After having spent a few days thinking about the conversion from personal computers to Smartphones - two major problems needs to be solutioned before I can proceed. The first is what Smartphone am I going to buy for myself? The second major question was how migrate to off of PCs without having to purchase multiple iterations of hardware along the migration route?

As it turns out the phone decision for me will be a simple one. Once I am again able to drive to the Verizon store - I will purchase one of the Android Smartphones. The reasons are very straight forward. My youngest daughter has an iPhone now. Therefore I will be integrating and solutioning the top two Smartphones when I buy an Android. The only other Smartphone in the running was a Windows 7 phone. Given how many years I waited in vain for MicroDooDoo to get a functional product out the door - you will understand why they were eliminated first.

The Windows 7 phone is a typical MS product. It solutions what the marketing strategists there think the market is headed and does not solve any of their current existing product users issues. Allow me some examples. For my project to get off of Windows PCs and move to Smartphones - wow should be a drop dead easy no brainer for them. I mean we are talking about solutioning only Microsoft’s technology! How much easier could it get for them? Well truthfully it actually couldn't be more difficult for them. We would all win the lottery before they could solve that equation. Here's why.

Steve Balmer is a straight ahead three yards and a cloud of dust kind of executive. Sorry for the old football analogy - it means nothing fancy just run straight ahead and get 3 yars befor being stopped. What this means is they are getting piles of revenue and profit from selling their Operating System(s) (OSs) and Office products at obscene prices (Word, Excel etc). For what they are selling their OS and Office products for you could go out an buy not only the fanciest phone on the planet, but a truckload of Applications which will provide you greater functionality and ease of use for the stuff you really use and still have cash left over in your pocket. So why wouldn't MS jump all over this one? Because they get paid in stock and bonuses to keep the river of cash flowing that was created when they had a monopoly on personal computing. They don't anymore so they see thier job as slowing down the loss of cash till they get thier killer product ready.

They are as tied to keeping you on PCs which they have no intention of substantially upgrading/fixing. How do I know this? Well let's look back at their history. When the Internet showed up (middle 1990s when the Internet became GUI (Graphical User Interface = uses a mouse and not typed commands via Netscape and therefore usable) - us PC gear heads were busily trying to network our systems both at work and at home. So what we really needed for the next code drop in Windows was fixing Microsoft's absolutely buggy network code. When Bill Gates announced the Internet was just a FAD as there was no money to be made there as everything was then free (no payment systems in place, no rules or security - tons of piracy going on etc) - I thought well they will jump all over their network code problems in Windows. Instead they did just the opposite.

Bill Gates then retracted his statement and said his company was going to put the Internet inside of all of his products. Code speak for "we are going to spend all of the tons of cash we are awash in to kill Netscape and Marc Andreesson (the kid who wrote the code for the first point and click web browser). And so that's what they did. They spent a gozillion to a bazillion man hours embedding their web browser into their OS while leaving their network code up through Vista crappier than Apples for over a decade! I am not an Apple fan but saw what a child could do in networking Macs while I was busy running to friends, families and neighbors homes for the following decade fixing freaking Windows networking bugs!! 

Now I took you on this little tour of the birth of the Internet in order to show you just how long Microsoft has had a specific problem and not fixed it. When I wrote yesterday that two of our PCs blew up yesterday - guess what the failure was? Yupper - their ability to see and work in my home network - they just stopped working after several years!! To see other Windows PCs – suddenly blind after an update from Microsoft!! Now that's an unaddressed bug that all Windows users have been howling about for over a decade! MicroSquish used to know that in the tech industry you had to eat your babies to survive. This would have translated to the most highly functional Smartphone - totally integrated with their own OSs. So totally integrated you could walk out and buy the Windows 7 phone and turn off your PC a week later. Instead they shipped a phone that looks at email and Facebook easily - sound familiar - this is what they did to kill Netscape. But you can't shut off one PC in your house with their phone.

Ok - so I am hoping you can clearly see why the Windows phone eliminated itself and was not totally overcome by my feelings towards the Redmond marketing teams. If you feel I did eliminate them for largely emotional reasons - that's fine - at least I explained to you where and why I have arrived at the conclusions.

In leaving negative land we are headed to solid constructive logic now. The second question was how to enable the migration without having to purchase variations of the same hardware for the PCs and the Smartphones and all the various Apps we run on our home network. Towards that end I am focused on purchasing a Network Attached Storage (NAS) box. What NAS is, is simply disk drives which are directly attached to your network. No PCs required. The bonus we get with NAS is that we can attach shared printers to them without a PC. This eliminates power draw and management of the PC we just eliminated. If it gets hung we just power it off and back on again to get it back online.

The PC we just eliminated is a large file server in my network which has over 10 hard drives in it to backup all of the PCs we are going to eliminate and also serves to store the crown jewels of my families existence. That would be photos (we went 100% digital in latter 1990s), mp3 music and important documents. The file server comes up to my waist and draws as much power as a space heater and sits in its own closet because of how noisy and how much heat it puts out. But we are not eliminating it just for green reasons but rather because even after we have moved totally to Smartphones we will need to backup the Smartphones and still store the big three types of files: photos, music and documents.  

Therefore we want this NAS unit to do more than just backup stuff but rather to enable our gleaming Smartphones to get to music stored on the NAS no matter where we are plus any other benefits we should get when we are always connected to the Internet and home with what is in effect a portable computer = a Smartphone! I will finish the research today and post tomorrow the NAS unit I am leaning towards.

Peace - Leo

I have reached one of those seminal watershed moments in my life. Besides recovering from major surgery – as soon as I got home from an almost 2 weeks stay in an ICU unit – my personal PC along with my wife’s just stopped working! An update from Microsoft killed both of our PCs. I just snapped. I asked myself why waste more of my own time repairing what Microsoft clearly does not ever care to fix? Worse yet – with the coming Smartphone’s maturation cycle, which will replace the majority of uses of PCs, why should I waste more of my time working on dead technology?

I had spent almost my entire adult working career using x86 technology and developing solutions for it. When I say I am done with x86 technology personal type machines and will move to Smartphone’s – I am talking about moving off of no less than NINE active machines (6 different OS’s), while another five are sitting dormant in my office (used when needed but not on 24x7 as are the other 9). There is a green aspect to all of this as well.

Had the folks in Redmond just made an architecture which became rock solid – they likely would have kept the mondo x86 gear heads like me. Had they just instantiated one way to install Applications on their machine – this could have easily been achieved. I have fought my way through many Windows bugs before. I have had some of my solutions published in magazines. I was the guy who your family, friends neighbors called for Windows and Networking problems. I am sorry to say that I am not going to be that guy in future. Call Microsoft, Apple or whoever you bought your PC from will likely have to be my response.

The hassle of switching alone stopped me from moving in the past when the choices were Linux or Mac. Now with far far less mature platform – this will likely be excruciatingly more difficult to switch. But if the Microsoft Mob doesn’t care than why should I continue to waste any more of my life refining support solutions for their deficient technology dumps? Answer – life is to short and after 30 years – they had plenty of time and cash to fix the stability issues.

Onward and upward – laying out what will be needed to dump x86 in the recycling facility is our next stop. The process of moving to utility type reliability (Smartphones, Cloud etc) will be the subject for this blog: lboeckl.Posterous.com. As I know Z E R O about Smartphones - the hill in front of me is quite steep! Out with old and in with the new!