07.11.08
Posted in General Rant at 10:03 am by Administrator
Nah, nah, nah, nah! Told you so.
Once again, the in-store ONLY activation plan - the Steve Jobs my-way-or-the-highway method of activating the phone - has crashed and burned - exactly as I predicted yesterday.
The whole idea of in-store only activation was to prevent people from buying the phone, going home, hacking it, and then switching providers. Because, the thought went, if you did that - you would be locked in to the AT&T contract and at the minimum you would have to pay the difference between the subsidized price and the retail price as well as an early termination fee to AT&T.
Sounds great! Good idea!
If only it worked.
Almost immediately the activation servers at Apple went down due to such a huge surge in traffic from such a huge surge in demand for the new iPhone.
That, in turn, took down the other servers that were serving up the iPhone 2.0 update software for iPod Touch and iPhone 1.0 people trying to update to the new software.
THAT, in turn, took down the iTunes store.
Well, if you’re going to crash and burn - you might as well do it all the way!
Nothing like working for 6 months to hype a new product, build demand, build feverish anticipation and actually get people to stand in line to buy the thing - only to fail at the last 10 feet of service. Even in my suburbian town we have an AT&T store on the way to the office, so I thought I’d stop by (about 8:15am PST) to see what the reaction would be. I expected a handful of the faithful waiting in line.
There was about 175 people snaking a line all the way around the building. I didn’t even have the courage to go into the parking lot. Our office is right across the street from a mall that has an Apple Store in it. I didn’t even bother going to see how many people were there.
What a bummer it must be to be an IT hack over at Apple Corporate today! I can only imagine how many people are getting fired on the spot in a patented Steve Jobs tirade.
The good news is - they now get to work all weekend long (FREE pizza! FREE RedBull!)… and get the opportunity to be under the entire world’s microscope. I sure hope they brought a sleeping bag and a change of clothes…
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Posted in General Rant at 10:02 am by Administrator
Well, the iPhone 2.0 goes on sale tomorrow in the US - and if the response is anything as big as it was in London and Hong Kong - tomorrow is going to be a banner day for iPhone and AT&T.
Or not.
My prediction is that everything is going to go horribly wrong - and that servers will crash (like they did for the big Firefox download) - and that people will go home with a nice looking brick that they won’t be able to activate for a day or two.
But hey - I’m always Mr. Glass-Half-Full. It might work wonderfully well with happy iPhone people holding hands and singing “It’s a Small World After All” as they gleefully walk out of the stores with fully functioning and activated phones.
Regardless of whether they’re activated or not - there will be certain places where the Mac faithful will stand in line, and there will be the usual reviews and “unboxing” videos from people with nothing better to do made expressly for other people with nothing better to do.
The larger picture here is that Apple has managed to create such a huge demand for a here-to-fore commodity device - a cell phone - that people everywhere are talking about it, writing about it, standing in line for it, and have been waiting with bated breath just for the opportunity to spend money to buy one!
Brilliant!
The iPhone isn’t the best-equipped, or most feature-rich, or have the best camera, or have built-in turn-by-turn GPS, or even have copy/paste! But it does have a few things that other companies, try though they may, are not even close to:
- First move advantage
- Excellent industrial design
- Excellent GUI design
- Stuff that’s included just works
- Revenue model for sustained growth beyond just a kickback on airtime
I have to hand it to Apple - they seem to have a winner on their hands - a 2.0 sequel that about 100% better than the first revision - and they created it, marketed it, hyped it and delivered it about 370 days after the launch of the first one.
That’s remarkable for a company the size of Apple. My hat’s off to you guys.
We’ll see how the implementation goes tomorrow…
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07.10.08
Posted in General Rant at 9:31 am by Administrator
Well, the iPhone 2.0 goes on sale tomorrow in the US - and if the response is anything as big as it was in London and Hong Kong - tomorrow is going to be a banner day for iPhone and AT&T.
Or not.
My prediction is that everything is going to go horribly wrong - and that servers will crash (like they did for the big Firefox download) - and that people will go home with a nice looking brick that they won’t be able to activate for a day or two.
But hey - I’m always Mr. Glass-Half-Full. It might work wonderfully well with happy iPhone people holding hands and singing “It’s a Small World After All” as they gleefully walk out of the stores with fully functioning and activated phones.
Regardless of whether they’re activated or not - there will be certain places where the Mac faithful will stand in line, and there will be the usual reviews and “unboxing” videos from people with nothing better to do made expressly for other people with nothing better to do.
The larger picture here is that Apple has managed to create such a huge demand for a here-to-fore commodity device - a cell phone - that people everywhere are talking about it, writing about it, standing in line for it, and have been waiting with bated breath just for the opportunity to spend money to buy one!
Brilliant!
The iPhone isn’t the best-equipped, or most feature-rich, or have the best camera, or have built-in turn-by-turn GPS, or even have copy/paste! But it does have a few things that other companies, try though they may, are not even close to:
- First move advantage
- Excellent industrial design
- Excellent GUI design
- Stuff that’s included just works
- Revenue model for sustained growth beyond just a kickback on airtime
I have to hand it to Apple - they seem to have a winner on their hands - a 2.0 sequel that about 100% better than the first revision - and they created it, marketed it, hyped it and delivered it about 370 days after the launch of the first one.
That’s remarkable for a company the size of Apple. My hat’s off to you guys.
We’ll see how the implementation goes tomorrow…
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07.09.08
Posted in General Rant at 9:12 am by Administrator
Last night I watched the movie “Live Free or Die Hard” - the next sequel to the Bruce Willis “Die Hard” series. While I’m a fan of car-chase-action-all-the-way movies - this one had a couple of twists in it that got me thinking about the Mac vs. PC debate.
Twisted logic, I know - but bear with me.
Justin Long, better known as “I’m a Mac” in the Apple ads, is the co-protagonist along with Bruce Willis. Willis plays the part of - well - John McClane - the “I’m just a cop doing my job but I kick bad guy ass by accident” and Long plays the part of Matt Farrell - a twenty-something hacker.
The basic story goes like this: Farrell is wanted by the FBI because there’s been a FBI computer breach. John is assigned to bring him in. As it turns out - Farrell is one of a bunch of hackers who are wanted for questioning and who are being hunted by bad guy Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant).
Gabriel and his crew plan to shut down the US infrastructure and grab a bunch of money in the process - over the 4th of July weekend. I won’t bore you with the details - but if you get a chance to check it out for yourself - it’s a pretty good flick. But that’s not the point of this post.
As I was watching this movie - I kept seeing the Farrell hacker character as a Mac. Really. It was weird.
All his actions; his speech; what he did and didn’t do; his attitudes - I filtered through the “I’m a Mac” persona.
And as I got more and more into the movie - Farrell in many ways DID play the same role in the movie as the Mac does in the marketplace. He even LOOKS like the guy from the Mac ads - same scruffy beard, dressed the same way - everything.
Long played an underdog - who just escaped death by the skin-of-his-teeth - and confronts his own feelings of inadequacy and fear and realizes that he CAN take on big challenges even in the face of a foe who is superior in terms of manpower, resources and technical prowess.
Long also uses his brain (and some really old Palm Pilot and a Nokia E90 Communicator) to partially thwart the enemy. He’s not worth a crap in the fighting department (he even gets bitch-slapped by Mai Linh [Maggie Q]) - but what he lacks in brawn he makes up for by just sticking to his guns and continuing down the path with a single goal in mind: save the world (or at least the US).
Here’s to the little Mac that “could” - hopefully someday Apple will get a Bruce Willis to help it take a man pill and kick some marketplace ass as well.
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07.07.08
Posted in General Rant at 7:17 am by Administrator
I’ve been using Firefox since version 1.0 - and, in general, I like it a lot over by old default browser - Internet Exploder. Version 2.x was cooll - although a bit heavy on the memory usage and it could be a bit sluggish at times. All-in-all - pretty good.
Then I “upgraded” to Firefox 3. At first blush, the rendering is fine, the speed is a bit better than 2.x, the UI has some improvements that are nice - but the BEST feature is the new automated crash-and-burn feature.
This terrific new addition is really fun and was probably added to shake up the web surfer’s day and remind them that they should take daily (or twice-daily) breaks and interact with other humans.
At least Firefox saves your session information. If not for this truly great feature - I would have chucked my laptop through the wall by now. Firefox just seems to crash now - for no apparent reason. Click a tab once - OK. Click a tab twice - bye bye. Open a file once - OK. Open a different file - OK. Open a new link in a tab - BOOM.
I admit I’m a tab-aholic and have 10-20 tabs open at a time - but, hey, I did in Firefox 2.x as well. My browsing habbits haven’t changed - the only thing that has is my browser.
So, I had a BRILLIANT idea - I’ll just start using Safari. So that’s what I’ve been doing over the past week.
Or at least tried to do.
Once you get over the sort of Mac-like goofy UI renderings of buttons and the glow around the active entry field and the terrible fonts for the menus and the horrible too-dark “metal” header - it’s actually not a bad browser.
One thing I will say for sure - it’s the absolute FASTEST browser I’ve ever used. The speed is almost embarassing. Sites pop up really fast - and even with zero browsing history and zero cached graphics - this thing cooks. It does take a little longer to load a new (never visited site) - but once it loads - it seems to have cached everything in the site.
So I thought to myself - YEAH! OK, a new browser, I can do this. I started to move a few bookmarks over - and entered some passwords to some of my many username-required sites - and that’s when I started missing some of the features that I take for granted in Firefox.
Like: password protection for auto-entering user information on sites.
The next one was the deal breaker: I shut down my laptop (with the browser running) - and just expected that the next time I launched - it would just restore itself. I had maybe 10 tabs open. Nope.
I mean, it’s not the end of the world or anything - but I’ve gotten so used to be able to just restore my last session (I often keep tabs open for days until I read the story, finish my research on a topic, etc) - that not being able to do that became a real pain.
Plus, the rendering and the fonts used - while readable and well-rendered - were just not… ummm… “normal.” Sites viewed in IE, Firefox, and Opera looked, well… a little Mac-ed up. It’s nothing that I’m sure I couldn’t get used to in time - but old habits die hard.
And so do cookies. And passwords. And browsing history.
When all was said-and-done - I really wanted to use Safari as my primary browser - but I just couldn’t.
Now I’m back to Firefox 3 - and I have convinced myself that those “daily reminders” (or more) are actually a benefit. They remind me to get up and take a pee…
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07.04.08
Posted in General Rant at 6:46 am by Administrator
It’s the 4th of July - the day that we in America celebrate our independence from Britain (no offense guys, we just wanted to do thing our own way).
It all started with a tax.
Back in the old days the British were hurting for cash due to the huge national debt they had run up fighting the Seven Years War - so Parliament decided it would be a good idea to tax the colonies since they were getting the benefit of military protection and… well… the British folks were tapped out (after having multiple taxes already raised).
The thing they passed was called the Stamp Act. The act required all legal documents, permits, commercial contracts, newspapers, wills, pamphlets, and playing cards in the colonies to carry a tax stamp. The only problem was - no one from the colonies was represented in Parliament when they decided this.
And that - taxation without representation - was the beginning of the end.
The British then kept on raising taxes on tea - and if you’ve ever been in England before you know how they LOVE their tea. Now, the colonists of the New World were used to drinking a bunch of tea (hey, they came from England!) - so they started smuggling tea in from The Netherlands (the Dutch ROCK!). This caused the incumbent tea folks to go crying to mommy (Parliament) and so they got their English tax waived - and only had to pay the American tax.
This made the tea cheaper than it was in England - and made the New World business people (some of our country’s founding fathers) really pissed off. They dumped a bunch of tea in protest - and that was the beginning of how we came to fight the War of Independence.
I’m seeing the very fist stages of this in the technology world as well. People are getting tired of having their operating system dictated to them by a power they have no control over (Microsoft).
They are sick and tired of paying the OS Stamp Tax (Windows) and are tired of being ignored (really - Vista sucks!).
There are the rumblings of the smugglers (Mac OS X, Ubuntu, OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird) - and they are slowly gathering support from the “average Joe.” Every revolution start with a single person.
So - if you’re tired of the Microsoft tyranny - become part of the revolution! Download OpenOffice, switch to Thunderbird and Firefox (or Safari or Opera or Camino) and stick it to the warlords of unfair taxation!
Happy July 4th.
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07.03.08
Posted in General Rant at 3:48 pm by Administrator
I just KNEW that Steve Ballmer couldn’t just walk away from the Yahoo deal. As I mentioned in a previous entry - I was shocked at the time - and actually proud of Mr. Ballmer for being an adult and just walking away.
I should have known better.
Now it seems that Steve’s big idea is to hook Time Warner and News Media into coming up with a partial bid - just for the search part of Yahoo. They basically just want to gut the company and divvy up the bits between themselves.
They know that Carl Ichan is STILL on the war path - and with the shareholder’s meeting date less than a month away - I can’t figure out if this is just a cruel joke on the part of Microsoft - of if they’re actually serious.
The shares of Yahoo were up $3 on the speculation that somehow, maybe, the shareholders might make some money out of this. I bet Mr. Ichan was happy about that!
The deal STILL makes no sense. The PR value of it is gone. Everyone agrees: it was a crazy move to begin with - and Jerry Wang is still insisting (with hookah pipe in hand) - that Yahoo is a viable company that is going to take off (any day now).
Meanwhile - back at the Google Camp - Eric Schmidt must be laughing his ass off. He struck a deal to put Google’s ads on Yahoo’s site - so even as Yahoo’s stock tanked after the original Microsoft deal fell through - Google is making mo’ money.
It’s still not all smiles and balloons for the Googlehoo alliance - they’re getting the strip search treatment from the feds at the moment - but I don’t think it’s going to amount to anything.
But even if it did - Google will still have made money on the “temporary agreement” they had with Yahoo. I’m sure it’s not much - a couple of million bucks - but enough to buy a nice latte for all their engineers who are actually working on stuff they can sell.
Steve (Ballmer) - it’s time to let go. Here’s a list of the 5 stages of grief - you’re making good progress! Only two more stages to go:
- Denial (check)
- Anger (check)
- Barganing (check)
- Depression
- Acceptance
The depression thing - I know you’re probably saving it all up on the inside - after all, Bill’s gone into the jungle, Vista sucks, you just pulled the license plug on the only thing people wanted to buy - XP, now this whole Yahoo thing.
Let it out. Buy some Chunky Monkey, grab an Xbox from the guys next door, steal your neighbor kid’s copy of Guitar Hero and let it all out.
Then, come Monday morning, you’ll finally be able to accept reality: this deal stinks as much as Vista does.
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07.01.08
Posted in General Rant at 8:54 pm by Administrator
Today
Frank Ohlhorst did a
review of Servoy for eWeek’s Channel Insider. It was really a nice review - and it got me thinking (rare, I know)… in the future how far will the line blur between web and desktop applications?
I think for the short term - there’s a lot of noise about where vendors *think* it should go. The market and the press has been announcing new paradigms and competing announcements for the-same-but-different tools to try to get developers to adopt their “new” platform.
There is so much confusion and noise out there about all the new technologies that I think we’re getting away from the real question - what are real life developers doing to create real life applications (both web and desktop) that real users actually use?
I think there are as many answers out there as there are individual developers. Some are still using the “old school” 4GL products (Access, Alpha 5, FileMaker, FoxPro, Magic, Oracle Forms, PowerBuilder, Progress, etc.) and some are using 3GL languages and products (Basic, C, C++, C#, Cobol, Delphi, Java, .NET, RealBasic, VB, etc.) - because that’s what they know and are comfortable with (or it’s been dictated to them that they use those tools).
Some have turned to the “new” platform as a service (PaaS) offerings or virtual (100% cloud-based) offerings like Bungee, CogHead, Gears, Force.com, QuickBase, etc. opting for both the development and deployment models to be 100% online.
Yet others are jumping on the connected/disconnected (and “Rich Internet Application” - RIA) bandwagon with AIR, Gears, Flex/Flash, OpenLaszlo, and Silverlight.
Not to mention the mobile platforms that are coming out with their own flavors of operating systems (Android, iPhone, Symbian, etc.) that also may or may not have their own particular languages (Objective C, Xcode, etc.).
Ummmm…. yeah. And the list goes on and on and on and on. I personally think it will get even more “muddy” before it gets more clear. You can bet that there are zealots for each of the various approaches and tools and platforms. There are an equal number of detractors as well.
Everyone’s got an opinion. But is anyone getting any work done?
I mean, it’s all well and good to take a look at all the various technologies that are coming out - they’re all trying to do the same thing: help developers develop stuff that end users will find engaging so that they be more productive - and actually get stuff done.
In my book - any tool that will allow you to reach that objective is the best tool to use.
It’s not a one-size-fits-all world - and there will never be a one-size-fits-all language, tool, protocol or way of doing business.
Having said that - it’s been my experience that end users, project stakeholders, CIO’s and CEO’s don’t really give a rat’s ass what the technology is - as long as it meets the business goals, and comes in on-time and on-budget.
And, in my opinion, THAT’S the problem. These tools are so complex, there is so much code to write, there are so many protocols to support, end user’s expectations of how applications are “supposed” to behave are changing so rapidly - it’s really difficult to find a tool that will help you be both productive (”get the job done”) and easy-to-use (”get the job done on time”) and flexible (”meet ever-changing business goals”) - it’s enough to drive developers nuts.
Couple that with the end-user requirements of a rich browser application, and/or a client/server application and/or a disconnected application that synchronizes, and now the water is even more murky.
Let’s not even go down the road of the changing business climate of offering software as a service (SaaS) and the nacient platform as a service (PaaS) initiatives to put stuff in the “cloud” while at the same time coupled with ISV business model of selling on premises licenses…
It’s for those reasons that I really like Frank’s article on Servoy. Servoy is a tool that will give you the best of all worlds: standards-based, JavaScript/Java power, easy Eclipse-based RAD design - but it also is flexible enough to be extensible (Java), and allow you to sell it as an on premises solution, a SaaS solution (in the cloud with or without PaaS) - deploy as client/server and/or browser (100% HTML/CSS) and/or “headless” client (for use by web services, other Java applications or JSP) - while at the same time doing it ALL from ONE code base.
For my money - that’s the best application to use. One that allows you to leverage what you know and handles all the code that’s behind the scenes. Who wants to code things like connection pooling, data broadcasting, manage client state, write 1,000,00 SQL queries, etc.?
The part that developers need to develop is less about infrastructure and more about the “inside of the window.” It’s like an iceberg - 80% of the typical application’s code is below the water line: the end user never sees it. They only see the 20% of the code on top.
If you can concentrate on the 20% of the functionality that the user interacts with - and have the other 80% handled for you automatically (but still have the flexibility to monkey with it if you want/have to) - you can finally be productive and actually DELIVER a secure client/server/web/offline application on time and on budget that end users will actually use.
Now that’s bringing the desktop and web applications together in a way that makes sense.
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