A Tale of Two iPads

This NYTimes review sums up the two sentiments that are behind the iPad.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/technology/personaltech/01pogue.html?ref=technology

In short, many tech people convince themselves of the lack of the iPad's utility due to comparisons with traditional computers. I might point out that some people privy to the early Internet believed it should not be made readily available to the masses. The reasons were varied but I assure you, the root of some of it was mere technical snobbery.

I completely agree with the New York Times reviewer's assessment, if you are not a tech person, Apple has created the computer for the rest of us. Funny thing is, I decided to do some googling to try to find references to that old Apple slogan but instead I found someone saying exactly what I'm saying here:

http://www.theroot.com/views/techies-are-wrong-about-ipad

The iPad is not even out yet (2 more days) and when you view the applications that are being released for it, it is truly impressive (the Netflix one took me by surprise):

http://gizmodo.com/5507569/gizmodos-essential-ipad-apps

I ask you one simple question - when was the last time you saw such a movement for any other device?

Ha! We beat Apple! (Dream on)

The nay sayers lined up when Apple announced the iPad but arguments such as "I'll get a general tablet so I can run whatever I want" miss the point. The point being these same critics aren't running off to buy a competing device like the HP slate gizmo announced roughly two months prior. In short, the Apple iPad isn't intended for them (barring hot air).

I read an excellent article on Tom'sHardware entitled 5 Reasons Tablets Suck And You Won't Buy One

Point number 4 is key. It should have been number 1, underlined and accentuated with a headline tag <H>. Interface is why previous tablet offerings have been relegated to niche status. Is there a particular reason for this? Yes, Rob Enderle sums it up nicely:

http://technologizer.com/2010/03/08/future-windows/3/

Excerpt:

Now the most successful company as measured by profitability is Apple–who appears to be still locked into the proprietary hardware and software model that proceeded Windows’ success.

The problem with the PC model and the even more complex cell phone OS model was that no one person owned the customer experience. As a result, with the exception of Apple, PC vendors started doing stupid things like not assuring the service experience or putting software that reduced reliability (crapware) on the systems they were selling. In addition, complexity and an excessive focus on cost reductions got out of hand, significantly reducing the perceived quality of the system.

When the iPad's sales numbers are announced in a year (with unit sales in the millions), the usual will happen. Microsoft will feel the need to duplicate Apple's success and will assemble a crack team to provide a competitive offering. Haven't we been here before? Yes. Zune trying to take on the iPod. This after Microsoft's first response to the iPod Plays for Sure completely fell on its face.

Do you see a pattern here? Continual reaction to Apple's market success stories. This all underscores my strong opinion that Microsoft's leadership lacks vision. Steve Jobs despite his warts (he's not the nicest person if rumors are true) is a tech visionary.

Up until now, Microsoft has simply told hardware vendors to slap plain jane Windows on a keyboardless computer. Once again, complacency and myopia hold Microsoft back.

How Microsoft Lost the Platform War

I'm a big fan of Joel Spolsky's blog:

http://joelonsoftware.com/

Joel Spolsky has a lot of software development experience. While having worked at Microsoft in the 90's it is clear from his writing that his talents are mutually exclusive from those days. Microsoft was just another employer on the road of life. Today he runs FogCreek Software in New York City. One of my favorite postings from Joel was entitled How Microsoft Lost the API War written back on June 13, 2004. In technological terms this is now ancient history. However, what Joel wrote back then is still relevant in terms of how Microsoft lost the hearts and minds of software developers. While writing that column Joel took a tangent:

Why Apple and Sun Can't Sell Computers
Well, of course, that's a little bit silly: of course Apple and Sun can sell computers, but not to the two most lucrative markets for computers, namely, the corporate desktop and the home computer. Apple is still down there in the very low single digits of market share and the only people with Suns on their desktops are at Sun. (Please understand that I'm talking about large trends here, and therefore when I say things like "nobody" I really mean "fewer than 10,000,000 people," and so on and so forth.)

I wrote to Joel Spolsky in the past year and mused how those words no longer hold true (about Apple anyway). I pointed out that half of my team members at work were operating with Apple Macbooks.  

Then today I caught this on the New York Times:

OS X Share Up 29% in Past Year, Slowly Chipping Away at Microsoft

Excerpt:

Apple’s relative share has grown by 29.4% in the past year, while Windows lost 3.8%. Mobile increased the most in the past year, more than doubling its share of web consumption.

Adding fuel to the fire is another potential paradigm shift - tablet/slate computing. While there will be various Windows 7 based tablet products on the market, I have a very high degree of confidence Apple's sales of the iPad will likely marginalize these offerings. This is an opinion I immediately formed when the iPad was announced and it is write ups like that of Brian X. Chen from Wired that reinforce this, i.e. he didn't write "What the HP slate Means for the Future of Computing."

What the iPad Means for the Future of Computing

At this point you're guessing I'm writing this on a Macintosh. Nope. I use Windows 7 day to day. However, I'm not an ostrich with its head buried in the sand. I see reality. Microsoft ZDNet blogger Ed Bott seems to be on the same wavelength:

Like I said, apps matter.

So why is Microsoft incapable of responding appropriately? Read the words of a former Microsoft Vice President:

Microsoft’s Creative Destruction

In short, Microsoft is severely hobbled by a Balkinzation stemming from differing agendas among its product groups, a lack of vision (Ballmer at best is a Chief Operating Officer, he has no vision whatsoever and the longer he stays the more Microsoft is damaged) and the usual myopia found at a large company wanting to protect cash cows originating in the distant past (Office, Windows).

Until Microsoft has a come to Jesus moment (often precipitated by lots of layoffs & loss of market share) nothing will change. Except by then, it could very well be too late...

Adobe's Flash R.I.P.?

Adobe is frustrated at Steve Jobs as Apple's mobile devices increasingly become a bigger player in the Internet experience. The iPhone platform which was released three years ago still does not have Flash and that does not seem like it will change anytime soon. But it's not entirely Apple's fault. Adobe's Flash platform isn't conducive to long battery usage. Simple as that.

The recently announced Apple iPad along with advances in HTML5 will only accelerate the trend of companies rebuking Adobe's Flash platform over the long term.

It turns out, Adobe's frustrations are well grounded (in fear). If content creators start considering the growing Apple userbase and stop leveraging Flash because they'd rather not alienate Apple device users, it means a long and slow death spiral for Adobe's platform. Fact: Adobe makes a LOT of money selling content creation software, Adobe doesn't make any money on people downloading the Flash plugin. Adobe is one of the largest software vendors for the Windows platform outside of Microsoft itself, e.g., Photoshop, Dreamweaver, PDF software, etc., etc. In short, Adobe makes a large portion of its revenue selling content creation tools. If one of its major formats dies, i.e. Flash, that's a serious blow to Adobe.

Case in point, remember when Real Networks blazed trails with respect to streaming audio/video over the Internet? Well, look where they are now. I can't remember the last time I installed any of Real's software and given the fact that practically no one puts out content in Real's format anymore, that won't be changing anytime soon.

I wrote about HTML5 a few days ago which shimmys itself in a position that essentially starts loosening Flash's vice grip on video playback. It seems I'm not the only one with this opinion:

"HTML vs. Flash: Can a turf war be avoided?"

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20000037-264.html?tag=newsLeadStoriesArea.1

Here's an excerpt:

Bruce Lawson, Web standards evangelist for browser maker Opera Software, believes HTML and the other technologies inevitably will replace Flash and already collectively are "very close" to reproducing today's Flash abilities.

"The Web (including video, games, animation) is too vital a platform for business, communication, and society to be in the hands of any single vendor," Lawson said. "But it'll be a while; there is a huge body of existing content that uses Flash."

Both Lawson and I have come to the same conclusion - the long term future for Adobe's Flash platform is not bright (pun intended).

The (Internet) World In Two Hands

David Morgenstern a blogger from ZDNet cuts to the heart of the matter as far as what Apple's newly iPad announced represents, "The iPhone is a device that puts the world into one hand; the iPad, two hands." Read on if you like:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=5890&tag=wrapper;col1

I could not agree more. A consistent behavior I've seen of naysayers is a continual comparison of the newly announced iPad vs. laptops.

Here's one scenario that I don't see any laptop or netbook taking on. Increasingly HDTVs are coming with Ethernet ports to stream content off the Net. But who says they have to act purely as clients? That is, reading information, e.g., movies off Netflix's video servers. Why can't the TV be the server? Albeit a really simple server. Like the kind where instead of relying on infrared signals it abides by a well known command protocol coming through its Ethernet connection.

So before too long the TV industry devises a standard (that would be layer 7 application protocol for all the geeks) for controlling televisions via Ethernet interfaces. Then, before you know it, you'll see a remote control application for the iPad (or its posterity) where every living room device that has a remote will have its buttons represented as a skin overlaid on the iPad's surface. This is one of many scenarios that comes to mind where a laptop or netbook simply does not make the grade and looking at the iPad strictly through such a lens falls short.

Which is why I couldn't agree more with the title of Morgenstern's blog post "Dude, the iPad isn't a notebook - get over it!"

If you have doubts about the enthusiasm the iPad generated, I can tell you empirically that as Steve Jobs unveiled Apple's latest creation, tech sites were being hammered with traffic. I found Engadget and ZDNet to be noticeably slow as the morning of the iPad's unveiling wore on. I was following the announcement through:

http://live.gdgt.com/

I visited other tech sites since I was curious to see the buzz elsewhere - I found them to be very slow.

Chrome 4.0 / HTML 5 Video Playback

Google's just released the next major revision of its Chrome browser, version 4.0, to the masses in the last day:

http://lifehacker.com/5456369/chromes-new-stable-release-brings-extensions-bookmark-sync-to-the-masses?autoplay=true

Previously Chrome 4.0 was only available to the initiated (development release). Updating to 4.0 for existing users is simply a matter of clicking on the wrench icon in the rightmost toolbar area and then selecting About Google Chrome.

DownloadSquad featured a variety of Chrome plugins in a November article (only useful at the time to folks with the development release):

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/11/02/15-great-google-chrome-extensions/

With 4.0's release Chrome's extensibility goes up dramatically and thus its utility.

HTML 5

Chrome's addition of extensions overshadow its in HTML 5. Among them, video playback. The ramifications of this while not immediately forthcoming are significant. For quite some time most web designers/developers have assumed their users to have Flash but it turns out Flash has its issues. For starters, Flash's performance under Mac OS X is very poor and something that many Mac fans continually scoff at. The proof is in the pudding:

http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/29/27-inch-imacs-having-performance-issues/

For a variety of reasons including the fact that the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) originally was focusing on document publication and not rich multimedia experiences, Macromedia (a well known company later acquired by Adobe) entrenched itself with the novel idea of extending browsers with video playback. Before you knew it, its Flash platform became the defacto standard for video playback. The fly in the ointment is that as the Macintosh user base has grown dramatically, they're increasingly a louder voice and unhappy with a second rate video playback platform. Rest assured, the number of Macintosh users is growing faster than Adobe (and Steve Ballmer) would like - Apple's recently announced latest quarterly results were phenomenal.

There are two big issues with Flash. First, Adobe has struggled with lots of security issues with both its Flash plugin and PDF reader. Secondly, as much as I've been a fan of Flash for blazing trails, I hate to say this but I'm liking the idea of not requiring it on my desktop. It turns out performance-wise, by today's standards its architecture poorly leverages my hardware. Despite Flash being pervasive for the better part of a decade Adobe only now has seen it fit to leverage GPUs during video playback. GPU acceleration within Flash is still in beta:

http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/17/adobes-flash-player-10-1-beta-gpu-acceleration-tested-document/

In other words, Flash can be very CPU intensive while your computer' graphics subsystem and its computational prowess goes unused. It turns out decoding video is intrinsically a parallel computation, something GPUs excel at.

I'm willing to bet anyone with a laptop, even a powerful one, knows all too well what happens when you start playing lots of Flash content - the fan starts cranking.

I'll close with pointing out that if you are running Chrome 4.0, you can opt to use HTML 5 video playback by default on YouTube instead of Flash by visiting the following page:

http://www.youtube.com/html5

New Toys

The past week and a half has been a bit more tech filled than usual for me. I upgraded to Windows 7 Ultimate, I got ATI's latest über DirectX 11 compliant video card the 5870 and I've become more active with Twitter on account of the slick TweetDeck client.

The combination of the 5870 and Windows 7 Ultimate has resulted in me essentially having a new system. Despite having a motherboard dating back to mid-2006 this is the second time I've wound up putting off a motherboard/CPU upgrade with a new video card (I'm waiting for ubiquitous USB 3.0 and PCI Express 3.0 before I upgrade my motherboard). My previous video card, the 4870 was an excellent performer but state of the art is a state of change. The 5870 is an amazing product and it definitely falls into the techno-sybarite category. With gaming consoles providing an extremely compelling experience in the form very large communities (XBox Live), large displays (HDTVs) and the ability to ensconce oneself on the sofa, it's not surprising many gamers have eschewed high end PCs for consoles.

The 5870 however proved its power when I pulled out my old Crysis disc. Crysis was a PC game that came out in 2007 receiving lots of press for a couple of reasons - amazing visuals and the fact that probably 99% of people did not have the kind of hardware needed to make Crysis a compelling experience. My guess is Crytek, the developer, had more in mind developing an engine that was capable of realizing the visions of game studios for several years into the future (a.k.a. licensing its engine) and the casualty was everyone that didn't have a PC of the future. I'm happy to say that the 5870 is capable of rendering Crysis @ 1920x1200 with Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA) and Very High settings. I cheated with my 4870 by playing Crysis on an old 21" CRT I had (since given away) and thus I didn't need to enable FSAA. You see, a graphics card expends quite a bit more cycles applying FSAA. Nowadays I use Dell's excellent 24"2408WFP LCD and my initial reaction to seeing Crysis running on it smoothly was a bit of dissonance as Crysis has had a long standing reputation of bringing hardware to its knees.

Moving along, check out the TweetDeck client, either you get Twitter or hopefully you will realize its utility at some point. I must confess I wasn't blazing trails with Twitter but my coworkers (I wrote about the light bulb going off in a prior post) made me realize how effective it was to ferret out information on a topic that while impromptu was also suddenly very important even if only ephemerally. I will close with an article from the NYTimes I just read that echoes my recent post on Twitter:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/business/09link.html?ref=technology