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 . . .    

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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.  

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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.

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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.           

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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!    

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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

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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.

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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          

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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.      

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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.

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Market share data comparing 2011 to 2010 has come out showing that the marketplace for Smartphones is now just beginning to settle in. The huge share inroads that Apple's iPhone made on Rim’s Blackberry OS followed by Google and their Android OS were a tidal wave in titanic market shifts. Last year was the year where it was Google’s turn to push aside the other two competitors and take the top slot with 36% of the market for 2011. That’s up from 9% share in 2010.

It is being reported that the big three have settled down into their market shares for the last few months. This market stabilization begins the slow grind where winners may gain more slowly and losers will be pushed to the side. This dynamic is even worse for companies like HP where they have no Smartphone strategy and therefore the barrier to entry is becoming virtually insurmountable for them. Their stock price of course reflects this as it down 40% since they changed out CEOs. In 2011 HP’s WebOS entry in Smartphones is stagnating at an abysmal 2%.

What the Nielsen data also showed is that the Android users are consuming far more of the bandwidth. This is from games, Internet radio and movies being streamed to their phones by the youngster’s whereas Blackberry users are business workers who are just processing email and such. iPhone is also popular with the younger crowd but the Apple phones are sitting over both the consumer and business market spaces with 26% share this year vs 28% in 2010.

If Blackberry had a better strategy this might bode poorly for Apple but Apple looks like they have a real opportunity to displace more Blackberry market share, which has dropped 12% to 23% in 2011. RIM hasn’t yet found a way to provide the latest technologies and features as have Google and Apple. Further big slices of the consumer and business users in the Smartphone market is still a huge money maker therefore Apple will likely survive the Android storm. The real question is whether or not RIM becomes the next Palm.

Microsoft hasn’t yet found a way to crack double digits in share despite their large cash outlays for advertising which Redmond has thrown at the problem. Microsoft’s advertisements look and feel a bit reminiscent of the ADs for OS2 vs Windows when PCs were the coming technology in the last century instead of the legacy machines that PCs are increasingly relegated to in the 21st century. The data charts follow for your perusal.

2010 (TOP) Marketshare Smartphone OS Data vs 2011 (Bottom):

Some links to articles on the Nielsen data:

BetaNews link,

LA Times link, &

Broad Band Reports.

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I don't get smartphone manufacturer logic and I admit I am not looking at the numbers they see and have on thier business but I have to make a few comments that seam perfectly obvious to me. There are two market segments for smartphone tech companies in the consumer space. I suspect that tech giants don’t quite see it that way. I think corporate America can get caught up in corporate speak and sometimes be blinded by the most basic logic which can be staring them right in the face. Let’s review an enormous blunder that Research In Motion (RIM) made back in in 2008/2009 sometime and announced last August.

What RIM announced was that their first real entry into the full screen world in smartphone technology was going to be limited to AT&T only. That phone being the Blackberry Torch 9800. Great business phone! Slide out keyboard for those of us who need to feel keys to type reasonably while getting a large screen to see and surf and work on! So why would RIM restrict their great business phone to just one carrier - particulalry AT&T whose network has been shredded in the press as they fall further behind with 4G?

The reason why the Blackberry (BB is common parlance for the acronym) Torch got Torched by RIM is first because they saw the full screen phone as a potential iPhone and Android killer. How could they make such a huge gaff? Because they worked with AT&T for a year or two before they made the announcement back in August last year and while they working with AT&T they kept repeating that they had an iPhone competitor on their hands. Particularly since AT&T reinforced this I am sure as they knew that Apple was going to end their exclusive relationship with AT&T and offer the iPhone to Verizon.

So how could the smart business folks at RIM come to such an erroneous conclusion? They had after all successfully navigated the cell phone industry by creating the first functional integrated PDA and phone with the Blackberry in the first place. First they looked at AT&T’s numbers and said that they have 90 million subscribers to target with the Torch. They keep their current business users and then pickup some share to boot. Second they reinforced their thinking because it costs money to tailor a new phone for a carrier’s network. This was used as reinforcing logic as to why they should go with AT&T because they saw the 90 million subscribes as the way to defray the carrier customization costs for the Torch.

Well if this logic is true then how is putting the Torch on AT&T’s network a miss? It is a miss because there are two market segments for consumers in smartphones. The first segment consists of the teenagers and other early adopters who stampeded to AT&T to get the iPhone originally when it first came out or are doing the same thing with Android on Verizon. These consumers are floating consumers. They are not tied to a carrier. Few of these consumers have ever chosen a BB and likely never will. They will always chase the neato features on the big buzz smartphones (iPhone and Android phones).

The second consumer market segment is folks like me who actually use the phone for work. My BB has all my Lotus Notes forwarded to it along with my personal email. I am in touch with the office whenever I have my BB with me because all of my voicemails, work emails are with me in real time. However the carrier I am using is not my choice. Sprint was assigned to me at work. I work for an enormous company. My brother works for a tiny company in comparison and yet we both carry BB that are almost identical, boysenberries as my brother jokingly refers to BBs.

This more restricted market would have moved in a few months to the Torch as we went through the next upgrade cycle with our older BB’s (mine is the World Edition). But since neither of us can opt to switch carriers the Torch is out of consideration. Truthfully the phones released between my World Edition and the Torch were all basically the same phone so far as I was concerned. They had half a screen on top to see a couple lines of text/images and the bottom half was the keyboard. All of the intervening BBs from RIM were this style and had improvements in glass, CPU speed etc. As a business user – don’t care too much about that stuff.

What will I do when my BB dies and I need a phone? It is already dying to be truthful – I POR the phone to get it unstuck when it is hung now. Well when that fork in the road occurs anytime between this year and next year I can replace the phone with another half screen BB or if my company allows us to use Androids or iPhones to use with the corporate server farms – then I will switch. If that option is not available to me – I will likely see if my daughter wants the 4G iPhone and if so then just take her old 3G handset. I will switch because I have no interest on getting stranded on another dead or dying platform. This issue is what launched this blog as PCs begin thier descent as the computers of choice for end dusers. This link is an article saying that RIM/BB lost 5 points of marketshare just last month alone! 

But aside from me – what if other companies begin to allow other cell OS’s to interface with the corporate data bases? Truthfully we may go in short order from the big three in smartphones to the big 2. I recognize that RIM could stem the bleeding by making new models of the Torch and releasing them on the other carriers. But that requires cash which is what gets scarce when marketshare dwindles. And if RIM is not contractually obligated not to . . .

This is where corporate business logic can become lethal for large companies. When investment costs are used as reinforcing logic for routes to market and channels (the carriers in other words) – you can almost bet on the catastrophe to be dead ahead. Executives should never allow the answer to be the addition of two muddy answers which reinforce one another. One good answer is always the soundest strategy. But technology strategy is something you have to almost eat and breathe and know at a visceral level. Most executives have become so disconnected from what makes their products so unique that the muddy answers start to sound good to large enterprise America . . .

Peace, Leo

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Due to the change in weather – I have been spending more time outside and much less time on this blog as a result. However I have also slowed my dispatches to the blogosphere because I ran head long into an issue that I hadn’t considered when I started this project. That being that none of the major Smartphone OS or hand set makers actually are thinking about replacing your PC with a single Smartphone!

What they appear to be doing instead is to replace it – maybe – with a couple of more devices. My guess is they see you paying for their OS for a touch screen (iPad like device) and a Smartphone. I guess that’s how the numbers add up for them so that there is no potential impact in their OS revenue streams! I am talking about RIM (Blackberry), Android and iPhone here. Microsoft wants you to keep your PC and add the Smartphone!

What they have now:

Today the majors enable you to watch video on your Smartphone and most (iPhone and Android) allow you to hook-up an HDMI cable to display the movie on your flat panel TV. I didn’t investigate it but assume Blackberry and Windows phones do the same thing. However none of them allow you to put your Smartphones workspace on your TV and then allow you to execute an App on your big screen – natively – that is.

One App company called Real HDMI does sell an App for some Android models which will allow you to do this; however, they don’t guarantee all your Apps will work and there is no support from the OS or the handset maker to do this. Therefore it could work or it could just crap out on you. Given this totally unexpected turn of events I will not be buying a Smartphone from any of the majors now. I am not going to reward idiotic behavior with my money!

When will I – when one of the majors wakes up and realizes we all bought these stupid huge flat screen TVs and would actually like to use them! Not buy a tiny little screen Blackberry Playbook, or an Applie iPad or anyone else’s additional junk just retire all of the corresponding management headaches from using legacy PCs and Macs.

For now that project is shelved. I will build a scorecard to demo who is where on the road to real utility type computing in future. For now it looks like this:

Google Android: 35% (Real HDMI App moves the platform in the right direction. To bad it is not Google’s direction yet!!)

RIM Blackberry: 31% (Blackberry’s mission has always been to replace your PC while on the road. Just wish they wouldn’t follow the bad Apple’s lead and change their mission to totally replace my legacy PC!!)  

Microsoft: 30% (at least they have the Office on the Cloud via your phone. You just can’t  read the text yet!!)

Apple: 25% Yes you can see movies on your TV and you can also chain your iPhone to your iPad and then cable that to your TV. But what on earth do they think we want in the future to have cables and one trick pony devices laying all over our homes and offices? We kind of went through that with USB hell on our PCs and Macs already!!) Steve Jobs or not – Apple is beginning to head in the same direction Microsoft did in the latter 90s. Stupid land where they think their marketing ideas are real market requirements and not just their own wish lists as a strategy!

This blog will continue but will focus on what I can enable for our phones from our NAS unit (music, pictures, docs etc). As the industry is yet to embrace the challenge of the future which matters to adults – no sense in wiring another technology kluge together again – kind of lost interest in that when I decided to start shutting down one trick ponies and other lower functioning computers.

Peace, Leo

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Well today was a study in frustration. Brought back just too many bad experiences with Microsoft’s unrepaired OS’s. The reason was I was migrating off of my personal PC which was running Vista and moving to the desktop I had built to run my work stuff and it is an XP Pro machine. With each frustration – I had to just keep repeating to myself that this would all soon be over for me.

In terms of what I accomplished – I shut off two very large PCs. The file server had over dozen hard drives in it not including al of the specialized cooling mechanisms I had in the case for all that heat. I am pretty sure the power in the neighborhood would sag when I first powered that large PC up! Well it is powered off now. The reusable hard drives will be turned into spare external USB drives. It just sits under a table in my office by the shredder. Someday I will go through what is needed to dump it off at the recycling center.The following photo is the old file server.

The Old File Server:

My personal PC had been a quad CPU machine which was one of the only PCs I ever bought. Most of them I stick built so that I knew rach PC like the back of my hand. It was a Gateway and I moved my remaining personal apps (Html coding tools for websites, important docs, Epson scanner etc) to an older slower single processor desktop. I want it to be painful everyday that I continue to use a PC. It is for this reason I decided to power off the newest and most powerful PC I own. But at the end of this day – despite all of the frustrations with how difficult Microsoft makes it for the end user to move around within their OS’s – I had TWO very large PCs powered off.

Not a bad days work! Of course this next picture is what is picking up most of the displaced workload: my Synology NAS DS-411+. You sure can see why it uses a pile less power and oh by the way – it works much better than my old file server ever did! And I don’t have to do anything to keep it running! It just hums along!

The New NAS box:

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So after I got the copying process rolling I started going through all the junk I had collected over the years to maintain all the PCs in my life (meaning mine as well as everybody else who called me for help). I filled an entire large county recycling can with just the boxes I flattened. The electronics I will take up to the recycling center as this crud should not be dumped into a regular trash and end up in a landfill somewhere. Here is a short list of some of the junk:

Multiple network adapter cards (yes of course mostly PCI). Was the most common bug I shot and after the network adapter was integrated into the motherboards – it really paid off to put a new adapter card in instead of getting a whole new motherboard. I don’t know who was to blame for all those NIC cards crapping out. Maybe they just picked up surges more than any other components due to the extreme connectivity.

The next major class of junk: the hard drive adapter. I had to laugh as I scaled the speed ladder over the years. A 100MB ATA card and then 133MB ATA card etc etc. You needed those because if you really used a PC there was never enough storage. I was always putting the in my PCs to add more drives. I also used to put those in other peoples PCs when they had a drive failure. I don’t remember ever losing the data but I always put in a new adapter card and mounted the drive so that in case some piece of data had been overlooked the person could try and get it off the original hard drive.

The next major thing was video adapter cards. I found stacks of them just like the hard drive adapters. Each generation adding more and more memory making the video adapters increasingly bulky as a result.

As I thought PCs were really here to stay I had stocked up on 2.5 and 3.5 external USB hard drive enclosures. I reasoned that the 2.5 drives would become standard and therefore I would need them in the future. I did make a couple of external USB 2.5 hard drives but they have all crapped out along the way while my 3.5 external drives are still humming along years and years later.

With all of the utilitarian stuff: fans, adapters, power supplies and the like. There were a few devices which made me laugh when I saw them. Most I didn’t even recall buying in the first place. Some examples:

A USB network adapter dongle. I guess I thought my NIC would die on my laptop and then would have no way to use it till I had fixed the bug. Never happened – now is just trash. Network phone adapter. The box says just plug this puppy into your home phone line and then use your phone lines instead of CAT5 ethernet cable. Again – no recollection of buying but another oddity heading for dust bin.  

There were other oddities which I won’t bother to try and explain. I will say however that it felt really really great throwing all this crap out with the thought I would never have to fix those friggin PCs again!! WooHoo – fun day!

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This morning I unboxed up the new NAS unit and the four hard drives. There was no quick instructions guide that came with the NAS unit and therefore I winged installing the hard drives. It was not difficult. Just use 4 of the short fat screws bolting each hard drive to its plastic tray at each corner. I then used the long thin screws to bolt the trays (in the middle) to the unit so they won’t budge in the coming years. Later I found out that the small short screws were if you used 2.5 hard drives in the NAS instead of the 3.5 drives which I used. I realize the 2.5 drives are greener but I have had a higher failure rate with those little 2.5 drives.

After having put the NAS back together with the hard drives installed I connected the network cable and power and powered it up. All the drives were lit and green with the exception of the lit on the far left. I then installed CD which the NAS shipped with and then configured the NAS unit. The guide on the CD was pretty useless for me as the instructions didn’t match what the software presented. Again this proved to be no big deal. I knew I wanted RAID level 5, as it provides the most efficient use of the space on the hard drives and I also wanted to fix the IP address for the NAS server (No DHCP for me). Those were the only two decisions I had to make after having chosen to install the NAS using the custom and manual paths.

With the 8TB of storage installed in the NAS unit, 10 hours later the NAS unit is still creating the RAID array and formatting the drives. It says it is 90% complete but I will leave the unit till tomorrow before I start copying in the files from my file server. So far pretty simple and even if there is a problem anytime this week – reinstalling everything was so easy it will not give upset me. So far I give NAS DS411+ my stamp of approval for setup!

One thing I didn't mention when I wrote this yesterday was that when I tried to see the NAS unit on my network this morning - I could not - and I looked at it from five different PCs. I fired up the web interface and clicked on Control Panel and clicked on the icon in the very hand corner (under sharing management). The icon was labeled Win/Mac. As soon as I brought this up the NAS unit told me I had not joined any networks yet. That was because my network has a unique name instead of Workgroup. I changed that entry to my netwrok name and I was rolling again.

I have started copying the largest folder into the NAS unit. It is around 1TB in size so will be awhile before that copy is complete. Becuase the DS411+ does not ship with a copy program - I jumped onto another PC and used Microsoft's free Synce Toy to do the copying for me. Not the fastest tool on the planet but it was free.

Peace, Leo

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Ok just so that you know that yesterdays rant was not as off the wall as you might have suspected – this morning the four WD hard drives and the NAS unit were sitting inside of our garage! I ordered the gear on the 20^th in the evening. Still think the USPS isn't over delivering value for reduced fees?

Due to the holiday I am not going to post tomorrow. For the remainder of today’s post I just wanted to talk about how reviewing what was on my PCs reinforced that this move is somewhat justified – for a super techie kind of over reaction type of justification that is.

Yesterday evening I looked at my personal PC, which is quad processor – Vista box and is the most powerful in the house. However I have so many issues with that PC that if I keep it I will migrate the key applications off of it and format it and load XP on it. I am not adding anymore OS’s from Microsoft therefore Windows 7 is not option.In looking at that PC - my frustrations with MicroSquish became so clear for me.

Some of the frustrations I have had with the Vista units in my house. First – they wrote all new print drivers for Vista therefore I either had to upgrade all of my PCs to Vista or get a new shared printer, along with a print server for the XP boxes in the house. I went with a new printer rather than upgrade 4 PCS just because Redmond decided they wouldn’t make the print driver backward compatible.

The second major issue was the additional security that was added onto Vista made crappy network architecture a total mess. It was because of the inability to easily move, backup and restore data on my home network that I began to loose interest in my home network all together. It was the latest patch which cratered my Vista PCs from talking to each other that pushed me into this project – migrate off of all my PCs onto Smartphones! But don't forget that Vista came more than 5 years after the introduction of XP. The longest time between OS releases for Windows. So they had tons and tons of time to fix this buggy code mess known as Vista - which they chose not to do!

If I tried to justify the effort and cost to my wife – frankly I couldn’t. She would win that argument hands down. It would go something like – well even if the network is messed up, let’s use it till somebody else spends the time and money to figure out how to use Smartphone technology to replace all of our broken Windows (PCs). And she would of course be right. But just do me a favor and don’t tell her that . . .

I will be spending this holiday weekends at my wife’s parents house. Therefore I will be back on Monday. Happy holidays!

Peace, Leo

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I received confirmations last night that my NAS unit and the drives had been shipped. Since I had taken the free shipping option, in theory they should be here in 5-8 business days. However it has been my experience that the free shipping is usually 3 days. That’s because the free shipping is via US PS as they have so much infrastructure and people resources that there are no efficiencies gained in cost to deliver mail more slowly.  

Given that the post office lost 8 billion dollars last year I thought I would use todays blog to put in my own 2 cents in case the US Post Master General is reading my blog and is looking for some ideas as to how to eliminate the loss. Or for the rest of you - something to do on this grey rainy day today.

Truthfully the way forward for the USPS is incredibly simple if you stop to think about it for just a minute. What do you do with technology and infrastructure which is no longer relevant in the electronic age? The answer is to reduce the headcount and infrastructure inline with the ongoing reduction for demand. Unless you all have a totally different experience than we do – 80% of our daily mail is from bulk advertisers which is nothing more than mail spam.

What’s worse is the USPS gives the mail spammers reduced postal rates for bulk mailings when there are no cost efficiencies for the USPS and they are loosing money by the truckload. When a bulk mailer mails out 1 million pieces of mail, then those 1 million pieces of mail go into mail trucks around the US and are then resorted and delivered daily! Want to know where an 8 billion dollar loss comes from - this kind of logic is what digs a financial hole of those proportions.

But let’s not devolve into a negative rant. Let’s give the Post Master General something to sink their teeth into for solutions! All regions of the country should be put on alternating delivery schedules. If it absolutely has to be overnight or really fast use FedEx or UPS instead. Otherwise mail would be devlivered once a week.

Let’s start with the cities. For our example let’s say we divide all major cities into 5 zones. Then in each zone subzones would be created. The post offices in a sub zone would be open every 5^th day. I am not suggesting closing all the post offices in a subzone but rather something more like the European systems. When I needed a prescription filled in Europe the pharmacy would put a sign in the window if they were closed listing the closest pharmacy that was open. Usually the next pharmcy would be just a few blocks away. This design would be very similar.

In the subzones a closed post office would have a sign in listing the closest post office which was open on that day. The USPS employees would work different subzones each work day enabling post offices to remain open for each area of the city but reducing 80% the manpower required to keep the USPS running.

The same would hold true for the suburbs and surrounding areas. In my rural area of the county I live there are no less than 3 post offices 5 miles from my house in three different directions. I can’t count how many within 20 miles but way more than 5! Remove the staff from 4 of the post offices and then have the one USPS post office team work each day in one of the post offices while the other 4 would be closed for that week.

The only fly in the ointment is the really rural and remote places. If shuttering 80% of the post offices during the week doesn’t pay for the cost of the super rural post offices then the gov would have to outsource remote delivery. Meaning one would have to pay much higher fees for super remote mail. Think of it like the airlines system. They charge much more for low volume remote flights. You play less to fly to major centers than you do to fly to Charlotte VA or some other remote place even when they are closer. the prce is predicated on the volume not distance. The same could be true for the USPS system.

I promise tomorrow I will write something more on topic. Just a lazy today.

Peace, Leo  

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The Configuration     

I reviewed my file server and saw I was using between 2-3GB of hard drive space for the files I will be using in my new Smartphone post PC networked world. Therefore I ordered 4 2TB WD drives as they will provide about 6TB of space after RAID redundancy has been setup on the drives in the NAS unit. That leaves me with two times the space to grow over 5 years. I had read that some PC OSs can only work with 2TB hard drives and I didn’t want any compatability issues before I powered off and took the PCs to my local recycling facility.

I would like to be clear that I don’t expect to trash all of the PCs. I will likely keep some to hand out to people when their systems crash as a way to get them running immediately and others have Apps I doubt I will be available anytime soon on Smartphone tech. Example: my family makes music videos using my daughters Mac and an old PC which has a copy of Pinnacle on it. I won’t trash those machines as the Apps are to large and used way to infrequently to justify replication on Smartphone technology. But they will be powered off and they run all day everyday today.

A listing of the PCs I am looking to trash and functions to move:

All 4 of the families personal PCs – especially and including my own.

1 PC that runs the surveillance cameras for the house – will migrate those to the new NAS unit which natively supports IP based cameras.

1 PC (the mondo file server which doubles as a print server). The NAS unit replicates this function to include the ability to be a print server as well.

Drum roll please

7 PCs (really 6 PCs and 1 MAC) eliminated!

I will only keep two not on the list yet. One a laptop for work and one a desktop I built for work as the laptop hangs and chokes on the workload. If my company expands its Smartphone policy to one including the Android - I will move to totally eliminate those as well which could shut off a total of 9 machines. My company is piloting Smartphone policies for Androids as well as others therefore potentially not totally wildly optimistic pipe dream!

The next article will be the logic for which Android I will select and some useful Apps to put on it to move off my personal PC ASAP.

Peace, Leo  

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Our goal is to select a NAS unit which enables us to move off of our file server PC to a NAS unit which can support the PCs till will have Smartphones and their Apps up and running. At which point we are going to power down and shut down the nine personal computers and radically reduce the amount of time spent on administering the complex PC network.

Selection Criteria

I was a little surprised when I looked at the websites for PC magazines in how little information they provided for the project. If I had been looking for a laptop, a printer or a camera – I could have found many lists where those technologies were ranked in order for application to this project. There were NAS reviews but just in piles and not ranked therefore I had to create my own criteria and then apply it through individual reviews I found on Amazon (primarily but some other sites as well).

The criteria I laid out as the most important was features, speed and support. By features I mean that the NAS unit takes into consideration that we are talking about PCs and Smartphones and is not a barebones design. I had my file server for 11 years in my current network and only upgraded it once. Therefore I would like to have this NAS unit for 5 or 6 years and this is why a bargain unit will lack features and will force to replace it sooner. It was for this reason why I wasn’t focused on price. If I buy the more expensive unit and it lasts for several more years, then return on the investment will be worth extra expense upfront.

The second feature is speed. I hate waiting for anything. My youngest has learned this from me and waits even less patiently. So as the line in the movie goes – I feel the need for Speed! Now when I said support I mean more than just people said they had good experiences when they needed support. First I meant that they had upgraded from a manufacturers prior NAS unit because they loved it so much. That tells you how much they loved the sum in features and support.

The Short List

I visited a few discussion boards on NAs units and came up with the following three NAs units which are currently considered top of the NAS small business market:

QNAP

Synology NASes

Netgear readyNAS ultra (4-bay)

There was a 4^th model (Thecus) but I had never heard of them before and when I read the reviews of their products their support was rated poorer than the other three makers. I eliminated them as a result. Here is a link to the discussion as to why the 4^th NAS unit was removed from our short list. http://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/showthread.php?t=3716

The Top Three

Netgear is a major network manufacturer and as a result they have the largest support organization as they have so many hubs, routers and switches in the marketplace. However their unit is slow compared to the other two and has far fewer features. If installing and configuring a NAS unit scares you to the core then could consider the Netgear unit so long as you understood that you will likely be replacing it in a year or two maximum as it’s processor is only a single core verses dual cores with the other top two units.

The point of this project is not to predict a change which is not yet happening but rather to see if Smartphones and the surrounding technologies have matured to the point where they can replace the need to sit in front of a PC in future. The shift to completely mobile computing is going to dramatically change how we communicate and work together in the future. It is for this reason why I rated the Netgear box in 3^rd place as they did not give us any utilization tools or view of their vision for the Smartphone driven future.

Pricing for the Netgear unit along with a photo: Netgear readyNAS

Then There was Two

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I will admit that once I began reading the reviews on Amazon that I began to lean towards the Synology. The complaints about the unit were primarily based on how difficult it is to take the covers off the unit and how long it takes to format the drives. Since I intend to use the unit for years these complaints for were of little concern. If it takes me two days to get the unit online I am perfectly pleased given the features it has. Also when I compared the QNAP website to Synology website I felt like Synology gets it. Meaning that QNAP website was dominated by all the different hardware boxes with a mention of an App for Smartphones. While the Synology website was evenly balanced between hardware and the Apps they have designed to expand the multi media uses of thier NAS units.

The QNAP unit had features, even Apps for Smartphones along with speed going for it just as the Synology unit but had a major knock on the service side. I read where the QNAP folks only provide email support and was not very fast turning even email issues around. I did not find a service knock against the Synology unit. If you would like to see a list of the specific techie components comparison between the two units - check out this link.

Pricing for the QNAP unit along with a photo: QNAP NAS TS-419p+

The One

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An online review of a Synology DS410 from CNET. Though we are really looking at DS-411+, there are no videos of it and therefore I posted the DS-410 as they are very similar. The case that made itself to me beyond all of the postive reviews on Amazon was how Synology is positioning themselves for the future in the NAS space. They aren't just throwing a single App in for the most popular Apple devices (Ipad, Ipod, Iphone etc). Rather Synology has built full blow applications to extend thier NAS products functionality. Not just we do PCs and a couple of other really cool devices but more along the lines that the NAS unit can enable your network to do stuff without PCS, multimedia for your TV, Smartphone access to your files from anywhere etc. As I haven't used thier Apps yet - I can't say that they are terrific. For me it is more of a strategic statememt as to where they are headed that interests me. Finally the Synology's web based access/software was rated as easier to use and more functional by most reviewers. Last word however - it was very close between the two units. Had the luxury of money - I would have loved to test both of these NAS units head up for myself.

Synology's Disk Station Manager version 3.1 --> Streaming videos and tunes to your TV and Stereo.

Synology's Mobility App --> Smartphone & mobility support.

Synology's utility for file manipulation --> File Sharing.

Pricing for the Synology unit along with a photo: Synology Ds-411+

Amazon reviews of Synology's NAS unit: AMAZON.

As I have an eye Dr appointment in a few minutes I will post what I have so far as I don't know how long it will be before I can see to read & type again. The next leg of the project will be to select a place to buy the Synology DS-411+ and to determine which hard drives work with the unit and order the four hard drives which will live inside of the NAS unit.

Peace - Leo

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