (we have several macs at home and I use an iBook as my primary machine, largely due to the small footprint factor (there are previous few 10 inch screen computers in this world and I am among the list of oddballs that prefer that form factor when it comes to portables)) and that I only want to see the best for Apple, a company that exudes coolness when it comes to marketing and design but one that may be losing the war in the consumer space.

Why I feel now is the time for Apple to consider a change

Over the past few years, Apple has made great headways in the music business, first with the iPod, which now holds a substantial lead over all of its competitors, and later with the iTunes Music Store, which has solidified the company’s position in the emerging world of digital music. Much of that success, I believe, stems from a smart decision to look beyond the mac and start offering like-for-like products on the windows platform. First, it was an iPod that could work with Windows, and then it was iTunes for Windows. Historically, Apple has had many successes on the Windows platform. Look, for example, at the success of Quicktime, which still represents a dominating force in the world of digital video. I believe the embrace of either Windows or Intel as a platform (in the examples I’ve given, it is the combination of both) always benefits Apple as a company. Every time Apple has offered a product on those platforms, it’s been successful. Let’s look at different combinations and the advantages and/or pitfalls of that approach.

Apple and Intel

It’s hardly a secret that Apple has switched CPU providers in the past. While their relationship with Motorola sustained them through the 80s and 90s, the move to the G5 architecture showed a willingness to switch provider. In that case, the provider became IBM, ie. the other provider of PowerPC chip. Who’s to say that Apple could not start holding discussion with Intel, looking to them as a provider of chips for their platform?

One of the possible combination here would be to port the Mac OSX operating system to the Intel platform. The bottom line would be a new market for Apple software product and a third alternative to Windows and Linux on the Intel platform. Darwin, the underlying core of OSX, is based on BSD. It has already been ported to the Intel platform and BSD itself has a rich history of distributions running on Intel processor.

The advantage of this approach is that it would make OSX available to a much wider public. This could translate into higher software sales for Apple (which provides a more end-user focused product than Linux at this time and a more secure product than Windows at this time) and could allow for a rise in the number of developers for the OSX platform as the potential of a larger market could enlarge the whole eco-system. One could foresee a time when iLife would be offered on that platform and Apple could use this as a seed for their new product offering.

On the downside, is the competition presented by Windows and Linux. By some accounts, Apple is now in danger of becoming the third most popular Operating System, behind Linux and Windows. However, one could look at this approach as a way to stem some of the losses. Another downside would be that Apple hardware would no longer be tied to the OS itself so people who want the features of OSX would not have to buy Apple hardware.

By offering their operating system on Intel processor, Apple could find itself with a growing market again in the OS world, providing a solid mainstream consumer alternative to Windows. On the downside, it could be cannibalizing its own hardware sales.

Apple and Windows

All this brings me to part two of the Wintel Strategy: Windows machine from Apple. It is undeniable that the look and feel, the design, and the marketing of Apple hardware exude coolness. The hard work that the Apple design team puts in its products is a large part of the company’s continued relevance in the market and few companies (Sony and Alienware are the only ones that come to mind) in the industry have the kind of following that Apple hardware enjoys.

If Apple started offering hardware that ran with Transmeta CPUs and could run Windows software, one could see an upsurge in the sales of laptop and desktops as part of the Apple business. For the last few years, sales of macs have been sluggish at best and I believe that part of the problem is a skittishness on the part of consumers to be locked into the Apple world, forced to use only Apple hardware and software. With the software being liberated, Apple could look to a slow migration of its hardware platform to Transmeta processors (AMID or Intel could also be contenders).

Why Transmeta? Well, my thinking is that the Transmeta approach is to do software-based processor units through code morphing. If they were to offer a G5 equivalent of their morphing software. This would establish a base line in terms of offering equivalence with current hardware. The next step would be to offer the same hardware but with the Transmeta Intel-based chips, which could then run the windows or Linux platform (or any other Intel-based OS). Users who want to experience the coolness factor of owning a mac would be able to do so and still run the apps that somehow kept them from moving to OSX.

On the downside, Apple would not necessarily hold much of a lead with the operating system. As more and more Intel-like systems go out the door, Apple could loose some of the remaining market share they hold in the operating system. Another potential downside would be the commoditization of the hardware platform. However, I believe they would still be able to hold patents on their designs and continue producing products that look cool.

Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?

Some people will probably dismiss these concepts as plain nuts and I have to admit that it takes quite a leap of faith. To me, however, that leap of faith was made by Apple with the iPod and I believe that they can make it again as a way to increase their overall market share.

The overall downside of this strategy is that it might anger fans, who are notoriously devoted to the company. However, Apple has not really worried about this much in the past. In the 90s, the company started OEMing their hardware platform but decided to pull back when some vendors started representing real competition (remember PowerComputing?)

The question is whether Apple wants to remain a niche player in the computer market. Based on the last quarterly report, it seems that most of the growth is coming from the music business. So maybe this would be a good way to reinvigorate the computing part of the business.

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

Microsoft

Of course, everyone will focus on how this move puts Google and Microsoft in a competitive situation. Microsoft representatives have said they considered search an important space, potentially putting Google on the defensive. The interesting thing in the way Google approached this is that they did not react as Netscape did, launching into announcements about the future irrelevance of Microsoft; they did not take Microsoft head on in a market (Operating Systems or web browsers) that Microsoft currently dominates. What they did was leverage off a market in which they had the advantage: Search. While they did not come out and say it out loud, the message is clear: you can have search in Longhorn when it comes out or you can have it now. Try Google today and maybe you’ll want to stick around in the future.

Apple

Apple has already announced an interest in search, with the unveiling of Spotlight, a new search feature available in the next version of their operating system. Google has not released a product on the Mac platform but I would not be surprised if that were coming… after the product is available for Linux. The continuing decline of the Mac platform seems to push it further and further into irrelevance. Now, Google attacks the mac platform by taking a feature that was supposed to be a differentiator, compared to Windows, and making it available on the Windows platform. This is potentially dangerous to Apple, a company trying the monolithic approach at offering solutions: Use Apple and that’s all you need.

Modular by Design

I recently highlighted what I call the Modular by Design approach, which is predicated on 6 basic key points: standards, focus, flexibility, speed, communication, and stealth. In unveiling this new tool, Google seems to be adopting the approach as a competitive advantage. If you consider Google as the standard for search (and it seems there is a consensus agreement that, for the time being, that’s the case), they are following a pretty standard-based approach. Their focus is on search, obviously. Their flexibility comes from the ability to adapt that focus to target key markets. In terms of speed, it is hard not to see the speed of growth of the company (which did not exist 7 years ago and has rolled most of its new offerings in the last 2–3 years). From a communication standpoint, they are involved in getting feedback from their user community, often releasing products as very long beta (for example, Google News and Froogle, their shopping search engine, are still in beta even though both have been out for over a year). And moves like the announcement of Gmail and today’s new offering show a strong ability at operating stealthily.

On the relevancy of the Operating System

Almost as important in the blurring of the lines between desktops and the web, as illustrated by Google desktop, is a discussion about the long term relevancy of the operating system as an application platform. It seems that increasingly, the application platform is becoming the web, with operating systems being roughly a way to run connected software. Already today, more and more of our daily tasks are running through the Internet, whether it is communication (email, IM, VoIP), research (web surfing, information consumption from news sites and blogs), creation and distribution (weblogs and their extensions like podcasting, photoblog, etc..) or entertainment (music, movies, games…)

From there, then comes two potential areas of interest for new software developers: tools that can help the creation of new things (weblogs, photo-editing software, music editing software, other data-type creation tools like Flash), tools and protocols that can help their distribution (RSS, search tools, servers), and tools that ease their consumption (Newsreaders, picture-viewer, plug-ins, etc…) Most of those, however, seem to be increasingly able to run within the context of a web browser. So what happens when tools that bridge the gap between the browser and the desktop become more important? Google desktop does provide one of those points of integration and if you look closely, it seems that Google is placing itself at the other end, providing tools for creation (Blogger, Picasa) and organization and discovery (search). This could be a pretty large marketplace for them and could help them control a substantial part of the digital future. At the same time, the move of those tools continues to erode the relevance of the operating system as the platform as more and more services move to browser-based systems. Google firing this shot across the bow of the Microsoft ship is not only aimed at Microsoft but also at other OS vendors.

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

The news of banners poking fun at Microsoft made people think that the new operating system would be something to contend with. With statements like “This should keep Redmond busy”, one would expect some radical improvement to this new OS… but most of the changes were under the hood and most of them showed a company that seems to be on the defensive. Let’s look at what they offered and what are the hits and misses in this new OS:

the Dashboard will probably be the feature that most people talk about as it is the most visual new component to the new version of this operating system. Put simply, it is a collection of widgets that can sit on your desktop, similar to the third-party produced Konfabulator, a company that will now have a hard time competing with Apple. It also seems to be a defensive move to counter the power that XAML will offer to its developers. Beyond the issue of Apple running over one of its own development partners (ie. Konfabulator), the fact that their dashboard does not seem to offer any programming interface and does not seem to offer a way to integrate rich Internet client applications (what I call hybrid applications) seems like a fairly tremenduous gap. Why not open it up to developers so they can start coding applications now so that, when the new OS comes out, an increased number of widgets is available?

Safari RSS is another one of those features where Apple runs over one of their own developers. This is a big win for RSS, similar to the news that Microsoft is building RSS into their tools. It may be a leap but I believe that Microsoft will have an RSS reader in their OS too. A couple of missed opportunities in the implementation Apple is highlighting, though. First, why keep it limited to Safari? It seems that this is the perfect kind of service to integrate with .mac in order to compete with something like my favorite RSS reader, bloglines. The problem with keeping it limited to a desktop app is that I don’t spend all my time on a mac (I know, I can hear the shock and dismay in Cupertino) but want to be able to read my RSS feeds from different computers and devices. How about integrating it with their own ipod line?

New Search Technology: There seems to be a trend in operating systems about making better use of search. Longhorn is looking to offer better metadata and search handling, merging Internet and hard drive search in a single tool. Apple is trying to restore parity on this front with a new feature. At this time, it provides a nice set of file types to search for. Noticeable in this queue is the lack of support for search of windows media files, and what looks like a lack of interfaces to allow other developers to offer their data types as part of the scope. On the Microsoft side, the way they handle this is through some changes to their file system (a new file system called WinFS will sit at the core of the new operating system) with a richer metadata set. A question here is whether Apple is changing the underlying file system of their operating system to support this. It would be nice to know as nothing was said about backward compatibility.

Another improvements is Automator, a new visual interface to scripting repetitive tasks into your OS (basically, you could call it Applescript++). This is actually a pretty nice thing and I hope that Microsoft will include something similar in their next OS. It could greatly simplify things. I guess this is one of those cases where a photocopier could be useful in Redmond.

Another feature that Redmond should copy is the iChat AV product, a competitor of MSN messenger. Apple understands that those chat products are used for collaboration and Microsoft needs to learn from that. Desktop sharing, audio and video conferencing, complete with VoIP integration is a product that will become key in the enterprise market in the future.

A significant announcement is the support for 64-bit processors. While this is not a huge market right now, it is evident that Apple is placing big bets on its G5 product line. This could be a good move in terms of getting more involved with the research community. Great for number crunching but I don’t know what apps will run on this beyond the scientific community. Similarly, announcements of improvements to their rendering technology and support for advanced video coding will probably appease members of the creative community who have generally been at the core of the Apple market. These two announcements are aimed at market protection and are a good move.

Finally, while most people tend to focus on the desktop, let’s not forget that there is also a server product. OSX v10.4 server is Apple attempt to compete in the enterprise space. The introduction of blogging software blojsom into this server shows that Apple understand that blogs are now an important feature of the server enterprise space. This is another significant win for RSS and for the blogosphere as it adds legitimacy to the concepts of syndication and blogging. Also of interest in the server product is the fact that Apple is bundling NT migration tools. If Apple attempts to keep quiet their goals of displacing windows machines, this might not be the way to do 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 OSX 10.4 preview: hits and misses. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

It may sound like heresy and would create quite some controversy in the online space but let’s face it, the browser wars are over. Since AOL decided to get out of the browser business, the Mozilla foundation has successfully managed a transition and is now moving forward on adding value to their offerings.

By adopting Mozilla as their core rendering engine, Microsoft could achieve a number of quick wins: first of all, it would allow it to adopt a number of new features that many users have requested. Things like tabbed browsing, an expandable plug-in architecture, a rendering language for the application layer (no more XUL vs XAML discussions) would come out of the box.

Second, it would put an end to issues relating to standard compliance that have plagued the different implementation. Since Internet Explorer controls the market, and Mozilla and Firebird represent a substantial portion of the remaining of the market, throwing Microsoft’s support behind Mozilla would mean an increase in market share for IE in that compatibility issues between the two browsers would become inexistent.

Such a move would also get Microsoft more involved in the open source community and could be seen as extending an olive branch to that world by saying that Microsoft employees can work side by side with open source volunteers to produce great software.

Last but not least would be the fact that Microsoft could offer versions of IE for more platforms, discontinuing its concept of abandoning the Macintosh platform and extending into Linux and other Unix system (wouldn’t that be ironic?)

While it is evident to see what advantage Microsoft gains, some people may wonder what are the advantages for the Mozilla foundation. On this end, I would see a couple of things.

First of all, a player like Microsoft backing Mozilla would solidify the financial footing of the Mozilla foundation for years to come. Another issue would be in terms of market share: While IE has a dominant market share and Mozilla still remains the second player by a large margin, such an alliance would make both browsers only one, hence turning the platform in the de-facto industry standard.

Another advantage to the Mozilla foundation would be the marketing power of Microsoft coupled with the technological advances made by the Mozilla foundation could help standard compliance flourish around the internet. At the current time, many web developers only develop for Internet Explorer because it has the leading market share.

The firebird effort would also benefit from this as I am assuming that Microsoft would still want to keep Outlook as its email client (the integration with Exchange server means that trying to get Microsoft to move to a new email client would be difficult at best)

The road would not be an easy one. First of all, Microsoft would have to find a way to either import its plug-in architecture (the ActiveX one) into Mozilla or abandon it and consider Mozilla’s approach instead. This would be a major development as many of the security issues in IE have been relating to this.

The other thing would be an audit of the Mozilla code base to plug any holes that may exist and ensure close connectivity between the Windows Operating System and the browser. At the current time, I would venture to say that Mozilla products have benefited from the lack of notice by script kiddies. Becoming the largest player in the market would make Mozilla an instant target.

While I am dreaming about this, the realist in me says that it will not happen. But then again, one can always dream.…

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

First of all, a correction to the previous entry: In that entry, I said that LightScribe was a silk screening technology. Steve Loughran, who worked on the technology, points out that

It has been likened silk screening, but it is definitely not: it is laser printing at v. high resolution onto discs.

This is an important distinction that I missed out on.

Another alert reader pointed out to me that LightScribe now has its own site. From there, one can learn more about the technology and licensing information.

More details:

• At the current time, LightScribe will work with Windows 2000 and Windows XP but support for additional operating systems will come in the future.
• The new technology will not have much of an impact on prices, adding only a few pennies to the price of disc media and a few dollars to the price of a computer.
• LightScribe-enabled disc drives will also be available as peripherals
• Basic printing will take about a minute to complete but more complex images can take up to 15 minutes to print.

I do believe that LightScribe has the potential of being a very disruptive technology for the media industry and, unfortunately, a boon to piracy, as it will lower the bar on creating professional looking CDs and DVDs. For example, what happens when someone downloads a whole album in MP3 format from a peer to peer network, copies those tracks to a disk, and then prints the disk’s label with LightScribe. How will one then know the difference between the original and a counterfeit?

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

My personal suspicion is that the net community will route around the problem once enough people become aware of what is going on.

The rise of Linux as an alternative to deeply entrenched Windows is showing that something new is happening here. While SCO has started menacing litigation over intellectual property and Linux, the message from big companies is that they are not changing their strategy. What is important here is not the fact that companies are adopting Linux but the fact that companies are starting to look at the OS as a commodity, one that can easily be replaced at a later time. This is an important development because it lowers the potential for control. In order to fully control what consumers have access to, you need to be able to control the environment. With operating systems becoming a commodity, that control erodes.

Control of the operating system is one of the key elements behind the TCPA’s goal to lock up computers in order to give more control to content producers. However, with a commodity operating system that control becomes more difficult to gain. The next two areas in which such control can happen are at the processor level (and here, I would invoke market dynamics as a surefire way to fight this point since at least one vendor will probably want to differentiate itself from its competitors by offering non-crippled chips) and at the access level.

That last point, however, is countered by the fact that increasingly (and this is something the phone and cable companies do not want you to know), the cost of running your own access point is dropping. True, it still costs several hundreds or thousands of dollars a month to do so but I suspect that something much scarier could happen if the pipes start clamping down.

With the rise of Wi-Fi, control of the net is moving from cables to the open airspace. Granted, many will say that in order to access resources on the Internet, there is still a need for access to a land line software, even if that land line is connected to a wireless router. However, with the rise of cheap access point devices, there is a possibility for creating a new network, one that does not touch upon the rest of the net, but one that does connect computers from access point to access point. In a way, all the technology needed for this already exists. A network protocol like TCP/IP can carry content over the air, and technologies like Zero Configuration Networking make discoverability easy to do. Coupled with the explosive growth of wireless hotspots, the hold on connection lines is increasingly becoming irrelevant. What is happening here is not only a commoditization of the operating system but also a commoditization of the connectivity space.

Even in a world where the United States manages to outlaw Linux and where the big telcos manage to regulate Internet access, unfetered access to ressource beyond their control will continue. If one studies geopolitics, it is easy to see that some countries will see it in their best interest to avoid such regulation so they can offer data havens, picking up nice extra tax dollars on the sale of goods and services in those havens. Ultimately, the problem US companies have, whether they manage to regulate the Internet or not, is that the network is now largely a global one.

To date, attempts to limit Internet activities in certain parts of the world (Iraq and China for example) have only met with resistance and ultimately failure in terms of limiting what people can and cannot see. I suspect that if such limits were imposed by large corporation, they would meet the same fate as those efforts, maybe stopping activity for a little while but, eventually, someone would find a hole. And it is from such small hole that the dam would burst.

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

Fortunately, while Mozilla had a rough childhood, the project eventually paid off with a browser that offered true innovation. It may have been late to the party and, due to its Netscape background, the group was forced into creating an all-in-one Internet application that was running slowly on most computers. Through the efforts of a lot of volunteers, performance eventually improved, to the point where parity on features was reached. A recent realization that some people might just be interested in a browser led to changes in the roadmap, which allowed for increased support for Firebird, one of the fastest browsers currently on the market (it is now my default browser on non-mac machines).

Meanwhile, Netscape kept using that good code, getting rid of a few user-centric features (like pop-up removal), and bloating it with more marketing content. In a way, this contributed to people writing off Netscape as an also-ran. But in the geek world, Mozilla has been gaining ground, offering a powerful alternative to IE. A recent shakeout, due to Apple’s decision to use a non-Mozilla code base, was a good thing that refocused Mozilla on the user community.

With the announcement of the creation of the Mozilla foundation, the Mozilla project can now come unto its own, not having to worry about the legacy of Netscape. While the decrease in financial support offered by AOL/Time-Warner will initially be difficult, I suspect that other corporations will eventually step in to help increase the visibility of the project. Furthermore, with Netscape no longer associated with Mozilla, there is hope that AOL’s mistakes will no longer reflect badly on Mozilla.

A window of opportunity is now open for the Mozilla project, as Microsoft has announced that it will no longer support standalone browsers and as Longhorn, the next version of the Microsoft operating system is not expected for a while. If the Mozilla Foundation moves quickly enough, we could actually see an increase in overall market shares for the browser.

There are, however, many tasks ahead for the foundation. First of all, it needs to figure out how to get people to switch from Netscape to Mozilla Firebird. The reason for doing this is to allow for increased concentration on a single browser platform with the Gecko rendering engine. There is currently no point in trying to get IE users to switch, until the Mozilla Firebird browser reaches 1.0 status. Once that is done, the challenge will be in getting a portion of the other 90+% of the public to try it out. I believe that once they do, they will find it easier to use than the old Redmond browser (which was released almost 2 years ago, a lifetime in browserland).

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

Often, geeks like myself tend to jump on technology for technology’s sake. An example of this is the recent hubbub over (n)echo, which has left many people wondering whether RSS is broken. The truth is that it isn’t and that whatever new format comes up will live nicely in parallel to RSS for years to come.

When estimating technology, one should ask himself/herself whether it is the right tool for the job. I could write a calculator program to calculate the sum of one and one but that does not mean that I should (especially on such a small thing). So why is it that we get so blinded by technology? Why is it that the old axiom “to someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail” holds true so often when it comes to technology projects?

Part of it is what I would call institutional blindness. It is the kind of thing that sits at the source of most of the big conflicts in the technology space: platform wars like Windows vs. Mac, Windows vs. Linux, Internet Explorer vs. Netscape, RSS vs. (n)echo are often rooted into a set view of how the world is, not how it could be. Some of the most vocal people in those discussions are set on a particular approach and refuse to see the value in the other way.

For example, I’ve recently made the switch from Microsoft windows to Linux as the underlying operating system for TNL.net. There was no acrimony on my part regarding Microsoft. I think Microsoft is a good company when it comes to building desktop operating systems that people use. While many assign sinister motives to Microsoft moves, I do not believe that the company is inherently evil. What I do believe is that the company has a certain view of computing and that this view no longer aligns with my own. Companies, in and of themselves, do not have any motives. They are merely legal entities created to market products and services.

The same can be said of projects. Many people are saying that Dave Winer is inflexible in his stewardship of RSS. However, what they fail to realize is that, while Dave did come up with the initial RSS 2.0 specification, he specifically said that

while these copyright restrictions apply to the written RSS specification, no claim of ownership is made by UserLand to the format it describes

By doing so, he essentially gave anyone a right to extend RSS. So why come up with another format? And why fight over it?

It seems to me that the discussions over the restoration of David are no more academic than the recent discussions over RSS and (n)echo. In both cases, we have people who have done some great work. In both cases, we have disagreement as to how to move forward. In both cases, we will end up with something that will leave some people unhappy.

However, in the case of online syndication, unlike in restoration, there is a way to have your cake and eat it too. Based on my cursory experience of (n)echo to date, I am not yet seeing much value. I do know, however, that RSS is driving large amounts of traffic to my site, and thus, helps me have interesting discussions with a lot of people. RSS 2.0 is highly extensible, if that’s what you want. Some people say it is stuck but I can’t help but think that it is they who are stuck. Stuck on personal conflicts that, in the end, accomplish little in terms of moving standards forward but end up irritating everyone (while Dave and I do not always agree on implementation, and while I have often been on the receiving end of some of his flames, I do value his technical input and his past accomplishments. At the same time, I am willing to go with what I feel is right, whether he or anyone else agrees (as can be attested from my own offering of RSS 1.0 feeds on the TNL.net site))

The question to all participants in the current RSS/(n)echo flame wars (as this entry is largely targeted at them) is where is the value? and will your format stand in the long run. I suspect RSS will be in use for years to come. I also suspect that, for the most part, it will change. I do believe that all those involved in this fight need to take some time off and figure out what is best for the format. Sure, people can make fun and attack each other but how does that help anyone? At the end of the day, I wish that we all had a Ruby filter in all our discussions.

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

1. familiarity
2. consistency
3. generalizability
4. predictability
5. simplicity

Let’s delve further into each of those in more details.

Familiarity

The concept of familiarity is almost self explanatory. It talks to the way people “expect” things to happen. A good example of this is the web browser. Most people expect the browser to be divided into seven areas: an application menu, which mirrors the look and feel of other applications on their operating system (such as file, edit, view, bookmarks (Microsoft Internet Explorer calls those “Favorites”), Tools, and Help); a loading graphic (which is animated when the browser fetches a page); a navigation area, which includes familiar buttons such as backward, forward, stop, refresh, and home; a web address box where they can type in an address to get to a web site; a bookmark (or “Links” as Internet Explorer calls it) bar, which lists sites that are bookmarked; a main window, where the content of the site they are looking at is displayed; and a status bar, displayed below the main window and providing information on whether things have downloaded or not.

As you can see from the list of what makes a browser screen, this is already a fairly large set of components to think of, when designing a browser. Mozilla, my favorite browser, succeeds in mirroring most of this properly. However, the lack of a home button in the navigation bar of the default install of the software may confuse a lot of users (There is a patch to resolve that problem but beginners will not know this. This creates some concern for the user, which easily unsettles them because, if this part is unfamiliar, what else can they expect?

The challenge here is to start thinking like a low-end user. Mozilla is a very powerful tool but how do you make it easier? As developers, we often forget that the people who could use our software may not know as much as we do (or worse, some developers believe that people *should* be experienced enough to use their code). The best way to handle this when working on designing screens as part of an OSS project is to show it to people who are not programmers (family members, or non-geek friends are useful here!). If it takes a regular user more than a few minutes to understand what the program does, you may have a usability problem.

Consistency

Consistency talks to a certain level of expectation. As a general rule, users expect a program to act in a consistent fashion. Consistency issues arise when a piece of software looks different from area to area. For example, if you let the designers loose on your interface, you may end up with different fonts, font sizes, buttons switching positions, etc… This happens a lot when skinning applications.

In order to maintain consistency, ensure that your application reacts in the same way on its sub elements as it does on the top ones. For example, if you use buttons like OK and Cancel next to each other, make sure that they always show up together so that you don’t end up with an OK or Cancel button standing on its own or with something like Go and Cancel in one screen and OK and Cancel in another.

A consistent interface breeds familiarity, which in turns makes your application more usable.

Generalizability

The concept of generalizability expands on consistency but goes beyond your application. Generalizability talks to the wider world of all applications like yours. As a result, it’s kind of a pack mentality thing. If you are working on building a better mousetrap, you have to make sure that people realize that it is a mousetrap. As a result, you have to use some of the elements and attributes of other mousetraps.

The best advice in terms of maintaining generalizability is to look at what similar applications do. For example, going back to the browser, the edit preference screen is generally organized in subsections. In the case of Netscape and Mozilla, they show up in a category list on the left of the preference screen. In the case of Internet Explorer, they show up on the top as tabs. In the case of Apple Safari, they show up as big icons on the top of the preference screen. As you can see from here, there is some level of consistency in terms of organizing that content.

Another example of generalizability is the tabs implementation in Apple Safari. Mozilla and Opera had taken an early lead in establishing tabs as part of their browser offering. Opening multiple tabs showed a tab navigation bar and opening a new tab on the mac implementation of those browsers was done by using Apple-T. When Apple implemented their solution, they bowed to the consistency rule by implementing tabs in the same way as its predecessors.

Predictability

Predictability is, as expected, building a system that works in the way you expect. This is much tougher than one would think as level of expectation are different based on user levels.

For example, advanced browser options in Internet Explorer are under in an item called “Internet Options” under the “Tools” menu. The assumption here is that anything that is user configured is optional and that, in order to configure it, one would use a tool. On Mozilla, the browser options are in an item called “preferences” under the “Edit” menu. The assumption here is that the user would want to edit their preferences. Two different paths to the same area, which can lead to confusion.

Because Internet Explorer has the leading market share, we must fall back on the generalizability principle here as to where a user should expect those options to be. This points to one of the issues related to all the points brought up so far: sometimes bad interfaces are what the user expects. Trying to change that is often difficult and goes against the concept of learnability.

Simplicity

The last item in learnability is simplicity. The simpler the interface, the easier it is to use. Here’s an example: If I create a button called XML in an application, fellow geeks will expect that once they click on that button, they will see the XML version of the document I’m presenting. However, someone who does not know what XML is will look at that button and be confused. As a result, that button should not figure prominently as part of my default interface.

A good way to enforce simplicity is to provide a regular user and an expert user setting. For example, Apple Safari is a very basic browser when you look at the out of the box version. However, several tools can reveal new menus that will be used by experts. If I were involved in development on the Mozilla interface, I would recommend that it ship with a default dumbed-down set of menus. In the preference setting, one could turn on the super-user mode, which would then provide all the remaining menu items. This would allow to create a simple-looking browser, while retaining all the great features under it for more advanced users.

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: Learnability. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

One thing all those devices have in common, however, is that they are all connected in one way or another to a network, and can access the Internet. As the network becomes more and more central to our daily lives, why is it that no one has come up with a solution that allows for synchronization on a central device (probably a server sitting on the Internet)?

In the case I am highlighting, the central server would be a repository of basic information: contact info. However, the challenge comes from the fact that it would be able to synchronize in real-time without involving any actual extra work on my part.

The system I am describing would have some key features. First of all, it would have to be easy to use and access. A simple screen would allow me to enter basic data on a single person: name, email address and phone number. Once entered, the system would fire off an email to the person so they can add the rest of the data themselves. This would ensure that the information is up to date at the time of entry. Every so often, the system would double check with the person to ensure that their data is up to date.

Devices like my phone, PDA, or computer would then use some pull technology to get their information up to date on a regular basis (every hour? every day? every week?) and update themselves automatically.

All the components seem to be here to devise such a system. For starters, building a central repository is largely an issue of proper database management. Of course, there is a need for a proper security wrapper to ensure confidentiality but it seems to me that this is also available.

The auto-update feature would mirror technology already built into the major operating systems (be it Windows Update, RedHat Linux Up2Date, or OSX. The last part that needs to be agreed upon is a consistent way to push this information across all devices, allowing for similar functionality on phones and PDAs too.

Granted, this centralization of contact may not please everyone. As a result, the software should allow users to point to a different central server (hence removing the possibility for one company controlling all this information). Systems like Microsoft passport have failed in the past because they assumed that control should remain in the hands of a single company. A way to get around this would be to use a web service approach that would sync data across multiple servers (a server administrator would be able to set levels of access to the federation and a user would also be able to customize whether they want that information to be made public.)

The end game here is a system that would allow for synchronization of data with minimal involvement from the end user (meaning the devices would be smart enough to distribute the information amongst themselves once they have been registered as trusted entities by the user). We’re starting to see some of that with products like Apple iSync but those still rely on a desktop metaphor, control of the system by a single vendor (in this case, Apple), and some level of user involvement in order to sync data up (even though connectivity between devices can easily be established with things like BlueTooth).

I’m dubbing this concept SuperSync.

Does anyone out there know of a system like the one I am describing? If so, please feel free to contact me.

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

We need to ensure redundancy across the network as a whole.

At the time, my comments were centering around the evolution of a single format. As the net moves forward, the same words can be applied to the wider spectrum of protocols on the net. I dare hope that people will see this as a battle cry to enhance our key infrastructure. Otherwise, the next time something like the Slammer worm comes around, we may end up loosing more that 15% of net traffic; we may end up loosing access to a complete information infrastructure that could include mobile phones, land lines, Internet access, and more.

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 Net as Critical Infrastructure. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.