On Microsoft’s Bing what’s new in web search: By all accounts, Microsoft has a success with its re-crafted bing search site. I posted something about it mainly to say, competition can re-emerge even in a market as dominated as web search. With the follow-on Microsoft-Yahoo deal, bing on TV, and all the rest, bing + Yahoo + related now can claim almost third of the search marketplace to google’s almost two thirds, with others nestled in there in single digits.
How good is bing? Or, how good is it for you? Here is a great site for doing a “blind taste test” style search comparison among google, bing and yahoo. http://blindsearch.fejus.com/. Its beta, but it’s fun.
On Apple and the hole it is digging for itself by stridently controlling iPhone software: I wrote about this on idealware recently. The iPhone App Store saga has really emerged as a major business news story for the summer. Apple finally conceded a more standard version of Gmail for the iPhone (one with email push out to the phone). The fact that these developments are covered like the daily sports says a lot. Here is a great run-down of some of the reaction to Apple’s brinksmanship on the iPhone.
The stickiness of this story reflects an important development of wider significance. Having changed the game in audio and mobile devices, consumers expect more and different of it. Sure, part of it is pressure to be more responsive on price. What is really fascinating is how much the pressure is about being more open, as in open source/open content. Compared to the beginning of this decade, having great design is not enough.
We are really in a new era in which “pure” Open Source software has given way to much more of a continuum between being completely closed, proprietary, license-driven and being completely open. And Apple is catching it as much as Microsoft, Oracle and other hold-outs of the last decade. Its about as likely that iTunes be open sourced as Windows, yet the issues of intellectual property, “walled gardens” of controlled add-ons, DRM and so on have become part of much wider social awareness and consumer thinking. This is a good thing for software and technology development generally.
On drop box. When I wrote about dropbox last spring, I really was just looking for something to keep home and work computers in sync. Start with a free Dropbox account and create folders on Windows, Mac or Linux computers (including servers) that will dynamically sync the files, simple as that. I am seeing now just how useful Dropbox really is.
First, it offers another piece in the project management, project planning puzzle. You can share a sub-folder of your drop box with a project team for working collaborative on documents. You can do this in a larger way with Basecamp, Sharepoint, Microsoft Office Live, a Google site and others. What’s nice about Dropbox is that setting up the sharing is really light-weight and easy where collaboration is short-term, project-specific, and not particularly staff-based. It is easy and free to get an account, and it only takes a minute to share out a folder for a team. You are still working in your standard desktop office applications. Yes, the documents are on their server, so there is that Web 2.0 trust factor, but they are also always on your computer. And the web interface includes revisions and other features in simple format.
The other thing I have been thinking about with dropbox is drop box as a full back-up alternative. The free version allows 2 GB of storage. If that doesn’t cover your current, active documents and more, then you lead a different life than me. Moving up, the price for 50GB and beyond, and is more than, say, Mozy or Cabonite, but reasonable enough to consider using it to back up everything. I don’t think I would even true to have it back-up Exchange Server, but I have been playing around with ways to ensure it will back-up active shared files (such as a database). Check it out at getdropbox.com or use this link, and yes, help me get even more storage free! https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTU4MjExMTk.
Dropbox seems like an ambitious small company. Hope they survive.
The last few weeks saw some big announcements in the smartphone world:
Palm released the phone that they've been promising us for years, the Palm Pre, with it's new WebOS, to reviews that were mostly favorable and summed up as "The iPhone's baby brother".
And Nokia's E71 hit our shores, an incredibly full-featured phone that you can get for just over $300 unlocked, and use the carrier of your choice. While this isn't a touchscreen, and is therefore suspect in terms of it's ease of use, it is an amazingly full-featured product.
Left in the wings were Blackberry, who keep producing phones, including their iPhone competitor, the Storm -- to yawns from the press, and Microsoft, who are talking a lot about Windows Mobile 6.5 and 7.0, but seem to have really been decimated by the ugliness of their mobile OS when compared to just about anyone else's.
What's clear is that a few things differentiate smartphones these days, and the gap between the ones that get it and the ones that don't are huge. They are:
Responsive Touchscreen Interfaces. The UI's of the iPhone, Android and Palm's WebOS get around the sticky problem that phones were just to small to support anything but simple functionality without requiring an oppressive amount of taps and clicks. This is why Microsoft has fallen down the smartphone food chain so far and fast -- their mobile OS is just like their desktop OS, with no flagship phone that does the touchscreen nearly as well as the new competition.
Desktop-Class Web Browsers. This is where Apple and Google have drawn a huge line, and it looks like Palm might have joined them. All three use browser's based on Webkit, the same technology that fuels Safari and Chrome. On a 3G phone, this makes for a fast and complete experience that puts the Blackberry, Mobile Internet Explorer and the Treo's hideous Blazer. Add Google's voice activation (native on Android and available for iPhone), and their smartphone-optimized results (which don't work on the non-webkit browsers) and the task of finding a Starbucks or hotel on the road takes seconds, instead of the average ten to 15 minutes on the old, lousy browsers, which simply choke on the graphics.
Push Email. If you connect to Exchange servers, the iPhone and Pre have Activesync built in. If your mail is with Google, you're connected to it as soon as you tell an Android phone your login and password. And the Android phone app is the best out there, with Apple's mail running close behind it. What's ironic is that Microsoft targeted their biggest threat with Activesync -- the Blackberry's kludgy, but, at the time, unparalleled email forwarding -- and gave it wings by licensing it to Palm, Apple and others. This is fueling corporate acceptance of the iPhone and Pre, meaning that this Blackberry-beating strategy might have worked, but more likely it did it for Apple and Palm, not Microsoft.
Music. The iPhone is an iPod; everything else isn't, meaning that, if having a high quality phone and music experience on one device is a priority, you're not going to go wrong with the iPhone. I love my G1, but I weigh my value of the real keyboard and awesome, open source OS on T-Mobile over the iPhone's built-in iPod and Activesync on AT&T. As OSes go, Android is only marginally better than Apple, but the Apple hardware is much better than the G1. Newer Android phones are going to show that up.
People make a lot of noise about the apps available for the iPhone (and Windows/Blackberry) as opposed to the newer Android and Pre. I think that's a defining question for the Pre, but it looks like companies are jumping on board. For Android, it's quite arguably a wash. All of the important things are available for Android and, given that it's open source, most of them are free. And with those 18 phones due out by year end on every carrier, the discrepancies will be short-lived.
I have to wonder how long it will take Microsoft to "get" mobile. They have a heavy foot in the market as the commodity OS on the smartphones that can't get any buzz. But the choice to bring the worst things about the Windows Desktop experience to their mobile OS was unfortunate. Should I really get a pop-up that has to be manually dismissed every time I get an email or encounter a wireless network? Do I have to pull out the stylus and click on Start every time I want to do anything? What's even more worrisome is that Windows Mobile is a separate OS from Windows, that merely emulates it, as opposed to sharing a code base. Apple's OS is the same OSX that you get on a MacBook, just stripped down, and Google's OS is already starting to appear on Netbooks and other devices, and will likely fuel full desktops within a year or two -- it is, after all, Linux.
So, the state of the smartphone market is easily broken into the haves and have-nots, meaning that some phones have far more usable and exciting functionality, while most phones don't. There's a whole second post dealing with the choice of carriers and their rankings in the race to offer the most customer disservice, and it does play into your smartphone decision, as Verizon might be a very stable network, but their phone selection is miserable, and AT&T might have the best selection but, well, they're AT&T. I love Android, so, were I looking, I'd hold out until four or five of those new sets are out. But I don't know anyone with an iPhone who's unsatisfied (and I know lots of people with iPhones).
As the proud owner of a T-Mobile G1, the first phone out running Google's Android Mobile Operating System (OS), I wanted to post a bit about the state of the Mobile OS market. I've been using a smartphone since about 1999, when I picked up a proprietary Sprint phone that could sync with my Outlook Contacts and Calendar. We've come a long way; we have a long way to go before the handheld devices in our pocket overcome the compromises and kludges that govern their functionality. My personal experience/expertise is with Palm Treos, Windows Mobile, and now Android; but I have enough exposure to Blackberries and the iPhone to speak reasonably about them. My focus is a bit broader than "which is the best phone?" I'm intrigued by which is the best handheld computing platform, and what does that mean to cash-strapped orgs who are wrestling with what and how they should be investing in them.
I wrote earlier on establishing Smartphone policies in your org. The short advice there was that the key Smartphone application is email, and you should restrict your users to phones that offer the easiest, most stable integration with your office email system. That's still true. But other considerations include, how compatible are these phones with other business applications, such as Salesforce or our donor database? How easy/difficult are they to use and support? How expensive are they? What proprietary, marketing concerns on the part of the vendors will impact our use of them?
The big players in the Smartphone OS field are, in somewhat random order:
Palm: PalmOS
Nokia: Symbian*
RIM: Blackberry OS
Microsoft: Windows Mobile
Apple: iPhone
Google: Android
Palm is the granddaddy of Mobile OSes, and it shows. The interface is functional and there are a lot of apps to support it, but there isn't much recent development for the platform. Palm has been working on a major, ground -up rewrite for about two years, code-named Nova, but it has yet to come to light, and there's a serious question now as to whether they've taken too long. Whatever they come up with would have to be pretty compelling to grab the attention of customers and developers in light of Apple and Google's offerings.
App Support: C (lots, but not much new; Treos do Activesync)
Ease of Use: C (functional, but not modern interface)
Cost: C (Not sure if there's much more than Palm Treo's available, $200-200 w/new contract)
Nokia's Symbian platform is notable for being powerful and open source. It's more popular outside of the US, I'm not sure if there are any Symbian smartphones offered directly from US carriers, which makes them pretty expensive. They do support Activesync, the Microsoft Exchange connector, and have a mature set of applications available.
App Support: B (Activesync, lots of apps, but missing some business apps, like Salesforce)
Ease of Use: B (Strong interface, great multimedia)
Cost: D (Over the roof in US, where contracts don't subsidize expense).
The Blackberry was the first OS to do push email, and it gained a lot of market and product loyalty as a result. But, to get there, they put up their own server that subscribes to your email system and then forwards the mail to your phone. This was great before Microsoft and Google gave us opportunities to set up direct connections to the servers. Now it's a kludge, offering more opportunities for things to break. They do, however, have a solid OS with strong business support - they are either on top or second to Microsoft (with Apple charging up behind them) in terms of number of business apps available for the platform. So they're not going anywhere, they're widely available, and a good choice if email isn't your primary smartphone application.
App Support: A- (lots of everything except Activesync)
Ease of Use: B (Solid OS that they keep improving)
Cost: B (Range of models at decent prices)
Windows Mobile has broad third party support and powerful administrative functions. It comes with Activesync, of course. There are tons of smartphones running it, more than any other OS. But the user interface, in this writer's opinion (which I know isn't all that pro-Microsoft, but I swear I'm objective), is miserable. With Windows Mobile (WinMo) 5, they made a move to emulate the Windows Desktop OS, with a Start Menu and Programs folder. This requires an excessive amount of work to navigate. If you use more than the eight apps (or less, depending on model/carrier), you have your work cut out for you to run that ninth app. And the notification system treats every event -- no matter how trivial -- as something you need to be interrupted for and acknowledge. It's hard to imagine how Microsoft is going to compete with this clunker, and you have to wonder how the millions they spend on UI research allowed them to go this route.
App Support: A (tons of apps out there)
Ease of Use: D (the most clunky mobile OS. Period.)
Cost: A (The variety of phones means you get a range of prices and hardware choices)
Apple's iPhone represents a leap in UI design that instantly placed it on top of the pack. Best smartphone ever, right out of the first box. Apple clearly read the research they commissioned, unlike Microsoft, and thought about how one would interact with a small, restricted device in ways that make it capable and expansive. The large, sensitive touch screen with multi-touch capabilities rocks. The web browser is almost as good as the one you use on your desktop (and this is important - web browsers on the four systems above are all very disappointing - only Apple and Google get this right). The iPhone really shines, of course, as a multimedia device. It's a full-fledged iPod and it plays videos as well as a handheld device could. As a business phone, it's adequate, not ideal. While it supports Activesync and has great email and voicemail clients, it lacks a physical keyboard and cut+paste -- features that all of their competitors provide (although the keyboard varies by phone model). So if you do a lot of writing on your phone (as I do), this is a weak point on the iPhone.
App Support: A (it's still pretty new, but development has been fast and furious)
Ease of Use: A- (Awesome, actually, except for text processing)
Cost: B (since they dropped it to $199).
Android is Google's volley into the market, and it stands in a class with Apple that is far above the rest of the pack. The user interface is remarkably functional and geared toward making all of the standard things simple to do, even with one hand. The desktop is highly customizable, allowing you to put as many of the things you use a touch away. This phone is in a class with the iPhone, but has made a few design choices that balance the two out. The iPhone makes better use of the touch screen, with multi-touch features that Google left out. But the iPhone is has far less customizable an interface. And, of course, the first Android phone has a full keyboard and (limited) cut and paste. It is, however, brand new, and I'll discuss the future below, but right now the third party app market is nascent. Today, this phone is best suited for early adopters.
App Support: C (it will be A in a year or so)
Ease of Use: A
Cost: A (G1's are selling for as low as $150w/new plan)
The big question, if you're investing in a platform, is where are these all going? Smartphone operating systems are more plentiful and competitive than the desktop variety, where Windows is still the big winner with Apple and the Unix/Linux variants pushing to get in. But the six systems listed above are all widely deployed. Palm and Nokia have the least penetration and press these days, but they're far from knocked out. Nokia could make a big push to get Symbian into the market and Palm's Nova could prove to be really compelling -- at one point, Palm was king of these devices. Today, the interesting battle is between the other four, Microsoft, RIM, Apple and Google. Of these four, all but Android are commercial OSes; Android is fully open source. RIM and Apple are hardware/software manufacturers, building their own devices and not licensing their OSes to others. Windows Mobile and Android are available for any hardware manufacturer to deploy. This suggests two things about the future:
Proprietary hardware/software combos have a tenuous lead. RIM and Apple are at the top of the market right now. Clearly, being able to design your OS and hardware in tandem makes for smoother devices and more reliability. But this edge will wane as hardware standards develop (and they are developing). At that point, the variety of phones sporting Windows and Google might overwhelm the proprietary vendors. Apple is big now, but this strategy has always kept them in a niche in the PC market. They dominate in the MP3 player world, but they got that right and made a killing before anyone could catch up; that edge doesn't seem to be as strong in the mobile market.
Open Source development won't be tied to the manufacturer's profit margin. Android's status as open source is a wild card (Nokia is Open Source, too, so some of this applies). Apple and Microsoft have already alienated developers with some of their restrictive policies. If Android gets wide adoption, which seems likely (Sprint, Motorola, HTC and T-Mobile are all part of Google's Open Handset alliance, and both AT&T and Verizon are contemplating Android phones), the lack of restrictions on the platform and the Android market (Google's Android software store, integrated with the OS) could grab a significant percentage of the developer's market. I've been pleased to see how quickly apps have been appearing in the first few weeks of the G1's availability.
If I were Microsoft, I'd consider isolating the WinMo development team from the rest of the campus. Trying to leverage our familiarity with their desktop software has resulted in a really poor UI, but their email/groupware integration is excellent. They need to dramatically rethink what a smartphone is -- it does a lot of the same things that a computer does, but it isn't a laptop. Apple should be wondering whether their "develop your app and we'll decide whether you can distribute it when you're finished" approach can stand up to the Android threat. They need to review their restrictive policies. RIM has to fight for relevance - as customer loyalty, which they built up with their early email superiority fades, well, didn't you notice that Palm and RIM the only names in our list that don't have huge additional businesses to leverage? And we, the smartphone users, need to see whether supporting Android -- which has lived up to a lot of its promise, so far -- isn't a better horse for us to run on, because it's open and extendable without the oversight of any particular vendor.
* I have to own up that I'm least familiar with Symbian; a lot of my analysis is best guess in this case, based on what I do know.
While Peter is busy Biting Microsoft's hand, I figured I'd spend some time biting Apple's hand. I've been an Apple user since the Apple II, which I spent hours programming on back in college (oh yes, this dates me.) The first computer I owned was a Macintosh SE, and I have owned 14 Macs (or, briefly, Power Computing boxes) in the 21 years since.
I won't spend time here on my Linux desktop experiment(s), and I had a blessedly brief sojurn as a Windows user back in the late 90s. For the most part, I have spent the vast majority of my time in front of the Mac OS, from version 1.0 to 10.5. And, at the same time as it makes my computing life wonderful, it gives me profound misgivings.
No one (even Microsoft) will argue with the notion that Apple OS X has the best desktop user interface currently in use. They do say that "imitation is the best form of flattery" and if MS user interface is any indication, they love Macs.
Things "just work" in ways that make me spoiled. But part of the reason this is true is that Apple has a lock on both the hardware and the software. They don't have to spend developer hours making sure that every different chipset and processor and hard drive combination, etc. will work with their OS. So they spend their time on design and making things pretty and easy - because the hardware will work with the software - it's designed that way. Apple is, at it's heart, a hardware company. That's what they sell, and that's how they make a profit - not on software. Whether it be Macs, iPods, or iPhones, Apple sells primarly hardware.
To Apple's credit, they built OS X, their modern OS, on top of an open source base, called Darwin. It is UNIX, and provides an extraordinarily robust and secure underpinning for their user interface. That was a smart move. But, of course, their user interface is proprietary. Apple is still the leader in providing DRMed music to the world, and any application that runs on the iPhone has to be vetted by them, and has to fulfill certain criteria. They continue to make a profit using a standard proprietary software model. And as an open source advocate, that gives me pause.
However, Linux on the desktop (at least in the US) hasn't caught on, and isn't, in all honesty, anywhere near being able to compete with either Windows or Mac OS in terms of usability except for specific kinds of uses (at the low and high ends, like email/web stations and kiosks, or as workstations for developers - although tons of developers also use Macs.) And I can do more, and do it faster and easier on a Mac, so that's what I'm sticking with.
Would I like Apple to be different? Yup. Do I expect it? Nope. Because Apple will always (I think) be selling proprietary and premium products, I don't think they won't ever be in the position Microsoft is - as a monopoly. I don't necessarily think that they would behave much differently than MS in that position (although they'd likely do it with more style.)
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