Posts by Techwriter10

I agree about Bing. I think the numbers we are seeing are curiosity about a new entry fueled by a very expensive media campaign. I'm not sure that bandwidth matters for most people using a broadband connections (or that Yahoo! is that bad in any event), but I can't wait to see the next round of market share stats and see if anyone's numbers have moved.

Today Yahoo! is releasing a new version of its search tool with many changes. This is significant for a number of reasons:

• Yahoo! has been in the news lately mostly as Microsoft's take-over target. The make-over provides the company with a news opportunity that's actually about an upgrade to their venerable search product.
• Secondly up until now Yahoo! has confined its home-page links to internal Yahoo! services. The new version provides a way to link to third party services.
• Finally they've devised a way to keep you on their site while updating information on your social media tools; a smart move on their part.

Not Just Microsoft's Plaything

Yahoo! is not sitting around like some pathetic loner waiting for someone to call for a date on Saturday night. It continues to be an independent company and this shows it's still viable. Microsoft may have set its sights on Yahoo!, and word is an ad deal could be imminent (as I wrote in Microsoft and Yahoo! Would Be Better Together), but it doesn't mean they are just sitting pat. In fact, that they continue to improve the product makes them even more attractive to a potential suitor at some point, and while I still believe a combined Microsoft and Yahoo! would be the best thing for each company, it doesn't mean that another unknown admirer couldn't be lurking in the shadows waiting to pounce.

Opening Up to Social Media

The …

Hi:
Thanks for the comment and for directing me to some additional resources. I have read eBooks on the iPhone, but I find the screen a bit too small for prolonged reading.

Thanks again for your thoughts.

Ron

Thanks for your thoughts, although I think you might be dreaming at those requirements, especially if you want the latest releases. As for ODF and PDF, I think that we need a eBook standard, preferably in XML, that is written specifically and tuned for books and all the elements we expect in books.

Last week Amazon did something despicable. They violated the privacy of every Kindle user when without warning they remotely deleted copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from Kindle Readers. It seems that Amazon had determined these books had been purchased "illegally." (The irony of choosing these particular books goes without saying.)

This set off a firestorm of protest and criticism aimed directly at Amazon and raised some very serious questions about electronic books (and electronic content) in general. If it could be deleted or even altered, what could that do to the integrity of the written word?

My colleague Steve J Vaughn-Nichols, a writer whom I've written about many times in the past thinks this is grounds for never buying another eBook. I'm not sure it warrants a reaction that strong (although I certainly understand it), but it does say something about what can happen when large corporations like Amazon have complete control of our content.

Who's Content is it Anyway?

When you buy a paper book, you own it, period end. Neither the publisher nor the book seller can come to your house and alter, delete or take it from you. It's yours. When you buy something in digital form, however, what you are buying typically is a license to use the content. Unlike the paper book, you don't own it in a concrete sense. Many of us who have grown up with the paper variety, find this power …

It's not always easy,
And sometimes life can be deceiving,
I'll tell you one thing, its always better when we're together
~Jack Johnson, Better Together

News leaked out this morning on the All Things Digital Blog (and subsequently widely carried by the New York Times, PC Mag Online, Wired and so forth) that Microsoft officials were in Silicon Valley today to meet with Yahoo! and finally hammer out a deal.

The two companies have been doing a dance since Spring, 2008. The talks began, the talks ended and rumors flew, but the two organizations remained separate. In the interim, Microsoft released its new search engine Bing and made some progress in the search market, but no matter how well Bing may do, it can't gain as much search engine market share as it could get by simply joining forces with Yahoo!.

Not An Outright Purchase

Whatever happens, and these are just rumors right now, all pointing to that one All Things Digital blog post, all things point to an ad agreement, which would be an easy way to get the ball rolling. Google's total domination in the search engine advertising market is overwhelming to the two companies. Perhaps if they put their collective businesses together, they could make a respectable dent in Google's monumental market share. It's never clear how these deals will go, but it's certain that neither company offers the power they get from a …

I have news for you, I own an iPhone. My wife owns a Samsung Propel and she uses iTunes. It's just a tool to process video and MP3 files. You don't need to use an iPhone or an Ipod to use iTunes, and it's in Apple's best financial interest to make it available to everyone who wants to use it because there's a good chance if they are using iTunes, they're visiting the iTunes store.

It was revealed yesterday that Apple began blocking Palm Pre users from syncing with iTunes. Apparently the latest upgrade, which I installed just this morning won't allow Pre users to sync with their phones.

Seriously, Apple? Are you really going to be this petty? Do you really feel this threatened by another company's phone that you would sink to blocking the ability to sync?

Who Are You Hurting Ultimately?

Some days the colossal stupidity of these large corporations astounds me. It really does. As a blogger, I peruse the web on a daily basis looking for ideas, for situations to which I can react, but when a company like Apple does something this monumentally self-destructive, it just makes it too easy.

Apple makes literally billions of dollars from the iTunes store. It's one of their cash cows. iTunes is just a piece of software for organizing your MP3 files. It doesn't care if you use a Palm Pre or an iPhone or Samsung Propel.

As I wrote yesterday about Microsoft in a similar vein, when you sell software and services, you tend to be hardware neutral, and this is even truer now that Apple has removed DRM from its music on the iTunes Store. What this does is tell a large swath of users that you don't care about them, that you are going to let pettiness overcome good business sense. Not what I would ever expect from a smart company like Apple

When Microsoft first announced their retail strategy back in February I wrote a post called Microsoft Retail Strategy Doomed to Fail and I haven't changed my view. Today, it became clear that in the face of all common sense they are continuing to push forward with this wrong-headed idea.

Remember, Microsoft sells mostly software except for the Zunes (which haven't been exactly flying off the shelves) and XBox 360s. The strategy with software around Azure and Office 2010 for the web appears to be headed for the Cloud. So why would they need to sell cloud software out of a brick and mortar store front?

What's next? A Google Store? This is beginning to sound a lot like a Saturday Night Live skit.

Competing With Apple

Of all the bone-headed ideas this company has come up with to compete with Apple, this seriously the lamest one yet. The ads haven't worked, so now they are going to put Microsoft stores in the proximity (sometimes next to) Apple Stores. I can tell you right now that going head to head against Apple is a bad idea. Will they sell Microsoft branded PCs? I doubt it. I'm trying to figure out what they will do, other than make monumental fools of themselves.

Destroying Momentum and Opening Themselves to Ridicule

Microsoft has managed to get some positive publicity in the last 30 days or so, mostly around …

I think you're mixing up the free online version and the regular desktop version. The desktop version will still cost a lot of money.

Nicely said and I agree. It would be next to impossible to completely reinvent itself and I don't expect that, but I would like the tools to do my job and MS is just giving me eye candy.

Thanks for the great comment.

Ron

I read a blog post this morning on the Mini-Microsoft blog called Microsoft Has Turned the Corner and it got me wondering if they really have, or if it was merely wishful thinking on the part of the author. Then I saw that Microsoft had released Office 2010 videos and there was a lot of typical first-day hype around my social networks. The machine was in motion, so I decided to go along for the ride and see what there was to see. Although I went in really wanting to be dazzled, I wasn't. What I saw was more bells and whistles and not much else.

Bigger is Not Better

Much to my chagrin, the intro videos required Silverlight to view, but being a curious journalist I put aside my dislike of being forced to download new software to view a silly video (what's wrong with Flash anyway) and went along. I really wanted to see what this was about and if it was worth my concern. As I recently wrote in Moving on From Microsoft Office, there are lots of alternatives out there. Microsoft senses that and is looking to get the masses revved up for one more release.

Frankly, when I watched the Word video, I was disappointed. What I saw was the product manager bragging about fancy font effects and cool chart tools. Not what I want from my word processor, but thanks all the same. I'm not …

I think actually Chrome will be even simpler based on the descriptions. It's job as I understand is to get you to the browser and get you online. There will be very little in the way of customization or even an OS as we traditionally think about it. I'm not convinced that the Asus form of Linux failed because it was too simple, but that's an interesting idea.

Thanks again for the comment.

Ron

At the end of May, Computerworld reported that Asus, one of the early Netbook success stories had all but given up on Linux Netbooks. This was telling because the Asus Eee (of which I own one) has a very nice, simple-to-navigate interface. It starts up fairly quickly and has long battery life, but even the simple tabbed interface was apparently too hard for users raised on Windows. It got me thinking, if this simple version of Linux failed, how will Google's Chrome OS, inspired by Linux fare any better?

Linux is a Tough Sell

Even though it will carry a Google Chrome OS label, at its core, it will be Linux. Nothing wrong with that, but consumers have rejected that proposition before. Just because it carries Google's name is no guarantee that consumers will embrace it any more than they did on other attempts to package desktop Linux.

I also own an HP Mini running Windows XP. It has all of the issues you would expect with a Windows machine.

It starts up slowly. It hangs for no reason. It eats battery surprisingly quickly. My Asus Eee on the other hand running Linux is rock solid. It has occasional issues, but for the most part runs fairly well. Yet people seem to trust the devil they know. They are more comfortable with Microsoft Windows for whatever reason and I'm not sure even Google's brand name is going to …

I've speculated in the past that nothing could keep Google from moving Android from a phone to a computer. After all a phone is just a hand-held computer, so it should come as no surprise that Google officially announced yesterday that it was getting in the computer operating system business with a new OS, initially targeted for the Netbook some time next year.

Meanwhile, TechCrunch reported yesterday that the free version of Google Apps, that's the corporate package of Google Docs, Gmail and so forth, is no longer being offered offered on the Google Apps page. If you want it, you have to pony up $50/user/year. This can't be a coincidence.

All the while, Bing is making waves (at least they are gently lapping at the shore) and Microsoft deepens its plans to take its show into the cloud. What the heck is going on here?

Google Goes for the Desktop

I've always maintained that the underlying OS on a netbook doesn't matter. All you really need is a browser and an internet connection and you're good to go. That's essentially the philosophy behind Chrome OS. The idea according the official Google Blog post announcing the new venture is to create a light-weight operating system. Get to your browser, get on the web, get out of the way. Sounds ideal for netbook use, but you do need a little more than that.

Unless the Netbook comes with a celluar …

My colleague Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols waxed nostalgically on Monday in his Computerworld Cyber Cynic blog about CompuServe, the long-time service that shut down recently, and which Vaughan-Nichols says he's going to miss. As much as I like SJVN, I have to say good riddance to old technology. It long outlived its time and I'm frankly surprised it lasted this long.

Back in the Day

As Vaughan-Nichols pointed out, in the early 90s, before any of us became aware of a concept known as the World Wide Web, we used services like CompuServe and AOL to communicate with one another on the Internet. In fact, I jumped on board this band wagon in around '93 and went the AOL route. I wanted an email address to communicate with my tech writing clients (and I wanted to be on top of things).

If I must wax nostalgically with my colleague, my first modem was a 300 baud and I used it to send files to a client in the late 80s. By the time AOL came along, I'm guessing I was zipping along at 2400 baud rate.

I chose AOL because it let me have a human-readable email address (rsmiller@aol.com) where as Compuserve used geeky numbers like 72407,334. I think it was supposed to protect your privacy, but it always seemed silly to me from a business perspective. After about a year, I tired of AOL, and its automatic updates that tied up …

Thanks for the comment. I had seen that Get a Mac ad. They are really funny and a great example of what I'm talking about. I agree that Microsoft needs to find their own voice and capture people the way these ads have.

Thanks again for commenting.

Ron

Over the last year, Microsoft ads have been simply bad on one end of the spectrum and horrible on the other. It's really time for the company to reconsider their ad agency choices and their overall strategy because right now they are throwing good money after bad. I had one friend who described the ads aptly when he said, "It's strange how tone deaf they remain."

Let's review (in the words of Genesis), the grand parade of lifeless packaging:

Puking Women

The latest in the series of disasters that have been Microsoft ads was pulled last week because people were offended by a woman vomiting three times in a surprisingly realistic portrayal. The ad for Internet Explorer 8 was only available online and it still lives on YouTube if you want to see it. I actually found it mildly amusing in an offensive 7th-grade humor kind of way, but you can see how people wouldn't be drawn to the product after enduring images such as this. My friend and socmedia101.com business partner Julie Roads responded after seeing this ad, "I don't get it." That's unfortunately a typical response to just about every ad from Microsoft over the last year.

Bing Bang Boom

Then there are the Bing ads. The Cure for Search Overload ads; I watch them and I have the same reaction as Roads. I don't get them. Watch this example for …

In the final days of a failing model, old media made one last futile attempt to save its fading way of life by trying to expand copyright law to exclude fair use and linking.

Just this morning, my DaniWeb colleague, Sharon Fisher wrote a post called This Blog Post Could Be Illegal. Seems Richard Posner, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago has written a blog post of his own (note the irony here) that copyright should be expanded to bar access to any copyrighted material without the copyright holders express consent and to ban linking and even paraphrasing copyrighted material. Meanwhile Connie Shultz wrote a post on the Cleveland Plains Dealer web site also suggesting that tighter copyright laws could save newspapers (Do I dare link back to her article?).

Copyright is Not the Problem

If the Digital Millennium Copyright Act didn't save old media, it's hard to picture how further copyright expansion could help. John Blossom, president of Shore Communications, Inc. and author of the book Content Nation says attempting to juryrig the copyright laws is not an appropriate way to deal the problem. Blossom explains that copyright laws were first conceived to enable the then-fledgling publishing industry to be able to sustain the dissemination of ideas and information that would benefit society. "In essence," he says, "copyright is a temporary monopoly that enables a rights holder …

How come I can't let go?
I'm between two worlds
~Tom Petty, Between Two Worlds

As I watched vendors navigate the changing software world last week at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston, it struck me that the old companies are trying desperately to hold onto to the markets they have dominated for so long. I listened as executives from IBM, EMC and Microsoft tried their best to convince everyone that despite their old-world pedigrees (or perhaps because of them), they were the best choice for facing the new world of Enterprise 2.0, collaboration and sharing. To be fair, all three companies have introduced products and services in an effort to compete in this shifting world, but as I listened to them I couldn't help but feel they were between two worlds unable to make that final leap into the future.

Collaboration is the Key

BusinessWeek has a very interesting article which will be its July 6th cover story called Microsoft Defends its Empire. It's an apt name because Microsoft faces threats from many venues and while it is still a rich and viable organization, it has huge challenges ahead. Among those is addressing the increasingly collaborative way we work. One theme that came up continually at Enterprise 2.0 was the idea that we are moving away from the focus on the individual worker and more on the group.

Further we are moving away from the idea of a document-centric environment …

On June 15th, less than two weeks ago, the Apple Insider blog reported that Apple sales continued slipping in May. Mac sales were down, perhaps not as much as expected but still down, and more surprising, the previously recession-proof iPod sales were falling. Could it be that the economy was catching up with Apple?

But no, because that was May sales and as you no doubt know, Apple released a shiny upgrade to the iPhone called iPhone 3GS and sold a cool million of them in the first weekend. Talk about a quick rebound.

People Want These Things

One thing is clear, Apple still hasn't lost its touch (pun intended) when it comes to giving the people what they want. Three years after the launch of the original iPhone, people were still waiting in line outside Apple and AT&T stores to be among the first to get an iPhone 3GS. Ars Technica reports that analysts were predicting first weekend sales of between 500,000 and 700,000 units. Apple beat that and kept on running. It's not clear how Apple does it, but they have the most loyal group of enthusiasts round.

Author and marketing expert Seth Godin has said mass marketing is dead, that what you want is a core of enthusiastic true believers who carry the word about your product to the world. Apple actually encompasses both extremes, a mass market with a large core group …

Speaking about consumer search last week, Steve Ballmer said he now regrets that Microsoft quote "didn't start earlier" unquote. But it seems to me that Microsoft has been all in for a long time and they just haven't been very successful at consumer search. It wasn't so much they gave in, as consumers simply preferred Google. It's unclear if Bing can change that in spite of Ballmer and Microsoft's best efforts to convince us otherwise.

Did They Give Up or Get Rolled Over?

According to searchenginehistory.com Google launched in 1998 and Microsoft launched its first search offering MSN Search the same year. While Google relied on its own algorithms to generate results, Microsoft used other companies' search engine technology until 2004 when they began using their own. From this perspective, I suppose Ballmer is accurate, but in the 5 years since Microsoft began using its own technology to generate results, it hasn't gotten very far.

They have rebranded a number of times, but never with much success. Now they are really, really serious with Bing, or so we are lead to believe. They are at the very least willing to invest huge sums of money to the tune of $100 million trying to convince us that Bing should be our search engine.

Early Success Out of the Gate

People seem to be jumping on Bing's early success, but even if Bing succeeded over the next year in …

Thanks for you comment and your compliment. I appreciate it.

Ron

One of the big rules of online advertising as I understand it is that you count success to a great extent based on how many people click through to your site. It's really the basis of how people get paid by Google for Google AdSense. If you get click-throughs you get paid and advertisers pay Google based on this number, but a new study has found that there is value in people simply seeing the ads, so long as the person is fully engaged with the content and there is some contextual relationship between the content and the ads.

Hasn't This Always Been So?

When I read this, my first thought was this is always how newspapers and magazines have sold ads. There's no clicking through in print. You simply have an ad right there with the content and there's no way of knowing whether anyone glanced at it or paid attention to it, but if enough people (or the right people) bought the publication it could command high ad rates. John Blossom, president of Shore Communications, Inc and author of the book Content Nation, says this research shows there can be a similar dynamic online (which only makes sense).

"This research confirms that contextual search ads can be a valuable opportunity for building brands when those ads appear next to content that is helping people to solve problems through search. In such a moment of immediate gratification for …

Hi:
Thanks for the comment. I agree. I don't need the picture either, I'm there for the results as fast as I can get them. Bing does have some nice touches, but as I wrote Google has such control of the market that it's going to be very difficult for Microsoft to even make a dent.

Thanks again for commenting.

Ron

I've seen a lot of love for Microsoft's newly branded search engine, Bing lately and frankly I just don't get it. Bing landed a couple of weeks ago with a huge ad budget (as I wrote in Microsoft Ad Wars Turn to Google) and a big splash, but I've used it and I don't see anything new here, but a pretty interface. Why are some people falling all over themselves to say how great they think it is?

Decisions, Decisions

Microsoft has decided that search engine wasn't an adequate term, so they came up with the much catchier name "decision engine." Do you get it? It helps you make decisions. They determined that most people search for four things: shopping, travel, health and local search and they are attempting to make it easier to do that. I've looked at this and I'm not sure why I would use Bing for shopping, travel or health since I've got that covered on other sites.

Local search could be an area, however, where Bing could shine, except when I did a local search for car insurance near my home town, I got a set of results that looked just about the same as the results that I get from Google, so where exactly is my motivation to change? Could it be a pretty, shiny interface?

Pretty, Shiny Things

One thing Microsoft has done well here is wrap Bing in a pretty wrapper, putting …

Sherri McLeish from Forrester reports that 80 percent of enterprise customers still use Microsoft Office. While this is down significantly from the 95 percent reported in this 2006 BusinessWeek article, it still makes me wonder why so many companies would continue to use Microsoft Office given the current economy and the number of lower-cost or free alternatives.

Did Office 2007 Change Things?

For years Office used the menu/toolbar, metaphor that so many of us have grown up using. There's nothing wrong with change per se, but when Microsoft moved to the ribbon metaphor a couple of years ago, they changed the way people interact with the software completely (as I wrote in Office 2007 Review: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back in my by Ron Miller blog). That meant the new version required companies to train their users to find the things they had previously understood instinctively.

That could account for why Microsoft lost 15 percent in market share between 2006 and 2009 (if you trust these numbers; but for the sake of argument, let's say they're accurate). Companies might have decided 'if we're investing in an entirely new approach and we have to train our users anyway, why don't we look at some alternatives.' I don't know for sure that's what happened, but it would make sense.

Viable Alternatives

Even before the release of Office 2007, there were numerous options such as Google Docs and

Apple kicked off its annual World Wide Developer's Conference on Monday, and it proved something very important; it could generate plenty of excitement without Steve Jobs on stage.

I know that I along with many others watch with anticipation as live bloggers on the scene gave us the blow by blow of each announcement; and with each one--the new lower priced Mac Book Pros, the iPhone 3Gs, the $99 iPhone and the $29 Snow Leopard upgrade--you could watch the buzz rise across Twitter, across the blogosphere. It simply didn't matter that Jobs wasn't up on stage delivering the news. It wasn't about who gave the news; it was about the news itself.

This is an extremely important development for a company that has lived and died by the cult of personality around its fearless leader. Jobs by all reports will be back at the helm sometime this summer, but his time off should put to rest once and for the notion that Apple will somehow fall apart when Jobs eventually retires.

Jobs is a Force

Those of us who have been around long enough, remember a time when Apple was not what it is today. Back in the mid-90s, they were adrift with little direction when Apple executives at the time made a good decision; they bought co-founder Steve Jobs' company NeXT computers and brought Jobs back to the helm. At the time, there was a small committed group of …

As usual Apple put on quite a show at the WWDC 09 Keynote on Monday, but what struck me was the undercurrent of derision for its exclusive carrier AT&T. Tucked in among the big announcements of faster, cheaper Mac Books, $29 Snow Leopard upgrades, the long rumored $99 iPhone and of course the all shiny new iPhone 3GS, was this little bit of tension between Apple and AT&T.

It reminded me of the tension you might sense in a couple not long before they break up. They might not be openly hostile to each other, but you get the sense they are getting in their little digs couched in polite dinner table conversation. Let's put it this way, if Apple and AT&T were a couple their Facebook status probably changed on Monday to "It's Complicated."

So Many New Goodies to Behold

There were lots of wonderful announcements on Monday. The long awaited video iPhone arrived with long sought features such as cut and paste, full phone search and landscape mode across major applications. You heard a chorus of huzzahs go out across the land from all the fat fingered iPhone users because their lives just got a little bit easier, but perhaps the most exciting of all the exciting announcements was the ability to tether your iPhone to your laptop when you couldn't get a WiFi connection. Oh but sorry, AT&T isn't supporting this feature until at least next summer. The …

I'm not so sure I would take it quite that far. There is room for machines with a hard drive in this category, but I would agree that the idea is that you use cloud-based apps for the most part. As someone who owns one and uses it on the road, I can tell you that internet access is sometimes uneven and it would be very inconvenient if didn't have any hard drive.

Thanks for the comment.

Ron

That might be the case except the link you sent me indicates the dispute was settled. It's an interesting theory, but I think it's pretty clear that this about selling more copies of Windows 7 than it is about being legally prudent.

Thanks for reading and for taking the time to leave a comment.

Ron

Hi Paul:
Thanks for the comment and feel free to nit pick. :-)

You're certainly correct. It's about spin whatever angle you want to take on it.

Thanks again for taking the time to read my post and leave a comment.

Ron

Ah, Microsoft, that crazy company from Redmond, WA is at again. This time they want to rename the Netbook unilaterally to the...drum roll please..."low cost small notebook PC."

As first reported in the Digitimes last week, Microsoft decided on their own that the name was not appropriate and they were renaming it. I'm fairly sure they didn't consult with the rest of the industry about this change, but hey they're Microsoft right? They can do whatever they please. Of course, it doesn't mean the rest of the world has to go along.

Same Old Song and Dance

I doubt very much that anyone was actually looking for a new name, certainly not Intel, the company selling the chips to power these machines, which actually coined the term. This is after all a hardware issue and the last I looked Microsoft doesn't actually make PCs, but why should that stop them from trying to force an entire industry to bow to their considerable will.

Even if the Netbook industry were looking for a new name, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be from the succinct "Netbook" to the mouthful of "Low cost small notebook PC." Sure, that rolls off the tongue and should make the folks who write the marketing copy very happy.

It's Really About Selling Windows 7

Digitimes reports that Steven Guggenheimer, corporate vice president, Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) Division, Microsoft said the Netbook name suggests it's only for internet use and …

The iPhone faces a critical test this month with several factors coming together to threaten the dominance of the popular smart phone. First of all there's the Pre, a shiny new comer that threatens to overtake Apple's cool factor when it's released by Sprint this month (as I wrote about in Are You Ready for a Thing Called Pre). RIM and their Blackberry series surpassed the mighty iPhone in first quarter sales figures according market research firm NPD. Not only that, Nokia just opened an App Store and all the players are following suit after the great success of the Apple App Store (as I wrote in 1B Downloads Later: My 5 Favorite iPhone Apps).

With these factors in place (and probably others I'm not seeing), Apple will in all likelihood announce its new generation of iPhone next week at the Word Wide Developers Conference. The question out there is: have they hit a wall with iPhone popularity or will they offer enough compelling new functionality to make people want to buy or upgrade to the latest phone?

Oh That Pretty Pre Thing

There's a ton of hype surrounding the release of the Pre, which is set to be released this weekend on June 6th. We are not seeing lines yet outside of Sprint phone stores that we saw in the week prior to the release of the first two generations of the iPhone. So far, only …

Tbeek:
Nobody is denying its potential to be a very powerful app, but there are still open questions beyond seeing every keystroke and it it's worth having a discussion about the pros and cons of this approach.

Thanks for the comment.

Ron

Thanks for your extremely thoughtful analysis, Greg. I'm sure it's worth far more than 2 cents.

I appreciate you taking the time to leave such a lengthy and thoughtful comment.

Ron

Hi Imma:
Thanks for taking the time to comment and give me your thoughts. I think it's a little different than most real life communication. It has the potential to be more like the commodity's exchange with people all talking at once than it does a polite classroom where everyone waits their turn, or at least that's the danger. It will likely be a combination of both.

Perhaps you're right and the masses will cling to the Email/IM features and business will latch onto the collaboration parts. Regardless, I can't wait to see how it works and what parts people will use. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out in the months ahead.

Thanks again for your comment.

Ron

Hi Bruce:
Thanks for the link. Nice site.

Ron

Koopman,
Thanks for the comment. It may look similar to you and clearly takes from several different models, but I think if you look closely that the way they are implementing Wave is new and different from anything that came before it. It encompasses parts of IRC, but it's much more than that and what's different is the ability to collaborate in real time that it brings. Whether it can overcome the potential noise and become useful to many remains to be seen, but there is little doubt that it's interesting and the fact it's open source leaves open lots of possiblities.

In spite of my reservations, I still can't wait to see it in action.

Ron

Thanks for including the link on your post. I guess great minds think a like. :-)

Ron

Hi Synrath:
I'm not forgetting your point at all. i realize it's a very preliminary snap shot, you're right that the idea is more than worthwhile, but I do think Google gets into these things for a reason, and it's not for a few geeks to enjoy the technology. It's because they see if it scales and grows, they can make more ad money. So if it's not accessible, and it's nothing more than a cool programming experiment, I don't think they will have achieved their goal, but I think in the end it will indeed be much more than that.

Thanks for commenting.

Ron

Jason,
You make excellent points. The idea of a communications system minus the spam is a compelling one, on that point alone, and this is so much more than that. I'm not denying it's amazing technology. I've made that point throughout. I'm just pushing back at the preliminary gushing and hype and trying to find the areas of weakness. I haven't used this software. I've only seen the demo of the end user portion of it. I agree it has tremendous potential and I'm certainly not suggesting that they don't try. I think the fact they've been able to get this far with it is very impressive, but it doesn't mean there aren't questions we shouldn't be asking throughout the process to help improve it and help the developers fill in possible holes that could develop. Thanks for the great comment.

Ron

FYI I watched the first 40 minutes because it provided a demonstration of the end user functionality, which was what interested me for the purposes of this post. The rest of the video was on web development tools and ways to build the programmatic links. I will watch those sections and write about that part of the functionality in another post.

Ron

Hi Julie:
Great point. People will need to be taught how to use this tool effectively, wisely and well. Lots of potential, but like any tool, in the wrongs hands it could be dangerous. :-)

Ron

Lots of talk about Google Wave last week, but after reading five articles that all described it in a similar fashion, I still didn't quite get what all the fuss was about. Finally, at the behest of one of my online friends I looked at the first 40 minutes of the 1 hour and 20 minute presentation from last week's Google I/O conference, and I finally had an inkling of the potential.

I still didn't quite share the enthusiasm at first glance of Tim O'Reilly or Mashable's Ben Parr, both of whom saw the whole presentation, and believe that this could be game changing software. Although I certainly can see its potential, I can also see some potential problems that I think we should discuss before pronouncing this a crowning achievement.

What It Is In a Nut Shell

What this software does is provide a unified communication interface, and believe me, I'm not dismissing that lightly. Think of it at its most basic level as a way to view IM and email in a unified interface in real time, right down to seeing individual keystrokes as you type if you wish. What's more, you can also share and collaborate from the same interface, so think of having Google Docs built in to the same interface, with real-time collaboration and editing capabilities including the ability to add items like photos and even enabling your colleague to …

It's never a dull moment when it comes to Google, Microsoft and Apple (which is why I write about them so much), and this week Google and Microsoft made some big announcements.

For Google, it was Google Wave, an incredibly hyped new communications interface (more on that it in a moment). From Microsoft, it was the HD Zune and Bing, its new search engine (which I wrote about just the other day in Microsoft Ad Wars Turn to Google).

The New HD Zune

I've been as derisive as the next guy when it comes to the Zune and sales of Microsoft's answer to the iPod have been abysmal (as I wrote in Zune and iPod: The Tale of Two MP3 Players), but at first glance, this new Zune looks pretty cool. You can watch a video of it in action in this AppleInsider post, which called it the "better than the iPod Touch."

That may be engaging in a bit of hyperbole. It's always best to take a wait and see approach with Microsoft until you get your hands on one, but judging from this video, it has a very nice interface. Unfortunately, the video quality was not good enough to see the HD display in detail and that could be a huge differentiator.

But as I wrote about Microsoft's attempts to catch Google, they are so far behind Apple in MP3 player market share …

Hi Phil:
Thanks for the comment and for helping us understand this decision. I still think you would be better off sticking with XP and starting to test the Win 7 Public Beta now.

Thanks for the comment. I see what you're saying, but this announcement involved a blanket upgrade for 700K desktop machines. At this point, they would be better off staying put in my opinion, rather than upgrading to Vista/Office 2007, which will involve a huge change in the way they operate because Office 2007 uses the ribbon and it will likely require a lot of training to make the transition. If I were making recommendations, I would use this as an opportunity to reevaluate the desktop system and see if there were a percentage that could be switched to Linux/OpenOffice. If you're training anyway, might as well do it with a lower cost option. Plus I'm willing to bet many users would be more comfortable in the menu/toolbar world of OpenOffice than in the new ribbon of Office.

But it's interesting to hear about your experience using other systems and I'm sure that's the case throughout the military for larger systems when you get beyond the desktop.

Hi:
Thanks for the comment and for sharing your experience. That's what I'm learning and private sector companies can learn from this especially when military personnel share their experiences at conferences like the ones I've seen recently.

I've been to a couple of conferences recently where I was surprised to see representatives of the U.S. military on panels discussing various uses of technology, but I was shocked to learn that the military was on the cutting edge of the technologies being discussed. To be honest, my perception of the military would be more in line with the recent announcement that US Army was updating its 700,000 desktops at the end year, not with Windows 7 and Office 2010, but with Vista and Office 2007.

So how is it that the military can be by turns cutting edge and clueless?

Military Gets Social

At the AIIM conference in Philadelphia recently, I watched a CIO panel discuss various technology topics. When the discussion turned to social media, I was taken aback when the military representative, James Whitlock, Lt. Col., U.S. Air Force Medical, seemed to understand the most and the private sector representatives the least. Indeed, David Meerman Scott (whom I interviewed in Don't Spread a Virus, Catch a World Wide Rave), has written extensively about the Air Force's use of social media including this piece called The US Air Force and Social Media. A Discussion with Colonel Michael Caldwell.

Scott is clearly impressed with the way the Air Force has embraced social media and he wonders (quite rightly in my view) why some large corporations are so afraid of it:

I was impressed with how deeply the …