Posts tagged as: microsoft

IE7's aggregator isn't impressive, but it is good enough

Trying to recharacterize a quote once it is loose in the blogosphere can be a tricky business. In my initial thoughts on IE7 I wrote that it would likely kill many RSS aggregators that did little more than let you read feeds. Richard MacManus linked to this and wrote "Adam Green thinks IE7 will kill a lot of independent RSS Aggregator products, due to IE7's impressive RSS integration features." The first clause was mine, but the second clause wasn't. I don't fault Richard. He was using me as an example to prove his point, but I don't want to leave the impression active that I think IE7's use of RSS is impressive. In fact, it is just the opposite. IE7 is a very weak aggregator, but it will still drive out the other independent aggregators, because it will be part of IE.

Microsoft long ago mastered the trick of calculating exactly the minimal feature set needed to suck the air out of a market it wants to enter. They do about half of this the first time around, and eventually reach the minimal set by about the third version. Then they stop completely. This is the thing I hate the most about Microsoft's monopoly over the software market. Take a look at Excel and Word. They are basically frozen with a feature set that is over 10 to 15 years old. Microsoft knows that people aren't willing to go through the bother of switching products if most of their needs are met. More features beyond the minimal set means more bugs, so Microsoft has nothing to gain once a market is theirs. The result is a stifling of innovation. It was just this stifling that led so many in the software industry to flee to the Internet in the mid-Nineties.

My favorite example of the Microsoft effect is the graphing in Excel. It absolutely sucks. I have been using it for years, and I still have no idea how to create what I want. Each time I use it I just keep whacking away at it until I get close to what I want, and then I stop. Once when my son was creating some complex graphs for a science project, I went to some download sites and got a few shareware graphing packages. He was amazed by their power and ease of use. He asked why Microsoft didn't do graphs this well, and my answer was "Because they don't have to." I then explained my theory of the Microsoft effect. (Yes, having me as a father can be a bit tedious. My kids usually know better than to ask my opinion on software. My wife won't even stay in the room when software comes up.)

So does this mean that we are doomed to a life of mediocre aggregators when IE7 wins? I am afraid so, but I hope not. What I really hope is that Scott Karp's vision will be realized: "The New Media revolution will come when content is completely atomized and fully tagged, so that it can be remixed into perfectly tailored packages to suit every taste, i.e. truly what I want (when I want it)." But the aggregator publishers have to move fast. Once IE7 is cleaned up enough to release, it will shut down much of the opportunities to find new users. That doesn't mean that the average user is lazy or stupid. It means that they have a life, and seeking out the ultimate aggregator won't be a high priority for them.

David Berlind at Harvard

David Berlind's luncheon talk at Harvard's Berkman Center was interesting, but we have different approaches to predicting the future. David takes the traditional journalist's perspective of discovering who is doing what to effect change, while I try to figure out why people will adopt that change and whether they have ever made a similar decision in the past. For example, David recounted the various software, standards making, and political activities taking place in an effort to replace Microsoft Office with an open standard. While I, on the other hand, tried to find any sign of people looking for an alternative to Office. Of course Word is buggy and cumbersome, but I can't remember any time in the last few years when a real end-user has told me that they wish they could switch from Word to something else. Are they too dumb to realize they would be better off with a replacement for Word? No, I think they are too smart to waste their time looking for alternatives when they just want to get their work done. They aren't lazy, they're busy. If you want to beat Word's monopoly, you have to give people a powerful reason to switch, you can't just point out a better alternative. In marketing terms you can't just present a better mouse trap, you have to convince people that they have mice and that not getting rid of them will cause serious consequences. This isn't meant as a criticism of David. What he does serves a valuable purpose, and he certainly knows his stuff when it comes to the issue of alternatives to Microsoft. He also needs to incorporate a more market driven and historical perspective into his analysis.

I made my pitch to get David to use the term copy protection instead of DRM. He was sympathetic to the issue, but not too interested in making the change. He understands the issues of DRM so much better than I do, including the legal aspects, that he sees the problem of DRM as much greater than just not being able to move content to a new computer. He is right, but you aren't going to get people upset enough to demand change by providing more details. You need a simple hook. Maybe copy protection isn't scary enough. I'm not great at coming up with really compelling marketing terms, but I do know how to recognize them. When I find a way to describe DRM that makes people's eyes go wide, I'll know I've hit the target. If you have any suggestions for a really repulsive name for DRM, please let me know. I'll do my best to promote it.

Windows Live, part 2

I went back to the Windows Live website today to try out some of the user created gadgets and discovered that some of the sillier bugs have been fixed. Coincidence? I could hope that this is just the normal bug fixing process, but the bugs that were fixed had been there for at least two weeks before I wrote about them. Anyway, this was an encouraging sign, so I went on to look at what users had been able to contribute to Microsoft's collection of gadgets. It isn't fair to talk about bugs with these gadgets, since they are not produced by Microsoft, so I decided to see what type of apps were popular and how it felt running them on the Windows Live browser desktop.

Let me stop here for a second. What are we supposed to call the simulated desktop when it appears in a browser? The help file for Live refers to it as my "page." So I guess they are thinking of this as a home page builder, not a web based desktop. It would make sense for Microsoft to adopt this terminology, but I want to remember to track what Live's competitors call it. I can see how this is going to be confusing when this stuff gets rolled out to the general public. How do you parse statements like "Now you can move your desktop to a Web desktop."? A quick check of Technorati shows that bloggers are indeed trying to construct sentences like this. Thank God, I'm not still working in a dot-com. I can just imagine a meeting with marketing people trying to decide how to unravel this verbal knot we have tied around ourselves. Remind me to tell you someday about the time Andover.Net marketing people came up with the slogan "Fat and Sticky."

Can you tell I don't really want to get to these gadgets? OK. Let's talk about the great stuff people have built. One of the first things I liked is the use of a tag cloud to select gadgets. From the intro text it looks like they're pretty damn pleased with themselves about it too. Another cool thing is the fact that someone posted a Firefox download gadget two months ago, and its still there. It is also one of the most downloaded gadgets.

Alright, I'll admit that I can't find any really great gadgets. But there are some cute ones (click Install Gadget to view gadget):

• Financial Clock.
• Boise Traffic Map. Make up your own joke.
• Chord Finger.
• Live Math.

Overall, this system seems to hold some promise. If it can become cool to build gadgets, I think we might see some useful ones. I am surprised, however, that Microsoft hasn't appeared to commit any resources to developing killer gadgets of their own. Maybe they are waiting to see what users create first so they can copy them.

Web App or Web Farce?

If you are feeling blue and need a good laugh to brighten your day, try out the beta of Microsoft's Windows Live web-based desktop app. It goes beyond buggy, to a place that can only be called Web farce. Yes, I understand what Beta means, but check out the bugs I was able to find in just a few minutes:

• To test out Windows Live as an RSS reader I imported my feed list as an OPML file. This worked fairly well, except that many of the feeds showed up in the main menu without titles.
• I haven't been able to find any way to tell the system to reload feeds, or to show feeds with new posts.
• When you pull down the menu with the feed list, it covers up about 1/3 of the screen on the left for the menu, even though the menu items take up only half of this space.
• When you click on a feed, only the first 5 items appear, even when there are many more in the feed. The funny part is that the pull-down menu stays down, covering the blog headlines. The only way to clear the menu is to click "hide sidebar."
• Gadgets are supposed to be a big part of Windows Live. These are little tools that you can load onto the home page to display some specialized information. The current beta only lists 5 gadgets: mail, weather, horoscopes, ticking clock, and welcome.Ticking clock is just a text line with the current time, and Welcome is a one screen help page.
• I tried the Weather gadget and entered my city as Lexington, Mass. The gadget displayed the closest weather station in the town of Medford, (I actually thought it was in Bedford, but this is close), but showed the temperature as 17 degrees. A quick check of Weather.com gave the current weather as 27 degrees. Wait. I just reloaded the page again, and now the temperature says 32 degrees. Boston's weather fluctuates, but not that wildly.
• The town name of Medford, Mass. is a link to what I assumed was more details. Unfortunately, the details were about Australia. That's right here's the link.
• Along with gadgets you can also place RSS feeds onto the home page so they display all the time. I tried this with a pre-defined feed from Reuters. This one was really weird. If I continually reload the page, the contents of the feed alternate between today's news and items that are apparently from last summer. The lead headline is "Bush picks Roberts to succeed Rhenquist." Believe me, I'm not creative enough to make this stuff up.
• At the bottom of the screen there are a bunch of links, including Privacy, which has a nonsense link of "http://g.msn.com/0PR_/enau", and Legal, which seems to work,but also shows a confusion over whether I am in Australia. Here is its link: "http://www.live.com/loc/en/au/tou.asp."
• Finally, there is a settings menu item, which doesn't help me refresh the RSS feeds as I hoped, but does give me a choice of nine different languages, including "English (United States)," "English (United Kingdom)," and "English (Australia)." Right now I have it set to Australian English, but it hasn't called me mate yet, or offered to put another shrimp on the barbie, which is the full extent of my Australian English. Wait a minute. Maybe that's why the system thinks I am in Australia. OK. I've switched to good old USA English, and the weather gadget dissapeared. I reloaded it and again put in the city of Lexington, Mass. and this time the gadget can find it, only it is also displaying the weather report for "Novo Cruzeiro, BRA," where it is a delightful 88 degrees. The Lexington link now points to US weather. So it appears that setting the language tells the system to point to that country, which has a curious sort of logic.
• So what happens if I choose Spanish as my language? The weather gadget again clears, but when I enter Lexington, Mass. this time the system again thinks Medford is the closest weather station. Clicking the town name takes me to a weather map for Spain of course. I am speaking Spanish after all.

That's enough fun for now. Boy, it was great to do some Microsoft bashing for a change. I miss them. Next I'll try to find the rest of the Windows Live gadgets. I know there must be more, but I couldn't find any links in this system for them.

Don't be immature

Google's purchase of 5% of AOL is now official, and the issue that everyone, including the mainstream media, is picking up on is Google's agreement to start giving preference to AOL content in its search. Of course, nobody is passing up the opportunity to remind people of Google's "Don't be evil" motto. Google's promotion of this mantra is a perfect example of the immaturity of the people running the company. Idealism is great for kids in college or grad school, but an adult businessperson would have warned them that capitalism isn't based on good and evil, it is about profit and loss. Eventually you have to do things that are legal, but maybe unpalatable. Google is now entering that phase, and instead of being viewed as pragmatic and maturing, they are being painted as evil, just for doing what every other website already does.

If I sound a bit cranky when discussing Google, it is because I'm really nervous about having them as the perceived leader of the industry in which I work. For the next few years at least we will rise and fall along with Google. It's funny. Microsoft was the industry leader for so many years, and they were always viewed as evil, at least within the industry. When Microsoft slipped it was an occasion for joy and schaudenfreud. Now when Google slips, it signals a loss in the potential for the entire Web.

As I write this I'm listening to Squawk Box on CNBC. The announcer just teased the next segment as follows:

The press lives by building up icons and then tearing them down. If this pattern repeats itself with Google, we will all face the consequences.

A closer look at SSE

Dion Hinchcliffe has some thoughtful things to say about Microsoft's SSE.

SSE Comments

I haven't worked with the issue of synchronization between clients or between multiple servers, so I can't evaluate the merits of Microsoft's new Simple Sharing Extensions to RSS. Alex Barnett has a good roundup of SSE posts. There is a lot of cynicism so far, but it will be hard for the Open Source advocates to ever accept anything from Microsoft. I just like the idea of the folks at Google having to lose sleep catching up on anyone else's announcements.There is a huge amount of FUD flying in all directions, but the mud is all landing in the right general directions. Eventually this will all turn into products.

The other shoe drops

Scoble has reported that Microsoft is releasing the Office XML spec. Exactly when and how this will be supported in Office products isn't clear, but the direction is great. It is always best to cannibalize yourself instead of letting others cannibalize you.

Dave Winer has the best week ever

Ever since I became aware of the Web 2.0 meme I've been telling people that Dave Winer was one of the pivotal forces behind this new wave, maybe the central force. Everyone would have to admit that with GoogleBase turning out to be the world's biggest RSS database, and Ray Ozzie announcing Microsoft's synchronization and replication protocol based on RSS, Dave Winer is having the best week ever! Ozzie's announcement letter can only be described as effusive in his praise of Winer's role:

Microsoft and Google are being maneuvered into a massive game of chicken. I'll show everyone my Office data if you'll show your search data, and Dave is instigating it. My question is what comes next Dave? What are you working on for the wave after this, because I think this one is going to be pretty condensed.

Lest anyone reading this get the wrong idea, I should also make it clear that Dave and I haven't spoken in a couple of years and I'm hardly a sycophant, but that doesn't diminish my estimate of his influence on where the computer industry is headed. For right or wrong, we're riding the RSS train now.

Disruption is the new Disintermediation

The impetus for the latest round of Microsoft naysayers was a pair of memos from Ray Ozzie and Bill Gates. Dave Winer published the complete text of both documents, and they are well worth reading. What I found most interesting is the way they captured the current "Disruptive" zeitgeist. Ozzie's October 28th memo is titled "The Internet Services Disruption," and Gates declares to his troops that "This coming 'services wave' will be very disruptive," in his response on October 30th.

There is clear evidence on Blogpulse that "Disruptive" is gaining favor among the blognoscenti.

Wikipedia tells me that "disruptive technology" was coined by Clay Christensen (from Harvard of course) in 1997 during the run-up to the Web 1.0 boom, but it looks like it will reach a peak with Web 2.0. My own Harvard training tells me that this phrase is a terrible example of technological determinism. Technologies don't "do" anything, people do things with technology, if a host of circumstances are just right. I also can't help but notice how gendered a term this is. Women cooperate, men disrupt, like a bunch of little boys on a playground smashing each others forts.

The rumors of Microsoft's death are greatly exaggerated

The Web 2.0 bubble has reached the predictable stage of assuming that Microsoft will inevitably fail to adapt to this latest tech craze. You can get the feel for it by reading the comments on Scoble's post about this subject. Where have we seen this before? Oh yes, in December 1982 when VisiOn was announced at Fall Comdex and the press (this was before blogs existed) fell all over itself predicting that Microsoft would lose control of the operating system market to the new wave of integrating environments and integrated products. We saw it again in 1995 when Netscape's browser was going to wipe out Microsoft, because Gates just didn't understand the Internet. Now ten years later we are again hearing that Microsoft is a dinosaur and can't possibly catch up with the latest web services wave.

Let's get serious for a minute. Microsoft has control over 90% of the desktops on the planet. I haven't seen any stats that web based apps are being used by even a few percentage points of the real users out there. As keeps happening, especially in Silicon Valley, the bleeding edge sees everyone they know going crazy over a new set of technologies, and they extrapolate that onto the general public.

History has shown repeatedly that first-movers do not always win, and often disappear. VisiCorp died within a few years of announcing VisiOn, and Microsoft won that round with two products that they hadn't even started work on in 1982: Windows and Office. Netscape failed under the weight of their own arrogance, and IE is now the dominant browser. It isn't just Microsoft who has beat the early market leaders. When Google first appeared, Yahoo was firmly entrenched as the dominant search engine.

I'm far from a Microsoft fan. I've made plenty of jokes about Gates being the Antichrist. I just don't see how the race for a set of technologies that may be exciting (I'm excited by the potential of Web 2.0 too), but haven't produced any products that real people (not bloggers) are using in any sizeable numbers is already over.

Microsoft keeps winning these races for two reasons:

• They keep plugging away at an application area until they do eventually get it right. They have the cash and the fortitude to keep retooling until the market starts adopting their solution.
• Their competitors ALWAYS f*** up. This is the part where I may believe in the supernatural aspects of Gates' success. I've seen it too many times, Fylstra, Kapor, Andreesen. There is something about becoming a billionaire, or at least a hundred-millionaire, that warps people's minds and ability to innnovate. Gates has avoided this, but look at Page and Brin with their new 767 toy. The drumbeat for Google as the new evil empire can be clearly heard.

Do I think Microsoft will inevitably win this race? Of course, not. Nothing is inevitable. But anyone who says the race is already over, and Microsoft can't turn the ship around fast enough is either a fool, has an axe to grind, has no idea of the history of this industry, or all of the above.

Multiple bodies colliding with their heads cut off

Ah, for the simple days when it was just Netscape with a browser causing the fuss, and all Microsoft had to do was suck out all their air with IE to kill them. Today, with Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo all competing to do EVERYTHING anyone could ever want (even that is questionable) with a computer, it is almost impossible to tell where the leading edge is leading to. I guess the computer industry expanding in all directions at the same time is the definition of a bubble. The real reason why bubbles form and then expand to extremes is that there is no chance for customer feedback. The Web 1.0 bubble was funded by VC money chasing markets without any time to see if there was any money to be made. Web 2.0 is expanding because the Big Four are locked in a steel cage deathmatch and don't have time to see if any of their new projects in beta will find a positive response from the market. By market I mean actual users in the millions, not just tens of thousands of bloggers.

Book Note: Ajax in Action

Ajax is so bleeding edge that I am reading a book on it from the future. I thought the rule in publishing was that you could use the next year for the copyright if it was printed in late November, but this book arrived November 2 with a copyright of 2006. After yesterday's Microsoft Live demonstration, it is clear that all forces are converging on client side programming with Javascript and DHTML. There have been many blog posts accusing Microsoft of being a follower rather than a leader in this area, but the irony is that Microsoft created the XMLHttpRequest functionality that is the heart of Ajax. Adam Bosworth has an interesting post on this history.

The idea of simulating a desktop app in a browser using DHTML and Javascript goes back further than the XMLHttpRequest. I designed just such a product called GifWorks in 1998. The goal was to create Photoshop in a web browser. It wasn't completely client-side though. The interface runs in the browser, but the image processing is done on a server.

I'm not sure what I will do first with Ajax, but the most likely candidate is some type of mashup with Google maps.

The return of FUD

I thought the DOJ agreement forbade Microsoft from engaging in the type of massive pre-announcement they performed yesterday with Microsoft Live. Could it be that the rise of Google has let Microsoft out of their box? Since Google has 50% of the search business and is using their position to dominate EVERY other possible use of software on the Internet, I wonder if MS can now argue that they are no longer in a monopoly position?

The biggest losers yesterday were the new crop of Web 2.0 start-ups. It is clear that they are caught in the middle of a battle between Google and Microsoft to spend billions to capture the next round of applications. One aspect of the DOJ's argument against MS was that bundling represented unfair competition because it allowed MS to undercut competitors on price. Now that MS has adopted the mantra of "advertising will pay for it," they are freed to give away anything they want, even if it "accidentally" crushes lots of little guys.