Huibert Aalbers Portfolio

Leopard is a larger effort than most realize

June 13, 2007

For most, the WWDC keynote was a disappointment. Few new details were unveiled about Leopard and there were no hardware announcements. I can understand that. I can even understand that someone would start selling a t-shirt that says Worst Keynote ever. What I do not agree with is that some are starting to belittle Leopard and call it a minor update. That simply is not true.From what Apple has shared with developers at WWDC it is clear that a major code cleanup is at the heart of this new OS release. After adding tons of new functionality in previous releases, that was really needed. We like to say that OS X is efficient and not bloated. A lot of work was required to maintain this assertion true. Also, computer processors have changed, they are now 64 bits and have now more cores and applications have to learn to support them. This represents a major change. If Apple had decided to focus on eye candy and had ignored this fact, OS X would have been obsolete in 18 months. Instead they focused on the fundamentals and it seems that their work is paying off.The problem, however, is that core improvements to the OS are not sexy. They are difficult to demonstrate and do not generate much positive feedback from the press. Steve made quite a good job demonstrating the value of 64 bits, however that demo did not generate nearly as much interest as the video wall demo. On the long run though, great 64 bit support for consumer applications may be one of the most important differentiators in Apple’s battle against Microsoft. Despite Steve’s problems communicating that message to consumers, Leopard is clearly one of the most important OS updates in recent history.

Safari to reach 10% market share pretty soon

June 11, 2007

Just a quick note. I think that Apple was very clever to launch Safari on Windows. Although I do not expect to see people moving to a new browser in droves, I can see millions of Apple users who have to deal with Windows at work or at school switch to their favorite browser. This will immediately translate in a couple of percentage points in market share. If you add the iPhone, which will access traditional web sites using Safari, it is clear that in the next few months we will see impressive market share gains for Apple’s browser. Personally, I am betting that Safari will hit a 10% market share in December.

Although Apple makes no financial gains from Safari, the browser is a piece of software of strategic importance if they want to make sure that the Internet remains standards based. Microsoft and Adobe have recently announced strategies to develop proprietary technologies to improve user experience with web based applications. However, these technologies are a real competitive threat to other players. It is clear that Apple understands this perfectly. That is why they are attacking Microsoft on their own turf and at the same time fighting Adobe by making Flash less relevant (not supporting it on the iPhone and working with Google to switch youTube content to H.264).

Keynote impressions

June 11, 2007

I am just back in my hotel room, from the WWDC keynote. As soon as I post this update I will start installing Leopard. So far, all I can say is that I was somewhat disappointed, even though I did not have many expectations. All those stories about 3D interfaces and multi-touch screens always seemed totally fake to me. However, having attended WWDC last year, I know that Apple has been hard at work improving Cocoa in many ways. I really expected them to use those APIs in many more ways. Of course Apple mentioned 300 new features, we still have to learn about the remaining 290 so no all hope is lost.

One more thing, since most of the interesting stuff in Leopard is buried in APIs for developers, end-users will not realize the true power of the new OS until applications are written to use the new functionality. During the presentation it became evident that Steve Jobs was using an unreleased version of Keynote. Also, the fact that Leopard is able to render Excel files in Quick Look clearly points to a new spreadsheet application. It is evident that Apple is prepared to update most of it’s consumer software as soon as the new OS is updated. Apple is getting ready for a very strong shopping season.

Ready for WWDC

June 10, 2007

I arrived this afternoon at SFO, just in time to pick-up my badge at Moscone Center. I am now ready to stay in line for four hours tomorrow morning in order to see Steve Job’s keynote address.

I just read a blog entry from a student who claims that they will not be able to attend the Keynote. Instead they will be re-routed to other show halls to see the event on large screens. If this is true, I strongly disagree with this decision, even though I paid four times more (of my own money) to attend. Much of the passion and energy at the event is provided by students who spend countless hours programming for fun. I would hate to see such a decision have a negative impact on student assistance next year.

The good news is that it seems that this unfortunate decision is an additional hint that points at record attendance number this year. This should be fun.

Like last year, all attendees will be under NDA. This means that I will not be able to discuss the contents of any sessions beyond the public keynote address. However, I do not expect these sessions to include much confidential material. With Leopard, only four months away, few details will remain secret after Steve Job’s keynote.

Happy Birthday, Apple II

June 5, 2007

The Apple II turned 30 today. To most people this is probably totally irrelevant. To me it is an important part of my life.

I discovered computing on a TRS-80 at a local computer club. I read the manual in a single night and started almost immediately working on a game, a train simulator. However I soon became frustrated by the limitations of both the graphical capabilities of that computer as well as its BASIC language. The Apple II was in a different league, offering high-res color graphics and a built-in disassembler. It was love at first sight.

The Apple II was an expensive computer, at least for a 14 year old like me, at the time. However, I was lucky enough to have a friend at school who could import an Apple II clone (an Orange II) from Taiwan. Thanks again How-Tzer.

Armed with a single book, Nicole Bréaud-Pouliquen’s excellent 6502 assembly language reference, and some Call-A.P.P.L.E magazines, I started writing my own applications, many of which I was able to sell successfully around the world, while still in my late teens. This gave me a sense of achievement that is hard to describe. I can remember a scene that is burned deep in my memory. On my third or fourth trip to San Francisco I was finally able to rent a car (previously I was underaged) and on my way to visit the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco, after signing a distribution contract for a new game that I had just started writing (LaserForce). I turned the radio on and almost instantly the song “California Girls” started playing. I felt I owned the world.

The Apple II gave me many friends (you know who you are), money and a career (surprisingly at IBM) but more importantly it gave me a passion that still burns strong inside me thirty years later. Happy birthday, Apple II.

TB patient should be thrown in jail

May 30, 2007

News that an American tourist decided to return to the U.S. in a commercial flight despite knowing that he was carrying a contagious potentially deadly virus should have everyone outraged.

Selfish cowards like him will put the world population at risk if we were to face a worldwide health crisis like the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. We have to send a clear message that such behaviors are totally unacceptable. He should be thrown in jail as soon as he recovers (which I hope he does).

No matter how unethical this person’s behavior, the worse part of the story is that he decided to return to the U.S. because he believed that it was the only country in the world were he could be successfully treated. It is amazing how Americans are blinded by their own propaganda about the quality of their health system.

If this person had spent just some time researching, he would have found out that people living in countries like France and Italy, two countries he stayed in while knowing about his condition, have a better life expectancy than the U.S, which is tied for 33rd place with Cuba, according to a WHO (World Health Organization) study. Of course, longevity is the combination of a number of factors, which include diet and quality of life among many others. However, it is also true that no country with a terrible health system can claim a top spot in any longevity survey.

Countries in Europe in general have a healthier population because unlike the U.S. they offer a good health system that covers almost the whole population. Wealthy Americans may think that they can get better treatment at home because they can stay at hospitals that look like luxury hotels and sport the latest and greatest in medical technology but even then they may be wrong. Technology is great but experience is at least as important.

For example, if someone needs an organ transplant, Spain, a country generally associated with bullfights and flamenco, may be a better choice than the U.S. because of the high number of organ donors existing in that country (the highest percentage in the world). This peculiarity is one of the reasons why they have so many experienced specialists over there. In Europe doctors are also more likely to have chosen their profession for humanitarian reasons than for money. It is no surprise that the “Médecins sans frontières” (Doctors without borders) organization was created in France, and the Red Cross in Switzerland. This means that there is good expertise in treating diseases which are rare locally such as Malaria or TB, acquired by doctors that travel to remote regions to help those in need.

I understand that this person has made several poor choices by fear but that is not an excuse. He must be held accountable.

Basic Blue

May 25, 2007

I have spent the last three days attending Basic Blue, a training program designed for recently promoted first and second line managers at IBM.

As a technical guy I must say that I have always seen management as a necessity but not necessarily as a great career move. The problem however with techies shunning this development path is that too often the position is awarded to power mongers, money hunters or engineers who are falling behind due to obsolescence. That was not my case. I just saw that something was wrong with the team and I wanted to fix it.

My declared objective is to make sure that IBM’s software group technical team becomes the best of the industry (at least here in Mexico) and that we get recognized as such even by our competitors. And I want to make sure we have fun while working on this objective. The mission can be summarized in three words, pride, recognition and great work environment. I realize that I still have a long way to go but I have great hopes to reach my goal relatively quickly as I see a lot of talent in my group.

To tell you the truth, I did not have great expectations for this course and I wasn’t totally wrong as some of the topics were a simple rehash of what we had already seen before in previous training sessions. The most interesting part was analyzing the results of employee surveys. This really helps to understand what is working and what needs to be changed. It would be great to be able to submit this survey once a year t monitor progress.

However, what really encouraged me was to see a group of fourteen managers really committed to the success of their respective teams as well as their individual members. Nobody complained about their survey results, even though you can believe me when I say that nobody got good grades on every measured competency. On the contrary, it was clear that all the attendees saw this as a great opportunity to improve their behavior and the organizational climate. This clearly demonstrates to me that since HR has professionalized the selection of new managers they have managed to start building a team of truly committed leaders that clearly understand that their position as people managers is primarily about people. This seems to be a result of the personal focus of IBM CEO Sam Palmisano on values. Too often such kind of initiatives sound shallow and useless. It seems that at IBM this is not the case.

Ok, enough about management. I have to return to XCode, I still have a lot of work to complete before WWDC.

Second life is hell

May 22, 2007

The idea of becoming a Second Life user never made much sense to me. My current life is simply too busy to allow me to spend much time in any immersive virtual universe. However, it seems that many within IBM do not share my opinion. In fact, the company has recently increased it’s presence on this virtual world. The most recent proof of IBM’s interest in this technology was the life coverage of the inaugural session of the Impact conference on IBM’s virtual island. This conference is a major event for customers who are planning to deploy SOA solutions based on IBM technologies. Since I work closely with WebSphere products I thought that it could be interesting to participate and use the opportunity to discover this world everyone is talking about.

You probably know that even though I work at IBM I am a long time Apple user. So, logically I downloaded the Second Life Macintosh client on my 17” MacBook Pro. That was my first mistake. A big mistake. The Mac client is so incredibly slow that it is simply unusable. But the problem goes way beyond performance. This is a straight port from the Windows version with no concessions whatsoever to the Apple Human Interface guidelines. Frankly I do not understand why Linden Labs decided to develop (and release) such a crappy port. In my opinion they would be better off asking instead their Apple customers to use Parallels to run the Windows version, at least Mac users would not be so disappointed.

Since I do not have Windows installed on my Mac (why waste valuable disk space) I decided to try to install the client on my ThinkPad. There is no doubt that the client works much better on Windows. That doesn’t mean that the graphics are great, though. The Second Life client uses an old game engine to render the 3D world and it shows. However, what really made me mad was how complicated it is to get past the initial training island. The process is cumbersome and unintuitive. The first thing that you will see after landing on he island is a bunch of people who are totally lost, asking each other what to do to exit the island. If you have played games before that is not too difficult to understand, you just have to learn how to accomplish some tasks and earn stars for acquiring new skill. When you collect all the stars you can move on to the “real” second life world. The problem is that the training process is long and filled with bugs. You have to complete the tasks in order and without interruptions, otherwise you may be unable to get back in certain situations(despite many signs that allow you to retry a particular test).

The most frustrating part is that if you decide to leave your training session, when you come back you will find yourself in an inconsistent state with the objects collected so far and your last position but no stars (although it seems that the application remembers which tests you already passed, which causes additional problems). Be prepared to create a new character (and start from scratch) if you run into one of these situations. To make things even worse, there is no way to skip the training which is totally unnecessary for younger generations used to play online games.

To make a long story short, I was unable to complete the training in time to attend the event. It is clear to me that Linden Labs has spent no time whatsoever to make sure that newcomers have a great initial experience. They have a lot to learn if they want to grow beyond the geek population that is currently playing with their technology. As for me, I will never use it again unless they produce a decent Mac client and they offer true compelling content not available elsewhere on the Internet.

Jobs is wrong, R&D dollars do matter

May 17, 2007

Last February I bought a PS3. That is right, a Sony PlayStation 3. If I were to believe what seems to be the general opinion on the Net, I would have to conclude that I must be extremely stupid because I could have bought a much better console for half the price. That is at least what most of the Wii fanboys out there would want everyone to believe. Thank God I am old enough to be immune to peer pressure and therefore able to take my own decisions.

The Nintendo Wii may sport innovative controls and offer some fun games but it uses graphics that will make it obsolete before the end of 2008. Just compare any Wii games to games developed exclusively for the PS3 like Resistance: Fall of Man or Motorstorm on an 1080p screen and you will understand. It is clear that the Wii is less expensive than the PS3, but I would argue that it is simply a cheaper device.

Wii gamers tend to dismiss the fact that the PS3 supports Blu-ray. They are wrong, dead wrong. Since I started buying movies in this new format, I have never looked back. There is simply no way for me to go back to the traditional DVD format, the difference in both image and sound quality is so incredible that you have to see it to believe it.

My PS3 lives in my TV room, and is placed just under my 42” plasma screen. Three cables is all I need to enjoy an amazing multimedia experience. That is really important to me because the proliferation of cables is something you really want to avoid if you care about aesthetics. How many cable would I need to use if I had to buy a Blu-ray player in addition to my game console? How-much would that cost?

If you ask me, I will tell you that I am extremely pleased with my PS3 and that I totally recommend it. So, where do the negative comments come from? Short answer, kids who do not have the budget to buy a PS3 or a big flat TV for their room. You simply do not care about graphics quality or cable proliferation when you play on a small screen in your room or dorm. If you add to the mix a sense of treason towards Sony for producing an expensive console that most teenagers cannot afford, you get what we are currently witnessing, a violent, systematic backlash against the console.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand these kids. They are frustrated because they feel that a product designed for them can only be purchased by adults like myself. Sony probably made a mistake by creating a console not targeted at their traditional customer base. However, that does not mean that the Wii is better than the PS3, that is not true, there are no facts to back that claim. While I am aware that sometimes a cheaper product can be better than more expensive options it usually is simply not true, even if a legion of loyalists say so.

That takes me to a comment Steve Jobs made recently at the annual Apple shareholder meeting. He said that if effective R&D depended only on money, Microsoft would have been able to release great products. That may have provoked some laughs in the audience but it concerns me. If Steve thinks that Apple is winning against Microsoft because the Zune failed miserably or because the Mac market share has increased slowly but steadily over recent years, he is missing the whole picture. Apple faces multiple threats from Microsoft and most are much more serious than what they have been battling so far.

One of these threats is the XBox 360. The device has sold well over ten million units and is therefore much better positioned than the Apple TV to win the battle over the living room. The other significant threat is Silverlight, a recently announced technology that has the potential to change forever the way we interact with web applications and move content creators to the Windows platform. Both products are good examples of healthy innovation coming from Redmond and are the result of investing billions of dollars in R&D.

When I read that comment I felt that Steve Jobs was trying to cover the truth and use us, Mac loyalists, to continue spreading that tale that you can do much more with much less, much in the same way that Nintendo fanboys spread the tale that their cheap console is much better than the expensive one. Apple has grown a lot over the last year but R&D spending has not benefitted significantly. In order to remain competitive, Apple has relied a lot on open-source technologies to produce innovation. In fact, some of the most touted improvements that will be included in Leopard (ZFS and DTrace) actually were created by Sun Microsystems. That has worked well so far for OS X , but it is clear that Apple lacks the R&D punch to create and push new standards in new areas, unlike Microsoft or companies such as Sun Microsystems, Oracle or IBM which are perceived to be much larger but have a comparable market cap value to that of Apple.

Right now, the big technological battles are raging around the technologies that will be used for the next generation web interfaces. Adobe (Apollo), Microsoft (Silverlight) and Sun (Java) are the main players that are fighting for this strategic market. Apple is not participating in this war or even endorsing one of these technologies. Come on Apple, we all know that you can do better. Spend more on R&D, your future is at stake. Unless you move the puck yourself, it may become harder and harder to know where it will be.

Don’t ask don’t tell is not enough

May 16, 2007

In my family we never talked about sex. That did not surprise me, I thought that it was quite normal. I have since found out that other families are much more open about the subject. Whether this is good or not, is not really relevant to this post. What I want to write about is that probably because of that, I always thought that a “don’t ask don’t tell” policy regarding homosexuality was enough to solve discrimination problems in the workplace. I was wrong, dead wrong. Problems do not disappear by simply avoiding talking about the subject.

At the company I work for, employees know that gays should inform their manager about their sexual orientation. The idea is that by disclosing this information, managers can make sure that they do not become the victims of discrimination.

Why would managers need to know the sexual orientation of their staff? After all, it is our responsibility to make sure that no discriminatory behaviors happen in our teams? I think that this makes it more personal. A couple of weeks ago I was in a meting where someone started to make inappropriate sexual jokes. Knowing that I had gay members of my team present made me stop her immediately. I knew that she was hurting them. If I had not known I would probably not have realized the gravity of the situation. That is why “don’t ask don’t tell” doesn’t work. Nobody should have to hide any personal characteristic in order to avoid discrimination while suffering in silence.

Don’t get me wrong, while the policy works it also generates some problems. Many straight persons in the company believe that gays are over protected and that some managers are scared to fire homosexuals because they can be accused of homophobia. I can see that happening with unexperienced managers but overall I do not really buy it.