One Platform

A couple of things have struck me about the iPad and iBook Author.  If you want to read some background John Gruber has a good summary.  It may well come down to whether being focused on one thing is wrong.

Firstly, Steve Jobs is quoted in his biography saying he'd give away textbooks.  This is a pretty big bargaining chip when Apple was talking to the textbook publishers: go with us or we'll give your product away for free.  How does this differ from Bill Gates saying they'd cut off Netscape's oxygen supply?

The other thing it reminds me of is Bill Gates' developer virtuous cycle.  This is where developers write applications for a particular platform, users pick the platform with the most applications which then feeds back to developers supporting that platform.  In the past, developers have had to make a single choice as to which platform they wanted to support in order to succeed.  It continues to happen with Android and iPhone.  Jeff Raikes has given a good example in the early days of Microsoft in, "The Principle of Agility", he says:

I suspect many of you or in the audience might if I ask you the question of, "What was Microsoft's first spreadsheet?" You might think Excel was our spreadsheet. But in fact, we had a product called Multiplan...Our strategy was to be able to have our application products run on all of those computing platforms because at that time there were literally hundreds of different personal computers.

And on January 20th, 1983 I realized, I think Bill Gates also realized we had the wrong strategy. Any guesses to what happened on January 20th, 1983? Lotus, it was the shipment of Lotus 1-2-3. How many personal computers did Lotus run on in January of 1983? One, and exactly one. And it was a big winner. So what we learned was when it came to customer behavior. It wasn't whether you had a product that run on all of those computing platforms. What really mattered to the customer was, did you have the best application product on the computer that they own. And Lotus 1-2-3 was the best spreadsheet. In fact, it was the beginning of a "formula for success in applications". That I defined around that time called, "To win big, you have to make the right bet on the winning platform."

So what's the principle? The principle is agility. If you're going to be successful as an entrepreneur what you have to do is you have to learn. You have to respond. You have to learn some more. You have to respond some more. And that kind of agility is very important. If we had stayed on our old strategy, we would not be in the applications business today. In fact, one of the great ironies of that whole episode is that in the late '80s or early '90s our competitors, WordPerfect, Lotus. What they really should have been doing was betting on Windows. But instead they were betting on and WordPerfect was the best example. Betting on, putting WordPerfect on the mainframe, on minicomputers. In fact, they went to the lowest common denominator software strategy which we switched out of in the 1983 timeframe. So, for my key principle is, make sure that you learn and respond. Show that kind of agility. 

This is echoed in one of the recent exchanges (about an hour into MacBreak Weekly 283) where Alex Lindsay talks about how important it is to him to make education interesting and how he's not going to wait for standards, he just wants to produce the best.  Leo Laporte responds by saying how important it is for an open standard to prevail in order to prevent every child in America having to own an iPad in order to be educated or informed.

You have to wonder if developers have reached a level of sophistication that allows them to use a cross platform solution or whether that will ever happen.  I think that it's inevitable that a more open platform will succeed but I'm not sure whether multiple platforms can succeed - we shall see.

If you want to here more there are many interesting conversations around including: Hypercritical 51, MacBreak Weekly 283 and This Week in Tech 337.

Why the Cloud isn't the Internet

I think people are just starting to realize what some of the cloud vendors are providing and their drawbacks.  Steve Jobs is quoted in his biography describing the intent behind iCloud:

We need to be the company that manages your relationship with the cloud - streams your videos and music from the cloud, stores your pictures and information, and maybe even your medical data...over the next few years, the hub is going to move from the computer into the cloud...So we wrote all these apps - iPhoto, iMove, iTunes - and tied in our devices, like the iPod and iPhone and iPad...We can provide all the syncing you need, and that way we can lock in the customer.

The Mac has always been different to Windows.  One of those differences Windows users' notice is that you switch between applications in OS X compared to documents (or windows) in Windows. The Apple cloud maintains that pattern by syncing between applications rather than documents (or individual files).  This approach confuses a lot of people.

This is different to how most Mac users currently sync their files with Dropbox.  iCloud has ended up following its Mac heritage whereas Dropbox sticks to file syncing.  Matthew writes:

The difference between Dropbox and iCloud synchronization is that Dropbox is theoretically just a file system...If you have a document that you edit on your iPad and sync with Dropbox you can edit that same file, using a different application, on your PC...The iCloud experience is completely different. The only way to edit a document across platforms or devices is to use a version of the application for each device. Not a compatible application...it may actually make me change the desktop application that I use purely based on iCloud support.

If you want to read more about Dropbox and Apple there's a really good article in Forbes which details how Steve Jobs personally made an offer to buy Dropbox.

The edges of iCloud - the integration points to applications and the operating system - it's incomplete even if you buy into the idea of applications over documents.

For example, on iOS devices there is a Notes application but on OS X these notes are in a tab in the Mail application.  This seems like a weird and non-standard place to put it - if you are going to sync by application you'd think it should be the same application across platforms.

In iCloud for Windows, Windows users get more choice than OS X users.  Mail, Contacts and Calendar integrate with Outlook but you can choose your application for Bookmarks (IE or Safari) and Photo Stream.

Even within applications Apple haven't quite gotten syncing right with iCloud yet either including the new rules around where files are stored and what is automatically removed or backed up.

The cloud is about vendor lock as much as any other platform, like application servers or databases, but with the extra problem that your data is tied to the vendor's application, cloud and user base.  A stickier solution.

Some, like Google and Facebook, offer export services, but these almost don't matter, because you get an almost useless hunk of data, lose the ability to run the applications and you can't access users on their network (who may well have been collaborators).

With the Internet, the Web and open source you still have the possibility to use your data with applications shared by many people across different networks.

URLs for 10 minutes

Protect Your Site With URL Rewriting seems a little bit of a mad suggestion. They are basically suggesting that you change your application's URIs every 10 minutes to prevent XSS and XSRF (Cross Site Request Forging).

We could mitigate much of the risk of these vulnerabilities by frequently changing our URLs—not once every 200 years but once every 10 minutes. Attackers would no longer be able to exploit application vulnerabilities by mass e-mailing poisoned hyperlinks because the links would be broken and invalid by the time the messages reached their intended victims. With all due respect to Sir Tim, while "cool" URIs may not change, secure ones certainly do.

The negatives seem vast and I wonder what this is really trying to solve, as they say at the end:

An automatically expiring URL can still be exploited by an attacker with access to a Web server of his own. Instead of sending out malicious hyperlinks that point directly to the vulnerable page, he can send out hyperlinks that point to his own site. When his site gets a hit from one of the phished e-mails, it can contact a landing page on the vulnerable site to obtain a valid time stamp and then redirect the user accordingly.

If you are a REST advocate then maybe a quick read over, The Resource-Oriented Architecture in Action, may soothe you (from the excellent book, RESTful Web Services).

Into Thick Air

Chrome, JavaScript, and Flash: Two (Mostly) Opposing Views the second comment closely follows a reason update on CounterNotions, Google Chrome: Bad news for Adobe.

But a full-fledged browser. One that behaves, however, as a platform to host applications best tied to cloud computing with built-in local persistence for offline computing. Sure, in its current form Chrome can’t compete with Silverlight or Flex/AIR for what Adobe calls “expressiveness,” meme-speak for rich graphics, animations, integrated video and other visual UI goodies.

Chrome may shut it off for good. It’s possible that various open source Chrome technologies could melt into Safari and Firefox. But –– whether as a stand-alone product or a progenitor of fast, powerful and expressive browsers –– Chrome signals to anybody but the diehard Microsoft constituents that the browser itself, not a proprietary plug-in or a separate runtime, is the future of RIAs. With its huge ecosystem, Microsoft can live with that. At least until its enterprise monopoly seriously erodes. But Adobe cannot.

In a world where the online pie is divided among the .NET army of Microsoft, the browser-gang of Apple+Mozilla+Google, and the lone Adobe, it’s not difficult to predict whose share will shrink into insignificance. If the exclusion of Flash from the iPhone wasn’t a wake-up call for Adobe, Chrome should certainly be one.

Most of the commentary is focused on the browser within an operating system angle. Although one of the easter eggs is a familiar screensaver. I think it's more helpful to concentrate on the fact that these browsers are getting rich enough to remove the applications embedded within browsers. There is already a lot of functionality developed or being developed such as SVG and storage (part of HTML 5). Chrome ships with Gears though and Webkit, to see how HTML5 and Gears relates see Aaron Boodman's talk on implementing HTML5 in Gears. They create two namespaces one for implementing the standard APIs and one for non-standard APIs - it seems like it has quite a solid development process behind it. Is there really a lot of reason left to support these proprietary applications within applications?

Round of Links

• Apache Hadoop Wins Terabyte Sort Benchmark "One of Yahoo's Hadoop clusters sorted 1 terabyte of data in 209 seconds...This is the first time that either a Java or an open source program has won." There were just under 1000 nodes, the benchmark results are hosted by HP (a tad more detail here).


• Microsoft buys Powerset one of the interesting things is that they use Hadoop (see their blog). It's hard to tell whether this is bad or good for Hadoop.


• Google vs Microsoft - oh for structure.


• Tom talking about GridGain from his presentation in February. C++ isn't as productive as Java?


• Applets are back (according to Sun).


• Why commenting is for n00bs. "And Haskell, OCaml and their ilk are part of a 45-year-old static-typing movement within academia to try to force people to model everything. Programmers hate that. These languages will never, ever enjoy any substantial commercial success, for the exact same reason the Semantic Web is a failure. You can't force people to provide metadata for everything they do. They'll hate you."


• Some interesting discussion on Web 2.0 and the future of the web.


• Rich text editor for browsers. Not free though.


• Linked data and what it is.


• ThoughtWorks Podcasts (the REST talk was what drew me to it).


• Turtle specification. I've been looking at this for serialization of RDF molecules but it seems that you can't have blank nodes as objects using the nested syntax.


• Semantic Web for bioinformatics.


• Data structure stuff: Linear Bloom Filters, Bloom filters for Spell Checking, Optimal Bloom Filter replacements and scalable btree and B-tries for Disk-based String Management.

Bad Balmer

Eight Years of Wrongness. Lists some of the things believed to have gone wrong with Microsoft in the last 10 years or so. They include: losing the DOJ and EU cases, Vista, XBox, IE, Zune, and Windows Mobile. Linked mainly because they use Fake Steve as a source of analysis.

Google Culture

So a perspective of Google has been going around for a little while now. The story of when an interview gets widely distributed though is more interesting. It's not like Microsoft has anything to gain from distributing this information.

Via, "RE: Life at Google - The Microsoftie Perspective".

An Efficient Link Store

• Another web of data store that produces a subset of RDF/XML, Astoria, is from an unlikely source, Microsoft. Instead of a proprietary Semantic Web, Danny sees it as going to town with URIs and REST.


• Silverlight was the other surprising Microsoft development, nothing beats running code - except maybe browser-based dynamic code 2000 times faster. Applets are cool again.


• Some ideas for static triple indexing "Most mature triplestores also index a 4th query element ‘graph’ or ‘context’. I intend to support this query type without expanding the index by using a trick: In my triples format the fact that the subjects are auto-generated and local to the graph means I can choose them to be sequential and effectively re-use them as graph indexes..."


• Plugged In/Invisible Worlds/Tucana/Northrop/TKS/TMex/Kowari/Mulgara podcast (links to the Talis page).


• PAGE a distributed triple store using DHT and YARS (the original). It does seem to miss the DELIS work on P2P RDF which scaled up to 64 nodes.


• Haskell and the Faith of Programming Languages Phillip Wadler gives a rather brilliant talk on programming languages. Covers Haskell, Java generics, combining different typed languages (weak, strong, very strong) as well as monads and Links.

Allchin's Buying a Mac in Context

Allchin's 'Buy a Mac' E-Mail Exposed "Jim Allchin's "I would buy a Mac" statement now has ontext. The e-mail is publicly available."

Allchin says: "I am not sure how the company lost sight of what matters to our customers (both business and home) the most, but in my view we lost our way. I think our teams lost sight of what bug-free means, what resilience means, what full scenarios mean, what security means, what performance means, how important current applications are, and really understanding what the most important problems are customers face are. I see lots of random features and some great vision, but that doesn't translate into great products.

I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft."

Ob. iPhone Comment

Apple's Son of Newton "Gibson learned that, like iPod, iPhone will have a non-removal battery. Let me repeat: The battery is fixed. Non-removable battery is a shortcoming If only Ffor a device with only five hours talk time and functions like Web browsing and music listening that sap power. Heck, Cingular sells the BlackJack with a spare battery in the box."

"With Zune, Microsoft adopted a more end-to-end approach of providing all the pieces (albeit, hardware from Toshiba). The Windows Mobile business model is Microsoft software and partner hardware. If Microsoft had considered releasing a Zune branded phone, greater debate inside the company is sure to follow."

So Apple's move seems quite smart compared to Microsoft's Zune and Smartphone combination. A lack of removable battery isn't so bad when you have cars and airlines all providing iPod integration. And reminds me of the lament of Douglas Adams' for a standard power adapter. The iPod dock connector provides a variety of 3.3, 5 and 12 volt pins depending if it's plugged into Firewire or USB. If only firewire had been that standard.

Microsoft isn't all bad, it announced to much fan fair the next version of Office for the Mac.

X for Vista

Windows Vista Vista is not a copy of OS X. The search box is in the completely opposite corner (bottom left opposed to top right), gadgets not widgets, and the 3D chess games in Vista has porcelain as a board type (innovative).

Vista Wins on Looks. As for Lacks ... suggests that the copying wasn't quite perfect, "And then there’s that Sidebar, the floating layer of mini-programs. If you close one of the gadgets, you lose its contents forever: your notes in the Post-it Notes gadget, your stock portfolio in the Stocks gadget, and so on. You couldn’t save them if you wanted to. How could Microsoft have missed that one."

Microsoft does RDF

Microsoft Connected Services Framework "The Profile Manager component provides profile management services. Connected Services Framework uses Profile Manager to store custom information about users and their preferences. Profile information is held in a Resource Description Framework (RDF) store, which is implemented by a Microsoft SQL Server database. Profile Manager provides facilities for creating and managing user profile information and for propagating profile information to Web services that cooperate in a service-oriented application."

Behold MS SPARQL: "

string sparqlQuery =
    @"PREFIX ex: 
    CONSTRUCT {
     ex:fullName ?Name
    }
    WHERE {
     ex:fullName ?Name
    }
  ";

"

Via, links for 2006-12-07. Microsoft using RDF and SPARQL, "...according to timbl Vista will be using XMP (RDF inside) to store metadata about photos etc."

Also, I recently noticed their implementation of EXCEPT (SQL's set difference) EXCEPT and INTERSECT (Transact-SQL).

Agile Bigger than Jesus

Software Development: It's a Religion "But software development is, and has always been, a religion. We band together into groups of people who believe the same things, with very little basis for proving any of those beliefs. Java versus .NET. Microsoft versus Google. Static languages versus Dynamic languages. We may kid ourselves into believing we're "computer scientists", but when was the last time you used a hypothesis and a control to prove anything? We're too busy solving customer problems in the chosen tool, unbeliever!"

With Infinite Money

Life at Google and the Talent Myth "I've talked to people who've come to Microsoft from Google (e.g. Danny Thorpe) and it definitely is as chaotic as it sounds there. For some reason, the description of life at Google by Steve Yegge reminds me a bit of Microsoft where there were two huge money making projects (Office & Windows in the case of Microsoft and AdWords & AdSense in the case of Google) and then a bunch of good to mediocre projects full of smart people dicking around. Over the years I've seen a reduction of the 'smart people dicking around' type projects over here and more focus on shipping code."

Someone seems to have forgotten that real artists ship.

I read the original article, "Good Agile, Bad Agile" expecting indepth analysis of Agile (or agile) methods. Instead it says things like, "Most of us in our industry are date-driven. There's always a next milestone, always a deadline, always some date-driven goal to it.

The only exceptions I can think of to this rule are:

1) Open-source software projects.
2) Grad school projects.
3) Google."

All of these cases are without time or money constraints.

Another post, "Stupid is as stupid does", says their methodology explains the continual betaness of Google, "Unasked by Joel, and left unexplained by Steve: everything at Google stays in beta, pretty much forever. Hmm. Why do you suppose that is? Well, you get a bunch of "really smart" people together, don't put any product/project management together, and let them move around at will... what do you get? You get a bunch of projects that end up being 80% done (i,e., all of the technically "interesting" pieces are done, but that boring "polish" stuff isn't).".

Iron VMs

Will It Be JRuby vs. IronPython? "On the heels of Microsoft's release of IronPython 1.0 comes the news that Sun has hired the two primary JRuby developers.

I don't know if Sun intended it, but the juxtaposition of these two news item gives the effect that the two managed execution environments—The JVM and .NET—have each chosen an anointed champion scripting language for their platform.

The orphan that's left out of the spotlight is Jython. I feel kind of sad for Jython and its lone publicly known active maintainer Frank Wierzbicki."

JRuby Steps Into the Sun "The potential for Ruby on the JVM has not escaped notice at Sun, and so we'll be focusing on making JRuby as complete, performant, and solid as possible. We'll then proceed on to help build out broader tool support for Ruby, answering calls by many in the industry for a "better" or "smarter" Ruby development experience."

Vista Chicken - System/360 all Over Again

Discontent at Microsoft. "What I saw in MS was PM's pushing hard for features:
* even if it meant that the test combinations would be very large, so the product couldn't not be tested properly.
* even if it couldn't be done properly in the time allocated. After all an estimate of time was made, now all of those features mus go in the product evne if things are taking longer than expected.
* even if the product was falling apart at the seems b/c every other pm was doing the same thing.

In fact, people often played schedule chicken. It didn't matter if you were running late by the metric of the day as long as another group was running later."

"WinFS is a great example of a file system designed by lunatic engineers and inbred GPM teams (led by a totally lunatic DirPM) without a clue as to what a real customer even looks like. Complexity in the design for complexity sake is the kiss of death. Complexity without a clear, or even muddy, picture of the problem you are actually trying to solve for the actual customer is the kiss of death. Not having customers involved at every step of the design and development process is just arrogance. Believing you know better than the customer is just stupid."

Also, Exceptions to Brooks’ Law "Brooks’s Law: adding manpower to a late software project makes it later...It depends who the manpower is...Some teams can absorb more change than others...There are worse things than being later...There are different ways to add manpower...It depends on why the project was late to begin with...Adding people can be combined with other management action."

Fortune interview with Fred Brooks: "One is to officially slip the schedule. And officially doing it has many benefits over unofficially letting it slip...That is, if you're going to take a slip, get everybody onboard, get organized, and take a six-month slip, even though you may at the moment feel as if you're only four months late."

JRDF 0.3.4.2 is out

Another bug fix release. This time it was problems in the parser with RDF/XML literals and a fix for EscapeUtil. The first was an interesting problem, not directly to do with fixing the problem per se, but trying to maneuver the code in such a way as to only use the standard Java SDK. The second was a simple regex change and finding out how Unicode support has changed from 1.4 to 1.5 (and how it breaks certain regexs from 1.4). It now means that JRDF 0.3.4.2 works under 1.4 and 1.5 as expected.

Both of these problems reinforce the idea that without tests to prove code works almost always means that it doesn't.

Microsoft has an interesting and incorrect words on TDD (from here).

UPDATE: Microsoft seems to have pulled the above mentioned article, although it's still available in Google's cache.

UPDATE 2: More comments artima developer forum.

UPDATE 3: Microsoft Gets TDD Completely Wrong "Microsoft has completely missed the point of TDD. They got it wrong. Do not follow their guidelines: they will decrease productivity. You'll find that the process they've described doesn't work. If you stick with it, you'll find yourself writing increasingly bad code to work around its problems."

New from Google

Coincidentally, Google's Index Size Jumps and Search Engine Size Wars V Erupts "On the eve of Microsoft's long anticipated launch of MSN Search, Google is reporting on its home page that its index size has nearly doubled. Google now claims that it is now "Searching 8,058,044,651 web pages." Earlier today, a search for the word "the" returned nearly 11 billion results, a far larger number than officially reported on the home page. No matter which numbers you believe, it's a significant expansion of Google's web database."

"Microsoft had planned to seize the title of biggest search engine by announcing 5 billion pages indexed today."

And the people at Google "abusing" their power Tweaking the tiger's tail. It's still there. A search for kowari only brings up references to the RDF triple store and not the animal. Google brings up Kowari the animal as the second result.