Technovia

I was right about Vista

Looking through some old work, I found this post - an article I wrote in 2005 for the Irish Times on Windows Vista, and why it was doomed to fail. I identified three key problems:

• Lack of effective (at the time) competition from Mac and Linux meant that Microsoft wasn't being pushed very hard to improve the system.
• Windows XP was "good enough" for almost everyone. 
• The real action was happening away from the desktop, with the mobile phone taking centre stage. 

  Not a bad prediction, when you think about it.  

Repeat after me: browsing share is not market share

How many times are we going to have to go through this? Computerworld reports that "Windows lost nearly a full percentage point of market share for the second month in a row in December". Except, of course, it's not market share.

In fact, they're "reporting" (I don't think it actually justifies that label) the Net Applications survey of Internet use, which the company itself erroneously describes as "market share". It isn't. It doesn't indicate sales, only a particular kind of usage.

And that's something Net Applications acknowledges itself, in a roundabout way. As it notes on its page on "market share" at present, "the December holiday season strongly favored residential over business usage. This in turn increases the relative usage share of Mac, Firefox, Safari and other products that have relatively high residential usage."

That's the important word, here: usage. And usage doesn't tell you much about the number of machines being sold, or the installed base. So to draw out a headline which makes it sound like the sales of Windows machines are on the wane, as Computerworld does, is either hype or sloppy journalism.

UPDATE: TUAW gets on the same bandwagon, with the same dumb headline and opening line. Look, I know that an Apple blog is going to want to say that Mac market share is "almost 10%", but reporting this without the caveat that it's not really market share AND ignoring NetApplications own warning about Windows being under-reported is either consumate spin or stupidity. Are reporters no longer supposed to look at things like this critically?

Possibly not the most informative release notes ever

Up there with Apple's classic "Bug fixes".

The G1's big weakness: the keyboard

I went along to the T-Mobile store today to take a look at the long-awaited G1, the first phone based on Google's Android.

Count me amongst the unimpressed. The keyboard, which should be a strength, is horrible if you're used to a Blackberry. Given that there's no on-screen keyboard this is a total pain. So I'll be sticking to the iPhone an Blackberry for now.

Is there anything original in Google Chrome? | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Jack Schofield picks up on Paul Thurrot's question about whether there anything original in Google Chrome?:

"All of the features here are present in existing browsers, all of them. So what does Google really bring to the table?"

The problem with questions like this is that they fundamentally misunderstand what makes software good or bad. The same question is often posed by people looking at Mac and Windows, with much the same conclusions: look at a side-by-side feature comparison between the Mac and Windows, and you'll probably conclude that Windows  has "more features".

And for lots of technology journalists, more features = better, because they operate a check-list approach to reviewing.

Jack (and Paul) are correct, there are very, very few features in Chrome which are original. But that doesn't matter, because the overall design of it shows a really lovely economy which makes it a treat to use.

I spent half of last night playing with Chrome on my Advent 4211, and on a 10in screen Chrome is by far the best experience of any browser I've come across. Chrome uses space well, implementing tabs which feel like they use far less room on a small screen than either IE or Firefox. Even on the 1.6GHz Atom, it's very fast, with none of the sluggishness I associate with its competitors.

In short, I'm sold. While Chrome may not have lots of original features (or even lots of features at all) it Just Works, and nicely.

So Muxtape is shut. Golf-clap to the downloader writers

One of the things which irritates me immensely is that attitude that something is fine to do if it physically can be done. There's a great illustration of this in the thread discussing the Greasemonkey muxtape downloader script, in the interchanges between jstn (of Muxtape) and the authors of the script.

And now, surprise surprise, Muxtape is closed while it "works out some issues with the RIAA. Would those issues have something to do with the scripts which let people download music from it, rather than just streaming as the service intends?

Here's the point: If you hack a service to do something which is illegal, you are almost certainly going to cost that site time and legal fees. You are not being big. You are not being clever. You are being an asshole. Start taking some responsibility for your own actions and stop acting like a big, stupid smirking baby.

How much of a success is open source?

How much of a success is open source? In his musings on open source, and how ideas cross the chasm, Alan Patrick ponders the origin story of open source, and how it relates to a particular brand of utopianism.

"The problem of course, is that many of these Utopians are the dreamers and idealists who got in early and inspired so many others to join the movement in the first place. Without these enthusiastic early adopters, these ideas would never get off the ground to be in a position where the leaders do have to grasp the nettles."

Part of the problem, too, is that too many promises were made by open source evangelists who understood neither project management nor people management. Anyone who's even passingly familiar with project management knows that piling more "eyeballs" on a problem doesn't make it shallow: what you need are the right eyeballs, in the right context, at the right time. This becomes more and more true as projects become deeply complex: someone picking up the code of, say, MySQL today will have quite a long learning curve before they can meaningfully contribute to the project.

What's the point of copyright law?

One of the things that is making me happy at that moment is that Danny is blogging again. Of course, with Danny being Danny and me being me, we don't always agree - and there's a great example in that in his post on "Copyright, Fraud and Window Taxes (No, not that Windows)". Comparing copyright to the old Window Tax (don't ask - read it), he mentions this:

"Copyright is a similar tax, imposed for the benefit of artists, and collected at the act of copying."

I understand where Dan's coming from here. But, I think that if you want to change copyright law for the better, this isn’t a good way to frame the argument.

By stating that it exists to benefit artists, you’re framing the debate in the same way that Cliff Richard does when he argues that “my songs are my pension plan” - ie that the argument is all about the actual group that benefits financially, and to what extent they benefit.

And that’s an argument that, actually, you’ll never win - because not only are you taking on existing rich artists, but you’re taking a lot of aspiring ones too. Think of every band that’s ever wanted to be famous, every actor who wanted to be a film star, every street kid who wanted to be a rapper. Or think of the DJ friend that Danny mentions, who, as soon as they’re directly hurt by copying, becomes vehement about the fact that copying is bad.

The key question shouldn’t be “does copyright benefit artists?” Instead, in order to get copyright laws which aren’t the current insane mess, we need to return to the idea that copyright must be framed so that it benefits society as a whole, by encouraging and rewarding original work - or as the Statute of Queen Anne put it, “for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned.”

In other words, we should always remember that copyright is an artificial monopoly granted because it has a beneficial effect for society as a whole, not privilege that's designed simply to benefit a particular class or profession (and that word “artificial” is really important here).

So the real question is “what would a modern copyright work look like if it was written from the perspective of encouraging original work for the benefit of society as a whole?” And the answer to that is “very different from what we currently have”. It certainly wouldn’t last longer than the author’s life (and 20 years from time of completion seems to me to be more justifiable - artists who can’t rely on work made in their 20’s forever will be far more productive in their 50’s than ones who can).

It would codify and extend the rights of readers to copy for personal use under a much wider range of circumstances than is currently permitted, because the wide distribution of original work is beneficial for society; and it would constantly remind authors that this is an artificial monopoly, granted to them for the benefit of all, not a favour granted because we like their hairstyles.

Cloud computing makes me nervous

Maybe it's because I'm old, but cloud computing makes me nervous. I remember the Apple "1984" ad not just because it was a great piece of work by Ridley Scott, but also because of its underlying message. And that message was simple: monolithic computer systems supplied by monolithic suppliers aren't a good idea for individuals.

Cloud computing is a return to the dark ages of the 1960's and 1970's, when all of your most valuable things - your data - sat on a big server somewhere. You accessed it from a simple terminal, but only so long as you paid IBM or whoever to process your data. While you owned the data in theory, in practice you were at the mercy of your supplier.

Alan Patrick, too, has been around the blocks a few times, which is why he is equally amazed at what people are sleepwalking into:

"I've been reading some of the comments on other blogs about this with a mounting sense of wonder at the sheer naivete of some users. For anything that is important: Firstly, always plan for redundancy in your systems - have an online and on computer service that are synched. Secondly, do frequent backups to a 3rd source. Thirdly, if its important, pay for it. Ad funded services are responsive to the advertisers, not to the users - its that pipers / tune thing."

If you use Google Documents exclusively you are taking a serious risk that one day Google will lock you out of your data. I'm not impuning anything about Google here - they may, indeed, plan to "do no evil". But you are relying on their good grace, and that should make you nervous.

Own your own documents - keep them on your hard drive, and on a seperate drive or two as well. Use Google Documents as a backup, not your only storage.

Why the DRM industry is clueless about consumers

Guy Tennant, chief operating officer of Entriq, a company that helps online stores manage DRM'd products, thinks that a company terminating your use of music is just like when you lose a CD:

"Tennant says he doesn't want to sound unsympathetic but reminds digital-music buyers that CD owners don't demand a refund from stores when they lose their discs. As for backing up songs to a CD, people should just accept the loss of quality because the only other alternative is to lose the music entirely, he said."

It's stupidity like this that makes me think the music industry is determined to commit collective suicide. Of course it's not the same: turning off DRM key servers is the equivalent of coming round to my house, breaking in, and stealing back the CDs you sold to me in the first place.

Idiot.