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Bloggers are being closely monitored

December 16, 2006

I started blogging relatively recently, which means that while my audience has been increasing steadily, it is still relatively small. That is why I was quite surprised to see the response I got to my most recent posts.

Two days ago, I wrote about a web-site called yourminis.com. It is a great site and I highly recommend it but, in my commentary I mentioned some small problems as well as some wishes for future releases. I was very surprised to see that I almost immediately got a post from one of the developers addressing the issues and telling me that indeed a future version of their site would include some of the features I wanted to see implemented. I was shocked. Sure, my site is listed on technorati, but even so, they must have been doing some serious blog monitoring to find my post that quickly.

Yesterday, I wrote about the motives that may have pushed Adobe to publish a beta version of Photoshop CS3. Sure enough, I almost immediately got a response from someone claiming to be an Adobe employee. In this case, finding the post may have been easier since my post was mentioned on digg. It is therefore possible, and even likely, that this particular Adobe employee just stumbled upon the article while looking for technology news. Even so, the fact is that he took time to write a post and tried to diffuse some of my speculations by stating Adobe’s position.

The point is that companies, large and small are listening to what is being said in the blogosphere. They know that if they want to be successful they have to both leverage the positive comments as well as address the issues before they grow out of proportions. Bad comments can have terrible consequences. Take for example the recent Forrester study that alleged a sharp drop in sales at the iTunes store. Even though Apple denied the story, it was too late. By that time, newspapers everywhere had published the story, which bloggers had made popular over the Internet, and Apple’s stock was down 3%. Even though this mishap was short lived, the stock returned quickly to its previous value, it is clear that bloggers are gaining a growing influence. This fact cannot be ignored by corporations and small companies alike and some are starting to act. Companies like relevant noise or cymphony are capitalizing on these new needs to grow a business. I can’t blame them, it is obviously a market that should experience explosive growth over the close future.

Why is Adobe releasing a Photoshop CS3 beta?

December 15, 2006

I just watched the latest MacWorld video podcast which discusses the launch of a beta release of Photoshop CS3 for existing Photoshop customers.

While I am sure that pro Mac users will be very pleased to be able to finally use this great app at full speed on modern Apple hardware, I cannot avoid wondering why Adobe decided to take this unprecedented step. Don’t get me wrong, I am well aware that this isn’t the first time Adobe has released a beta of one of their products. It has happened twice before. In order to react to the launch of Aperture by Apple, Adobe rushed to offer a free beta of LightRoom. Something similar happened with Soundbooth, a new product designed to compete against Apple’s SoundTrack Pro. It was clear that these moves were in reaction to competitive threats and there was no reason to believe that Adobe would continue on this path with established products such as Photoshop.

On the video, Adobe product manager says that one of the main reasons to release the beta was to please their existing Macintosh customers. The fact that this beta is not open to everyone seems to confirm this. If they had decided to offer the download to everyone, this could have affected their sales to new customers, not a pleasant scenario. But what does Adobe gain from helping Apple customers? I think that this is a fair question, because in the past, Adobe has proven in multiple occasions that they couldn’t care less if their customers ran their products on Windows or Mac OS X boxes. In fact, it could be argued that they preferred Windows since some of their products only run on that platform. The fact that over 60% of their customer base is currently on XP is a direct result of their business decisions.

So, what has changed? As a publicly traded company, Adobe cannot afford to take decisions based on OS preferences or even customer preferences (otherwise they would just give away their products). They have to take a look at the competitive landscape and act accordingly. The question therefore is, what competitive threats is Adobe facing?

As any successful Microsoft partner knows, if they grow past a threshold they will ultimately have to compete against Redmond. Don’t believe me? Just take a look at what is happening in the antivirus or ERP market. It is well known that Microsoft has been working hard on competitors to Photoshop and DreamWeaver, and that those products have either just been released or are in late beta stages (under the new Expression brand). The launch of the Photoshop CS3 beta could therefore be interpreted as a defensive move against these new products and as a way to stop more designers to move to the Windows platform where there now is more competition than on the Mac.

That is a nice theory but I hardly believe it is the whole story. The Macintosh platform is hardly a safe harbor for Adobe. Apple has grown a solid software business in the multimedia market where Adobe has its own ambitions. Apple has also significantly beefed up Mac OS X in recent versions, adding new APIs such as Core Image, that make it easier and easier to create Photoshop competitors. This has led many to believe that Apple could be close to launch its own Photoshop competitor. It could be that Adobe has reasons to believe that Apple is very close to release a product, maybe as soon as MacWorld. After all, in Silicon Valley rumors spread very quickly.

Whatever the reasons that motivated Adobe’s move, it is clear that currently, even though they currently totally dominate the creative software market, they indeed are between a rock and a hard place. Of all their products, one of their cash cows, Photoshop, is probably one of the easiest targets. Losing market share in that product category would directly translate into a sharp drop in profitability which would have dramatic effects on their stock price. This, in turn, could make them an acquisition target for a company with deep pockets, like, surprise surprise, Apple (MS would run into antitrust trouble if they tried to buy the company).

In the end I believe that this was just a defensive move designed to anticipate on both Microsoft and Apple. It is probably part of a strategy, where being truly platform agnostic will be presented to their customers as an important competitive advantage. This is a significant shift for Adobe and Mac users stand to gain from this new situation. However, even with a non-partisan Adobe, I still would like to see Apple enter the competition. Why? Well, simply because I believe that they have consistently demonstrated that they do develop great software and we all know that even though Photoshop is a very good product it can be improved.

Multitasking

December 14, 2006

Every time I read articles in which the author is amazed by the alleged ability of teenagers to effectively multitask I can’t avoid frowning. It is true that we can all see examples around us of young people chatting simultaneously with countless friends while listening to music or watching TV, but does it really mean that younger generations are better at multitasking? I do not believe so. I think that this is yet another example of parents being amazed by what their children can do, amplified by their own lack of understanding of new technologies.

I just turned 40, so I guess that I can no longer be categorized as being young, yet I am writing this post in a restaurant while watching a soccer game. If someone called me on my cell phone right now, that would probably not interrupt any of my other two activities. Am I specially gifted? My mother probably would love to think so, but since she doesn’t use the Internet I can confess that unfortunately this is not the case. The only reason I can do multiple activities at the same time is because none of them requires my full undivided attention. It is that simple. This has always been the case for me (and I suspect, most of us). For example, at school I could listen to music or watch TV while doing simple repetitive math exercises but not when trying to memorized laws. Today, nothing has changed, I can watch TV while testing an application or making small changes to it but I need to avoid any distraction when developing a new algorithm to solve a complex problem.

I have found that time is an extremely scarce resource. Once I take into account the time I spend working at IBM and the time I devote to my family, not much is left. That is why I try to use it effectively. Since many of the activities I enjoy do require my undivided attention, you are not likely to find me logged on my IM system. That is because I find the simple thought that I could be receiving a message at any time, distracting. The truth is that any complex activity requires at least a couple of uninterrupted hours of work to make progress. We all know that, even teenagers who claim they can effectively multitask while doing their homework. So, why lie? Well, we have all been there. Studying is not (always) fun and I can certainly understand (and sympathize with) those who want a little distraction to ease the pain. However, when you grow older, reality catches up with you. If asked to do something complex and fail to deliver, we have to pay the consequences. So, what do we do? We just turn the TV off and focus on our work. That doesn’t mean that adults are less capable of multitasking, it just means that we have more responsabilities and that what we do is more complex than chatting with friends, and therefore requires more focus.

Google’s unfair advantage

December 13, 2006

There has been much discussion on the Net over the fact that Google has an unfair advantage over any potential competitor because of their leadership in the Internet search market.

The truth is that even though Google has been building up an amazing arsenal of online services, either developed in-house (gmail, google calendar and google maps come immediately to mind) or through acquisitions (writely and youtube, being some of the most notable so far), most users have not felt yet Google’s dominance outside the search market.

From my point, this is due to the fact that they have done a lousy job integrating all these services into a single, practical portal. Sure, you can now customize Google by clicking on the “Personalized Home” link on their home page (by the way, this link is not available for Safari users in the U.S. but seems to work fine on their British site) but this is certainly not the kind of experience I was expecting from this company. Of course, I did not expect ground breaking graphic design, as Google is known for their spartan (bandwidth saving) looks, but this portal looks just plain ugly and doesn’t offer any compelling features that will make me oversee that problem.

I recently discovered a site that offers exactly what I expect from a portal that could become my home page. That site is yourminis.com and it is simply gorgeous. Adding or removing widgets, minis or portlets (whatever you choose to call them) is very simple and is clearly based on the way Apple manages its dashboard widgets, which makes it very intuitive to Mac users. Currently there are plenty of widgets that you can place anywhere on the page and resize as you wish. Besides the well known time and weather widgets there are many games and useful services to choose from. Even if you have no use for widgets inside your browser, it is still an amazing display of what can be accomplished with Flash (not that most users would know that that is the underlying technology used by this great site).

The only problem, from my point of view, is that in order to succeed, your minis.com needs to offer a few additional minis and rethink some of their existing components. For example, the .mac mail mini shows the first twenty emails in your inbox. That is correct, the oldest twenty messages, not the most recent ones, which would have made much more sense. It would probably be even more exciting if developers could create and offer their own minis.

Until now, the web has seen a lot of competition because there simply isn’t a single site that offers almost everything to everyone. Google has been very successful developing strategic web services that are appealing to most of us. Still, today most internet users only use a couple of those services, mainly because of their poor level of integration. However, that could change quickly if Google learns from companies such as yourminis.com or even Yahoo (which despite its current woes offers a much better portal). Then, and only then, will most people realize the amazing influence that Google has over the Internet and the negative effect this can have over competition in the virtual world.

Top 12 reasons to get an iPod (instead of a Zune)

November 15, 2006

Microsoft has just released the Zune (in the U.S. only). This seems to have generated a lot of buzz among geeks, even though the general public does not seem to have followed this story with the same level of interest.

I must say that I have not been particularly impressed by the Zune. This is my Top 12 list of reasons for sticking with Apple (10 was simply not enough):

1. The iPod has more accessories
2. The iPod offers better integration with cars
3. iTunes offers seamless podcast support, unlike the Zune which requires third party software
4. Apple has a clear personal digital media strategy that goes beyond the iPod, as demonstrated with products such as Airport Express and the upcoming iTV
5. iTunes is the best software to manage digital media
6. iTunes is multi-platform (Windows and Mac), unlike the Zune software that is Windows only and still does not work on Vista
7. Airlines are starting to offer iPod integration with their in-flight entertainment systems
8. iPods can play games (Hard Disk drive models)
9. The iTunes store offers more songs than any competitor
10. iPods are smaller and lighter
11. Apple offers worldwide support for the iPod
12. The songs bought on the iTunes store can be used more liberally.

So, what do you think? Did I forget something?

MAME OS X released

November 14, 2006

When Apple decided to move to Intel, most were concerned with the performance of Photoshop or Microsoft Office on the new systems. I was much more concerned with the lack of availability of a native version of MacMAME. That is why I was so glad to find out that Dave Dribin had just ported MAME (from the original source code) to OS X.

I must say that at first I was really disappointed to find out that none of my roms seemed to work. Every time I launched the program, the application would try to load the ROMs from the corresponding zip file, and quit. At first I thought that there was something wrong with the application, but after taking a look at the console, it turned out that all the ROMs that I had tested had missing files. So I decided to download some newer ROMs designed to work with MAME 0.103. However, newer ROMs did not fix the problem. Luckily there is a bulletin board to support this MAME port and David has been very active answering all the questions posted by the users. He explained that the roms have to be copied to ${HOME}/Documents/MacMAME User Data/ROMs. It worked!

While this new version of MAME is great news for Intel Mac owners, I still miss the polished interface of MacMAME. I hope that in the future, other programmers will join the project and improve on this initial version. Still, I am very grateful to David.

So, what are you waiting for? Download the binaries from sourceforge.net and start playing!

iTV’s missing piece

November 12, 2006

Last September, Apple’s Steve Jobs clearly explained the strategy for the iPod during a Special Event. He mentioned that people can now use their digital content on their iPod, in their cars and on their computers. The next step is to be able to access that content from the living room on large TVs through the se of the upcoming iTV device.

However, there is still one crucial piece missing, namely storage. On many PCs, specially on laptops, storage is still constraint. On my 17” Mac Book Pro I use about 25% of my internal HD with digital content, which currently is mainly music and a couple of TV shows episodes (mainly promotional content given away by the iTunes store). However, once the iTV is released, I see myself subscribing to more vlogs and probably purchasing movies, specially if Apple moves to a HDTV quality format.

The obvious question is where will I store all that content? I just checked the size of an episode of Weeds and it weights 357.6MB. In this case, the first season of this show only consisted of 10 episodes, but this is unusual, 22 to 24 episodes is what we should expect. That means that if you subscribe to just three standard 40 minutes shows, you require 25GB of free space on your hard disk drive and that is per year! This may not sound like a major problem if you have one of the new custom built iMacs equipped with a 750GB hard drive, but it should worry the owners of an 60 or 80GB iBook.

So, what is the solution? Desktop users do not have a problem, they can easyly add external hard disk drives and stack them on their desks. However, the world is shifting away from desktops, as most users value more mobility over performance. For mobile users, external drives are not very practical. Don’t get me wrong, I do have an external device for backup purposes, but I do not enjoy the process of taking it out of the drawer where I store it, connect it and later unplug it and return it to its drawer. I can live with it, but I do not enjoy the process. If I had to do that in order to watch a movie or a TV show, it would probably be a show stopper. For me, taking a DVD out of its case and insert it in the DVD player is just much easier.

Of course, there is a solution. It is called NAS (Network Attached Storage). Apple sells a NAS device for its XServe rack server, it is called XServe Raid and allows professional users to store up to 7TB of data which, combined with XSAN, can be shared by up to 64 concurrent users. However, at even under $2 per MB, this product is still clearly aimed at professional users. What home users really need is a smaller capacity wireless NAS device, where everyone at home can store their digital media. With 802.11a/b/g this was simply not possible, but now that Apple and others seem poised to adopt the much faster 802.11n, this now seems like a viable solution. With such a device turned on 24/7 in your den, you could backup your files from your laptop at any time and watch all your TV episodes without having to turn your computer on. Better still, by using RAID and hot-swappable drives, your valuable files would be totally safe.

I certainly hope that Apple is working on a Bonjour discoverable NAS, because we all know that it would transparently integrate with iTunes and the upcoming iTV device. However, should they decide not to enter the market (after all such a device could easily cost more than US$500, which puts it out of the reach of most consumers) there is an opportunity for third party manufacturers such as Linksys or Maxtor that have started dabbling in that market with some promising, though immature products like the NSLU2 and the 500GB Fusion.

The future of public opinion and democracy

November 8, 2006

In the fifties, in most countries there was a single TV channel. This made it a very coveted media for politicians, who bitterly fought over control of TV news in order to influence voters. This fight for control of mass media continued until recently. In the 90s there was much concern that a media mogul like Ruppert Murdoch could use his empire to shape public opinion and this fear prompted many democratic nations to pass laws against excessive media conglomeration.

With the advent of the Internet, those fears are quickly fading. There are many ways to get the bare facts and blogs provide countless reactions to those facts. Following a trend that started in the 90s with News channels such as Fox that present the information clearly eschewed toward a particular point of view, it is now very easy to find information analyzed by people who think the same way you do.

Since there will be an almost infinite number of channels, people will have a better opportunity to position themselves exactly where they want to on the political spectrum, instead of having to chose from a discrete number of options, like we do today.

As a result, instead of having two or three large movements competing for power, it is likely that in the future there will be a very large amount of relatively small loosely connected groups of people who share similar opinions. It is hard to imagine that a leader from such a small group could emerge as a leader of a large enough coalition to run a country while maintaining that leadership. However, it is more likely that coalitions will form ad hoc, based on particular proposals.

This leaves me to a simple conclusion. In the future, a system based on political parties will not be aligned with the way people think about or even discuss issues. If we want to preserve democracy in such a world, we will have to change the current system.

One solution could be to ask the people to vote on each major issue through referendums (probably online, to reduce the costs associated with an increased number of elections). That means that the government will have reduced executive powers and as a result is likely to become a technocracy over time.

I do not believe that this is a very compelling scenario because a technocracy could give too much power to non-elected bureaucrats. This would therefore require some mechanism that would maintain the public servants under control and such a system could prove difficult to implement.

Of course there probably are many other options. However, we should start thinking right now about how the internet is changing our society and how this will impact the way people will want their respective countries to be run in the future. This is a nice challenge for the day after election day.

A new virus on the Mac?

November 6, 2006

Over the last few months we have been bombarded with news of malware for the Mac. However, Macintosh users are very skeptical because despite all the noise, we still have to see one of those mythical

Don’t get me wrong, it is just a matter of time before a Trojan causes some damage on our preferred platform. But Trojans are easy to write for any platform, since they do not exploit flaws in the operating system, instead they rely on the end-user to install it voluntarily. What is really hard is to trick the users into installing the malware my making them believe that they are installing something else.

On the other hand, a virus is something totally different. It relies on defects in the OS, common applications (such as a browser or IM product) or removable devices (such as USB memory keys) to propagate by itself to other computers. This is what we haven’t seen so far on the Mac and that we are not likely to see anytime soon because of the way Mac OS X is build. Another important factor is that most Mac OS X users have broadband and quickly install security updates. Finally, Mac OS X is updated on an 18 month basis and if you believe the figures published by Omni Group, it seems that most Mac users update their OS rather quickly compared to their Windows counterparts. This makes it harder for hackers to rely on old security problems.

So, why the fuzz over possible malware on the Mac? The point is that Windows market share in the U.S. is down. Therefore if you sell software for the PC you get worried that you are not going to hit the number analysts are waiting for. The only way to grow is by selling products on the platform that is on the rise. So, Mac users do not need their products? Who cares, they will try to sell them anyway because otherwise they are screwed. This is specially true now that they will have to compete with Microsoft security products (if that sounded like an oxymoron to you, don’t worry, you are not alone) on Windows. These guys are fighting for their lives, so do not expect them to give up easily.

Saddam Hussein to be hanged

November 5, 2006

As expected, today Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death. The head of a regime based on terror certainly deserved a harsh punishment for his acts. The defense argument that Saddam did not order the slaughter of Kurds as a Shiites after they tried to free themselves from his ruthless rule is simply childish and unsustainable.

However, it is also true that this trial was a mockery of justice, organized by the Bush Administration and their Iraqi puppet government to justify the American intervention after other arguments presented to the American people, such as the WMD, have proven to be false. The timing of the sentence is by itself very suspicious, just a couple of days before an important U.S. election which is expected to condemn Bush over its own actions.

The truth is that we are all responsible for what is happening in Iraq today. We all knew that Saddam was a threat to his own people as well as neighbors and we never did anything to stop him until the 9/11 attack. A couple of years later, many believe that Americans should have listened to the French and not invade Iraq to avoid the countless victims that have resulted from the invasion, but that logic is also flawed because it would have left a ruthless dictator in power, even though that would probably have resulted in a much lesser evil. Of course, the foreign and local islamic extremists are also largely responsible for the suffering of Iraqis who are being slaughtered, in a war that is, in general, not theirs.

Many believe that the only way to quickly reduce the violence is to divide the country in three (this is not very easy as there are important minority enclaves). However, this is unlikely to happen since the U.S. and Europe are concerned that an oil rich Shiite South could ally, or even merge with Iran which has generated lots of justified concerns with its nuclear ambitions. They are also concerned about an oil rich Kurd country that could in the future represent a threat to Turkey which rules over a Kurd minority that has always aspired to independence. Therefore, we are trying to maintain the integrity of a country by force, much in the same way Saddam did it, even though, we can obviously not compare the U.S. forces, which try to respect human rights, to the military forces from the Baath regime.

The fact is that in Irak there is no white and black. All the players are grey, defending primarily their own interests with no real concern for the Iraqi people. While I am personally against the death penalty, which should not come as a surprise being European, the truth is that defending him is hardly one of my priorities. I am much more concerned about what we call justice. There are countless players that have shaped the current situation in Iraq and most will never get to be judged. Even worse, they will claim that they did what they did in order to help the Iraqis. Today we should all examine our conscience and see if some of our acts (supporting Bush, Blair or Aznar, turning a blind eye to the situation or simply ignoring it) have helped shape the current situation. I really believe that this exercise will help us see the gray in us.

Today, more violence is expected. More innocent Iraqis will die. For them and their families, knowing Saddam’s fate is probably totally irrelevant.

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