It did not make many news reports, but on May 22nd something remarkable happened. Apple Inc. became worth more than Microsoft. The worth of Apple shares totaled $222.12 billion. Microsoft shares totaled $219.88 billion.
Why is this so important? Clearly for as long as most people can remember, Microsoft’s value out shown Apple’s by many order of magnitudes. Also, Microsoft technology is pervasive. You really have to look hard to find a business that does not have its information technology centered on Microsoft. In spite of this, and Apple being hardly seen in the business world, Apple is worth more.
How can this be when Microsoft Windows is on ninety percent of desktop computers, and its pricey Microsoft Office software is the de-facto business-standard? The answer appears to be that Microsoft has peaked. Its products are lackluster and generally boring. Apple on the other hand is now a brand with sparkle. Its iPhone, for example, is the pricey but niftiest smartphone on the market. Its newest product, the iPad, which left me unimpressed, is being snapped up across the world. Apple always had a reputation for having cool products. Particularly since the iPhone was released, Apple now has a product that is no longer niche but widely used by people at all income levels. Even if AT&T’s service leaves something to be desired, people marvel at the cleverness and usefulness of the pervasive iPhone, and take that as a sign that other Apple products are the same way. When the time comes to upgrade home computers, many are now happily paying premium prices for the Mac.
Microsoft’s strength has hitherto been playing copycat and offering similar but not as great products with the official Windows seal on them. Its Windows operating system began as a blatant rip off of Apple’s graphical user interface. I have to think hard to find any Microsoft product that is truly innovative. Its Microsoft Office suite is not. It’s success, like Internet Explorer, was due largely to its ability to bundle it with its Windows product. Why should a company buy Lotus 1-2-3 separately when they could get Microsoft Office preinstalled with their PCs? If I had to pick an innovative Microsoft product, I would pick its Xbox gaming console. Even there, Microsoft was hardly first in the game box market.
Microsoft remains a very profitable company, but reading its tealeaves should be making Wall Street reach for the Pepto Bismol. With the introduction of Windows 7, revenues are up substantially this year as businesses refresh their Windows operating systems. Yet, like most of their operating system upgrades, they did not get it right until they went through an unsuccessful introduction of another Window version, Windows Vista. Much of Microsoft’s revenue stream comes from customers paying premium prices for just so-so products: Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. However, both of these products have serious long-term viability issues.
Although Windows 7 is being well received, it is unclear whether ten years from now we will still want Windows at all as a desktop operating system. After all, Windows is proprietary. Open source operating systems have been available for a long time, and certain desktop Linux variations are entirely free. These have not caught on, but the Google Chrome OS might, once it is formally introduced this year. Particularly on lower end machines like cheap laptops and netbooks, computer manufacturers are going to find the combination of the free cost of Google Chrome OS along with its rapid boot up and swift loading time to be compelling reasons to use the operating system. If nothing else, a model with Chrome OS will cost less than the same model with Windows on it. Microsoft may find itself discounting the price of Windows, or maybe even making it an open source product so it does not lose too much market share. In either case, the profitable and reliable Windows OS revenue stream looks precarious.
On the Microsoft Office front, things look better for Microsoft but perhaps not forever. Google Docs is a sort of Microsoft Office-lite product that is free and lives in its Internet cloud. Right now, most people will not prefer Google Docs to Microsoft Office, but for personal use, Google Docs is free, whereas Microsoft Office requires spending at least a couple hundred dollars for a license. You don’t have to be particularly smart to imagine that the well moneyed Google will work hard over the next decade to up its Google Docs feature set so that it will work faster and be more functional. It is already pushing Google Docs for business, allowing businesses to offer similar functionality to Microsoft Office for a fraction of its cost. For businesses that need the basics and don’t want the hosting hassle, it’s good enough and quite a bargain. Microsoft Office is the other major component of Microsoft’s profits. Drive a stake into it, or just dilute its market share and shareholders will be hollering.
Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Outlook rule the business email universe, but in a decade, this can change as well. Exchange is pricey, needs beefy servers and is hard to administer. GMail has proven to be reliable and as quick as Exchange/Outlook, plus there are no hassles with hosting GMail and no desktop software to install, maintain and patch.
Microsoft’s server and entertainment lines are profitable, but make up only a small percentage of their profits. Others, like their online services, currently do not make a profit, although Microsoft claims its Bing search engine should soon be profitable. It’s unlikely though that Bing will ever overtake Google’s search engine.
The general problem for Microsoft is the same: lack of innovation in general and always playing catch up with the more agile players in the IT world. At what point does the desktop become obsolete because most of the work is being done in the cloud? When that time arrives, the handwriting will be on the wall for Microsoft.
Things are not guaranteed for its agile competitors, of course. Google and Apple still have to show they can continue to be innovative. Given their records of accomplishment the smart money is on them, and was borne out recently in Apple’s share prices. Microsoft stockholders might want to petition Bill Gates to return as CEO and software architect. During Gates’ reign, Microsoft steadily advanced in both sales and market share. It is unclear though even if Gates could be convinced to return to Microsoft whether he could change the dynamics at play.
It appears that Microsoft is being slowly being bested. It won’t disappear entirely, but in ten years it may be but a shadow of its current self, perhaps where Apple was in relation to Microsoft ten years ago. If I owned a lot of Microsoft stock, I would make it a goal to sell about half my stock over the next five years. While it may lose market share, it will still be profitable for quite a while, just not as profitable as it could be. I would begin putting my money into more agile and promising companies instead.
July 10th, 2010 at 10:26pm
Posted by
Mark |
Technology |
no comments
Tags: Apple Computers, Google, Google Chrome OS, Google Docs, Microsoft
For as long as I can remember, maps have fascinated me. This may have come from not having a very adventurous childhood. Our vacations, when they happened at all, rarely occurred more than a few hundred miles from home. I never took a commercial airline flight until I was an adult. However, we did have an oversized National Geographic atlas of the world. It was a good way to visit faraway places in my imagination.
I was fortunate enough for a while to work for what was then the Defense Mapping Agency. While I had no training in cartography, I did earn a modest living tracking the printing of various topographic maps and nautical charts used by the military. It was neat to watch the process, from the careful correction of negatives (generally one for each map color) to seeing the map roll off the presses. I left that job more than twenty years ago, and since that time the Defense Mapping Agency has changed names a number of times and now probably produces far more digital products than printed products. For about four years, I was in map heaven. Trying to better track the production of maps lead me into a career in the information technology field that has since kept me well moneyed. Yet, my interest in maps never waned.
So naturally, I was quite agog when Google Earth was introduced in 2005. Who needs television when you can play with Google Earth instead? Since then, the product has gotten progressively better and their street views left me euphoric. Nevertheless, even a product as mature as Google Earth has some limitations. Want to plot a great circle route? There is no way to do it. Want to draw concentric lines around a point on the globe? Here again Google Earth falls short.
Most people don’t want to do these things, but I do. My frustration eventually turned up the GPS Visualizer site, a small work of wonder by itself, as it is a creation of one man, specifically Adam Schneider, who must also have my mapping bug. You can do all these things and more on the GPS Visualizer site.
Great circle routes fascinate me. In case you are not familiar with the term, this is the shortest distance between two points on the earth. The shortest path is not what you would think looking at your typical Cartesian map. You can sort of figure it out if you have a globe with a piece of string, but what you get is an approximation. In the northern hemisphere, trips to anywhere in Europe are typically flown far north of where you would expect them to fly. This is good. It saves the airline a lot of gas. Since the earth is not a perfect sphere, there are some minor errors in most calculations. Schneider has figured it all out and can produce extremely accurate Great Circle routes.
One of the things I like to do is draw great circle routes between far-flung airports. The routes airlines actually fly often differ quite a bit from great circle routes, mainly because in the United States the FAA designates that flights must follow standard routes. Still, you can get a good idea of your flight path by creating its great circle route. For fun, I tracked one of the more unusual flights I took, between JFK International in New York City and Narita airport in Tokyo, Japan. My flight was a bit south of the great circle route because at the time, the Soviet Union still existed and they were known to shoot down foreign aircraft that wandered into their air space. In addition, not all aircraft are certified to fly above the Arctic Circle. The great circle route for this flight though would scrape the top of the Bering Sea and pass over Vladivostok. Sadly, I remember little but clouds approaching Japan, but I only had the vaguest idea of where I was. In nearly fourteen hours in the air I looked down at a lot of frozen tundra while the sun hung largely in the same position in the west. It was disorienting, weird and wonderful, almost like being in outer space.
The GPS Visualizer site does lot of other neat geographic tricks. You can create a great circle map between any two points if you want, not just airports. You can type in two addresses and it will tell you the exact distance between them and give you an exact compass heading should you want to hoof it. It will draw elevation maps between two points. You can draw rings around a point at given distances. You can see the results in Google Earth by downloading the .kmz file it creates. You can also see it in Google Maps or get it in SVG, PNG and JPEG formats.
One thing I am discovering it that despite having over six billion people on the planet, most of our planet’s landmass is thinly populated. Last night as an experiment, I used the GPS Visualizer to draw lines exactly north and south of my house going ten thousand miles. I got the coordinates of my house out of Google Earth. I was curious who might be living one hundred, one thousand or five thousand miles due north or south from my house.
The answer: hardly anyone, except in the United States and even then, not that much. Five hundred miles south of my house is a point that looks like it is in the Bermuda triangle. At my longitude, the line cuts through Panama, but not through any populated places. It tracks through the Andes Mountains then disappears into the vastness of the Pacific Ocean. I then tracked it north. It came close to Rochester, then traveled over forests in Ontario, out into the tundra, over the pole, over Russia and Mongolia and did not hit anything resembling civilization until it reached Thailand. Even so, I hit no major cities.
Ideally, Google would put all these features into Google Earth. Perhaps some day they will because as good as the GPS Visualizer site is, it is just one guy having fun so it is a bit awkward to use at times. Still, to a man fascinated by maps like me its power combined with Google Earth give me a neat way to geek out. Try it out sometime. You may end up like me finding it oddly entertaining.
May 18th, 2010 at 08:43pm
Posted by
Mark |
Technology, Travel |
no comments
Tags: Google Earth, GPS Visualizer, Maps
For about three months, I have been taking Google’s Chrome browser out for an extended spin. What I am discovering is that while there is a lot to love about Chrome, it has some usability issues that annoy me.
As I noted three months ago, you have to love Chrome for how fast it is. It both loads quickly and renders web pages quickly. Although a new browser, it has proven to be much more stable than my browser for the last seven years, Mozilla Firefox. My instability issues with Firefox may have a lot to do with poor engineering of the many user created add-ons that I have grown accustomed to. Arguably, Chrome is better engineered for both stability and speed. One way it does both is by assigning one computer thread to each open tab window.
Three months ago, add-ons (or extensions as they call them) for Chrome were relatively few. That has changed dramatically. You can find equivalent extensions for most of Firefox’s voluminous add-ons, often written by the same developers who created them for Firefox. In some cases, they lack the maturity of the original Firefox add-on. The Firebug extension for Chrome, at least as of this writing, is just Firebug-Lite, which has maybe fifty percent of the features of the full Firefox add-on. If I need to peer deep into the document object model of a web page to troubleshoot it, I am using Firefox with the Firebug add-on. Still, most of the extensions I care about are already there, often in many subtly different flavors. These include Web Developer, an XMarks bookmarks synchronization tool, Web of Trust (which lets you know of suspicious sites), a Web to PDF converter, a webpage screenshot tool, a tool that automatically converts text links into real links, Chromed Bird (a really sweet Twitter extension), a Weather Underground add-on and a Yahoo Mail Notifier. Doubtless, I would find many more “must have” extensions if I spent more time trying them out.
You would expect Chrome to have a tight integration with the Google Search Engine, but it is not yet smart enough to act like Firefox’s Awesome Bar, which intelligently tracks your most frequent queries and finds them by typing a few characters on the URL field. Similarly, Firefox’s Bookmarks toolbar (where your bookmarks conveniently rest on a window on the side of the browser) is so much more usable than Chrome’s “Other Bookmarks” button and navigating through the multiple levels of bookmarks to get to the bookmark of choice.
In addition, Chrome could use a real menu system, so you can easily get to every feature. (You do get one with the MacOS version because MacOS requires it.) Say you want to open a local file or print a web page. You can click on the “Control the Current Page” button and get to it there, but it is counterintuitive and breaks the standard desktop computing metaphor. Instead, I clicked on the “Customize and Control” button (the little wrench icon) expecting it would be there, but it wasn’t. I sure would also like to be able to add a print button to the toolbar, but if there is a way to do it, it is not intuitive.
I understand why Google made these major changes. They wanted to maximize the extent of the browser window on the assumption that content is what really matters and every pixel counts. The reality is that using a browser requires an intelligent tradeoff between viewing web pages and swiftly navigating to (or finding) where you want to go, and that requires real estate for more controls. Chrome made too many compromises and broke too many metaphors in pursuit of its Holy Grail of making the largest possible browser window.
To understand why they became so anal, you have to remember their long-term vision. They want to kill Windows, and if they kill MacOS as well, they will be even happier. Their vision of the future is that everyone is carrying around a netbook running their ChromeOS operating system which will boot very quickly and immediately dump you into the Chrome browser. All your applications would be web applications that run inside of Chrome. In the netbook world, almost everyone is accessing as a wireless device and they are likely to be keyboard challenged as well. They want to wrest our minds away from the PC metaphor of menus and task bars into something new and compact, behaving more like an intelligent cell phone or iPad. Chrome aligns fine with their Chrome OS vision, but while we live in the Windows/MacOS world, the disconnect is quite jarring. It’s like sitting in a Prius and looking desperately for the slot for the ignition key. In short, right now it’s just weird.
Having said these things, Chrome is so smoking fast that a lot of the time I don’t care. If I just want to search the web to visit a few favorite sites or want integrated access to their search engine, it excels. It’s just that I’ve gotten used to having my browser do all these other tricks. Making Chrome do them as well is going to take time. I suspect Google’s engineers will get us there if we are patient.
At work because I have an extensive collection of bookmarks for obscure places I need to go to quickly in order to do my job, the small latency and instability in Firefox is a small price to pay versus the speed and counterintuitive ways that Chrome works. At home, where my needs are more modest and I have MacOS, I use Chrome. Meanwhile, feeling the heat and losing market share to Chrome, Mozilla is trying to speed up Firefox by imitating Chrome by placing each tab in a thread. Unfortunately, it will take some time implement it, as it requires a lot of reengineering. If they do it quickly enough, I may continue to stay with Firefox indefinitely. Given that Google’s pockets are far deeper than Mozilla’s, I am not too hopeful.
May 3rd, 2010 at 05:24pm
Posted by
Mark |
Technology |
no comments
Tags: Browsers, Firefox, Google, Google Chrome, Google Chrome OS
I first started metering my blog using SiteMeter back in 2004 because it was free and it did not have much competition. It solved the general problem of knowing who was accessing my web site in a simple way that still seems quite elegant. Create a SiteMeter account, slap some code into your site’s templates and you were done. The only alternative we had back them was to hope our web hosts had installed a package like Awstats. In many ways, SiteMeter was better than Awstats because it filtered out a lot of the noise. Awstats was not that good with determining “real” visits and page views vs. “fake” visits and page views. “Fake” visits and page views are any access by search engines. They don’t represent an actual human being reading your site. SiteMeter and similar services can tell real viewers from fake viewers because it depends on the browser to read and execute some embedded Javascript. The Javascript in your browser essentially “pings” a remote server, passing on information about your access. Search engine robots generally cannot be bothered.
Over the years, I have developed my suspicions about how accurate SiteMeter was. However, it was at least a common benchmark, since SiteMeter was also metering most other prominent websites. At least it gave you some idea of your relevant web traffic. Back in 2006, Google became a serious player in the site analytics business. In 2007 I began also monitoring my site with Google Analytics.
Over the last few months, it became clear to me that SiteMeter was missing many page requests. While it came close to matching the number of visits to my site, it was way off in the number of page views. For example, here are some statistics over the last six days for my site:
| Date |
Google Analytics |
SiteMeter |
| Visits |
Page Views |
Visits |
Page Views |
| 3/22/10 |
174 |
286 |
147 |
212 |
| 3/23/10 |
167 |
418 |
152 |
201 |
| 3/24/10 |
150 |
319 |
165 |
190 |
| 3/25/10 |
127 |
296 |
143 |
176 |
| 3/26/10 |
143 |
369 |
146 |
189 |
| 3/27/10 |
87 |
289 |
91 |
144 |
| Total |
848 |
1977 |
844 |
1112 |
What explains the difference? One small factor is that Google Analytics tracks days in Pacific time, while SiteMeter tracks in Eastern time. However, Google Analytics is reporting more than forty percent more page views that SiteMeter, 865 more page views over the same six-day period!
I really don’t think Google Analytics is creating artificial page views. As best I can figure, SiteMeter is either not getting notified of these additional page views or, more likely, one or more page views per visit are getting lost on the Internet and not actually arriving at SiteMeter. Why would this be? This is speculation, of course, but Google has much deeper pockets than SiteMeter. I suspect they have more servers listening on the edge of the cloud than SiteMeter. If correct, this means that for Google Analytics to collect a “ping” there are fewer routers to hop through on its journey, so they are more likely to be recorded. Part of the problem may be SiteMeter’s more precarious revenue stream. I don’t pay SiteMeter for monitoring my site, which means the only money they make from me are from serving me ads when I (or others) visit SiteMeter to see my statistics.
There are other issues with SiteMeter that show that they are getting sloppy. SiteMeter is also including the Google Search engine as a visitor, which artificially inflates my page view. If you are being metered by SiteMeter, you may be affected as well. Look at Recent Visitors by Details. If for example you see “googlebot.com” as the domain and a large number of page views, it’s pretty obvious that these are not human beings reading your site and the Google search engine is indexing your site instead. This problem has persisted for months and I have brought it to SiteMeter’s attention. They clearly don’t consider fixing it a priority, which implies they are not very concerned about the accuracy of their statistics.
I can understand that keeping track of the myriad search engines out there is a large challenge. I am sure Google has the same issue, but I am also confident that Google has the resources to make sure my statistics are clean. It sure appears that SiteMeter does not, or gives much lower priority to us non-paying customers.
SiteMeter is still useful to me as a quick way to check usage on my site. It gives me an idea of whether a certain post has gained in popularity and who has visited the site recently. However, it is clear that it is, at best, a rough record of actual usage of your site and is probably underreporting your site’s actual numbers of page views. You would be wise not to read too much into its statistics. If you have not added Google Analytics tracking code, you might want to do so.
March 28th, 2010 at 01:51pm
Posted by
Mark |
Technology |
no comments
Tags: Google Analytics, Sitemeter
Remember when I said I didn’t need a social network? Okay, maybe you don’t remember. I likely don’t have a lot of regular readers and those I do have probably don’t recall some vague post I made on the social networking phenomenon back in 2008. Yet, somehow I seem to have found myself on Facebook.
Those social networking psychologists, they sure are tricky. They hit me at my Achilles Heel. I take pride in not having a whole lot of friends but some of the friends I do have are on Facebook. Some of them (I won’t mention any names) kept persisting month after month by sending me these electronic invitations to join Facebook. Sometimes they actually sent me personal emails to try to convince me to join. Think of how much better we’ll be connected, they told me.
One day a few months ago, it just became easier for me to join Facebook than it was to decline and hurt my friends’ feelings yet again. The peer pressure finally got to me. I had hardly set up my account on Facebook before my sister and one of my friends started chatting away with me in Facebook. For a brief moment, I was impressed. I never got this much attention from them until I joined them in the Facebook enclave. I could feel the love.
Now they knew I kept up on every aspect of their lives, or at least those parts they were willing to post in Facebook. Ah, and there’s the rub. I wasn’t on more than a couple hours before I started tinkering with Facebook’s privacy settings. How much about myself was I willing to share with the world? I quickly decided: as little as possible. Would I be like many on Facebook and have hundreds or thousands of friends? Would I keep up with the friend of someone I know vaguely from church? No way! I decided that if I were going to share things about myself on Facebook then they would have to be a real friend, not some casual acquaintance.
So my list of friends is unimpressive. I regularly decline or ignore friend requests because, quite frankly, I consider them acquaintances, not friends. I currently have twenty-five friends, and nine of them are relatives, which means I have only 14 real Facebook friends. The good part is that all my Facebook friends are real friends. They are people I have interacted significantly with in real life, who I want to keep in touch with (albeit not necessarily every day) and whose opinions I respect. Frankly, I didn’t know I had that many friends.
In some cases, they are now distant friends. They include a now 37-year-old woman who nearly a quarter century ago was our foster child and who rarely got more from me than a Christmas card with a family newsletter. Now I get to read her daily psychic horoscope. They include some cyber friends who I actually have met in person over the years but otherwise rarely chat with regularly. They include some former coworkers who I liked so much we traded email addresses when I left. In addition, they include a couple current coworkers with whom my relationship is more than superficial.
Still, even with my privacy settings up to very high, just how much about myself am I willing to post on Facebook? It turns out: not a whole lot. If I have marital issues, I’m not going to tell them about it via Facebook. I’m not even going to tell my family, but if I do it will probably be over a landline or in person and certainly not on Facebook. What sort of interesting stuff am I willing to share with my friends? I link them to a Jon Stewart video. I tell them I painted the garage door this weekend. I ask for vacation suggestions. It’s very innocuous stuff.
It is true that via Facebook that I am learning things about my friends that I would probably not otherwise know. Renee is looking to rent her townhouse and escape to third world countries. My nephew got a new set of glasses. Sometimes I learn interesting things. What is lacking is the sort of intimate details that you might glean over a cup of coffee. It seems my Facebook friends understand that posts on Facebook could come back to haunt them if they are not careful. With Facebook free to change its terms of service anytime it wants, it’s best to keep conversation pretty superficial. Who knows what future employer might check me out in Facebook and find out I was recently in the hospital for clinical depression? (Umm, I wasn’t really, at least as far as you know, but you get the idea.)
I have also joined a few Facebook groups and fan sites, but for the most part, I don’t have the time to delve into these groups. They are mainly means to alert my friends about what interests me. I do tend to check Facebook most days because it comes up as a browser tab automatically, but sometimes I forget. Moreover, as I use Facebook more often, I find it less and less compelling.
The truth is, I regret getting on Facebook. My instincts were correct. I am not yet courageous enough to close my account. Why? I am a weenie. I don’t like confrontation. For my friends might feel that if I closed my account, I don’t think learning the details of their lives are that important. While I appreciate those nuggets I have learned about my friends, Facebook has a high signal to noise ratio. At best maybe five percent of the things I learn about my friends truly engages me.
I also find plenty of things that annoy me about Facebook. What annoys me the most is simply its commercial nature. Of course, Facebook needs to make a profit, so they throw ads at me in the right sidebar. They want me to rate ads on whether I like or do not like them. Like hell. The last thing I am going to do is volunteer more information about how to successfully market to me.
As for its user interface, I have to wonder if a bunch of trolls created it. Truly, it is baffling confusing. Perhaps it is one of these interfaces that if you have been in it for a few years would make complete sense. There are endless notifications. You have a home page, but you also have a wall, and it’s unclear what the difference is. I find myself posting stuff on other people’s walls that I should have put on mine because pages can’t be customized, so they all look the same. I can’t edit posts or comments. It reminds me of software, like Microsoft Project, that are largely baffling and frustrating for the average user, but who has to use it anyhow. I just don’t get the interface. I find it annoying. What is “Top News”? How does Facebook decide? Why not just show “Most Recent” all the time? Why do I get all these notifications I don’t care about?
My suspicion is that within the next few months I will just give it up. It will have to be done carefully. Perhaps I will go from checking daily to once a week, and then once a month, and then once a quarter. If one of my friends asks, I will sheepishly admit I find the site largely a waste of my time and could they please email me, call me on the phone or meet me for a cup of coffee? Perhaps if there were a non-commercial version of Facebook that actually was usable, I would migrate to it.
I frankly don’t understand the fuss about Facebook. If it died tomorrow, I would be fine and even happy. I would not miss it at all. I hope that enough people who agree with me will find the courage I currently lack, and just get off it altogether. Facebook, like other technologies like Twitter, or for that matter Craigslist’s Casual Encounters section, I find to be largely a waste of my time.
March 21st, 2010 at 07:53pm
Posted by
Mark |
Sociology, Technology |
no comments
Tags: Facebook, Social Networking
Does it really matter which browser you use? So many of us spend our lives in a browser that it is reasonable to think the answer is yes. Nevertheless, all browsers pretty much do the same thing. Once familiarity sets in, you have to have a compelling reason to move from one browser to another.
In 2004, I ditched the world’s de-facto browser Internet Explorer for a weird upstart browser called Mozilla Firefox. It was an easy switch. It was true that back then, thanks to Microsoft’s proprietary extensions to HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that things would not always behave the same way in both browsers. Six years later, I still have to use Internet Explorer on a few sites, because the application has not been updated to use web standards. This is now largely a past memory. Unless you need some quirky feature like HTML 5 compatibility (which most browsers are racing to address anyhow) most of the rendering oddities are in the past. Not that a few don’t still bite us. Last I checked, Internet Explorer still did not allow rows in HTML tables to dynamically collapse through Javascript.
For six years, I have been satisfied with Firefox, and generally happier with each new release. I loved all the free plug-ins that were available. The latest version of Firefox (3.6) that I recently downloaded introduced personas. These are sort of like themes for the blank spaces around the edge of your browser. It’s pretty neat to look at, but it’s really window dressing, just like the wallpaper on your computer’s desktop. What matters the most to me is usability. Simple tends to be better.
Firefox’s weakness the last year or so has been its instability. It crashes a lot for me on both Windows and the Mac. This could be more annoying than it is, for you can at least restart it quickly and it will remember your open windows. Firefox also suffers from new version syndrome. Once every few weeks it wants to install a new minor version of itself, sometimes with new features, but mostly to fix bugs. As annoying as new versions are, it’s a straightforward and quick process. It’s better than Internet Explorer, which even though it claims to have excellent security is rife with bugs that require all sorts of mostly behind the scenes patching. IE wants to keep you in the dark about its bugs. Firefox is in your face with them by patching them so quickly.
Since I have a Mac, I also have Safari, which I use from time to time. It’s pretty nice, and there actually is a version of Safari for the PC, although it looks quite a bit different on a PC. There are lesser-known browsers out there like Opera (proprietary and not necessarily free) and Konquerer (for Linux boxes). Now there is also the official Google browser called Chrome. Chrome is part of Google’s grand design toward a web-centric architecture. Its operating system Chrome OS, which I wrote about recently, is taking wings and will soon be appearing on fine netbook computers.
I had installed the Chrome browser but had never really put it through its paces. I did so over the last long snow-congested weekend. After a couple hours, I was hooked. I will still need Firefox for quite a while. If Firefox can be made as fast and stable as Chrome, I would gladly drift back to Firefox. I must say though that Chrome’s speed and stability are both very compelling. I didn’t need Firefox to come out with a persona feature. What I need is a browser that is a lot like my Mac: I don’t have to think about it. It should just work. The best browser is like a sheet of glass. It renders the page of interest transparently, cleanly and correctly. Chrome just takes you where you need to go quickly and with (so far) none of the quirky rendering issues that plague most browsers. Through delivering high backwards and forwards compatibility, Chrome seems to have filled the niche. No wonder that Chrome’s browser share is climbing rapidly, mostly at IE and Firefox’s expense.
Clearly, it is not as feature rich as Firefox. The bountiful plug-ins that are available with Firefox for the most part do not exist with Chrome. However, some Chrome plug-ins do exist. My suspicion is that a good part of the Firefox plug-in community is already working on Chrome compatible plug-ins. As a web developer, I need the amazingly excellent plug-in called Firebug for Chrome. I sure hope it is being ported, although Chrome comes with some built in developer features that are quite decent.
The average user will just notice Chrome’s rendering speed, which tends toward blazingly quick. I had no idea so much of the slowness in Firefox was just its code trying to make everything look pretty. Of course, if the Internet is slow or congested, no browser will speed it up, but whatever Chrome is doing to render content quickly it is doing very well. It helps to have very deep pockets. Since a lot of our content comes from Google, Google can do a lot to put its content on the edge of the network so it will download quickly.
Simplicity and too much intimacy with your favorite browser have a downside. It would be nice, for example, if Chrome would refresh the page by pressing the F5 key, which I have used for the last 15 years. (Instead, it is Ctrl/Command-R.) It would also be nice if my bookmarks would appear on the side, as in Firefox, by pressing Ctrl/Command-B. I also like Firefox’s search box in the top right corner, although by integrating the URL field with search engines you arguably have a simpler interface. Perhaps those features will show up in time. Maybe it would be better if they did not. Simplicity also has a certain virtue. Most of us prefer cars that are simple to use. Too many gizmos and gadgets on the dashboard can make for a confusing experience
Here is hoping that the folks at Mozilla address the instability and page rendering issues so I can go back to it. I hate to give any monolithic company, even one as friendly as Google, all my loyalty. Still, Chrome is compelling in a way IE never was. If you try it for a couple days, you are likely to find yourself also hooked.
February 9th, 2010 at 07:02pm
Posted by
Mark |
Technology |
2 comments
Tags: Browsers, Firefox, Google, Google Chrome, Google Chrome OS, Internet Explorer
You may not have noticed, but Google seems hell bent on a strategy that it hopes will ultimately kill Microsoft Windows. Many have tried but so far, none have succeeded in toppling the behemoth desktop operating system. Google’s ultimate success in toppling Windows will depend in part on its success convincing people to move their data from their desktop computers into “The Cloud”.
For those of you who are not terribly tech savvy, “The Cloud” refers to the Internet in general, but more specifically to the many data servers attached to the Internet that hold personal and other data for us. You may already have much of your personal data in the cloud and not know it. For example, if you use GMail (Google’s email service), your email is hosted by Google somewhere within its cloud-computing infrastructure. Chances are even Google would have a hard time telling you exactly where your email is stored. It is probably redundantly stored among its hosting centers. Redundant hosting helps ensure that your data is always available.
In fact, there are plenty of vendors outside of Google enamored with “The Cloud” and Microsoft is among them. For example, recently Microsoft announced a stripped down version of its Office Suite for The Cloud. You may not even have to pay to use it, providing you are okay with its limited features, advertising and trust that Microsoft will forever store your personal data. Microsoft is playing catch up. Google has offered Google Docs (its version of a web-ified MS Office) for years. It too is not as feature robust as the Office Suite, but it has certain nice to have features and in most instances is free. Because it exists in The Cloud, it also allows easy sharing of documents and spreadsheets among multiple parties.
If Microsoft’s killer product is Windows, Google’s killer product is not necessarily its search engine, but its ability to maintain a highly available and scalable Internet cloud. These things do not just happen. They require many years of work, research and refinement. The reason cloud computing took off slowly is that building such an infrastructure is hard. Google did it first but there have been other leaders in this field, including Amazon. Amazon, in addition to its ability to sell you pretty much anything online, has been a cloud computing innovator too. It takes a different tack by offering businesses very cheap computing resources on demand.
It takes a while for cloud computing to work up a head of steam, but Google is getting there. For example, the City of Los Angeles will be letting Google host its email services using a commercial version of its GMail service. Whether this will be a stake in the heart of Microsoft Exchange remains to be seen. Exchange is Microsoft’s pricy but widely used business-class email server. It is a complex beast requiring many skilled specialists to keep it going. With email seen as a commodity, cloud services like GMail seem a logical way for a business to save a lot of money.
Even the Department of Interior, where I work, is rethinking email. It is seriously looking at cloud computing as a replacement for its mixture of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes email servers. Its goal is to complete a department-wide transition by the end of 2010, which seems ambitious to me. It is possible that a year from now when I am sending work related email it will be through a hosted service like GMail rather than Lotus Notes.
It’s a little known fact, but far more email is transmitted across the Internet than web pages. (This may be due to ninety percent of email traffic being spam.) Consequently, a company that can grab a majority of the email market is well positioned to drive the future of the Internet. GMail and Google’s ubiquitous search engine are two feet into the enterprise space that may eventually kill Windows. The next part of Google’s strategy is to control the desktop. What Google is hoping to do is make desktop computing obsolete. If you store all your personal stuff in The Cloud and it is always highly available then what is the point of a big, bloated operating system like Windows, particularly when Windows can take many minutes just to boot up and costs a lot of money to set up and maintain?
To help sell this vision, Google has released its own web browser called Chrome. It’s big selling point is speed. It reputedly renders pages ten times faster than Internet Explorer and is even faster than Firefox, my browser of choice. Its market share is currently quite tiny, and is likely to remain such for the near future. For many people with high-speed Internet connections, faster rendering of web content is very much appreciated. While I like Firefox, it can be slow at times, particularly when you press the back button. If Chrome can do away with such annoyances, I might have a compelling reason to switch browsers.
Google’s strategy for killing Microsoft has two parts: selling people on netbooks and its promised new operating system called Chrome OS. If you are unfamiliar with the term netbook, it is small (generally portable) computer optimized for interacting with the Internet. It deemphasizes storing documents on the netbook. Instead, data is stored in “The Cloud” where presumably it lives longer than you do. To succeed, Google needs to convince you to trust it to not only always retain your data, but to keep it secure and highly available at all times. While Google suffers from widely scattered service problems such as a recent GMail outage, overall its track record is very good and getting better. The Facebook generation seems to be comfortable keeping its data in the cloud. Chrome OS then becomes little more than a very lightweight operating system for Netbooks. It would boot up very quickly, unlike Microsoft Windows. Presumably, Chrome would be the browser of choice for its speed and a virtual desktop operating system as well as an integrated web browser. The netbook becomes really nothing more than a portal for allowing you to interact with all your data in the cloud as well as surf the web. In some sense, it is a Back to the Future operating system, where netbooks essentially become fancy terminals.
If Google can convince us that desktop computing in the 21st century is for Luddites, then the handwriting in on the wall for Microsoft Windows. Microsoft can try to offer its own netbooks and cloud-computing infrastructure, but it is clearly years behind Google. Nor can it offer a compelling reason for us to stick with the Windows brand in a network-computing world. Why pay for an operating system and software when Google Chrome OS would be (presumably) free, as well as most if not all of its hosted applications? Making Chrome OS available would also encourage software vendors to create their own applications that run under Chrome OS. The result could be an application-centric Internet realized through quick and response web-based applications using Chrome OS.
To the extent you believe in Google’s vision, you may wish to start selling your Microsoft stock for Google stock.
November 22nd, 2009 at 02:46pm
Posted by
Mark |
Technology |
no comments
Tags: Google, Google Chrome, Google Chrome OS, Windows
The Huffington Post must be getting uppity, or clever, or both. This online newspaper/mega-blog/news aggregator (it is hard to say exactly what Huffpost is) reached a couple significant milestones in September. Specifically, it overtook the online versions of stalwart newspaper web sites like The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times. Or so analytics.com reports, which tracks visits on many prominent web sites.
Neither The Washington Post nor the L.A. Times are going out of business any time soon, and they clearly also make revenue from their newspapers. However, the upstart Huffington Post is slapping them around. Amazingly, Huffpost cataloged more unique visitors than either of these sites in September, while also linking to interesting content on their web sites. Here are the statistics for September 2009:
- Huffington Post – 8,350,417 unique visitors
- Washington Post – 8,124,820 unique visitors
- LA Times – 8,319,427 unique visitors
I find these statistics amazing. Neither The Washington Post nor The L.A. Times is some obscure newspaper. The Washington Post is the paper of reference for Washington D.C. and by extension the federal government. It can count among its accomplishments bringing down a U.S. president. The L.A. Times commands a huge metropolitan area and has had no local competition since 1989. Yet, The Huffington Post, which has been online less than five years, now receives more visitors than either of these sites and likely generates more online revenue as well. By contrast, washingtonpost.com first went online in 1996.
So this is just more bad news for the newspaper industry: a spunky online startup is doing a better job of communicating news and opinions online than they are. Most likely, Huffpost is doing this with fewer people and at less cost. At least the Grey Lady herself is not yet threatened in cyberspace. The New York Times web site recorded 19,546,618 unique visitors during the same period. One sign that the New York Times is sweating is that they recently announced layoffs of an additional one hundred positions in its newsroom. This may not be a great strategy in the end, given that The Huffington Post is hiring while both The New York Times and The Washington Post are firing.
Newspapers like The L.A. Times and The Washington Post do like to complain about sites like Huffpost. Mainly they feel like they should get a referral fee for their shoe leather journalism. I feel their concern is without merit. Unless a web site has an agreement with a newspaper, they link directly to the article, rather than embed its content on their web site. Moreover, Huffpost only adds or quotes a sentence or two from the actual article, which is legal. Newspapers that do not want their content accessible by sites like Huffpost merely need insert one line of text into their site’s .htaccess file to block them. Clearly, newspapers are talking out both sides of their mouths. They know they are getting more revenue due to referral from sites like Huffpost than they would if their content was not searchable. If they are curious, then as an experiment, they could block these sites and see if their bottom line improves. Only a fool would take this bet. The New York Times actually tried it by hiding its “premier” content (like columnist Paul Krugman) behind a paid firewall, and found they made more money by serving the content for free with ads.
Nor does Huffpost survive solely by pointing users to other sites. Granted, it remains a fair amount of their business model, but the Huffpost also has a large number of prominent bloggers and something that is starting to resemble a news staff. Moreover, newspapers like The Washington Post are engaging in pennywise but pound-foolish strategies. A few months back The Washington Post let go their most prominent blogger Dan Froomkin, who apparently drew considerable traffic to their site. Two weeks after being fired, Froomkin was hired by Huffpost and is now chief of their Washington bureau as well as a part-time blogger.
What is Huffpost doing that the other newspapers are not? Many things. Newspapers, with a few exceptions like USA Today (15,487,750 visitors) are regional in nature. Huffpost is essentially national, although it is taking steps to provide localized editions (New York, Chicago and Denver so far). Second, it feels like a conglomeration of various types of newspapers. By combining the sober with the sensational, it is sort of like getting a New York Times and a New York Post in one online experience. Huffpost’s left column is essentially the “blogger/opinion” section of its “paper”, and is sort of, but not quite as good as opinion sections of The Washington Post and The New York Times. Its sober side tends to appear in the middle column, although its headline screams Drudge Report style. The right hand column is largely entertainment news.
Huffpost also watches demographic trends and is aggressively playing to them, as is evident with its liberal bent. Like it or not in 21st century America we are likely to see governments and social policies that are more liberal than today’s. It is trying hard to appeal to Generations X and Y, while keeping enough solid content to interest baby boomers like me. Most recently, it opened up an impact section, where readers can contribute stories about people dealing with major life crises. It is smart not only because it showcases those who have fallen through the cracks in our society, but also because it tends to a ready and underserved market of people interested in these stories.
If newspapers like The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times eventually fail, one has to wonder if Huffpost’s business model will fail as well, given how much of their business depends on newsgathering done elsewhere. It appears though that Arianna has a plan and is investing today’s profits to create staff and stringer-written national and local content.
In short, as I speculated recently, Huffpost may well replace traditional newspapers. It is smartly positioning itself to be the first mass-online newspaper. Even the venerable Grey Lady should quake. Tomorrow’s electronic newspapers will look superficially like today’s, but will be broader in scope and allow greater personalization. They will provide both general interest news as well as stories of interest to more specialized and local communities. Newspapers still clinging to old models are likely to end up outfoxed and out of business.
October 21st, 2009 at 07:00pm
Posted by
Mark |
Technology |
no comments
Tags: Huffington Post, Media, Newspapers
Two years ago, I wrote about what I saw as the hidden power of Google Docs. Google Docs offers word processing, spreadsheets and presentation software on the web, similar to Microsoft’s Word, Excel and PowerPoint. In the last two years, Google Docs have not displaced the Microsoft Office suite, but its functionality has improved. Some businesses are actually paying Google to use Google Docs, noting that even though its license costs money, it is cheaper than Microsoft Office. Google Docs remains free for personal use, unlike the pricey Microsoft Office suite. Free is nice, particularly if you are wondering why you have to shell out hundreds of bucks per computer to run Microsoft Office. You also don’t need to worry about losing a Google Docs file, as it is stored in the massive Google “cloud” somewhere. You also do not have to worry about installing, upgrading or patching it either.
In truth, most of us use no more than twenty percent of the Microsoft Office suite anyhow, so it is unlikely that we would ever notice any missing functionality if we switched to Google Docs. We stay with Microsoft Office primarily because we are comfortable with it. Microsoft Office is arguably faster, since documents do not have to traverse the worldwide web in order to be stored.
The folks in Google’s labs have been busy creating and improving innovative products like Google Docs, Google Earth, Google Maps, Gmail and Google Analytics. I have recently been experimenting with yet another product Google has been fostering called Google Visualizations. Once again, I really like what I am seeing. I think this product has enormous potential. Unfortunately, at least the moment still requires a web developer in order to create useful visualizations.
Google Visualizations is about more easily creating web pages with useful and interactive data driven graphics. The premise behind it is that static graphics on a web page are so yesterday. Most graphs and charts rendered on the web are images. The images are generally created on the web server and embedded in a web page. Largely, you cannot interact with these graphics. To the extent that graphs and charts are animated on the web, it is because they are written using Adobe Flash technology, which is built into browsers. Although end users do not pay for the privilege of seeing fancy animated graphics (and animations), those who create these graphics arguably pay hefty fees to Adobe to license the technology.
To be clear, Google Visualizations is not an Adobe Flash (or for that matter Microsoft Silverlight) killer. These products have other uses besides rendering data in fancy formats. What Google Visualizations provides is a programmer friendlier and less proprietary way to display and manipulate analytic information on the web in ways that are more visually appealing and more interactive.
To get a sense of what can be done with Google Visualizations, spend a couple of minutes here. I think that you will agree that Google has come up with some clever ways of rendering data. While Google created the visualization platform, it has also levered communities of open source developers on the Internet who, true to form, are developing innovative visualizations that may surprise and amaze you.
Google Visualizations are helping us better see and easily interpret data hosted on the web. Data sources are voluminous on the web, but they are only useful to the extent that we humans can interpret, understand and draw inferences from the data. Some web sites have tried to be data friendly by allowing us to download their data as Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. Assuming we have fluency in Microsoft Excel we could then slice and dice the data gathered over the web, but only after significant pruning of the data to just that subset we are interested in. It is not very efficient.
A good example of a useful Google Visualization is its Gauge Visualization. The Gauge Visualization succeeds because we understand it at a glance. For example, if you are responsible for monitoring a network, a customized console application that reads information from various data sources and places all the information in one place where it is easy to see where the trouble spots are is very useful. Even with the coding required to make these Visualizations work, it is a relatively fast way of being able to render data, once you are used to using the Visualization API.
Google Visualizations harness the power of the non-proprietary Javascript engine in your browser to render very pretty graphics on the fly. It does this by providing its own Javascript libraries. A programmer still has to write the Javascript that renders the particular visualizations needed. Yet most Javascript programmers will find the interface straightforward. Google hides much of its complexity from the programmer.
The true innovation in Google Visualizations is not the code that renders the pretty visualizations, but figuring out a generic way to render rich tabular data using one format. Tabular data is nothing more than data expressed in columns and rows, like a spreadsheet. Put data in columns and rows in a smart way and it can be rendered in an infinite number of ways, from conventional HTML tables, to bar and pie charts and even to advanced charts like heat charts, and you have something very compelling. If data content providers can provide data in a Google Visualization data query format, the data can potentially be rendered, analyzed and interpreted in infinite numbers of ways.
Not coincidentally, when needed Google Visualizations ties closely to Google Docs. If you take the time to express your data in the spreadsheet in Google Docs, you can render it in all sorts of creative ways as a Google Visualization. Since no special software is needed to view the visualizations, and since a well-supported code base is rapidly developing behind the product, I believe you can expect a lot more general use of Google Visualizations in the months and years ahead. Your bank, for example, may provide bank balance charts by day for your accounts, which are rendered using Google Visualizations. Your stockbroker might provide graphs that let you look at your investments in detail with a few clicks of a mouse.
It is my hope that the government will provide its data in Google Visualization accessible formats. Unfortunately, right now government licensing of the Google Visualization API is murky, but it is actually something I am helping to rectify where I work. For example, if the Census Bureau provided census data services in a Google Visualization data table format, its data will be far more accessible and, just as importantly, usable.
In time, I suspect that the Javascript skills currently needed to render Google Visualizations will become less onerous, or perhaps go away altogether. If this happens you will be able to create and share Google Visualizations without being a programmer. Google is a smart company. I would be very surprised if they were not already working on a programmer-less interface to Google Visualizations.
I expect great things in the next decade with this technology. Time will tell if I am correct.
September 4th, 2009 at 06:58pm
Posted by
Mark |
Technology |
no comments
Tags: Google, Google Visualizations
Since I put my first domain on the web around 2000 I have been in a quixotic-like search for a good web host. In case you are unfamiliar with the term, a web host serves web content, like the content on this site. To say the least, I have been frequently dissatisfied, in part because I have more sophisticated needs. Without some research, I cannot tell you how many web hosts I have used in these last nine years.
They all fell flat eventually. Moving my many domains from one web host to another was an annual (sometimes more than an annual) exercise. That is why it is such a pleasure to say that I have found a good and reliable web host at last. I just renewed my annual contract with my current web host, Media Temple, not with reluctance but with something bordering on enthusiasm. I had not even waited to get a billing reminder. To make sure nothing slipped through the cracks I took the initiative and renewed before the end of my contract in early August.
Is Media Temple the perfect web host? It is by no means because the perfect web host really depends on your needs. It is not for everyone because most people who need web hosting are not particularly web savvy nor are they particularly fussy. These people go to hosts like GoDaddy, in many cases because they do not know where else to go. I run a small part time business where I install web software for people, so I have worked on lots of hosts. GoDaddy is optimized for small sites like a Cub Scout Troop where page hits are low and customers are not too fussy if service is sporadically unavailable or inconsistent. In most cases, these customers do not notice issues because they do not get enough traffic for anyone to notice. In many cases, they do not know the right question to ask anyhow to resolve their particular issue so they stay silent and hope it goes away.
Media Temple like all web hosts has a help desk. However, you are expected not to be a web moron. You are expected to know what things like DNS and SSH are. You are expected to use their knowledge base to see if the answer to your question already exists. You are expected to take the time to make sure your sites are backed up and you are not exceeding your quota. Your primary interface for doing these things is the integrated Plesk control panel. Using Plesk is straightforward but at times a bit mysterious. I am quite web savvy, but even I was surprised by how deeply nested Plesk can be at times. For example, I wanted to use phpMyAdmin, a typical tool provided by a web host for administering MySQL databases. It is installed but you have to dig for it. Moreover, you have to turn off popup blocking for your site so it will come up.
Plesk allow you to do pretty much everything you need to do to manage a web site. You can create databases, backup your files, schedule cron jobs, set up users and mailboxes and enable features like SSH. Only occasionally have I had to get my hands dirty, so to speak. Since everyone is virtually hosted, I once had to change PHP to handle attachments of more than the default two megabytes, which meant going in as “root” and editing a php.conf file. I find certain things much faster to do the old fashioned way, using SSH and the Unix command line. Deleting a directory with all its folders is so much faster in Unix with a rm –r –f folder command.
Once everything is set up though, things run sweet and most importantly, reliably. Mainly, you do not have to worry about the sorts of problems that used to drive me nuts, like consuming too many server resources, or sporadic periods where page response is slow, or sudden inconsistent behavior.
I have had a few issues, some of them caused by my own ignorance. I ran out of disk space once because I stupidly hadn’t told the backup software to not let backups exceed a certain amount of disk quota. I have hit kernel and burstable memory limits a couple times, resulting in the domain not being available. When I have noticed quirks, I reboot my virtual server in the Plesk control panel and problems tend to disappear. Two system-related problems where I needed technical support in twelve months is a vast improvement over previous web hosts where issues were often out of my control and the help desk surly or not available.
I currently host six domains (including this blog) using one account with minimal issues regarding any of my domains. I am using their Dedicated-Virtual service, paying about $42 a month (a discounted price with a one year contract). If your needs are more modest, you may find their Grid Service ($20 a month) more than adequate. If your needs grow, Media Temple offers a convenient upgrade service. No web host can promise unlimited server resources for $50, $20 or $4.99 a month.
Paying more for a web host does not necessarily mean better service. If you are getting great hosting for a $4.99 a month special, enjoy it while you can because a company cannot be profitable selling hosting at $4.99 a month unless they cram a ton of rarely accessed web sites on the same server. $20, $40 or $100 a month will not necessarily buy you great web hosting either. It really depends on how much traffic your site gets. Mainly it depends on whether your host has the right mixture of people and technologies to juggle the complexity of web hosting. It also depends on management making a conscious effort not to oversell their servers to keep their profits up.
Media Temple is the first web host I have found that has demonstrated it has the right stuff. As such, providing they can maintain this high level of quality, they will have a long time customer.
July 26th, 2009 at 01:33pm
Posted by
Mark |
Technology |
no comments
Tags: Web Hosting
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