I am watching TV last night and on comes a commercial from Microsoft. You know them as soon as they start – they have the look and feel of a Coca Cola commercial. You know the ones that are wholesome and make you feel good but say nothing about what they actually offer of any value. Basically brand reinforcement and that’s all. Zero protein and 1,000 calories.

I sit back and to my utter amazement the commercial made the worst statement any brand could ever make about itself. What did they say you ask? The commercial shows children SMS texting their dad in grocery store via the families dinosaur Windows PC. What they were texting was 1,000 calories in candy requests that looked like was coming from the poor guys wife.

I was dumb founded. The Windows PC clearly had no security and the AD reinforced the 1,000 calories literally. What really stunned me was that Microsoft was saying, yeah we’re making our PC operating systems to communicate with Smart phones - that's all we provide of any value anymore!!!!

Are you kidding me? I can carry around an Android or IOS phone which can do everything Microsoft PC can do plus that last major thing – they are small and light. It was not the ginormous pig of PC the kids were typing their candy requests into.

In other words why on earth would I buy a boat anchor of a machine to tie around my neck? Hey if I wanted to do that I could have put a mainframe in my house in the 1990s! I didn’t do it because micro computers had arrived. Fast forward to today – Smart phones have arrived – don’t sell me mainframe PCs when what I want is a micro Smart phone.

Must be nice to have so much money that you can drive your company off a cliff.

Anybody else think Microsoft’s CEO should have left when Gates hit the showers . . .    

What this graph shows is that Apple (on the bottom of the graph) is growing share but not nearly at the pace which Google is exploding at - in gray. Sandwiched in between are the losers. Microsoft (red), Palm (yellow) and RIM (green). In the future Microsoft and Palm will only appear as lines as their share will become invisible as the ocean of opportunity above the Google gray is from 80 million to 240 million phones which are not yet smartphones but will be converted to some type of smartphone. No one can say that the opportunity was not large enough for the losers to have made bigger plays in the space.

I think the answer is the losers simply don't understand the new paradigm. Things like PCs, printers and the like are yesterdays technologies. The Cloud is not a recepticle for photos, which is Microsoft's lame advertising messaging but rather for everything. Just as in the past the loosers couldn't let go of their own failing thinking and therefore will be swept away. RIM is still interesting in that they still have a ton of market share.

If RIM could get some management in place with just a bit of vision they could compete - there are so many companies which have RIM's architecture deployed and in place. Hopefully they can get some execs who have some vision. Otherwise RIM's share will eventually look like Microsoft's and Palm's. HP has already disappeared from view.

On a separate note I tried some new technology out last week which works pretty well. I cancelled my office line which had been an old copper POTS line in favor of a Motorola cordless phone which connects via bluetooth to my cell phone. As long as I leave the cell phone reasonably close to the master unit for the cordless phone - the signal is clear and I can walk about using the cordless phone just like I could with my old copper line.

Until Cell providers build out their infrastructure to enable all of our activities to go through Cell towers and home repeaters - we will be stuck having to use these stop gap technologies. The Motorola 2 hand set unit was $53 including tax - about two months of the cost of the old phone line. Definitely a cost effective stop gap.  

I had written PCWorld earlier this year explaining to them that PCs were no longer relevant and what we needed for the new Smartphone world. I was heartened to see some articles on TVs, Smartphones and tablets a few months ago. I had even renewed my subscription for the magazine. Then the November issue shows up at my house (in October) and they demonstrate that they still just don't get it.

A look at their major articles this month paints the picture clearly.

November cover - Windows 8. What the writers don't get is nobody cares about Windows 8. Windows 7 volumes are still anemic. Why because? Windows 7 didn't solve any of the probelms Windows has always had. Can I mix different Windows OS's on my network and print? NO (not with PC shared printers). What was needed since XP is universal printer drivers. Did Microsoft ever care about this - NO! Microsoft assumed we would all upgrade all of our PCs to one OS. What I have seen is people downgrading to XP - at least the applications still worked on an all XP network. Finally no thought at all was given to mixed Windows / Mac networks which are common today.

Does Windows 7 still BLUE SCREEN like the prior Windows OS's? YES. This is why no one buys Windows 7 unless they are forced to. They only use it on PCs which came with that OS preloaded on it. The article talks about how Microsoft is making their PC OS into a phone OS! Oh my god - who cares? Why? Because if Microsoft hasn't fixed thier old broken down OS's - why would anyone think a phone OS would suddenly work better than thier core business?

This is typical Microsoft marketing. They make their junk look current and relevant without actually making it current or backward compatible. What's the payoff for those of us who fixed all of those Windows machines while sticking with Microsoft over the last few decades? Absolutely nothing - Bupkus! Windows 7 sucks - so they produce a Windows 8 OS - to generate revenue only - not to help the dwindling Windows population.

I have a year old dead Vista PC which got crushed by Microsoft when it did an automatic OS update. I haven't decided if I will cart it off to the recyling center or reload it. I am leaning towards the recycling center - another PC for the graveyard.

So why would PCWorld think we would care about Windows 8? I honestly have no clue. Then looking at their review for NAS units they wrote a superficial article which has no logic related to Smartphones. I know this to be true as they reviewed my NAS unit and said not one thing the sales brochures don't say online. They review NAS as if PCs are what peeople will be using those units for in future. Give me a break - could they spend more than 10 minutes just copying manufacturer data sheets?! 

Ironically the only thing of interest for me in the entire issue was an advertisement. Think Free Mobile has produced a cloud based productivity suite of Apps for Androids and tablets. One can only hope that after having produced an App with a homescreen for Smartphones, that they will take the next logical step and port it to Google TV and allow us to use their App on our huge flat screen TVs. Truthfully I am uninterested in having anything more than a Smartphone and a TV set anymore. 

I seek utility computing and not more machines to fuss around with. As Google has opened up the APIs for Google TV along with the ability of Smartphones to stream movies to TV's - this should not be that difficult to do. I wonder if any of these companies realize that a productivity App that works on my phone and my ginormous TV - is the killer App.

My fear is that Google's predisposition for engineers and not marketing people has left them blind as to how close they are to wiping all of these legacy PCs from our planet. I am hopeful they see the opportunity directly underneath of their nose and act on filling the missing piece even if no company installs this App on Google TV.

I don’t claim to be a savant. When I wrote yesterdays blog on how eerily similar the battle is between Apple and Google to the one a decade prior with Microsoft, I had no idea Steve Jobs was retiring as CEO. I have seen a pile of articles come out on the impact of Steve Jobs to Apple and I think most miss the mark.

Steve Jobs was not the person who thought up the technologies which differentiated Apple from the rest of the pack. In fact Apple was not the first to create the PC (Mac), mp3 player (iPod), smartphone (iPhone) or tablet (iPad). If Steve Jobs didn’t create these technologies then we need to ask a different question entirely to understand Jobs relevance in the tech industry.

What made Steve Jobs a really outstanding leader of his company was the two things he always focused on. He always asked himself if the technology he was going to embrace and extend was a game changer – independent of what the price tag would be for any product. He didn’t care that iPods/iPads/iPhones would have radically lower pricing and therefore lower profit dollars per unit. Instead he focused on what the impact would be in integrating those technologies into his business model and strategy.

This is no small accomplishment. The bean counters scream when a technology which is cheaper is introduced. The product managers of the older platforms scream that the new technology will eat into their sales volumes. Of course both of these concerns are absolutely true. But if you don’t go into business against yourself – you can be sure that another competitor will. External competitive pressures are far worse than loud and emotional arguments within your own company.

Steering his company through these eat your babies types of product launches and integrations was where Jobs was better than any other in the microprocessor era. Bar none. These are very difficult and he did it multiple times. This was the first great skill Mr Jobs brought to Apple.

Steve Jobs second great skill was that anything which was brought out had to be insanely great in terms of meeting the end users experience. There is a reason why people say Macs are better than PCs. If you ever upgraded your computers operating system you saw how well integrated his products were. My daughter upgraded her OS without any help or prior experience on her Mac. If you have ever done this on a PC you know how insanely difficult this is comparatively.

The design and integration are huge factors which Jobs brought to bear and beat the pants off of the competition. He never assumed this was business as usual. He always pushed for ease of use and simplicity of design. He won with this approach again and again.

As I wrote in yesterday’s blog – the world has learned a thing or two from Jobs and therefore the competition which Google brings to bear is not trivial for Apple. Whether Steve Jobs had remained with Apple or not – Apple and Google are going to provide a tremendous show for the battle in Cloud based products for end users. They are both totally focused on the end users experience and this is a huge differentiator for both companies as they are now recognized for this as their core brand value.

Google and Apple's brand value of in being totally focused on the end user experience actually has created barrier to entry for competitors in the tech marketplace. What I personally find more interesting is how Apple and Google will very likely rewrite the marketing text books over the next decade in waging this type of competition.

To get back on point – Steve Jobs wasn’t great because he was an engineer, or a visionary who invented the new technologies. Rather he extended the value of interesting technologies and products through design and integration. He recognized what could be done where others just saw a music playre or cell phone. In this he was King and I for one think we should recognize him for his very real accomplishments. I wish him well in future. All the best wishes for you Steve.           

I am not a Steve Jobs hater. Having worked my entire career in the big company world – believe me I get just how incredibly difficult it is to do anything new. People use process and what has been done previously as shields for not having to skate out onto the ice of invention. As well many sincerely worry that they won’t be able to deliver something on a projected timetable when they are really doing something new. They play it safe instead. I get how tough it is to innovate in big company world.

I have respect for Jobs for having done it not once but twice! He has mad skills as they say. Having just finished the book on Google “In the Plex,” I am struck that Jobs now faces the virtually the same dilemma he faced when he battled and lost to Microsoft. Google, having just purchased Motorola, is now going to compete with Apple on smartphones head up.

What is ironic for me is not the competition however. It is the fact that in both cases Jobs was blindsided as to who the “real” competitors were. Jobs thought he was battling IBM in the personal computers wars when he awoke to the realization that the primary threat was Microsoft and not Big Blue. That realization was almost to late for Apple.

Jobs had allowed Gates and Microsoft personnel into Apple’s development plans when he realized that Microsoft was using that information to compete against his company. He even took the famous trip to Xerox PARC’s development labs with Gates. Xerox PARC invented many of the core inventions which drove the PC era in computing. As those turn of events cost him control of Apple as well as a near death experience for Apple as a company, I would have thought that he would have never ever allowed any company to get close to Apple development plans again - EVER.

Instead Jobs thought Google was a Search company focused on advertisement revenue only and therefore had their CEO sit on his board. The board reviewed all the major strategic initiatives – Google was able to watch as Apple laid out the roadmap for the future in smartphones! When he realized a year or so ago that Google would launch a real smartphone – he freaked out – again!

What is even more interesting as a parallel here is that Google presents the exact same type of competition which Microsoft presented back in the 1990s. Apple is the bling to the competitive Spartan products. Microsoft went to market as the high volume cheaper competitor just as Google is working in the marketplace leveraging machine automation to radically reduce pricing. It is the same high volume and inexpensive competition dynamic repeating itself.

Today smartphones are expensive but as they become the standard computer which will displace 95% of all other computing devices - the volumes shipped will rock the pricing. In other words – smartphones will create the same dynamic over again. If something almost kills me – I tend to sift through the debris to make sure that doesn’t happen again. Clearly with Jobs this is not the case. Rather remarkable.

I don’t believe this will play out the same way as before however. This time Apple has a 2^nd major stream of revenue from iPods and iTunes which will prevent anything like the previous near death experience. Microsoft not only funded Apple to stay alive back then but due to the competitive vacuum Microsoft completely lost their way and developed products with increasing bloatware.

Microsoft had no culture in leadership of function or bling. Microsoft has descended from a market leader into the Avis of cutting edge technology companies. They have given up on innovating – they don’t even try to paint their products as new anymore. They just extend their dying Windows platform into new products in order to maintain some marketshare instead.

Google on the other hand is a model which I never thought could succeed. Better engineered and Spartan lead products devoid of bling I had always considered to be the recipe for disaster. It was the Betamax vs VHS competitive model which always leads to cheaper product winning (VHS).

Google seams to understand this and refuses to bling their products. From their revenue engine of advertising they realize that both speed and price is the winning combination in the race for Cloud based products and solutions. Therefore I doubt that Google will fall into the same Microsoft trap.

Apple has already demonstrated they won’t stand pat in having opened the iPhone to Verizon. They will not Google surround them in volume as they had with Microsoft previously. Truthfully I think this is better for not only Google and Apple’s long term health but also for us – the end consumers of their products. When there is zero competition reducing innovation and increasing price is just not a feasible strategy.

I had always thought the single winner takes all model to be a stupid one. I always hated visiting the winner de jure as the egos were nauseating. The business decisions were even worse. Not only did it produce monopolies but it also strangled innovation and most importantly value. I am hoping that both companies stay on their game and that we get to witness one of the great ping pong matches in tech history. One can only hope!    

In the event that someone was in doubt as to the future of the Smartphone marketplace, the link below attaches to an article which shows that the Apple and Motorola and HTC (Android OS) have taken the lead in marketshare. RIM and Nokia are now nosediving. 

The Smartphone Salad Days Are Over

As a follow up - I have been using Windows 7 on my new Sony Vaio now for a month plus and it is performing exactly as expected. I get system crashes on a PC that I have almost no software on beyond the original load that it shipped with. Whatever the marketing was for Windows 7 - it is pretty clear that it was just hype as I can't be more underwehlemd with this OS.

I purchased the Sony Vaio as my last PC. It is the size of a Netbook and I use it to manage what is still to difficult for Tablets and Smartphones. I realize they will certainly catch up but I am thinking I am still 18-24 months away from being able to power off my last PC. 

I loaded IBM's free open source office suite onto the little Vaio. I was pleased to find that it was not only free but also could open spreadsheets, presentations and word processing documents from Microsoft. It can also save a document you created in its native open source format in Microsoft formats as well. So you can receive a Microsoft office document or send one without having to send another behomth check to Redmond. Very pleased to say the least!

IBM Lotus Symphony Office Suite

I decided to get a little Notebook instead of a Netbook. My thinking was I may be on this thing for a few years so get something that has a little horsepower in it. I purchased a Sony Vaio - the littlest one. I recieved it today and it looked real bad for the first hour I had it. I updated the drivers on it and on the reboot it hung and stopped working. I tried Sony's online chat for support. A total waste of time - they pointed me to a webpage and said bye bye. The time it took them to respond to each line I typed took forever. They did give me a number to call and while I was on the phone with support I decided to try the things I know to get it running and it worked.

It has been running for a few hours now and it is pretty nice. I just need it for email, managing my NAS server, which has been sketchy for a few weeks and browsing the web. As it has an HDMI port - I will try and hook it to my TV just for giggles to see how well it performs. But the keyboard works well, it is very light and running wireless (g mode) it has been very quick. It has Windows 7 premium on it and the operating system stinks. They did improve network connectivity over Vista but that would be all that I care about. They changed where everything is from XP so finding things are a chore again. When I moved my bookmarks from Firefox it wouldn't just by copying the profile and updating the ini file. I had to use Mozbackup. Good news Mozbackup is free and works very well.

Sony put in a hidden partition so I think I will be able to restore the base system easily enough. I will have to read up on it to be sure. They have a bunch of crapware on the machine and I have started to de-crap it. The only thing which I have to say conerns me is the power connection. It is flimsy and doesn't look like it will last very long. When I use it - I unplug it and then replug when I set it down again. I still have to get used to the trackpad thingy. I was spoiled with high quality IBM laptops at work for years that had the little red rubber thingy which made moving the cursor around a breeze. Let's see if I can adapt. All in all it is brand new so let me beat on this for a few weeks and see if it still runs as good as does now.

When I began this blog I had hoped to move directly off of my PCs and MACs onto a Smartphone. What I have discovered is that this goal is not yet functionally feasible. Smartphones are getting better but they are a long way off from automatically connecting to my TV via Bluetooth so that I can surf the web and read/write my emails on a bigger screen.

In fact even the logical half step isn’t ready for prime time yet. I have been using an iPad for over a year now and though it is usually pretty good in entering the web quickly, it does not work for email and functional web surfing. The reason is because of a religious war Apple is having and therefore they are not supporting Flash which pretty much is ubiquitous on the web. Without Flash I am forced to get up from the TV room and find a PC to use a fully functional browser.

The iPad has other shortcomings as well. I have tried Apps to force the Safari web browser to remember my login settings but none of the Apps does this easily. Typing on the iPad is also cumbersome. I bought the iPad because it was on fast and ready for work but now actually typing makes it slower than a PC to use. The iPad interprets my misspellings and inserts words I didn’t intend to use – and I mean with every misspelling. Therefore I spend a bunch of time proofing so that I don’t send out emails saying the exact opposite of what intended or worse. Further typing on glass is difficult – you never know if you struck the tile properly which leads you back to the auto correction problem.  And I won’t get into the fact that you only delete characters backward and how hard it is get the cursor to where the misspelling is. Editorial hell.

I have read countless reviews for the spate of new Android tablets which are coming out on the market but the reviews are essentially meaningless.Here is a perfect example for the Samsung Galaxy Tab. They talk about glitz and glam – how the screen looks and how well a movie plays on the tablets which is not why I want to own a tablet. I want computing which is purely utilitarian. No operating system to patch and maintain or the other laborious chores. I have already invested 30 years of my life doing this. No mas  - No more.

The tablets will of course improve. However until such time as tablets can easily clear the bar in the following areas I am going to patch my move off of thick clients in another way. Before I describe that allow me to list the functional areas which tablets must be able to function seamlessly:

1)      Browsing the web. The browser can’t freeze, crash or take more than 2 seconds to go where I told it to go. The browser should be great working versions of the browsers we use today. Number one is Firefox – somebody please lift up the phone and call Mozilla - get cracking. Others like Chrome, Opera etc must meet the functional specs as well. Another huge element here is having the browser capable of remembering my website logons. Did I mention I want fast and not a ton of difficult and slow typing? Finally I have read forums of the top rated Android Tablets and they all say that the browsers are still clinkers. Here is a link to the Asus EEE Transformer tablet forum which demostrates this issue clearly. 

2)      Flash is the web standard for anything moving. Tablets that can’t handle Flash are none starters. Don’t give me 1,000,000 arcane instructions to get the OS and the tablet to try and work around this issue. If you don’t support Flash – the browser won’t display why I went there – then it will do all the things under item 1 like – crash, freeze or just go somewhere I had no intention of going.

3)      A tablet with some docking accessory also is a zero. I can’t hold the tablet and type on a Bluetooth keyboard without some docking mechanism. When the TV can handle the screen – I won’t be using a tablet anymore – I will be using a Smartphone. So don’t try and dance around or patch this issue. Just build the dock accessory and offer to us folks who actually intend to use the tablet to do something other than watch movies or aimlessly wander the Internet without concern as to what I am seeing.

4)      Not a pre requisite – hence in the bottom slot here but it should have some way to store data, photos, mp3s and my other junk on my local network. The hard drives are not the limitation. All of my data is shared inside of my network so that any other machines/users/my family can get to it. When they built these wireless tablets  - what on earth were they thinking we were going to do with our emails, files etc? Just throw everything away? I am betting Apple and Microsoft are hoping we will buy and keep both the tablets and the PCs. No thank you.

So here’s the thing. I am going to take the functional approach and get a Netbook. Which one I don’t know. Yes I know they are neither fish nor foul. They aren’t a full blown PC and they are not tablets/Smartphones  - BUT – they do items 1-4 fairly well, and yes I have heard they can be slow at times. However I don’t expect to have to run around the house when somebody sends me a flash video, email or weblink to locate a PC.

Stay tuned. When I said compromise – I meant for something which works. I will let the utility devices mature while I get my computing done quickly and easily so that I have a real life that isn’t glued to one screen or another for the majority of the day.

Leo          

I am going to try and insert the link to this page at the end of all of my previous blog posts about the NAS unit I selected because after having used it I think this post will most accurately reflect my final thoughts.

The final words on my Synology NAS review 

I have been using the Synology DS-411+ for several months now. It has been wonderful – fast, easy and reliable in it’s functions as a file server and a storage device. However after having installed several of the add-on packages I must admit it was not completely what I had hoped for up front. The MailStation package has been way too difficult for anyone but the most seasoned veteran to install. I want to be very clear that Synology has provided outstanding support for me – even going so far as to remotely take over my PC and NAS unit to help solve all the technical issues. In other words they worked real-time inside of my NAS unit - Synology’s support has been outstanding.

Other examples. The iTunes package did not turn out to be what I thought it was. I abandoned the iTunes server as it had less function than just setting up iTunes on a PC and syncing with my iPod. I thought it could wirelessly sync with my families SmartPhones/iPods but that was not the case – at least according the feedback I got from their user forums. The user forums have not been of much use to me therefore I am still not 100% certain this is true.

All of that said – I would definitely purchase this DS-411 unit again. I am very happy with the support and the reliability and speed of this unit. It is not Synology’s fault that the SmartPhone technology is too immature to power off our PCs yet.

Apple’s insistence on using the Safari web browser creates bugs that are just way way too difficult to fix. Some standard web packages are not supported by Apple for competitive reasons only and though I understand this, I think their approach will ultimately force me off the iPad I bought onto another tablet to view flash and other things non-Apple that won’t play on the iPad. These things are the standards to which everyone codes on the web therefore as a surfing device it is becoming unusable.

Why Apple doesn’t put Firefox, an open source and non-competitive browser but the gold standard in web browsers in their OS’s is just plain bulled headed stupidity. This is the negative effect from what I call the Steve Jobs overhang. His personality has too big an impact within the company. His views are not as “visionary” as everyone believes them to be. I can’t use my NAS MailStation package from my iPad because Safari can’t handle the code that Firefox does effortlessly. These means I have to handle all of my mail twice once upstairs in viewing mode on the iPad and then downstairs on my PC to store, delete and sort my email inside of the NAS unit where the email will be stored long term. I delete all webmails as I don’t believe that web based email is secure yet.

What I think I am going to do is discard the iPad – maybe see if I can use it up on my 2^nd floor. I am not sure the wireless router will work all the way from my basement but will test for that. As an intermediary step I will likely purchase a Netbook to read my mail using Firefox so that I only touch it once, surf the web and do my daily net searches with. I am crestfallen that I have to buy another kind of PC to get away form them ultimately but until SmartPhone standards mature and are put in place it is the only way forward without creating more complexity and work for me which is why I want to power down these PCs in the first place.      

My first major milestone in moving to utility computing was to get my NAS unit and move all of my storage requirements onto it. I then put all of remaining programs I use onto a single PC which I had been using for several months. This had enabled me to power off 6+ PCs as a result. I have never powered any of them on again. The last application which required my PC to be on 24x7 was my email application. Last night I installed the MailStation package on my NAS unit. A copy of all of my emails now is being stored on my NAS unit.

I could always access my emails via the web so that I could read and respond anywhere and this change has not impacted my access. I can still do that but now all of my emails are stored for future reference. The Synology NAS unit has additional packages which so far have been fairly easy to install. If work did not require certain applications which require a PC – I would now be lights out. I am hoping that in a year or so they will enable my smartphone to replace this last PC

I am thinking about getting a Google TV box from Logitech. It will allow me to surf on the big screen until the smartphone makers realize that the interface for the TV set is the last knot tying end users to their legacy PCs. I have to be honest – I am very surprised that they have not updated their OS’s to enable the wireless interface to more rapidly move us into the utility model. I am assuming it has to be the “Great Recession” which has been the impediment from achieving this last mile tie off.

Though the Google box has some other features and Apps – I am doubtful I will use anything beyond their browser. All the iPad Apps I have tried to date have been so underwhelming that I doubt Google did any better with their box. I will post after purchasing and installing . . .    

Upate: Not spending the money to buy a GoogleTV box and I am modifying my approach. Click here to view.