PlexNex

A New Mac Mini = New Lease on Life

This post reflects my first few hours on a brand new Intel Mac Mini.

I'll be writing, then, gradually about my new Mac and about the discoveries I make living with OS X Tiger (10.4.8) -- without running into the arms of the Microsoft Mac Business Unit ("MBU"). We already have a Mac in the house, so I'm hip; but having to cope with being productive I find forces me to learn a great deal more in a short time when there's no escape. After about 12 hours, I've already got three decent-sized epiphanies to report...below.

My intent is to show how easy or difficult an unplanned & unscientific individual migration can be -- data and all -- to a new Mac. These reports, you'll wager, will be worded to provide maximum pain to Microsoft, but they can aspire to nothing like the ascendant heights and internal truths, the hilarity, of "Cancel or Allow". My findings apply to individual migration: they will prove little in context of a workgroup or enterprise migration to Mac, but it's a start.

Y'all know I'm a Linux man -- high, wide & handsome -- and due to consulting clients working in Windows, I have spent 75% of my last 18 months in Windows XP. Skype, my killer app, is now largely caught up on Linux, but hardware config on Linux is just too hands-on still (exept for SLED 10, Linspire, Xandros & Mepis) and remains a time-suck (for me). Gary (Edwards) says it's the super-duper multi-media-Pro motherboards designed for XP where Linux can't get at the hardware (I cannot doubt it). And there are other problems on Linux, like the file incompatibilities of the different builds of OpenOffice and StarOffice on different Linux platforms (Ubintu/Debian us among the worst offenders).

I'll be in OS X now probably about 95% of the time and that means an experimental dip into a pure-Web 2.0 experience! Gmail and Google Docs & Spreadsheets will be my pallets for all document authoring outside of blogging (which is TypePad).

My alt system set-ups will remain two machines on the side, connected through a KVM switch: a dual-boot IBM ThinkCentre Pentium 4 running Linux (Ubuntu 6.05) & Windows (XP-SP2) alongside an old Compaq iPaq Celeron quietly running some old Linux TFTP & file server (for Cisco VoIP and light backup). VNC and VMWare would be best, but I change Linuxes every 3 or 4 months so cannot keep up with each permutation.

The single Samsung SyncMaster 191T (getting a little fuzzy by now) has DVI and VGA inputs, so the Mac Mini goes into the DVI and the KVM switch into the VGA hole.

Spotlight

I've always enjoyed the recent OS X's Dashboard, its smooth look, and the flexibility of Widgets for checking the air temperature before the dogwalk, checking my American Airlines flight status or checking the time o' day in Frankfurt at a quick glance.

Coming from XP and Linux I was ill-prepared for Tiger's useful desktop search tool called "Spotlight". It's an example of Apple competing head to head with Google on software tools that are intuitive, seamless and real time-savers.

If you're into Twister, the keyboard command-combo for calling Spotlight is Command+CapLocks+4, then SpaceBar.

Spotlight is hiding on the right extreme of the OS X taskbar -- a small blue sphere with a magnifying glass icon. Click it and the Spotlight textbox drops down for you to enter a keyword or phrase.

It looks like the Apple designers went back in their thinking to Eric Freeman's work under David Gelernter, his Lifestreams Project (a PhD thesis at Yale in the mid-1990's) and re-thought the fundamentals of the file-folder, file-system metaphor used on the desktop. They have put together something flexible and humane that works in the ad hoc way our minds work under the anxiety of frantically trying to find a lost piece of work of which we hardly remember the name or contents. (Eric has written some great -- truly great -- books for O'Reilly with Elisabeth Freeman under the Head First series.)

Upon search in Spotlight, we get the choice of either a list view of all relevant items as well as document icon view (the latter is shown if you click to enlarge the image). Spotlight searches within the contents of PDF files, and not just the title or metadata.

(Vista probably has something like this called SearchLight -- I don't even know.)

Google Docs & Spreadsheets

I'm sorry but I'm just so over fat-client office suites. I so am. That includes OpenOffice.org. Sick of 'em! I need collaboration, redlining. I need outlining that works (it doesn't yet, anywhere). I need simple features, not too many (my publisher does the important formatting in Adobe Illustrator). Whitepapers? I'll author final versions in OpenOffice on Linux with my patented custom mirrored page Styles (double-sided left-right page formatting to save paper), but that's not authoring per se. And it's well less than 10% of the heavy lifting -- which, these days is done with several eye-balls simul-like. I need what Office 2.0 has but is only 25% ready. But I can't wait. Googbye, cruel shrinkwrapped software.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets (what I call "Gdocs") is getting there, and it gets there quietly, under your nose. Changes to the beta happen without fanfare and without notice. Only a little link, "New Features", shows up in Gmail. If you haven't used Gdocs in a few weeks or months after last year's early disappointments, try again now.

In addition to the improving general stability and strong UI, there are two things I need to point out that have improved:

(a) redlining; and
(b) Upload via E-mail

Redlining is just about good now. I haven't tested it yet in a long & rigorous collaborative editing session, but you'll know when I do. Also, I'm not sure what registers as a change...how long between saves constitutes a red-linable event, but will find out.

Upload via E-mail

Upload via E-mail is a clever feature that just seems to have appeared out of nowhere. Google gave me a special e-mail address #$875PaulIsDead&75%-hsd7e@prod.writely.com (one I'll have as hard a time remembering as our WEP encryption password on our WiFi router). This I can use to e-mail HTML, ODF, RTF Word, spreadsheet and other kinds of documents into my Gdocs space where I can share, edit and store them. The upload e-mail's subject line becomes the document title. It's a way you can bulk-convert up to 500k of documents at a time by making multiple attachments.

Now, my friends at Google will probably disagree with me on this. One of the reasons they have been less than enthusiastic about ODF plugins is because they see the world through the lens of their metadata that they generate in their mission-critical Web Index. Document formats don't compute -- much -- against the value of the algorithms and the ad business. When we shift to the topic of office suites -- Google's "Office 2.0" in particular -- they still don't care much about the document format war because even if their ODF compliance is limited for a long time and their interop with Word is limited too, they see a world where many people are living within Gdocs and interop is less of a concern within that hermetic environment than it is in the transitional cases we are currently helping through the migration process. What I'm trying to say is that if you spend a while in Gdocs, you may get the inkling I did at the confidence Google feels that the sheer convenience of Gdoc's integration with Gmail is going to overwhelm any migration frictions that may arise due to their incomplete ODF compliance (and strange use of HTML). 

I welcome comments, if there is going to be any public discussion at all. Meanwhile, I'll air out this  theory some more over the next few weeks as I feel what it's like to live in Gdocs predominantly while looking at some of the other candidates including Virtual Ubiqity, ThinkFree and others.

Issues with Gdocs

Styles are still pretty much FUBAR.

My particular issue is that invoking Heading 2 from the Styles drop-down gives me a variety of two different font sizes in what looks like a pattern of nesting a smaller heading font beneath a larger one, above (despite my use of Heading 2 in all cases).

More, as we go.

iPhone is All the Buzz / Woof

All the dogs in Central Park this morning were abuzz about iPhone...whatever it will eventually be called. iTalk? iGen? iTelephone? iMe? iWoof?

They enjoyed that all the small dogs at CES felt like the bigger dogs at Macworld were having the better party. Admired Job's single-handed PR genius. Concensus is that it's very cool, evincing the must-have qualities of iPod. Jobs' SEC troubles are over; he's the biggest dog; Cisco will take the money, or Apple will do some even better branding. Agreement -- sniff, sniff -- the Cisco lawsuit is unbeatable PR. 

Even the usually laid-back Golden Retrievers said that the critics are mistaken, that Blackberry should adjust projections downward. Ease of use and aesthetics will trump the complexity of the old e-mail device -- even for clandestine text messaging under the conference table (when the small dogs are trying to get an edge).

iPhone = a Big Deal

Yes. iPhone is a big deal.

Its operating system software is a slimmed-down version of Mac OS X

An embedded version of Mac OS X could conceivably show up on any kind of wireless handheld device in the future, providing the guts to drive whatever newfangled user interface Apple comes up with for a given market. A wireless phone may be only the first step of a longer-term strategic thrust into all manner of consumer electronics devices, some more sophisticated and involved than the iPhone, some less so.

Arik Hesseldahl | "The Future of Apple" | BusinessWeek (10 Jan 2007)

View the BusinessWeek slide show --->

Among the interesting factiods to emerge, thanks to Dan Farber, is that the iPhone's touch-screen technology originated in Alan Kay's work at Apple on a tablet-type PC -- back when tablets were a gleam in Bill Gates' eye.

Dan Farber | "Could the Mac Tablet be far behind the iPhone?" | Between the Lines (10 Jan 2007)
Lev Grossman | "Apple's New Calling: The iPhone" | Time (9 Jan 2007)

Look for a tablet from Mac and other interesting technology, the R&D of which will have been subsidized by the development of iPhone.

Apple Stock Hits Record Hi on iPhone

At the opening of Macworld 2007 today, Steve Jobs announced iPhone and appletv -- two very cool devices. (Note the snide reference to the Pixar Clownfish ;-)

Wall Street reacted positively, sending Apple stock up 8% to its highest point ever.

There's also a new wireless AirPort Extreme for Mac & PC...

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That Question of 'Innovation'

Scobel & Winer have it out on The Wall Street Journal's generous "Today's Free Feature" on the question of does Microsoft drive or follow. (How grand of them...Dow Jones, that is...to give us a freebie.)

While Scoble in chicken-shit Microsoft fashion attempts meekly to redefine 'innovation,' Dave Winer makes the point definitively...

[Microsoft] are always playing catch-up, by design. That's their M.O. They describe their development approach as "chasing tail lights." They aren't interested in markets until they're worth billions, so they let others develop the markets, and have been content to catch-up.

But this discussion...it's about Microsoft innovating, and I say they don't do it. To expect them to innovate would be like expecting a football quarterback to throw a shutout. Different sports.

Interesting bone to liven the debate on Vista-eve-day.

Bellwether Tech Journalist Demonstrates He's a Putz

Tech punditry & online "journalism" both take a hit when John C. Dvorak is shown on this Google Video (ostensibly with Dave Winer behind the camera) admitting to deliberately taking incendiary positions to inflame Mac users with the intention of pumping up his hit stats.

You can't get more smug than JCD in what he will have assumed was a private moment drifting down memory lane with a geek friend in the fabulous Apple store.

Nevertheless, his recent outing of the idiotic & self-defeating Microsoft Zune Reviewers Kit is great stuff.

My message: dissing Microsoft and dissing the Mac are two very different things.

Microsoft: a Question of Air Supply

...their own.

The excellent John Markoff in The New York Times wrote yesterday about Google's Eric Schmidt going on the Apple Computer Board of Directors and made no subtlety of the Silicon Valley vs. Redmond theme.

Given the recent enterprise product announcements from Google and the move to Intel chips by Mac which support Windows as well as OS X, the squeeze is being applied overtly on the Monopolist from the two most significant & influential desktop computing companies. (This is really what Steve Ballmer was throwing chairs about back when Google was hiring the talented Microsoft doers: it was likely the dull Ballmer's first recognition that competitors were deliberately acting to both promote their own plans while interfering with his ability to operate.)

I add the world's attack via ODF on Microsoft's document file formats as a significant third factor which is presently increasing the blood pressure in Redmond and will be taking the state, municipal and key federal accounts in all countries away.

Next, we may be able to rely upon an attack on MrSofty stock from the more clueful sectors of Private Equity. The FT was laughably floating the Microsoft LBO meme last week, which to me indicates not only that greed is at an apex in Greenwich, Connecticut, but that hedge funds are running out of roadkill. The smart money will see that a) Microsoft is in a different competitive environment now, one pitted directly against them -- enlivened by the personal animus of people who's careers were adversely affected by Bill Gates' psychopathic anti-competitive business lust (or those from Bell Labs or Stanford who feel a personal responsibility to take computing back from a dishonest company); and b) customers are quite fed up with the status quo, and they have alternatives emerging.

In addition, Microsoft can't seem to help itself: Vista requires now more hardware, when the rest of the world is calling for less. And their new file format -- MSECMAXML -- is predicated on more and deeper ties (as in illegal monoplistic Tying) to Microsoft-only applications and platforms than ever before rather than less. One would be accurate to say that Microsoft is swimming against the current.

Who's Your Daddy?

A while ago, while I was OpenOffice.org Marketing Project lead and full of fire-in-the-belly to evangelize OpenOffice through local retail establishments, I had an edifying series of encounters on the Mean Streets.

At the time -- this must have been back in the Autumn of 2002, the year OpenOffice.org 1.0 came out in that May with our big globally coordinated PR push led by the wonderful Zaheda Bhorat (ex- of Apple & Sun, now at Google) -- Members of NYLUG and elsewhere were rather interested in the idea of an OpenOffice boxed set to fill the shelves at retail. This conceptually was the bricks & mortar version of colleague, Anthony Long's, Flexeity Software: selling OpenOffice CD's bundled with pre-paid email & online support. Here's Anthony's Z-Shop at Amazon, still up.

On my own reconnaissance mission in NYC, I went down to some retailers and took the temperature of the store managers' attitudes to giving shelf space to a $19.95 to $49.95 boxed version of OpenOffice.org 1.x. There were also discussions with some college book stores (Columbia, Yale & Princeton) about a possible unobtrusive countertop display -- like the nicely designed & branded cardboard holder that Ubuntu ships with each substantial ShipIt shipment -- holding free OpenOffice CD's or those including OpenOffice and other great free apps from The Open CD Project (which Canonical, Ubuntu's pecunious parent, has since "acquired"). The two retailers I visited were CompUSA and Tekserve, the latter being the most successful Apple retailer in the world which has the best support shop to prove it (still offering 10-cent Cokes from an old-fashioned Coke machine, while you wait for your number).

Long story short, the response from retailers about OpenOffice was tepid, ranging from an Academy Award-winning glassy-eyed stare of feigned ignorance to overt hostility and threats of violence. It took me a while to process the meaning of this -- I mean, shouldn't the world, tut monde, love a cheaper alternative to MS Office? But it hardly takes an MBA to figure out the problem. It's Retail 101 from the OldSchool: the problem is retail margins, i.e, at our price-point and market share we had nothing in the long green department to offer retailers.

If OpenOffice -- or Sun's StarOffice, for that matter -- wanted shelf-space at retail, it would need to dice & price the same as MS Office and its myriad versions (in order give the retailer an equal dollar profit on each unit) AND pay additional marketing spiffs to the retailers just to get on the shelves. This, to say the obvious, is beyond the means of the duct-taped mailbag toting rabble of students, college professors, save-the-whales do-gooders, office suite hackers and dot-com refugees who made up the OpenOffice Marketing Project at the time. Tea & toast as well as the one step above dial-up DSL plan was about the extent of our individual resources in addition to lots of time for endless threads of opinionated, often directionless, chat across time zones at weird hours of night and weirder hours of the day.

In retrospect, our intention that OOo would penetrate through retail channels, catch fire and overtake Mindshare in the general populace was Quixotic. It was the manager at Tekserve whose laconic cocking of his head (like a less excited version of my dog when I'm speaking to her) first disabused me of this enterprising daring do. When I asked him if the shop would like to offer free OpenOffice CD's on the counter, which I would happily re-stock regularly, he said, "Ah, no," as if (I now realize) he was only pretending to consider it.

In CompUSA, I got a really enthusiastic young guy who loved the idea to pitch it to the Manager; they were over there together for 10 minutes. The young attendant was gesticulating with his arms ('...but can't you see...it's so great!...). The Manager was looking up at me from their conversation like I was a homeless person and he was about to call the police. The young attendant came back and simply told me the news: "Uhm, you see. We make over a hundred bucks on each box of MS Office Pro...ya get it?" Following the math, I now can hardly believe the level of my own naivete'.

My experiences at the college bookstores were similar, if not actually life-threatening. At one -- which shall remain nameless (the one in NYC with no undergraduate social-life) -- the store manager yelled at me and saw me out with a large security guard checking me with repeated nudges past the t-shirts, coffee mugs, baseball caps and shrink-wrapped boxes of MS Office (priced low for edu). After gathering my mail bag and my cell phone which had skittered across the floor under the Alternative CD display, it took me a while and a bit of research through my connections in Registrar's to realize that part of the university agreements with Microsoft prohibit alternative software to be sold at the universities' on-campus bookstores. So much for our liberal bastions of free-thinking. The truth would make Larry Summers run swiftly and even apologize.

The MS Office alternatives like OpenOffice cannot crack the Mindshare Bind by naively accumulating users and developers alone until they can offer something like real cash to the retail channel or until some courageous or foolhardy soul sues the universities and Microsoft for having made illegal agreements. Same with the OEM channel. Open source must be able to replace the vigorish coming from Windows & MS Office if our new, new thing is going to play hardball.

The commercially inept open source projects won't ever go there successfully and, thankfully now that OpenDocument is taking off in its own right, they won't need to. Google is going to come in with Writely and whatever OpenOffice code they need and fund a competive office suite web service that will catch on and provide the necessary sprinkling of the retail and OEM channels to bump the other guy. It was Jason Calcanis who I saw speculating that Google will be able to cut a revenue share of the ads delivered via Goolge Desktops on Dell, hp or other OEM PCs. Perhaps Jason wasn't the first to make this point.

With regard to interrupting the influential cash flows that sustain the Microsoft Kairetsu, Google is the only open source entity with the dosh and the intent. Watch how quickly Dell, hp, Fujitsu Siemens, Lenovo and the whitebox chorus leap to Linux when Google demonstrates where Daddy really lives.