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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
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Mark |
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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
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Mark |
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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 |
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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
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Mark |
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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
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Mark |
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In the mood for some nostalgia but do not actually have the money to see your old haunts? This used to be a problem but in many cases, it is not true anymore. While not exactly new news, until recently I was not that aware of Google Earth Street Views. More specifically, I was not aware how much fun they could be.
Way back in the dark ages of 2005 I discovered Google Earth. Back then it was the latest and most impressive tool from the wizards at Google, allowing you to see amazing imagery of our planet. The user interface was so slick and it seemed to know the location of pretty much everything. Now nearly four years old, Google Earth, along with its companion web-based product Google Maps feel very institutionalized. I wonder how we ever got anywhere without it.
Since then, Google kept adding features to Google Earth. You can see the stars in Google Earth, as well as Mars, the Moon and, most recently, underwater features of our planet. In addition, many new layers allow you to see relevant sets of features on our planet. Street views are a new layer that you can toggle on and off within Google Earth. You may have to upgrade Google Earth to find it and enable it. If you do, you may find your appetite for nostalgia has increased dramatically.
Street views, as the name implies, shows you the view from the street, not the view from a satellite or highflying aircraft. Street views require a lot of photography. While you can submit your own photos and they might appear in Google Earth, street views are more systematic. Apparently, Google has deep enough pockets to send out cars to traverse the nations’ highways and byways. On top of the car is a camera which every ten feet or so takes a 360 degree picture of whatever it sees. While Google is a long way from having street views of every street in the United States, it is making steady progress.
My neighborhood in Northern Virginia has yet to be photographed, but neighborhoods inside the Capital Beltway, as well as much of suburban Maryland are already available. To see street views first you have to enable the layer, and then you have to zoom in close enough to see the icons that appear on the screen. If street views are available, you will see more icons as you zoom in. If you zoom in on a street, you can see icons representing pictures every ten feet or so, indicating the exact location where the picture was taken. They appear as a little globe on the street. Double-click on the icon of interest and the scene smoothly changes to a street view. Then simply use your mouse to change direction, zoom in or zoom out.
In many cases, the street views leave a lot to be desired. The cameras appear to be programmed to take more detailed pictures near major intersections. You will find rather low-resolution snapshots in many street views. The photos may be low resolution but they are available any time of the day or night for free on your PC.
Google has yet to provide street views of Endwell, New York, the town where I spent my formative years. While I wait for them to get around to this backwater part of New York State, there are plenty of other street views that I can enjoy. In 1972, my family moved from Endwell to Ormond Beach, Florida. One of my first major finds was a street view of our old house on Capri Drive. More than thirty-five years have passed since I lived on the street, and it is showing its age. Our old house does not look as well maintained today as it did when we lived there. Our garage is gone and is replaced by what looks like it may be a home office. There is also a rather ugly picket fence around the house. The chain link fence I remember was more inviting. Still, it is amazing that I can see it at all. From the air, you look at the roofs of houses. This limitation goes away with street views.
The old Winn Dixie where I wiled away many hours is gone too, but the building still stands. The imagery is not good enough to show what replaced it, but whatever class of retail inhabits the place today it looks like a step down. The imagery of Belair Plaza in Daytona Beach, site of the first Winn Dixie where I worked, is much better but if the store is still there, it is hidden behind the trees. Just up the street, the Red Lobster where my brother Mike spent late evenings up to his elbows doing dishes still seems to be doing business.
Google has also been down the street in Scotia, New York where I spent my earliest years. I had to go to the pictures I took in 2005 to find our old house with any accuracy, since my memory was so hazy. The years have not been kind to North Holmes Street. When we lived in our house, we had a painter next door. The house next door could use one now, along with carpenters to replace it siding. It looks like it should be condemned. Nonetheless, the current occupants of our house must be patriotic because an American flag flies on their porch.
Nostalgia is an obvious use for street views, but it is also a great traveling tool. If you need to stay at a hotel in a city, you cannot only find it, but you can look around and see what the block looks like. In many cases, you can make out neighboring businesses. You can also create virtual vacations. Want to visit Paris? There are thousands of street views that you can enjoy, most with excellent definition. (People’s faces seem to be fuzzed out; I assume this is some sort of privacy requirement by the government of France.) I found a street view of our hotel in Paris with little effort and could even traverse its side street and read the window of the Pizza Hut where we ate.
Street views thus serve a number of purposes. To me they help cement in my mind just how amazingly big and complex our planet actually is. In the years ahead, I look forward to spending many hours traversing streets both known and unknown.
February 28th, 2009 at 09:14pm
Posted by
Mark |
Technology, Travel |
no comments
At least a few of the best things in life are actually free. For web site owners like me who want useful statistics on our visitors but do not want to pay for it (in either money, time or advertising) there is a slick solution: Google Analytics.
Until Google Analytics, I had mediocre statistical solutions. I monitor my site with the free versions of SiteMeter and StatCounter. However, both services offer only limited free features. Both allow you to see detailed information on your last hundred page views only. If you want more information, you need to take out your charge card.
On the too much information side, my web server of course logs every hit for all of my sites. My web host like most provides access to free Awstats reports. It does a nice job of summarizing the data in my web logs. However, the information tends to be about a day old. Moreover, since it logs everything it provides statistics that, while valid, are not always terribly meaningful. For example, I get many hits on my RSS and Atom feed links. Most of these are just machines polling my server at periodic intervals. It does not necessarily mean that someone is actually reading my content. In addition, I am too lazy to try to figure out how to tune my Apache web server and Awstats configuration files to split my three domains into separate reports. However, the price of Awstats cannot be beat, and it does give me a picture of the total volume of traffic my site is getting.
What I really care about are those who are actively reading content. SiteMeter provided a close approximation. I could look at its statistics, add in a weighting factor for my newsfeed hits and get an overall picture. Still, without paying for it I had no way to ask questions such as, “Which entry was most popular last month?” and “What search words bring the most people to my site?”
Enter Google Analytics, Google’s free web site statistics package. Finally, I have a convenient way to dig down and see the relevant information I am looking for without having to pay for it or maintain it. I also have a way to get detailed statistics beyond the last one hundred page views. Google provides it as a free service to all but the largest web sites. It is designed to work with your Google Adwords account. However, you do not need to have a Google Adwords account to use Google Analytics.
While not a perfect package, it is slick. First, its drawbacks. It is not as easy to add the metering code to your web pages as it is with SiteMeter or StatCounter. You will need to dig through your web site’s templates and add the appropriate code in the HTML headers and ask it to validate each site. Second, by default you do not get up to the minute information. Google Analytics defaults to showing you statistics through the previous day. Current information is there but you have to change your date range. Third, it cannot track your non-browser related hits. This is good and bad because much of it you would want to ignore anyhow (search engine robots come to mine). Others, like relevant hits on your newfeeds, would be useful. Fourth, it would be nice if it had an API (application programming interface). I suspect this will come soon. With an API, Sitemeter-like features such as counters that appear on your web pages could be implemented. (Some WordPress plug-in authors have already done some clever things.)
With these downsides though, look at what you get. First, there is no money or advertising. Second, it has a super-slick user interface built on top of Flash technology. It allows easy customization of your Google Analytics reports simply by dragging and dropping widgets. You can customize your dashboard to show your relevant statistics. You can also drill down to get relevant statistics easily, either by clicking on the link or by placing your mouse cursor over the relevant items on the graphics. Mouse-over dialog boxes tell you much relevant information without even needing to click. Move easily from one domain to another by selecting the domain from the selection list. Change the date criteria easily by opening up the date control and highlighting the dates you want.
Google Analytics provides a wealth of analytical information. Some of it, while relevant, can be hard to understand. What is a bounce rate anyhow? Convenient links provide more details. Data is organized into four major areas: visitor information, traffic content, sources and goals. The goals area is most useful if you are using their Google Adwords service. With it, you fine-tune your Google Adwords campaigns to help you bring in more traffic. This is where Google makes its money. If by offering you free analytics it can persuade you to open a Google Adwords account, or use it more frequently or effectively, it is good for their bottom line as well as yours.
I wish Google Analytics had a mode that allowed the public to see my statistics too. If it did, it would more resemble SiteMeter and StatCounter’s features. Perhaps this will come in some future version.
I have a feeling that Google Analytic’s free service is worrying SiteMeter, StatCounter and similar services. I got a recent notice from SiteMeter saying they will be rolling out an upgraded statistics package soon. With Google nipping at its heels, I would not be surprised if it offered expanded free services.
If you have been using SiteMeter and similar services, I think you owe it to yourself to add Google Analytics metering too.
December 9th, 2007 at 09:41pm
Posted by
Mark |
Technology |
no comments
The application designers at Google rarely fail to disappoint. Some of their products have failed to capture much market attention, but all of them have been interesting. If their designers are disappointed that useful applications like Froogle have not captured the public’s fancy, other ideas like Google Earth and Google Maps swept us away.
I have spent quite a bit of time lately looking at and pondering Google’s recent offerings. This weekend I belatedly signed up for a Google GMail account. I do not know why I procrastinated so long. Admittedly, it is not a perfect application. The ads served based on the content of my email still spook me a bit. I am also a bit leery leaving all my email on their servers, no matter how convenient it is to search my email using their search engine. While their privacy policy looks reassuring enough, there is no law that requires Google to keep my email messages private. Since the NSA arm-twisted telephone companies like Verizon into opening up their calling records, in spite of the illegality of doing so at the time, I have to wonder whether Big Brother is also searching my GMail.
Still, GMail is slick. Spending some time using it makes you shrug off your paranoia. In fact, once you have it, it is hard to revert. Like all Google products, GMail is hardly flashy. Google likes white backgrounds, ordinary fonts and lots of white space in its pages. However, Google is not after flashiness; it excels at usefulness. While I can bemoan their capability to search my private email messages, having it hosted inside their 3 gigabytes of free server space also means that all my mail is available wherever I can access the web. The first time GMail threaded my email I was jolted, then I wondered why email programs generally do not thread email.
GMail has many other useful features. If your cell phone is Internet capable, you can receive and reply to email on your cell phone. Its spam detection is excellent. You can segregate important emails by “starring” them. You can teach GMail to assign labels to various kinds of emails. In fact, “email” is a word that Google makes obsolete. Since all your emails are threaded, it correctly refers to your email box as a collection of “conversations”. Importing my address book, a fundamental step for being useful, was not much of a chore. I simply exported my address book from my email client into tab-delimited files, and then read them into GMail. I can use it as a vacation responder. I can POP (download) email from other accounts, or download my GMail into my email client through a secure POP connection. I can add filters to segregate common kinds of emails. Many third party applications have been written for GMail. For example, you can install a notifier program. It tells you when you have new mail by placing an icon in your system tray. However, you may not want to install the notifier. Simply leave GMail in a browser tab and the tab title will let you know if you have new email. What is the cost for all this wonderfulness? Aside from the minimal advertising, unless you want to use more than 3 gigabytes of server space, it is free.
GMail lead me to try out Google’s news feed reader called Google Reader. Previously I had been using the now antiquated Bloglines as my web-based newsreader. Google Reader is magnitudes better than Bloglines. Adding a new feed is easy, and if you are having trouble thinking of a feed to add you can select from a list of canned feeds organized by category. Your Google Reader home page consolidates a list of recent feeds for your easy viewing. As you scroll down through a feed, Google Reader assumes you have read the item. You can “star” items in the feed like you can emails. By “starring” them, they become the equivalent of temporary bookmarks. Of course, all your feeds are instantly searchable. In addition, you can choose to share with your feeds with friends. Of all the newsreaders I have used, both web based and installed, Google Reader is by far the most usable. As with GMail, if I have a browser, I have instant access to all my news feeds.
Google has many other interesting applications, many of which have yet to take off. The Google Talk application is a Johnny come lately. With AOL and Yahoo holding dominance in these markets, it is unclear how it can overtake them. (There is an open application programming interface (API) for Google Talk, which could help.) However, if you can convince your friends to use Google Talk, you have one interesting feature: the ability to transparently save and search your own chat sessions. Google’s language translation tool, built into its search engine, is eerily accurate. Google has purchased some of its competition. As you may have heard, Google now owns Blogger and YouTube. Its attempt to compete with Windows on the desktop has thus far proven futile. However, its Google Desktop Search tool allows you to search your own computer with transparent ease.
What is Google’s next big thing? I think it is already here. It is Google Docs and Spreadsheets, soon to be renamed Google Docs. It aims to be a web-ified version of Microsoft Office. Should Microsoft be worried? No, they should be panicked. They should be panicked not because Google Docs will likely be able to build a better word processor or spreadsheet (although that may emerge over time) but because for most of us 90% of the functionality is more than adequate and free is an excellent price. Microsoft should also be worried because these documents inherently reside inside the Google hive. Consequently, they are easily and transparently shareable. Microsoft may be worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and its MSN network may be impressive, but it is a 98-pound weakling in the infrastructure hosting business. Google is the 800-pound gorilla. Moreover, Google Docs has something in common with Google Talk and, in fact, many of its applications. It has an API that can manipulate it. This means we are likely to see all sorts of small but clever applications used to serve particular vertical markets that will be at its core Google Docs documents.
Most computer users understand spreadsheets. Keeping track of tabular data (data formatted in rows and columns) is now second nature. Yet a database, even a simple one like Microsoft Access, is still relatively complex and generally too much trouble to use for the sharing data. Extensible Markup Language (XML), while certainly portable and easy to read, is still not simple to consume or process for a particular use. It depends on relatively sophisticated programs on both the sending and receiving end to make use of the data. A Google Docs spreadsheet on the other hand, needs no installation. If you can use Word or Excel, you can quickly learn to use a Google docs word processor or spreadsheet. If your use is personal, it does not cost any money. Since it is hosted in the Google infrastructure, you can easily share your Google Docs, unlike Microsoft Office documents. Generally, if you want to share these documents, you email them. And when you email them, you lose your ability to update them. This is not true when they exist inside Google.
Consequently, Google Docs is something of its own platform, but since it is an open platform anyone can write an application that works with it. You can sort of do this with Microsoft Office, but you have to write to a Microsoft API (generally Visual Basic for Applications). Google Docs is easier to interact with than XML documents (in fact, Google Docs stores its documents as XML) and can be programmatically extended using open source AJAX technology and the Google Docs API. Once this fact sinks in, Google Docs should become the de-facto means of sharing relatively simple structured data. It will create a brand new market that will make it easy to collaborate online using readily understood metaphors (spreadsheets, documents, presentations).
This is something Microsoft cannot presently do except through some of its costly and proprietary solutions. To even compete in this new market would take Microsoft many years, and would probably not succeed, given Google’s gigantic head start. It is likely that in time Google Docs (perhaps assisted by the OpenOffice suite) will crack the Microsoft Office monopoly. If you are a business, the fact that Google Docs is already hosted may very well be compelling. Why pay people to go around, install and troubleshoot Microsoft Office when they could do the same work online with just a browser? Whatever Google charges for a commercial service will likely be a small fraction of Microsoft’s costs. Moreover, you will not have to pay a help desk to support these applications.
Often it is the prosaic things endure the longest. Documents and spreadsheets are prosaic, but essential to information sharing. We were wowed a couple years back by Google Earth. I think that Google Docs, by extending the Google infrastructure to the applications level, will be seen as Google’s most significant innovation since its search engine. While it may not kill Microsoft, Microsoft may well emerge a shadow of its former self.
September 19th, 2007 at 10:28pm
Posted by
Mark |
Technology |
one comment
Google seems to have found its senses. I reappeared in its search index today around 12 o’clock Eastern Standard Time, after being ignored by Google for two months and 18 days.
I am not sure why it happened today. Perhaps it occurred because a few days back I requested a Google reinclusion. This was something I had not tried before, mainly because it was deeply buried in their web pages so I didn’t notice it.
I am skeptical that I will get the traffic I did before I was dropped, but time will tell. Anyhow, it now behooves me to be good on my word to my readers and resume blogging again.
Resuming blogging this week will be challenging because life finds me in Boulder, Colorado. I am at my brother’s fiancée’s house. I will be in the Denver area all week to participate in some training. I will likely see plenty of Denver this year. I should be back at least three more times before July. But hopefully my evenings this week will leave me reasonably free and I will have time to do some serious blogging again.
My thanks to all who left comments telling me how much they appreciated my blog. I will try to live up to your high opinions of me.
January 21st, 2007 at 06:24pm
Posted by
Mark |
Life 2007 |
5 comments
I wanted to have a blog that meant something to me, and that provided some unique thoughts and perspective to the world. Until early November 2006, my modest goals seemed to be within reach. It was about that time that Google unceremoniously pulled my blog from its search index. More than two months later, I am still stuck in the Internet’s version of Siberia, with no way to change my situation. My SiteMeter page views, which reliably were between 150 and 200 page views per day before last November, dribbled to as little as 14 yesterday. A simple query on Google’s search index on “Occam’s Razor” returns nothing related to my site. In fact, if you try this query you will see that its search index contains not a single reference to this blog.
There almost seems to be a cascading effect. I remain in other search indexes like Yahoo and MSN, but because I am not in Google’s it seems like with every passing day that I rank lower and lower in their search indexes too. This translates into fewer and fewer hits.
So I am at a loss. I can continue to write blog entries for my own amusement and for a handful of family or friends that visit this place regularly. Or I can decide that blogging when my content cannot be found amounts to a waste of my time, and I should be doing other things instead.
I choose the latter. I will continue to do what I can to influence Google to index this site again, although I have followed their guidance to the tee. Creating and managing a quality blog is hard work. I have worked very hard to provide a quality blog for more than four years. Nevertheless, creating and updating a blog that hardly anyone can find is a waste of my time. Life is too short for my time to be squandered on a futile endeavor.
Unlike President Bush, who thinks that more of the same failed strategy in Iraq will work wonders, I am under no illusions. I may post the occasional entry here from time to time. Moreover, I do hope to be back in force once I am listed in the Google search index again. Until that happens, this blog goes dormant. I will use my time more productively: to read, research, indulge my other hobbies, play the good father and husband, and maybe actually smell a rose or two. However, I will be back once I am indexed by Google again.
Please do not throw away your bookmarks to my blog. I hope this is just a sabbatical and not the end. If you enjoy a good discussion, consider becoming a member of my forum, The Potomac Tavern, where you will always find me having conversations with my friends. Enjoy my archives because I believe I have left a lot of thoughtful and rich content. My Best of Occam’s Razor category is especially worth your time. In addition, feel free to leave comments (which I will approve) or send me email. You can also call Google to complain.
Let me extend my thanks and appreciation to all who have spent and enjoyed your time here. Thank you for all those who have posted comments. Whether this blog comes back to life though is no longer in my hands, but in Google’s.
January 14th, 2007 at 09:42am
Posted by
Mark |
Life 2007 |
6 comments
