30 years of changing the world

Thirty years ago today, Steve Jobs unveiled the Macintosh. I didn’t see it live, but I bought the Time magazine report and put myself on the waiting list later that week.

It wasn’t much of a computer. At $2500, the Mac 128 was an overpriced and underpowered toy that didn’t do much other that matrix-print doodles. As I showed in my dissertation, it was another three years before Apple had something that could compete credibly with the IBM AT, and by that point the wheels were falling off of Apple as an organization as a series of mediocre CEOs replaced Jobs.

That said, Apple Computer changed the world — not once, but several times over. And nearly all these breakthroughs occurred when Steve Jobs was in charge.

Other firms changed the world, too. From the PC era, that would include IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Compaq, Visicorp and Lotus Development. When cellphones became smartphones, Nokia, Symbian and Research in Motion helped define the category before Apple released its first phone in 2007.

Some companies did a better job of created a technology (or product category) than a sustainable business. The first Palm PDA was an incredible breakthrough, but in the end, the world didn’t want a PDA, it wanted an all-in-one communication and computing device.

Just like aerospace engineers during the space race, I’m pleased to have lived through this era with a front-row seat. I’m also pleased to (so far) never have owned a Windows machine, which (given the PC industry’s ongoing decline) is a record that I’m likely to sustain to the end (Windows or mine).

Unimaginable reversal of market share

As part of my job promoting our school and its programs, I visited three college campuses in Boston this week (plus two more schools related to research).

My last stop before flying home was Wellesley College, which I last visited in a previous century as an MIT student taking a music elective my semester prior to graduation. As with other stops, this took me to the science building. The Wellesley Science Center has a large open interior space that reminds me a little of the Hyatt Embarcadero in SF (only much smaller).

As I wandered through the common area, I kept noticing young women typing away on their Mac laptops. After a while, I decided to count. In the cafe area, library and other open area of the science center, I counted 22 laptops: 19 Macs, 1 HP, 1 Lenovo, 1 Dell. (This doesn’t include the Macbook Air in my bag).

Admittedly college isn’t representative of society or an expensive private college representative of colleges. Still, the numbers were stunning.

When my original dissertation topic fell apart in 1997, I decided to study how people were abandoning the Mac. Apple’s overall US share (nearly 15% in 1993) had fallen under 5%. Even in marketing organizations, Macs were being replaced by Windows (aided by Aldus and Quark who launched their businesses on the Mac but by then were platform indifferent).

To get started, I did an exploratory study of organizational (de)adoption decisions, which for access reasons included some universities. Most universities were pushing out Macs, by requiring technologies (such as email) that lacked a Mac client or refusing to support or fund Mac users. (I spent 8 years at UCI’s business school, which banned Mac purchases in the name of efficiency and standardization).

In 1996, I even started a website to keep track of stat software that was still being updated on the Mac — so that those of us who needed stat software could stay on the Mac. Stata stayed with us through the darkest days (and won my unending loyalty), but now most of the major math and stat packages are dual platform (with the exception of the troglodytes at SolidWorks).

Back in 1997, I wouldn’t have imagined it possible to find a pocket — any pocket — where Macs would be dominant again. The last one to bail from the platform was supposed to turn off the light, but instead people started flocking back and turning up the light. At some points the Macs will run iOS (instead of OS X or OS 8) but it looks like they'll be around for another decade or two.

Less than excited about Apple updates

It's been almost 10 years since my last Apple developer's conference. (IIRC I last made the pilgrimage in 2003, 18 months before my Mac software company went away). So I have to rely on news accounts of the announcements Apple makes, like the ones CEO Tim Cook and friends made Monday.

A week ago, I thought there might be something there for me, since I’m in the market for a tablet, a smartphone and an updated (Mac) laptop. However, nothing announced at WWDC will cause me to open my checkbook.

The most hullabaloo was about the “MacBook Pro with Retina display” (not to be confused with the “MacBook Pro”). It’s a cool idea to have a 2880 x 1800 15" laptop (vs. half that for the conventional 15" MBP), but I’m not pay $2200 for no stinkin’ laptop, even if all the opinion leaders are doing so.

And it’s not just the prospects of paying more for less. As David Pogue put it:

Remember, too, that this MacBook Air-inspired laptop lacks both a DVD drive and an Ethernet jack. Apple says that Wi-Fi is everywhere now, and if you want to watch a movie, you can stream it from the Internet.

Frankly, that’s a typically too-soon Apple conclusion. Wi-Fi isn’t everywhere, and lots of movies aren’t available legally for streaming. (Ever fly on a plane? You can’t stream any movies at all if the flight doesn’t have Wi-Fi.) As a workaround, you can buy an external DVD drive ($80) and Ethernet adapter ($30).

While Apple might have been right about dialup modems — in a similar move nearly a decade ago — it’s wrong about the end of Ethernet. I will be using Ethernet for the next 5+ years at work — my office is not near a hotspot — and probably at home too so I can do backups over the network. Wi-Fi alone won’t cut it.

Supposedly there is a ThunderBolt to Gigabit Ethernet adaptor available, and a ThunderBolt to FireWire (for my legacy HDDs) is due Real Soon Now. Support for USB 3 is a plus since that’s what the cheapest new HDDs have.

So I might be tempted to get the regular MacBook Pro at $1200, but — like the “with Retina display” cousin — it requires a new MacSafe2 adaptor, rendering all my existing power adaptors obsolete. Since I need at least 3 adaptors (home, work, briefcase) I’l either need to spend 4x for new bricks or $10 each for the “MagSafe to MagSafe 2 Converter.”

So yes, Apple saying “we’re changing our peripherals strategy” gives me pause. But the reality is that the 2013 model of the MBPwRD or MBP or MBA wthat ill probably suit me better than this year’s model. Since I need a minimum of 250gb — about half that of David Pogue — that means either a spinning disk, paying a huge premium for solid state disk drives, or waiting for next year’s models.

There were no iPad announcements: no update to the 10" (not surprising), no long-rumored 7" model. I’ve been tempted by a possible 7" but the 10" would duplicate too much the size and weight of my laptop. At this point, our teenager seems likely to become our first iPad owner (since there’s no reason for her to start with a laptop if the form factor is on the way out).

Similar, this month’s announcement brought no iPhone LTE, just a vaporware iOS 6 with new web-based service: better Siri, and non-Google maps. The improved OS is nice, but better hardware — true 4G capabilities — are what everyone’s waiting for.

And that brings me to the announcement that is most likely to cause me to part with my money: a discount iPhone announced the week before WWDC. The (unsubsidized) iPhone on Virgin Mobile offers the cheapest data plan option around, worth $500+ over the life of a typical big carrier contract. Who knows: five years after writing about the iPhone I may actually get one.

Recessionary cost savings: Linux < Windows < Mac

Steve Ballmer argued that it’s foolish to pay extra for a Mac in a recession. Then open source partisan Matt Asay argues that the same could be said about paying extra for a Windoze license on your $400 netbook.

As Asay concluded:

Why pay a few hundred dollars for Windows on a device that costs only a few hundred dollars and drops all the time? The economics of the recession may help Microsoft against Apple, but they're no help against Linux-based Netbooks.

Apple netbook rumors

Dow Jones and others report rumors that Taiwanese makers are preparing to ship a 10" Apple netbook in the second half of 2009. Speculation is that these will be touch-screen equipped machines.

On the Wintel side, low priced netbooks are the only growth area left. But the design and price points chosen by Wintel netbook makers (particularly the off-brand Taiwanese new entrants) doesn’t tell us what Apple will do.

Of course the new Apple machine will run OS X (their only OS), have Wi-Fi and work with iTunes. However, there are some not so obvious design choices:

• Is it a large iPhone or a small MacBook?
• Is it designed for standing up or sitting down?
• Does it have a keyboard?
• Does it work with the iPhone App Store?
• Does it connect to a phone network?
• Is it priced like a netbook ($400-$800) or like a MacBook ($1000+)?

The only thing I feel confident about is that it won’t be exclusive to AT&T: they learned that lesson.

The fundamental puzzle for me is that if it’s a small, light, slow and cheap laptop, how does it avoid cannibalizing the MacBook Air — a thin, light, slow and expensive laptop? Apple (especially under Steve Jobs) is loath to cannibalize profitable products, and with the penetration rate of MacBook Air among our (not so rich) students, I suspect the MBA has been very profitable indeed.

A historic week for the Valley and the world

As everyone knows, this is a historic week, not just for Silicon Valley but the world. Twenty-five years ago today, Steve Jobs unveiled the Macintosh at the auditorium of De Anza College, the Cupertino junior college a mile down the road from Apple headquarters. Steve pulled his 20 lb. Macintosh from a bag, and then let the Macintalk speech synthesizer (later starring in Wall-E) do part of the introduction.

While the original Mac 128 was overpriced by $500 (thanks to John Sculley) and underpowered, it was arguably the most influential personal computer of the past century: it did more to change the direction of the industry than any before or since. One might argue that role belongs to the Lisa, but I believe that since no one bought the $10K computers, without the Mac the industry would have ignored for years the mouse, menus, icons and windows that later brought us Windows. The Mac also brought home the idea that software design matters — consistency of experience across built-in and third-party products is what makes a consumer platform usable.

Looking back to 1984, the Ridley Scott “1984” SuperBowl ad announcing the Macintosh is available from dozens of sites (even including MSN). In response to that ad, I went to my local BusinessLand store and put down my deposit for my first Mac, which came a month or two later. I’ve spent the last 25 years as a Mac owner, 17 of those years at the head of a (proudly) Mac-only software company.

I originally wanted to write about the original intro, the computer, the past 25 years — or at least the coverage — but I realized that was an impossible task. CNET, MacWorld and ComputerWorld have special sections on the 25th anniversary, while eWeek has a slide show and CNN has user-submitted stories. The Merc only has only one main story, but does have PDFs of the original news clips from January 1984. Larry Magid’s 1984 review for the LA Times shows that he really got it, even if he didn’t appreciate how slowwww those floppy drives were.

Perhaps the most personally relevant article was MacWorld’s question of “The best Mac ever,” in which 3 of the 5 experts picked the SE/30:

The Macintosh SE/30 was the pinnacle of the original Mac hardware design. It looked much like its predecessors, but it was far faster—the first all-in-one Mac where the software could really sing.
…
Sporting every bit as much horsepower as the phenomenally expensive Macintosh IIx, the SE/30 was like a V12 engine shoehorned into a Honda Civic. Though future models with the original upright shape were released, they were all tagged with the derisive moniker Classic. The SE/30 bore no such shame. It was and is the undisputed king of the original, iconic Macs and, therefore, of all Macs for all time.

The SE/30 has fond memories for me, because it was the workhorse for both Palomar Software founder/programmers for several years. Palomar couldn’t afford extra computers, so after Palomar got its first office in 1988, Neil and I would each carry our SE/30 back and forth from home so that we could work in the evening. Later on, when we could afford an extra computer, we would schlep an external hard disk back and forth. The first time I did real software development on a laptop was on Christmas Day 1991, when I used my PowerBook 140 to write the first alpha promised to Eastman Kodak.

A number of articles (such as this one at the Merc) comment about the Mac’s declining influence. One aspect of that goes without saying: many of the Mac’s ideas (themselves copied from the Lisa and Xerox Parc) were copied by Windows and a scad of other computing devices. It was bad for Apple Computer but good for the industry that visual copyrights did not impede these ideas from become ubiquitous in the computing industry.

At a higher level, HCI experts have been saying for years that the Mac is obsolete because we need to get beyond menus and icons. It sounded like a good theoretical argument, but that’s re-fighting last century’s war. The fact is, the heyday of the PC industry was a narrow window at the last quarter of the 20th century, just as the peak of the mainframe/minicomputer industry’s economic and technical importance came between 1964 and 1985 or 1990.

By the Mac’s 35th or 40th anniversary, mobile computing devices will be the dominant form of computing — devices that allow creating and editing any content that we now use a PC for, and also play music, video and communicate with the rest of the world. I don’t know if they’ll run PC operating systems or smartphone operating systems or something else, and whether they’ll be made by Nokia, HP, Sony or someone else. We’ll have our Knowledge Navigator about 10 years late, but with higher resolution and no menu bar.

I think it’s a safe bet that — even if Steve Jobs is gone — Apple will create a few more breakthroughs on the convergence of computers, entertainment and communications devices, if for no other reason than their current strong market (and design) position in each of these segments.

Mac-loving Obamites

From the Washington Post:

One member of the White House new-media team came to work on Tuesday, right after the swearing-in ceremony, only to discover that it was impossible to know which programs could be updated, or even which computers could be used for which purposes. The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software. Laptops were scarce, assigned to only a few people in the West Wing. The team was left struggling to put closed captions on online videos.

I suppose this preference for MacBooks should be no surprise, given that Al Gore is a director of Apple Inc.

At the same time, the Post saw the same gaps in the new website that I saw trying to quote the President’s speech:

By late evening, the vaunted new White House Web site did not offer any updated posts about President Obama's busy first day on the job, which included an inaugural prayer service, an open house with the public, and meetings with his economic and national security teams.

Nor did the site reflect the transparency Obama promised to deliver. "The President has not yet issued any executive orders," it stated hours after Obama issued executive orders to tighten ethics rules, enhance Freedom of Information Act rules and freeze the salaries of White House officials who earn more than $100,000.

The site was updated for the first time last night, when information on the executive orders was added. But there were still no pool reports or blog entries.

To tell you the truth, it’s not surprising that it would be hard to switch everything over a few minutes after assuming office. (Sure it can be done but there’s a lot of things that can and apparently did go wrong.)

A less ambitious goal would have been more realistic. As with other things, the new Administration has raised expectations of superhuman perfection, which probably won’t last more than a few months.

Hat tip: Matt Asay, “The Open Road”

Mac trivia

InfoWorld invited me to take their Mac trivia test. I got the pre-Next stuff (1984-2000) cold, but had to guess on two of the OS X items.

Overall, I got a 90% — an A- here at SJSU. I would have gotten a 95% if I’d not tried to outsmart the test when I was guessing: the obvious-looking answer was the correct one.

Even so, InfoWorld thinks I’m too trivia laden. This is probably the only category — other than perhaps US mobile telephone air interfaces (1960-2000) — where I could achieve this sort of batting average.

A curious lingering Leopard bug

On September 15, Apple released OS X 10.5.5. WIthin 24 hours, some MacBook owners noticed that their external monitors were no longer usable. The bug seems limited to MacBooks (Intel-based laptops) and to those connected via the DVI rather than the VGA port.

I saw this one myself, with my MacBook Air and one of the first Apple LCDs ever made, which I bought back in 2000. It showed up with 10.5.5 and went away when I went back to 10.5.4. Obviously, no one expected a software upgrade make their external LCD worthless.

Thus far, there are more than 125 posts on the main thread and 43 posts on a second thread, but there is no fix on either thread and there is no 10.5.6.

What I find odd is how long it has continued, given how prevalent it is. (If there were a few postings, I’d guess that it’s hard to reproduce, but that would appear not to be the case.) I’m guessing it’s being combined with everything else in 10.5.6. A beta of 10.5.6 was rumored a month ago, and new rumors suggest it will be finished before Apple shuts down for Xmas.

Update Dec. 28: The OS X 10.5.6 update (released on Dec. 15) corrects the problem, at least on my computer

Perplexed by ports

My post earlier in the week about Apple and Firewire was inaccurate: Apple is cutting back on Firewire but it is still available for most field graphics work. I noticed this when visiting the Apple Store Friday (to get a repair for a MacBook Air hardware design problem).

To recap, Apple now has five different MacBooks with five different port configurations. Once upon a time, they had a coherent port strategy but now everything is different.

Model	LCD	Price	USB	FireWire	Expansion	Audio	Video Out
MacBook	13"	$1000	2	400		in, out	Mini-DVI
MacBook	13"	$1300	2	-		in, out	Mini DisplayPort
MacBook Air†	13"	$1800	1	-		out	Mini DisplayPort
MacBook Pro	15"	$2000	2	800	ExpressCard 34	in, out	Mini DisplayPort
MacBook Pro§	17"	$2700	3	400, 800	ExpressCard34	in, out	DVI

† New model due in November, replacing current model
§ Rumored to be replaced in the next 90 days

On Tuesday, Apple introduced two new laptops: the 13" MacBook and the 15" MacBook Pro. Both have the same black keyboard and aluminum case design (although thicker) than the MacBook Air, and both new latpops (along with a promised update to the MacBook Air) will use the new Mini DisplayPort connector. Two old laptops were kept at the bottom and the top of the line: the old 13" white plastic MacBook is now the entry-level model, while the 17" MacBook Pro is unchanged for now but (store employees say) will soon get updated to look like its 15" cousin.

As I noted earlier, Apple deleted Firewire from its 13" laptop. What I missed was that even though the 15" MacBook Pro looks exactly like a stretched 13" MacBook, it still has a Firewire 800 connector on the side.

So of the new models, 2/3 (15", 17") will have Firewire and 1/3 (13") will not. FireWire is a “Pro” feature but not a “MacBook” feature: you can pay $2000 for Firewire — or get it in last year’s model for $1000.

Deleting Firewire from the 15" is my error. Serves me right from trying to make sense of what was going on from news reports, rather than going to look and the products myself. It also says something about the need for boots on the street rather than merely bloggers surfing the web.

Orphan MacBook Air owners

Tuesday, Apple updated the MacBook Air, adding a larger hard drive (or 128gb solid state drive) to the pricey laptop first introduced nine months ago. The computer still has an inadequate 2Gb of RAM and no expansion option.

Interestingly, they have eliminated the special Micro-DVI dongle introduced with the original MacBook Air, and replaced it with the new Mini DisplayPort connector, which will be common across all MacBook products in the latest iteration. There is a logic and sanity to sharing a single connector, and switching from the DVI-based predecessors to the new DisplayPort standard (already used by Dell), that is an updated royalty-free replacement for HDMI, at least on the computer side.

However, I am hard pressed to remember a time that Apple invented a new connector for a single computer and then abandoned it with the next version of that computer. The quirky Macintosh IIfx comes to mind. I am hard pressed to see why they couldn’t have chosen the Mini DisplayPort nine months ago, rather than foisting (and then abandoning) the $30 mini DVI dongles that I now own four of. (Two VGA, two DVI).

PS: Gizmodo speculated that today’s rollout was also part of Steve Job’s plan to prepare for his retirement.

Dousing FireWire

Note updated, corrected post on Apple's latest Firewire strategy.

One of Apple’s few really important inventions during the 1990s was FireWire. It was a high speed, hot-pluggable external bus that supported digital cameras, hard disks, and even peer to peer networking.

FireWire was particularly well suited for downloading gigabytes of digital video from a camcorder to a laptop, even though that required a different connector at the camera side. Longtime Mac users also know that Target Disk Mode (allowing access to a laptop HDD as though it were an external HDD) was one of its best system management features.

However, to make money Apple extracted a $1 per port while Intel was practically giving away USB. In 1999, Apple and its IEEE 1394 partners created a patent pool and cut their licensing fees dramatically to $.25 per device. But it seems like it was too little, too late, as USB 2.0 was just around the corner.

Due to clever marketing by Intel, a few people actually think USB 2.0 is faster than FIreWire 400, even though benchmarks show that it’s not true (due to bus contention, etc.) Apple and its allies released the faster FireWire 800, but (unlike USB 2.0) the connectors are incompatible and by the time it came out, almost nobody cared.

Today, FireWire is is officially appears nearing its end of life: Apple released its new laptops without FireWire, except in the largest model. in its entry level model. When combined with the lack of FireWire in the MacBook Air, this marks the end of FireWire as a tool allowing Mac users to edit digital video or restore their laptop drives (let alone have a speedy external hard drive). Apple has apparently concluded this is a niche market to be ceded to Sony and others.

FireWire coulda been a contender. It’s not clear if it had been created during the Jobs (or Jobs II) era if it would have been better managed — forestalling the threat from USB 2.0 — or Apple would have killed it even quicker based on a more extortionate licensing scheme.

Steve and I have been wrong

I bought my first Mac (the 128k variety) in January 1984. As part of the rationalization for spending $3,000 for a computer toy, I promised my wife I’d find a way to make money off of it — so I wrote a book on Basic programming. (Which wasn't published, but that’s another story).

Of course the Mac reflected Steve’s uncompromising vision of what “insanely great” was. One thing where he was notoriously inflexible was on the question of a cooling fan. The advantage of the fan was that it would keep the computer from overheating and malfunctioning; the disadvantage was that it made noise.

The original Mac 128/512 and Mac Plus all lacked the cooling fan, and the quietness of the computer I found appealing, at least at first. (After Steve left Apple, the Macintosh SE and SE/30 in the same case did have a fan.)

However, I found in the summer of 1984 — writing my book nights and weekends in Southern California — that without a fan that once the room temperature was about 85° or 90°, the computer would malfunction in unpredictable ways. To be able to work under typical summer conditions, I cobbled together a solution with velcro and a fan from a surplus parts store, and later bought one of the sleek add-on products sold by third parties.

Fast forward 24 years and probably 20 Macs later. Between 4-6 p.m. this afternoon, my MacBook Air was acting strangely. I kept rebooting and closing applications but it would take 15 minutes to do something that should take 30 seconds. I finally gave up and did something else.

On tonight’s TV news, I found the answer: record temperatures from our latest heatwave. The high today in San José was 99°, and 101° for the reporting station closest to my house. I’m guess it was above 90° inside today in my home office. (Of course there’s A/C at work, but none at home).

My use of the Air over the past 6 months has shown a consistent pattern that when the computer gets hot, the computer seems to slow down — consistent with older power management schemes of reducing power/cycles to the CPU to reduce its heat output. So today the computer got slowed down to avoid overheating. Months ago I put the Mac on a box roughly 4"x4"x1" to increase the cooling and heat transfer under the case, but that obviously wasn’t enough.

Mac users have been complaining (like Steve) about fan noise for years, including on the MacBook Air. Still, the computer needs an aggressive variable speed fan that goes full blast when it’s needed.

Apple claims

• Operating temperature: 50° to 95°F (10° to 35°C)
• Storage temperature: -13° to 113°F (-24° to 45°C)

but I don’t buy it. It’s not much use having having a portable computer that gives up before I do.

What's up with that?

Tired of getting its butt kicked by Apple, Microsoft reportedly will use Jerry Seinfeld to anchor a $300 million ad campaign to rebuild its brand. My initial reaction: What’s up with that?

The campaign is intended to address the slow update of Windows Vista, as well as the increasing (but still small) market share of Apple’s Mac OS X. IMHO the article in this morning’s Wall Street Journal sugar coats the problem:

Microsoft's immediate goal is to reverse the negative public perception of Windows Vista, the latest version of the company's personal-computer operating system. Windows is Microsoft's largest generator of profit and revenue, accounting for 28% of the company's revenue of $60.4 billion in the year ended June 30.

The software has sold well, and Microsoft retains an overwhelming share of the market for operating system software over Apple. But Apple's computer sales have been rising, and Vista is dogged by the notion that it has technical shortcomings and is hard to use. Apple's latest Mac vs. PC ads take swipes at Vista. Microsoft says early problems with Vista have been largely alleviated.

So that Microsoft has a problem seems clear, and Jerry Sienfeld is an iconic cultural figure who who can reach a wide audience.

My question is: why is Seinfeld doing it? Sure, he’s not a movie star (think Brad Pitt or Geoge Clooney) who refuses to do ads in the US but will sell himself overseas to the highest bidder. Beginning in 1992 — at the height of the popularity of his series — Seinfeld signed up to pitch AMEX cards.

Still, why is Seinfeld associating himself with a troubled brand? Is it just the money? He’s already pulling in $85 million a year, so the $10 million from Steve Ballmer (while significant) is not going to change his life.

One possibility I hadn’t considered is that spending hundreds of millions on ads and $10 million with Seinfeld) would establish Microsoft’s interest in style over substance. Certainly that was the reaction of the readers of the WSJ blog this morning.

Windows Vista has a lot of problems, with even Microsoft executives having trouble using it. One-third of business PCs are upgrading from Vista to XP, even though it’s extra work.

Microsoft is convinced the problems are one of image and not of substance (despite ongoing claims to the contrary). They seem to be ruling out the possibility that the world has grown tired of being forced to upgrade (by many firms) to bloatware, which seems like a risky assumption to make.

Upgrading to Office 2004

Last night, I upgraded from Office 2008 to Office 2004. Office 2008 is native for my Intel-based MacBook Air, but it turns out the four year-old Office 2004 (which I’d never used on an Intel Mac) actually runs faster. Plus is more reliable and has some more features. (Apparently I’m not the only one to notice).

I had hoped the SP1 update (Office 2008 12.1.0) released Tuesday would make Office better, but it’s about the same. For example, PowerPoint still wipes out the last changed date of any file you open (when or not you change anything). If not for the dreaded DOCX disease (a nonfatal virus spread by casual contact), I’d rip out of Office 2008 entirely.

I have not yet bought Windows Vista so I can upgrade to XP, but does anyone see a pattern here? Windows XP shipped in 2001 and its successor did not ship until six years later. Microsoft corporate is spending $7 billion a year overall on R&D — somewhere between 10% and 1/3 of that on Windows — so after six years that amounts to several billion dollars of R&D on Windows Vista. The cost of Office 2008 was probably only a few hundred million.

I am tempted to beat on Microsoft for poor management or lack of motivation, but I think the problem is more serious than that. Microsoft’s legacy code base is so large (if not bloated) that it’s very hard to add new features while keeping the old features, performance and reliability.

Rather than trying to be all things to all people, Linux (or FreeBSD or NetBSD) has the potential of allowing groups to customize the operating system to their own needs, serving a range of niches through decentralized community innovation. Desktop Linux seems dead for now, but such decentralized approaches seem one of the few options to overcome the inherent limits of coordinating such monolithic OS releases.

Send in the clones

Since the Intel-based Macs were introduced in June 2005, various analysts have wondered what would stop the maker of a PC clone from advertising Mac OS X support.

WIth the technical barriers relatively low (particularly since Apple switched to EFI), the only thing holding back clones was the vigor of Apple’s IP enforcement lawyers. Apple’s reputation was made more than 20 years ago with its various lawsuits against the Franklin Ace, Pineapple and other Apple II clones. Thus, it was not surprising that OS X compatibility was not something promoted by reputable established Wintel manufacturers.

Instead, it was tiny Florida-based Psystar (YALBNdtCS) that Monday announced its Open Mac (which soon became the Open Computer). Its web server has since been unable to cope with the traffic.

The key issue is that the license on Apple’s OS X software says you can’t use it on non-Apple computers. Based on the comment of a semi-anonymous Psystar employee, today the news is that Psystar will challenge that condition as anti-competitive. (Charging an 80% gross margin on the Mac is not illegal — that’s where their $782 million in R&D gets funded).

I share the view of at least one commentator that this will be a flash in the pan. (One report says Psystar has already given up). But the company has now emerged from obscurity — as Franklin did — and will be able to sell other products using its 15 seconds of fame.

Charlie likes his MacBook Air more than I do

I am still waiting for my MacBook Air that supposedly is coming Real Soon Now. But even when it comes, I don’t think I’ll value it was much as PBS talk show host Charlie Rose. Channel surfing after midnight, I couldn’t miss his shiner.

TechCrunch (via Salon) attribute the black eye his new MBA: facing a fall on the streets of Manhattan, he chose to protect his new laptop and not his face. Fake Steve Jobs isn't buying it.

To me, Charlies’s priorities seem in the wrong place. I don’t know what Charlie makes: he runs a business, Charlie Rose Inc., that sells a TV show to local PBS affiliates. However, if he’s paying for homes in NYC and Long Island, I’m guessing that he makes at least 3x what a CSU professor makes, and more likely 10x.

The machine can’t be more than a month old, so even if not backed up that’s not a lot of information to lose. I backed up my (old) laptop today, and you’d think he could get someone to back up his machine for him (or to set up .Mac Backup or Time Machine to do it automatically).

23 years of Macworld Expo

This week I had a chance to go to the iPod/iPhone Expo (née Macworld Expo) in San Francisco. Steve Jobs made headlines Tuesday for introducing a new portable Macintosh, but the term "Macworld Expo" seems to no longer really describe the show. With the declining role of the Mac to Apple’s bottom line has come a rise in non-Mac products; in Paris, it was always “Apple Expo”, a more generic term.

So as with last year, there was a proliferation of iPod (and now iPhone) accessories. How many different types of cases or iPod speakers do we need? The ultimate in cr***y iPod accessories was the iCanta, a $80 toilet paper holder/iPod holder to use in your bathroom.

I've been going to Macworld Expo since the first one at Brooks Hall in 1985. I worked the Silicon Beach booth a couple of years (IIRC 1985-1987) to get an exhibitor badge, and at Palomar Software exhibited at most shows (both SF and Boston) from 1987-1993. I also was a panelist for Peggy Kilburn during the conference she created until she was forced out in 1999.

At Macworld Expo SF 1998 I sat outside the expo and did preliminary interviews for my PhD thesis. That thesis during the darkest days of the Mac, and so my study tried to predict which Mac users would stay and which would switch to Windows. I nicknamed the survey “should I stay or should I go”? So a decade ago, I would not have believed that one of the books being shown at Macworld Expo today would be “Switching to Mac for Dummies”.

Software

The show’s origins as a Mac software show was hard to find on the floor. There were a few innovative packages, like TheSkyX and Seeker, an educational astronomy packages from Software Bisque. At $150 for the combo, it’s too expensive to buy for home use, but we might buy it to donate to my daughter’s school.

Instead of new software, there were probably even more 9.0 and 10.0 releases. SPSS (the standard stats software for social scientists) was showing SPSS 16 for the Mac. At one level a rev 16 is mundane as you can get, but on the other hand, it was an incontrovertible sign that the Mac is back. In June 1996, it was the decision of SPSS to abandon the Mac that caused me to start the MacStats website to educate the Mac faithful as to other alternatives.

Although SPSS now does their own Mac development, they came back to the Mac in July 2000 after outsourcing the port to Software MacKiev. Today, the Ukraine-based firm is the world’s largest independent developer of Mac software, with 400 employees. It does both contract work and also has a line of retail products, typically ports of Broderbund PC titles like PrintShop. According to Steve in the booth, its commercial products started when WorldBook decided not to do an OS X port of its encyclopedia and MacKiev stepped up. They still do contract development (taking over much of the HP printer driver work we once did) but are a major presence on the consumer side as well.

Although I ignored the the Microsoft, Adobe, etc. booths showing the N+1 release of their decades-old software, but that was just calculation that I wouldn’t learn anything new. Of course I’ll need to get Office 2008 (under university site license) to deal with the dreaded DOCX disease. Also when it comes out, I’ll buy (if it’s reasonably priced) Photoshop Elements 6.0 since my 5-year-old copy of 2.0 doesn’t run under OS X 10.5.

Hardware

Macworld (or at least my personal purchases) has always been about esoteric hardware accessories. I finally bought a Radio Shark 2 to listen to the radio at work, as well as another USB 2.0 hub to use with my forthcoming MacBook Air.

For those interested in the MB Air, I visited the Apple both and found the CD-free strategy convincing — you can boot from a remote CD(DVD) drive over a WiFi network, although Ernie Prabhakar suggested that for emergency booting I just spend $20 and install OS X on a dedicated USB pen drive. The annoying thing is that Apple will not recommend any power supply to share between the MacBook/MacBook Pro/MacBook Air. As someone who’s accumulated about 7 bricks (and a car adaptor) for the previous model (shared between 3 laptops), I find that inflexibility to be frustrating.

Another cute piece of hardware was the iRecord ($200), a dedicated appliance that will automatically convert analog video input into a format (H.264) that plays on your iPod. It even knows the resolution of your iPod screen and thus the resolution to use for transcoding.

The hardware I’m most likely to buy is the NetGear ReadyNAS Duo, a network attached storage with multiple drive bays (due in March). It sounds ideal for Time Machine backups. The little brother of the ReadyNas NV, it sounds like it will be available for under $500. And unlike the last NAS I bought (which I returned),it presents an HFS file system and thus can backup Mac file names without modification.

I’m also interested in the Western Digital MyBook Studio hard disks, not because they do a better job of commodity hardware, but because (unlike so many other firms) they bundle some decent software. The software does an automatic continuous backup which is interesting but not unique. Instead, what was attractive is how unusually versatile in how it backs up, since it will back up some data to different places or other data (like photos) to multiple places. I’m sure my wife will use the feature that automatically uploads photos to Shutterfly.

Mac robotics

This is (I think) the last robotics posting of the season. The big news for us this week was the great cover story in the Almaden Resident on TCC, my daughter’s successful robotics team. Update Jan. 24: Although the Almaden Resident story is no longer on their website, the Almaden Times has posted its own story.

As someone who thus spent the last six months with Lego Mindstorms, my interest was perked up with a Mindstorms mention at Macworld Expo. (Twenty years ago, I used to write for MacTutor which later became MacTech magazine.) At the MacTech booth, they were showing the April 2007 issue with an article on using the Mindstorms NXT software for Mac cross-development. I’ll file it away in case TCC makes more use of Macs next season.

Also at Macworld Expo, the most unusual hardware demo was The Krawler, a robot that uses Wi-Fi for remote control (and returning a live Wi-Fi feed), and is programmable from the Mac (only) via Objective-C. The robot was originally developed for inspecting home crawl spaces, but now is being sold as a general-purpose robotics platform.

The Krawler is from Pacific Parallel Research, a startup in Cardiff — a cute coastal town between Del Mar and Carlsbad in San Diego County.

I can see how high school kids wanting to learn robotics (or a low-volume VAR) would jump on this as an easy-entry starting point to solving a particular problem. I can’t help with VARs, but offered to introduce CEO Craig Davidson to our local high school robotics team.

Air ball

Today Steve Jobs only a few of the things predicted for Macworld Expo: a new laptop, iTunes movie rentals and a better AppleTV. They also came up with Time Capsule, a wireless backup server that should prove popular with price-insensitive buyers who don’t want to build their own out of commodity products. But the iPhone update was pretty minor, and there was no news on DRM-free iTunes music.

I’ve been waiting for the new laptop for more than a year, and aspects of the MacBook Air are compelling. 13" x 9" x 3/4" is a nice size, and 3 lbs is the lightest Apple laptop ever. The screen (1280x800) and keyboard are full-sized, it comes with a built-in camera and claims a 5 hour battery life. As expected, it uses an external CD drive to keep weight down, but apparently there is provision (“Remote Disk”) to remotely access the CD drive on some other Mac or PC.

The rumored diskless Mac was just a rumor — at $3100, nobody’s going to buy the 64gb flash RAM model, but instead the Air will be sold in an $1800 configuration with a 80gb iPod disk drive (even though 160gb drives are shipping now).

The MacBook Air shows the power of positive network effects from joining the Intel ecosystem. In PowerPC laptops, Apple was the only company interested in ultrasmall CPUs, but Intel has developed a smaller (“off the roadmap”) CPU that presumably will be offered to other vendors.

But beyond this, the tradeoffs are pretty disappointing:

• no built in Ethernet — only available via external dongle
• no FireWire at any price
• only one USB port (shared by the mouse, disk drive, CD drive and Ethernet)
• no expansion slot (ExpressCard) for cellular modems
  
• no user-changeable battery (forget swapping batteries over the Pacific)
• video cables (micro-DVI instead of mini-DVI) incompatible with any existing Mac out there

To me, the most serious omission is this is the first Apple laptop since the very beginning (1991) that does not have “target disk mode”. Originally in SCSI and later in FireWire, TDM has been a unique and invaluable tool for fixing hard disk problems on Apple laptops, and it’s hard to see how certain problems can be fixed without it.

Some are calling it another “Cube”: too defeatured in the name of style. (Since I bought a Cube, too, that would be appropriate.) If so, that would be another example of the problems not having checks and balances on Steve’s tastes

It’s a very portable laptop, and I may buy one. However, it’s not nearly as useful or innovative as (for its day) the 4 pound Duo 280. Mine's still in a desk drawer somewhere, but I’d still be using it if you could get software that ran on a 24 Mb 68040 OS 9 machine.