Will Google's Android Play DOS to Apple's iPhone?

Daniel Eran Dilger Today's broad array of smartphone operating system contenders are offering lots of potential answers to a problem that only requires one. It appears the market has two options ahead: either pool generic hardware makers behind a single operating system and deliver a smartphone marketplace that resembles the Windows PC market, or watch them fall to a dominant leader and have a smartphone market that resembles Apple's iPod ecosystem. This decision isn't going to be made by a class of intellectual elite, or by government mandate. it's going to be made by the market itself. Here are the factors that will influence the outcome, either marginalizing Apple's iPhone into a niche as the company has twice experienced previously at the hands of DOS in 1981 and Windows in 1991, or positioning it as the dominant leader as Apple has achieved for itself with the iPod since 2001. The third segment in this series looks at Google's Android and the Open Handset Alliance as a possible “DOS-attack” against Apple's iPhone. Subsequent segments will look at Nokia's newly opened Symbian and other mobile contenders challenging the iPhone. Will the iPhone Meet its Match from a Modern Day DOS? Will Windows Mobile Play DOS to Apple’s iPhone? Will Google's Android Play DOS to Apple's iPhone? Will Symbian Play DOS to Apple's iPhone? Google Acquires Android. In 2005, Google purchased a startup named Android, which had been in business for nearly two years. The secretive startup was known only to be working on software for mobile phones. It was being run by a who's who of mobile industry veterans, including Andy Rubin, the founder of Danger. Rubin had earlier worked at WebTV along with Chris White and Andy McFadden, both of whom had also joined Android. Richard Miner of Orange and Nick Sears of Tmobile also brought their mobile provider experience to Android. At the time of the acquisition, Google didn't announce any plans for Android and instead only told BusinessWeek, “We acquired Android because of the talented engineers and great technology. We're thrilled to have them here.” It appeared that Google was only going to be expanding its search services for mobile phone users, along the lines of the Google SMS answer system it had recently released. Google Buys Android for Its Mobile Arsenal - BusinessWeek Windows XP Media Center Edition vs Apple TV: The Fall of WebTV The GPhone Myth. As reports began to leak out about talks between Google and hardware makers throughout 2007, rumors began to fly about “the GPhone,” a competitive offering that was supposed to take on the iPhone. Some phone enthusiasts hoped Google would jump in to rescue the struggling OpenMoko project and turn it into a viable project that could attack Apple's new smartphone. In October 2007, I printed the Great Google GPhone Myth, taking apart the idea that Google would be directly competing against the iPhone, and describing that Google was really working on a free alternative to Windows Mobile as a conduit for getting its search and related services on a broader variety of mobiles. Google's services were already on the iPhone. In November, Google played its hand: it had organized a consortium of companies called the Open Handset Alliance to develop open standards for mobiles. The first product from the group would be Android, a mobile operating system built on the Linux kernel. Google wasn't getting into the phone handset business at all; it was only making sure that its mobile search products would not risk being marginalized by the threat of Windows Mobile on phones in the same way Microsoft had been working to leverage its PC monopoly to push Google search off the Windows desktop. The Great Google gPhone Myth Introducing Android: Leader of Linux. Two weeks later, Google released an early version of the Android software. On top of a Linux kernel, Android uses a specialized version of a Java Virtual Machine that takes Java language code and turns it into what Google calls “Dalvik bytecode” rather than Java bytecode as a standard JVM would. This allows Google to leverage existing and familiar Java language tools without paying Sun for a Java license. Like Mac OS X and its fraternal iPhone OS, Android includes a variety of open source libraries, including SQLite and WebKit. On top of that, Google developed a series of frameworks that handle the tasks Cocoa Touch does on the iPhone. Android also bundles a set of applications. While Apple adapted its existing Mac OS X to work in a mobile environment to create the iPhone OS, Android is more like a customized Java environment running on a specialized mobile Linux variant: elements of maturity in an otherwise experimental new platform. What is Android? -Google Android was by no means the first mobile OS using Linux. Both Palm and its amputated ACCESS software arm have Linux-based mobile platforms. Nokia has Maemo, which it uses in its Internet Tablets, and also recently acquired Trolltech and its Qtopia mobile Linux platform. Motorola has teamed up with MontaVista Software to use its Mobilinux. Intel created the Moblin project for mobile Linux, aimed at Internet devices. Google's OHA also isn't the first consortium to attempt to standardize a mobile Linux platform. The OSDL started the Mobile Linux Initiative to define requirements for hardware; the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) then worked to define various phone profiles aimed at the Japanese market; the Linux Phone Standard (LiPS) Forum tried to do the same thing in Europe. In 2007, LiPS was folded into the new LiMo Foundation, along with the OSDL. All of these committees have had some overlap and some complementary features. Several of Google's OHA partners are also LiMo members, including NTT DoCoMo, Wind River, and Motorola. So why didn't Google just join LiMo? “LiMo, very candidly, wasn't moving fast enough,” OHA board member John Bruggeman told CNET. Google hopes to herd the Linux cats into a progressive, structured platform that can battle against Symbian and Windows Mobile to succeed as the new DOS of smartphones. Will Google fracture or unify mobile Linux? The Presumption of the Necessity of DOS. The previous segment examining Windows Mobile pointed out how the PC industry as a whole assumed that Microsoft's desktop Windows monopoly would easily take over dominance in the MP3 player market, pushing Apple into a niche position. This was expected because DOS had pushed Apple's early computers into a reduced role starting in 1981, and Microsoft had repeated this again in 1991 when the DOS world migrated to Windows, effectively pruning Apple's Macintosh into a Bonsai platform. The inability of one company to dominate any product category has been frequently repeated by PC industry pundits as a given, despite the fact that history is full of examples of this happening. Sony dominated personal music players for two decades under the Walkman brand even while equally large competitors tried to push it from this position; Nintendo has similarly owned handheld gaming despite ill-fated efforts to grab a piece of its pie by products running a generic platform such as Microsoft's WinCE (Gizmondo), Linux (GP32), and Symbian (N-Gage). In fact, outside of the Windows/DOS PC, there are actually few examples of a generic platform taking over an industry. Nearly every other consumer-facing product uses proprietary platforms: car makers, stereo equipment, appliances and so on typically all use designs custom to their maker. The paradox of the Windows PC market has been that Microsoft's broadly licensed software supposedly saves hardware makers from investing in software development while ensuring compatibility, when in reality it adds significant costs to PC makers while limiting their ability to differentiate themselves. That explains why PC makers have been perpetually merging together and going out of business while Microosft has rolled in money over the last two decades. Parallel efforts to copy Microsoft in broadly licensing an operating system have regularly failed: IBM's OS/2, Apple's Mac OS, Palm's PDA OS, even Microsoft's own efforts to duplicate Windows dominance in other markets, from copy machines to PDAs to smartphones to SPOT watches to music players. The closest copy may be Symbian, but its customers are partners, not simply consumers of a generic third party's operating system as Windows licensees are. That indicates it is not necessary to duplicate the dominance exercised by Microsoft over the PC industry in the smartphone market. Google's Android and Symbian exist more as technology sharing pacts among manufacturers, but both aspire to take Microsoft's DOS role among smartphones. However, the idea that Apple's iPhone must be dethroned by a modern-day DOS, whether Windows Mobile, Android, or Symbian, is not just debatable, but does not sync with the reality of more recent events. Apple's recent history of the iPod further refutes the idea that a software analog to Microsoft is needed. The iPod Emergence: Apple & Pixo vs IBM & Microsoft. Apple's iPod in 2001 made no effort to clone the DOS business model; it actually did the opposite. When Apple entered the market, there were a number of existing MP3 devices using custom software, hardware designs, and DRM codecs. The iPod used off the shelf components to deliver a custom MP3 player using third party software, but Apple also added its own technologies: easy to use sync with iTunes, a fast Firewire interface that made uploading music far faster than the prevailing USB 1.0, and an attractive industrial design. With the iPod, Apple played the role of IBM in 1981, using Pixo's embedded operating system to enter the market quickly, just as IBM had used DOS. The difference was that Apple didn't direct any market attention toward Pixo and added a lot of value on top of that core embedded OS. A modern day Compaq couldn't simply clone the hardware and license Pixo to run on it in order to compete against the iPod, because the iPod was much more than just generic hardware running Pixo software. As the iPod developed, Pixo's role diminished and was eventually displaced. Just like IBM, Apple jumped into a new market just as demand was beginning to explode. Apple made MP3 players far more attractive to a general audience by delivering greater playback capacity than most entry level devices offered, along with an ease of use that encouraged buyers to jump in at the higher end of the market. That left Apple with not only the lion's share of the market, but also by far the most profitable segments of the market. Two decades prior, IBM badly fumbled its play with the early PC and ended up irrelevant in the PC world by the late 80s, sideswiped by Microsoft's DOS and the cloners who were licensing it in parallel, notably Compaq and later HP and Dell. Steve Jobs had witnessed that happen, and was determined to not let it happen again to Apple. Rather than being manipulated by a software middleware vendor as IBM had, Apple worked to incrementally develop the iPod market itself. After consuming the hard drive-based player market, Apple took on the Flash RAM-based market with a tiny hard drive system used in the iPod Mini, and followed up with Flash-based devices of its own in the Nano and Shuffle. This allowed Apple to progressively serve an increasingly wider market, incrementally growing upon an established foundation. With the iPod, Apple became, in effect, an IBM with its own internal Microsoft. Microsoft's Failure Despite Features. In contrast, Microsoft entered the music player market by promoting music player hardware reference designs around WinCE. However, it was unable to ship a finished design until the iPod had become firmly established around 2005. Later branded as PlaysForSure, the devices were sold by various hardware makers and all purported to support the same DRM and the same music subscription services while also offering a broader array of hardware that presented video before the iPod did, supported wireless before the iPod, and so on. Despite these unique features, all of those PFS designs still failed. Microsoft blamed the failure of PFS upon its music store and hardware partners and decided to take Apple on itself in 2006. It relaunched a Toshiba PFS player as its own device under the Zune brand, adding WiFi music sharing features and a larger display than the current Pods had. It failed dramatically as well. Did Microsoft's attempts to float a new DOS among music players fail because of Apple's success, or due to Microsoft's own problems? The failure of the Zune, which followed the iPod model rather than the DOS model, seems to suggest that Microsoft itself was to blame. Consider too that Microsoft's Windows Mobile phones, which use the same underlying operating system as its failed PlaysForSure music players and the Zune, had similarly flopped even before Apple could release a charismatic phone equivalent to the iPod. Of course, when the iPhone was released, it hit Windows Mobile hardest. The iPhone made Windows Mobile Smartphones look ridiculous and underpowered, and made Windows Mobile Pocket PC phones look clumsy and awkward, despite the fact that they both supported a variety of features the iPhone didn't, including the ability to edit documents, capture video, send MMS, and so on. Simply adding on features did not enable Microsoft to compete against Apple. The only conclusion that can be drawn from all this is that competing against Apple requires more than just having a feature arsenal. Microsoft's failures in themselves do not necessarily mean that Google's Android will fail in its attempts to float its own smartphone platform. Why Microsoft’s Zune is Still Failing Microsoft’s Zune, Vista, and Windows Mobile 7 Strategy vs the iPhone Will Google Succeed where Microsoft Failed? Microsoft's demonstrated inability to successfully enter consumer markets for MP3 players and smartphones has given observers little faith that the company will somehow turn things around in late 2009 when its next generation of devices are expected to be released. However, prior to that the first fruits of Google's efforts to build its own smartphone operating environment will arrive. Will Google's Android take over Microsoft's crown as the “DOS vendor” among smartphones? Supporters of Google's Android project point to some parallels between Android for smartphones and Windows on the PC: Android will allow hardware makers to differentiate in ways that can offer features Apple can't (or doesn't want to); it should allow software developers to offer features Apple does not allow on the iPhone; it embraces open, hobbyist experimentation in ways that Apple currently isn't; and it opens the potential for content providers that Apple is not interested in allowing. Openness is Android's key competitive feature. Will all this openness allow Google to unseat the iPhone to become the primary platform developers want to participate in, and subsequently soak up the market for third party hardware makers that Windows Mobile serves? While Google currently has no market share due to the fact that no Android phones have yet shipped, it does have broad vocal support from a variety of the same kinds of hardware manufacturers that supported DOS and Windows and helped to make those platforms successful in the desktop PC market. HTC and Android. The first Android phone is expected to be the HTC Dream; Taiwan's HTC (High Tech Computer) also manufactures Palm's Treo Pro phone as well as many of the most visible Windows Mobile devices. In addition to models produced under its own name, HTC also sells Windows Mobile devices under the Dopod brand, as well as no-name phones branded by providers, such as AT&T, Orange, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Vodafone, and others. HTC will also be building the XPERIA X1 Windows Mobile phone for Sony Ericsson. HTC was quick to throw its support behind Android despite its long term alliance with Windows Mobile. Why would it so enthusiastically support an unproven platform from a company that has no experience in consumer hardware platforms? One can only assume that HTC is not happy with the current state of Windows Mobile, and desperately wants another “DOS” to succeed where Microsoft's has so spectacularly failed. As an Original Design Manufacturer for Palm, HTC watched as Palm adopted Windows Mobile in place of the Palm OS and subsequently fell even deeper into crisis. Palm's only successful phone since has been its Palm OS-based Centro. HTC undoubtedly sees Android as its ticket to becoming the next Dell, but without a similar dependance upon Microsoft. Android for mobile phones is essentially playing the role of Linux for PCs, except that it has the backing of a major company behind it. Can Android Take on the iPhone with Openness as its Feature? As great as this sounds, it's important to consider that Linux on the desktop has made no significant progress in eating into Windows dominance after a decade of trying. Being open, free, flexible, and decentralized hasn't been enough of an advantage to get consumers to migrate from Windows to Linux in any fraction of significance. Similarly, in the music business, Linux-based MP3 players have had no impact on the iPod, despite offering more features, flexibility, support for additional codecs, and so on. In the mobile phone area, Linux enjoys a sizable portion of the smartphone market, but this is almost entirely due to phones sold by Motorola in China, where the advantages of Linux' openness are void. Motorola's Linux phones offer nothing to users in terms of openness or flexibility, and are really no different in terms of features than other appliance 'feature phones' based upon closed operating systems. And again, a key problem with assaulting Apple in a feature war is that neither the iPod nor the iPhone became popular by being “highly featured.” They both delivered perhaps 80% of the functionality found in all other devices in the market. Rather than trying to match every feature and cater to every niche as Microsoft had with Windows Mobile, Apple's devices did a few things very well at launch, and incrementally developed into full featured devices that still lack some of the more unique features of their competitors. Further, in terms of openness, the demographic that embraces Linux' characteristic freedoms is not the same as the demographic that buys smartphones in quantity and then pays for data service. This is a critical fact to consider because a big part of the iPhone's success stems from the fact that it is being pushed by mobile providers who want to capture the cream of the market willing to pay a premium for data services. The Frankenphone. Combining the fractured aesthetic of HTC's Windows Mobile phone hardware with Android's software, based upon Linux' perpetually unfinished DIY openness and Google's Java-like development platform, will not result in a product similar to the iPhone. Instead, it will look a lot like phones that have already failed in the market. Apple's advantage comes from slick hardware designs with a close attention to detail, combined with software that purposely does less so that it can do what it does better. Even Apple's own conservative attempts to broaden its software capabilities with iPhone 2.0 have resulted in instability problems that can be blamed upon both Apple's early releases of its phone operating system and software from inexperienced third party developers new to the platform. Would the current frustrations with iPhone 2.0 be somehow mitigated by additional openness that also embraced all kinds of variables from different hardware makers with less quality control than Apple, a loose committee of additional cooks working to serve up operating system features targeted at every possible conceived need, and a wider third party software group with fewer constraints on illegal behaviors? The Failure of Open. While it is politically unpopular to criticize the well meaning efforts of open source contributors, the failure of Linux on the desktop, the failure of the vaporware Indrema game console, and the failure of the OpenMoko project to deliver a workable phone within a year of its deadline all underline the serious problems open development faces in the world of consumer oriented devices. Open has simply failed to deliver on its promises in the world of consumer hardware. OpenMoko was supposed to release its first mobile phone to consumers for $250 several months in advance of the iPhone. When the iPhone shipped, the group then announced new plans to get its phone out by the end of 2007. Instead, this spring the group announced new plans to move to an entirely different development platform, and ship its phone mid year for $400 with limited functionality and incomplete software outside of basic GSM phone features. Linux's notable successes, from Motorola's Linux phones to the Tivo DVR to Linksys Routers, have often come without any associated openness or freedom, and were instead delivered simply to provide their manufacturer with a free kernel to build upon. This indicates that while Linux may find its way into an increasing number of smartphones, it will likely not be accompanied by the glorious freedom of an open development environment Google has said it would offer with Android. Apple iPhone vs the FIC Neo1973 OpenMoko Linux Smartphone Can Google Succeed Where Open Has Previously Failed? Despite “openness” being Android's strongest competitive feature compared to Apple's iPhone, Google recently revealed that its wide-open development model is intentionally gravitating towards a closed association of top tier partners due to practical considerations. In July, Google accidentally sent out a notice that revealed that it had been seeding private SDK updates to only a subset of its contributors, angering those who believed that Android would be as open as Linux on the desktop or the OpenMoko project. Further, Google has restricted initial development to higher level APIs just as Apple did, further indicating that Google itself realizes that being wildly open to impress a minority of hobbyists will not result in the commercial success of its new platform. That serves to neuter Android's primary advantage over the iPhone. Without delivering on the premise of being wide open, Android is really just a less mature set of Java libraries used to create a specialized binary that runs on a Linux foundation. Unlike Apple's iPhone, Android phones won't have a slick user interface developed by professional artists, nor the iPhone's legacy of mature software development frameworks crafted over the last thirty years, nor the iPhone's tightly integrated hardware with award winning industrial design, nor its marketing power tied into the iPod and Apple's retail stores. Android won't be an open iPhone, it will only be a Windows Mobile phone with a better kernel that runs specialized Java software instead of Win32 or .NET code. Don't expect consumers to be impressed by that. The Biggest Missing Feature. There is one remaining factor that strangles to death any last remaining hope that Android might assassinate the iPhone and assume the crown of the “DOS of smartphones.” That is: Android delivers zero price advantage to consumers. In 1981 and 1991, consumers who wanted Apple computers faced the sticker shock of a somewhat arrogant price tag. Apple sold its computers, as it still does, at the higher end of the market, but there was simply far more range in prices available. In 1981, that meant the Apple II was $2600 and the new Apple III was $3500, even before you added a monitor. On the low end, Commodore sold its far less powerful, but “still a computer” Vic-20 for $300, while IBM entered the market with the IBM PC at $3000. Over the next few years, Apple focused on delivering additional sophistication at the same price, releasing the $10,000 Lisa and then the $2,500 Macintosh. IBM continued selling PCs in the same $3,000 to $10,000 range, but other DOS PC vendors began selling machines at prices that ranged as low as $1500. That left Apple with a roughly $1000 price premium over low end PCs. The products weren't really comparable, but consumers only saw the huge price difference. In 1991, Apple was still selling moderate to high-end Macintoshes for $3,800 to $10,000; the crippled Mac LC was $2500, and obsolete-at-birth Mac Classic ranged from $999 to $1500. Windows allowed PC makers to ship a functional $1500 PC and claim a rough approximation to Apple's $2500 entry level system, maintaining that apparent $1000 price premium. Today, pundits are lucky to find a Dell or HP system that is even a couple hundred dollars less than a comparable Mac. However, in the smartphone business, the iPhone 3G is now the same price, if not less, than generic competing phones on the market. Even more significant is the fact that the price of the phone hardware is nearly nothing compared to the cost of the service plan. This fact simply eases any price premium that could cause buyers to flock to a smartphone running a generic operating system over buying the iPhone 3G, regardless of whether it runs Windows Mobile or Android. 1990-1995: Planting Software Seeds Android Partners Have Already Failed. That same pricing principle similarly prevented buyers from considering many of the alternatives to the iPod. While Apple's original iPod models were more expensive than many of the first MP3 players on the market, they were price competitive with models offering similar features. By 2004, it was Apple who was undercutting MP3 competitors on price. Microsoft offered zero price advantage when it began selling the Zune, a major factor in its failure, but Microsoft simply couldn't out-price the iPod; it was already losing money offering the Zune at the same price as the iPod. Apple now has tremendous market power in buying RAM and other components that will prevent any competitors from being able to offer a huge discount over the iPhone's $199 price tag. Even if competitors were to give their phones away, they would only offer a $200 discount to users who would then still need to pay the same mobile fees to use the phone. Android's other partners, including Samsung and LG, have already failed to capture any significant market share in the music player market. Are they going to maintain their position as smartphone makers now that they face similar competition from Apple, its iPod ecosystem, its iTunes Music and Apps Store, Apple's retail store experience, and other factors that are pushing the iPhone? If they can, it is not obvious how partnering with Android will help. Other Problems for Android. Android was announced in early November 2007 and was followed with an early preview SDK within a couple weeks, a month ahead of Apple's initial announcement of the iPhone 2.0 SDK. However, between March and July 2008, Apple delivered nine progressive releases of its SDK, opened its App Store, and sold 60 million apps, raising $30 million to support iPhone software development in just the first month. It has since released three more SDK updates to developers related to iPhone 2.1, which is expected next month. Android just published its first open SDK beta update earlier this week, warning developers that “applications developed with it may not quite be compatible with devices running the final Android 1.0.” Additionally, Android still has no phones available. By the time the HTC Dream is expected to launch, Apple will have an installed base of around ten million iPhone (and iPod touch) users supporting software development through iTunes. The business model for selling Android apps is no better than that for selling jailbreak iPhone apps: there is no iTunes Apps Store to promote them, so users will have to track them down on their own. Android developers also have no real freedom that jailbreak iPhone developers lack. The only difference is that there are ten million iPhones to sell jailbreak apps to, and currently zero Android phones. If selling a jailbreak iPhone app sounds like more trouble than its worth, imagine trying to sell Android apps to a non-existant audience. Now add the official iPhone App Store into the mix, where publicity, promotion and profits are booming. What platform is going to have the most applications? How many users will flock to a smartphone platform with no apps? The wisdom of releasing a desirable phone and achieving a significant installed base before releasing an SDK makes a lot more sense in retrospect. Additionally, while Apple has a decade of experience in shipping regular updates to Mac OS X and its Xcode developer tools, Google has only shipped a random assortment of web-oriented SDKs (a number of which have been abandoned) as a tangent to its core business of selling advertisements. When the Android SDK 1.0 is finished later this year, developers will not only lack an installed base to sell their apps to, but will also have no high profile market for selling their apps in, and subsequently no financial incentive to develop applications that add value to the Android platform, just like Linux on the PC desktop. Around the same time, possibly within the next month, Apple will be shipping its second major OS release: iPhone 2.1. Apple will also be upgrading its entire user base to the new software so that developers will have a cohesive platform to target. This mirrors the efforts Apple has taken to upgrade its Mac OS X users to the same reference release. Mobile developers will be seeing money pouring in via iTunes while crickets chirp in the Android section of various mobile online stores. Apple’s iPhone Vs. Other Mobile Hardware Makers: 5 Revenue Engines Same Same, But Different: DOS Model Problems. Android developers will also have a series of other problems to manage. Like Windows Mobile, Android is intended to support everything, from BlackBerry-style keypad phones with a small touchscreen to the simple Windows Mobile Smartphone form factor lacking a touch screen to iPhone-like full size touch screens. Also like Windows Mobile, Android phone makers will have the option to leave off Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS location services, graphics hardware acceleration, and so on. Each Android phone will also have unique camera hardware, support for different video and audio codecs, and varied support for other differentiating proprietary services demanded by mobile operators. This will force developers to to make complex decisions regarding the lowest common denominator they choose to support. So while the iPhone will have a cohesive feature set, a managed software environment, and a functional market, Android will be a loose federation of hardware makers selling the same random features found on Windows Mobile today, with a chaotic development environment that lacks any central market for users or developers. And it will be run as an experiment by a company with no experience in consumer hardware or platform development. The Missing Tap. One specific example of the “DOS model problem” is that Android currently does not support multitouch. It's not touched on in the API, and Google quietly tap dances around its omission. Why no multitouch? Because multitouch screens are expensive, and most OHA hardware members are more interested in making a profit in a competitive phone market rather than impressing consumers as Apple did with the iPhone. Most existing smartphones, even those trying to directly rival the iPhone, use a stylus driven, pressure sensitive tap screen or a simpler, cheaper touch technology that lacks support for sensing multitouch. The iPhone's screen can actually sense up to five fingers at once, but the primary feature multitouch offers on the iPhone is the two fingered tapping and the pinching effects everyone associates with it. Android could certainly support multitouch if there were a demand for it, but that's the point: Google knows that its hardware partners are cheap and unlikely to put out hardware that actually competes with the iPhone. Instead of using expensive technologies that deliver clever yet largely invisible functionality, OHA members, just like PC makers, are far more likely to add flashy, impractical gadgety fluff that's cheap to tack on, such as slide out keyboards, neon tubes, and scratch and sniff stickers. That's how you impress gullible nerds on the cheap. Google itself is blowing smoke and erecting mirrors to distract from the reality that it being a “DOS vendor” means supporting bargain basement hardware from penny pinching duplicators. Android has been demonstrating some “wow” features such as a Street Maps app that pans around based on an internal compass in the demonstration phone. The problem is that that kind of thing only makes for a fun demo. Nobody needs to twirl around their phone in the air to see a view of the other side of the street, but everyone who has used an iPhone will wonder why they can't pinch to zoom out. Even worse, most Android phones aren't going to have a compass built into them, so Google is demonstrating features most Android users won't be able to use. That Sounds Like Microsoft… Google's design decisions are beginning to look a lot like Windows Vista; rather than actually working to make laptops boot faster, Microsoft came up with the idea of adding a small screen to the back of Vista laptops so users could check their email without having to wake the system up. But this was a stupid idea for a number of reasons, the most obvious being that most users just want a laptop that boots up quickly. Few laptops got the mini screen, but every user who tries Vista on their laptop will wonder why it doesn't boot up as fast as Mac OS X Leopard. In the same way, Google is advertising features for Android that most users won't ever see in their actual phones while ignoring things people will expect based on their exposure to the iPhone. Android is simply selecting the wrong features. Android will offer the advantages of supporting MMS, recording video, and the list of other features Windows Mobile already supplies. Those features didn't stop Apple from firing past Microsoft in the smartphone arena however, just as the Zune's highly touted WiFi and screen didn't phase iPod buyers. Incidentally, just months after the Zune, Apple had not only demonstrated a larger display but a higher definition multitouch screen, and not only WiFi, but functional WiFi that could be used to browse the web or check email. This suggests that Apple, with its faster release schedule, won't stay behind any of the leading features potentially offered by Android for very long. Android partners, however, will find it as difficult to catch up with Apple's unique features, just as Microsoft has been stymied to keep up with Mac OS X, the iPod, and the iPhone. The underlying reason: both Google and Microosft are tasked with maintaing support for a huge variety of hardware options demanded by all their partners. Apple has the unique circumstances to do only what it needs to do itself. Android in Windows Mobile's Shoes. Like Windows Mobile, Android faces a difficult market. In the US, it competes against the popular BlackBerry in corporate markets and the iPhone among consumers. Worldwide, it competes against entrenched market leader Nokia. The difference is that Google, unlike Microsoft, has no in. Windows Mobile was adopted by Windows-bound IT shops despite its weaknesses. Nobody has any preexisting reason to try an Android phone apart from hobbyists and open software enthusiasts, a demographic that has done little to move Linux on the PC desktop. Google also lacks Microsoft's installed base; it's starting from zero. The smartphone industry initially doubted Apple's chances of making much progress with the iPhone, despite the company having the Mac platform, the iPod, retail stores, platform development experience, marketing savvy, industrial design prowess, and so on. Google doesn't have any of those things. Mobile Providers vs Android. Apple also started with an exclusive partnership with AT&T, a three legged race that demanded effort from both. Google is hoping that hardware makers handle the hardware details and that mobile providers will be excited to sell its Android phones. While hardware makers such as HTC clearly appreciate having found a free alternative to Windows Mobile, it's not obvious why providers would be excited about Android, as it promises an openness that most mobile providers strongly oppose. AT&T took a big risk in getting behind the iPhone, as the phone encouraged users to use email rather than fee-based SMS and MMS, it supported WiFi for data access, and it bypassed AT&T's MEdia Net services to plug into iTunes instead. Verizon refused to parter with Apple and grant it those kinds of concessions. Is AT&T going to take a similar risk to partner with a phone that is not exclusive to it, and is Verizon now going to open its arms to support phones that do not exclusively support BREW, VCast and its other proprietary services? While Android may well eat into Microsoft's Windows Mobile business by stealing away its hardware makers, it seems unlikely that Android will ever serve as more than free alternative to Windows Mobile in a market where Windows Mobile is increasingly irrelevant. Android may have the dubious distinction of swallowing Microsoft's mobile business the same way Microsoft ate up the Palm OS, but even if it accomplishes that goal, Google will likely find itself unsustainably hungry immediately afterward. It will also find itself swimming in a shark tank of hungry rivals, including Nokia's Symbian, RIM's BlackBerry, and Apple's iPhone. Symbian is the final generic platform vying for the opportunity to play DOS in the smartphone market. The next article will examine Nokia's chances in its bid to match Microsoft's PC dominance in the mobile market while setting out in a new venture to copy Android's open software model. Did you like this article? Let me know. Comment here, in the Forum, or email me with your ideas. Like reading RoughlyDrafted? Share articles with your friends, link from your blog, and subscribe to my podcast (oh wait, I have to fix that first). It's also cool to submit my articles to Digg, Reddit, or Slashdot where more people will see them. Consider making a small donation supporting this site. Thanks!

• on August 24, 2008
• More Details
• Related News

Ten Big New Features in Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Daniel Eran Dilger Apple is marketing the idea of there being “no new features�? for Snow Leopard and instead promising an overall improvement in how Mac OS X works under the hood, thanks to a diligent code optimization and refactoring cycle discussed in the previous article. At the same time, there are plenty of significant new features coming in Snow Leopard to look forward to. Here are ten big new features (plus a few minor ones) that you probably haven't heard much about from anywhere else, including my previous articles on the subject that already described QuickTime X, Grand Central, and OpenCL. WWDC 2008: New in Mac OS X Snow Leopard Snow Leopard Server Takes on Exchange, SharePoint Pulling Invisible New Features into Snow Leopard. Apple's increasing collaborations with the open source community have pulled back the veil of secrecy on several new but mostly invisible enhancements that will be showing up in Snow Leopard. One relates to LLVM, the Low Level Virtual Machine compiler architecture project originally founded at the University of Illinois. Apple began contributing to LLVM development in 2005, and started using it Leopard to expand support for OpenGL hardware features. Lower-end Macs that lack the silicon to interpret that specialize graphics code can now do it in software. LLVM is also working its way into Apple's Xcode IDE, initially as a highly efficient optimizer and code generator that works as a bolt-on upgrade to components of GCC, but eventually as a complete compiler replacement. That project, known as Clang, was opened up last year. LLVM compiler technology not only makes developers more productive, but also results in code that runs significantly faster on the same hardware. Apple's other open secret: the LLVM Complier The LLVM Compiler Infrastructure Project Another openly hidden secret in Mac OS X is CUPS, the Common Unix Printing System. Beginning with Jaguar in 2002, Apple adopted and licensed CUPS from its developer as Mac OS X's printing engine. It then purchased the project outright. CUPS is also the de facto printing system for Linux distros and is available for BSD and other commercial Unix systems. That means Apple owns the project that develops the printing architecture for Linux. That's not an issue because Apple has established a reputation in open source as a strong contributor and open sharer. According to a review of bug fixes and improvements in CUPS software, 24% of the enhancements came from Apple while 76% came from free and open source software contributors working with Linux, OpenSolaris, and other projects. Of course, 100% of both sides benefited from that sharing. CUPS collaboration has resulted in high quality code and the advancement of new features. CUPS 1.4, the version sources say Snow Leopard will use, adds performance enhancements and a variety of security improvements that use sandboxing to prevent malware attacks on the printing system from being able to read sensitive documents that may be in use by printers. Common UNIX Printing System A third significant new feature originating from an open source project in Snow Leopard is ZFS support, portions of which come from the OpenSolaris project (along with Sun's DTrace technology, which Apple uses in its Instruments performance profiling tool). Leopard debuted read-only ZFS features, but Snow Leopard and Snow Leopard Server will provide both read and write support for Sun's new 128-bit file system. ZFS was designed to provide “simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability.�? ZFS hype during the development of Leopard helped the new file system reach buzzword status as news of the three letter acronym swept through blogs and the tech media. It is frequently described as being the imminent replacement for the Mac's native HFS+. However, the benefits of ZFS including as storage pooling, data redundancy, automatic error correction, dynamic volume expansion, and snapshots all apply primarily to servers and higher-end workstation users who deal with multiple disk drives. ZFS isn't going to replace HFS+ outright in Snow Leopard, and has limited relevance today to desktop and laptop users, particularly those who never move beyond the single disk drive installed in their system. More Predictions for WWDC 2007: Solaris, Google, Surround Apple - Mac OS X Leopard - Developer Tools - Instruments Symbiotic: What Apple Does for Open Source Apple's Open Source Assault Pushing Visible New Features in Snow Leopard. Apple's extensive work in developing push support for Exchange Server on the iPhone will also be included in Snow Leopard's Mail, Address Book, and iCal. Push support in those client side apps are also being used to power MobileMe's push messaging subscription service and Snow Leopard Server's push messaging services. Apple will be offering both in parallel as alternatives to Exchange, thanks to smart planning on the part of Apple's engineers to develop an interoperable push architecture in Mac OS X and on the iPhone. There is also a fourth application of push that has developed alongside push messaging: Apple's new Push Notification Service. PNS allows iPhone and iPod touch users to set up server side notification alerts that don't require mobile applications to stay running in the background just to update users of the external events they track. Along with Bonjour discovery, PNS will keep iPhones wirelessly connected in all sorts of sophisticated ways that third party developers can imagine in their applications. Whether Apple will integrate a listener for the same PNS system into the desktop side of Mac OS X remains to be seen, but it would allow a single, unified interface for alerting client users of new events. I proposed a system wide, Growl-style notification system in the Leopard Wish List published back in 2005. Snow Leopard Server Takes on Exchange, SharePoint Apple’s Mobile Me Takes On Exchange, Mobile Mesh With the strong push into push messaging, Apple will make mobile devices even more tightly integrated with its desktop products. Leopard delivered Back To My Mac as a novel way to use Wide Area Bonjour's dynamic service registration as a mechanism for sharing resources served from home to any location without configuring static naming services for address lookups. Because any software can register itself with .Mac/MobileMe, this opens the door to third party developers with the vision to exploit the potential of these enabling technologies. A Global Upgrade for Bonjour: AirPort, iPhone, Leopard, .Mac Ten Big Predictions for Apple in 2008 Among the technologies profiled earlier in Myth 3 that have been trickling from the iPhone into Mac OS X, there's at least one idea I proposed for the iPhone that will be in Snow Leopard's Safari: self contained web apps. The new feature will allow users to run web applications as a local app in its own window, essentially making the web platform into a native-looking app that can run outside of Safari. I proposed a similar feature as a possibility for the iPhone prior to the announcement of the Cocoa Touch SDK: web apps packaged up into a set of files that could be run on the device as a Dashboard widget-like standalone app, even when off the network. Why Apple hasn't pursued such an obvious strategy is a little hard to figure out, but it seems they've got the ball rolling on the desktop. That ball will be rolling even faster thanks to SquirrelFish, a new JavaScript interpreter that will make Safari and any other WebKit-based browsers, standalone self contained apps, and Dashboard widgets all a lot faster. Apple's MobileMe, Yahoo's Flickr, and Google various web apps will all gain new speed thanks to faster JavaScript execution. SquirrelFish will also raise the bar in performance and efficiency in the Rich Internet Applications sector in general, giving Flash, Silverlight, and Java a faster, simpler, and more openly interoperable runtime to compete against. RoughlyDrafted: Leopard Wish List: 2005 How Open will the iPhone Get? Surfin’ Safari » Announcing SquirrelFish Microsoft's Application Features in Mac OS X, System Wide. Microsoft's business model of tacking on features hasn't been a total wash. The company's desperate efforts to invent novel marketing features for every new release of Windows and Office have pioneered a number of ideas that have later found their way into Mac OS X. One example is the idea of Fast User Switching, which Apple added to Panther. Windows XP pioneered the trick, but built it upon the kluge that is Terminal Services. Microsoft also helped originate the basis of Ajax web apps by inventing XMLHttpRequest in order to make its Outlook Web Access 2000 web app work decently within Internet Explorer. Today, standards-based web apps are eating a hole into Microsoft's monopoly on the proprietary desktop platform, and tools such as SproutCore and resulting products such as MobileMe are poised to tear down interoperability barriers and level the playing field. Microsoft may now regret having opened Pandora's Box in terms of standards-based web applications, but its efforts to seal the web back up with the proprietary Silverlight plugin, which turns web apps into .NET programs, will now be next to impossible. Another example of a Microsoft innovation are the fancy text features in Word, such as red underlining to highlight spelling mistakes and the green squiggle for grammar errors. Word also features a variety of word auto correction, smart dash insertion, and text replacement features (such as typing TM to get the ™ character). The former have already become system-wide features in Mac OS X, while sources indicate that the latter text processing features will find their way into Snow Leopard, and therefore every application that runs on it. RoughlyDrafted: Remote Display part 3: Terminal Server Cocoa for Windows + Flash Killer = SproutCore Super Size Me. On top of injecting Word features into its OS for the use of every application, Apple will also expand the use of its own Data Detectors, a technology it invented in the mid 90s for identifying useful bits of text and making it actionable. Leopard introduced Data Detectors in Mail as a way to extract contacts and events for use in Address Book and iCal, but Snow Leopard will expose Data Detectors everywhere it draws text. Sources also indicate Snow Leopard will expand upon Font Book to provide full Auto Activation of any fonts requested by any application, using Spotlight to track them down. Snow Leopard is also suggested to have a new set of frameworks specifically for working with multitouch trackpad gestures, patterned after those introduced with the MacBook Air. Speaking of the ultra-thin Air, sometimes less is more. However, the high cost and relatively low capacity of Solid State Drives like the $1000, 64 GB SSD option offered for the Air means that one Microsoft feature Snow Leopard could do without is bloat. As one reader noted, “Currently, Leopard requires 9 GB of available disk space for installation and iLife requires an additional 3 GB. This means that a product such as the [SSD] MacBook Air comes with the hard drive 20% full.�? How the MacBook Air stacks up against other ultra-light notebooks Leopard Predictions for WWDC 2006 WWDC 2007: An Inside Perspective From the Halfway Point Think Small. Snow Leopard aims below the bloat to accommodate the coming wave of SSD-based systems. In the latest build, sources say Apple's own apps are losing weigh dramatically across the board. The apps in the Utilities folder all drop from 468 MB to 111.6 MB, for example. Other apps are similarly svelte, as the graph below indicates. Is this the product of just code optimization and shared resources? One factor likely relates to work on Resolution Independence, which substitutes bitmapped raster graphics (which define every pixel) with smaller vector graphics files (which draw GUI elements and controls by recipe). Vector graphics can be scaled to any size while retaining a high quality appearance, while bitmapped graphics can quickly look blocky when scaled up. Adding larger bitmapped versions can solve that problem, but at the cost of consuming more disk space. Apple earlier told developers it would be providing a library of shared, high quality vector graphics they could use instead of each packaging their own bitmapped art into every app. The dramatic size reductions in these apps must also involve more efficient Localization. For example, Mac OS X Leopard's Mail currently weighs in at over 285 MB, but the majority of its bulk comes from 18 language localizations inside the application bundle that consume 276 MB. The actual Universal Binary code is only a few megabytes and even its associated graphics and other resources only amount to 2.8 MB. Why does Apple default to dumping support for 18 or more languages in every app without providing any simple, centralized way to get rid of the unnecessary ones? Perhaps that question is answered in Snow Leopard, where Mail is reportedly just 91 MB. That's too big to simply to be an English-only, stripped down version for developers, but still far smaller than than Leopard's. Across the board, it appears Snow Leopard apps are about a third as large as their Leopard equivalents. And so while Snow Leopard paradoxically gains more useful features through code improvements and under-the-hood retooling rather than from a Microsoft-style new feature focus that aims to deliver “wow�? with flashy marketing gimmicks, the system is also getting smaller and tighter. There must also be some other subtraction, right? Will Snow Leopard scrape away the old Carbon API? That's the next myth. WWDC 2008: New in Mac OS X Snow Leopard WWDC 2008: Is Mac OS X 10.6 the Death of Carbon? I really like to hear from readers. Comment in the Forum or email me with your ideas. Like reading RoughlyDrafted? Share articles with your friends, link from your blog, and subscribe to my podcast! Submit to Reddit or Slashdot, or consider making a small donation supporting this site. Thanks! Technorati Tags: Apple, Development, Mac, Software

• on June 22, 2008
• More Details
• Related News

Six Reasons Why Apple May Never Open the iPhone

Daniel Eran DilgerThe history of the Office Wars provides interesting context for Apple’s software strategy with the iPhone today. While third party software development offers all kinds of tantalizing potential for the new mobile, there are a half dozen reasons why Apple may not ever deliver the iPhone fully open to third party development, following the model of gaming consoles.Office Wars 1 - Claris and the Origins of Apple’s iWork Office Wars 2 - Microsoft’s Outrageous Office ProfitsOffice Wars 3 - How Microsoft Got Its Office MonopolySoftware Lessons For the iPhone: 1997 - 2007.When Steve Jobs gained the opportunity to retake control of Apple in 1997, he immediately set out to build and assemble a software business for the Mac platform. Apple restarted serious development of QuickTime, much to the chagrin of Microsoft, which had targeted its sights on quickly destroying it to make way for monopolistic expansion of its Windows Media. [Microsoft's Plot to Kill QuickTime][How Microsoft Pushed QuickTime's Final Cut][Why Apple Failed][How CPR Saved Apple][Why Apple Bounced Back]In addition to repurposing NEXTSTEP as Mac OS X and buying and building a series of professional and consumer software suites, the new Apple also developed the iPod platform. The iPod used intuitive software to differentiate Apple’s hardware, launching the computer maker into a new market for sophisticated, data-driven consumer devices. Microsoft’s own efforts in consumer electronics have flopped miserably with the failures of its Handheld PC, Pocket PC, UMPC, Windows Mobile, Media2Go, Mira, SPOT, and Personal Media Center initiatives, among many others.[Apple’s NeXT Server Offensive on Microsoft][The Spectacular Failure of WinCE and Windows Mobile][Windows XP Media Center Edition vs Apple TV]Microsoft Outgunned in Software by a Hardware Maker.Microsoft was late to realize the software threat posed by the new Apple. Five major revisions and over thirty free updates to Mac OS X have ran circles around Microsoft’s capacity to deliver one desktop operating system software update and a couple service packs since 2001.[Leopard, Vista and the iPhone OS X Architecture]Apple also introduced three generations of iWork as an expanding productivity suite during the four year hibernation period Microsoft left since its last version of Office for Mac. Apple delivered support for Microsoft’s own proprietary OOXML file format on the Mac even before Microsoft itself could. At $79, iWork will eviscerate sales of the $400 Office for Mac, which has until now been a cash cow lazily ruminating for years between releases.This year, Apple also targeted and destroyed Microsoft’s fledgeling efforts to repurpose WinCE as a smartphone platform, seemingly overnight. That has given Apple a significant new platform in the iPhone, soon to be joined by the new iPod Touch. [What’s New in iWork 08][Apple's Secret iPhone Application Business Model][Curious Stuff About the New iPods]Six Reasons the iPhone Will Stay Closed.Will Apple give third party developers the keys to its new vehicle and allow them to drive off with the value it has created? It hasn’t yet, and there are a number of reasons to think that Apple won’t. Note that I am not expressing an opinion that the iPhone should be left closed, but rather simply presenting why I think it is unlikely Apple will ever open it up in the same way the Mac is open to any and all development.First, the company has lined up a suitable outlet for third party expansion via the standards based web platform available within Safari. That’s not enough to do everything developers want to do--it has serious constraints for creating games, for example--but it offers a good enough alternative to serve more than 80% of most developers’ needs.

[Mobile Disruption: Apple's iPhone and Third Party Software]
[iPhone Gremlins: Crashing, Security, and Network Collapse!]
Second, the company has developed and begun production testing of online software sales through iTunes, currently limited to 5G iPod games. This mechanism appears too sophisticated to simply be designed for a half dozen $5 games. Apple is quite obviously going to distribute other software through iTunes for the iPhone. If it were going to be open, there would be no need for such a secure software distribution system.

[Apple's New Dual Processor Game Console]
[Hacking iPod Games: How Apple's DRM Works]
Third, historical perspective suggests that once a solid platform has been established, a vendor can sell software as fast as it can deliver it without even trying very hard. Apple’s Claris, Microsoft’s Windows, and the game consoles from Sony and Nintendo all provide examples of this. The iPod’s success suggests Apple can establish a viable mobile platform without the need for software partners. It can handle software transactions as fast as it can sell iTunes songs. That’s big.

[Office Wars 1 - Claris and the Origins of Apple’s iWork] 
[Office Wars 2 - Microsoft’s Outrageous Office Profits]
[Office Wars 3 - How Microsoft Got Its Office Monopoly]
[Nintendo Wii vs Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony PlayStation 3]
Fourth, depending upon large third party developers has caused Apple--and Steve Jobs--some severe headaches. Microsoft's late 80s betrayal of the Macintosh led to Apple’s enslavement to Office, and induced CEO John Sculley to sign away broad intellectual property rights to Microsoft, which Microsoft then immediately used as a weapon against Apple.

In the mid 90s, Microsoft led Adobe, Macromedia and other large companies to abandon the Mac platform. In the late 90s, those same companies refused to support Apple’s new Rhapsody plans following the company’s acquisition of NeXT, forcing Apple to spend half a decade retooling the Mac OS, primarily so those developers could sell their existing apps to Mac users without much effort, even while they were earning fantastic software profits and delivering minimal innovation.

In other words, Apple’s technology game plan was delayed for a half decade so that Microsoft could sell its $400 copies of Office and Adobe could sell suites of its $500 and up creative applications, all while Apple did all the work in adapting its $99 operating system to run their Classic Mac OS code with minimal effort. 

Prior to returning to Apple, Jobs experienced his own betrayal and abandonment at the hands of partners--including IBM, HP, Digital, Data General, and Sun--related to NeXT and OpenStep. 

In all of these cases, the third parties were simply acting in their own best interests. With the iPhone, Apple will act in its own best interests. It will carve out a phenomenally powerful software platform for itself.

[Why OS X is on the iPhone, but not the PC: The History of NeXT]
[Office Wars 3 - How Microsoft Got Its Office Monopoly]
[Cocoa and the Death of Yellow Box and Rhapsody]
Fifth, open Application Programming Interfaces involve complex management and maintenance. This is not a problem unique to Apple; it exists for Microsoft and every other company that offers an API for developers to build upon. An API is an interfacing boundary between the software supplied by a vendor and the software supplied by third parties. 

Ideally, an API allows third parties to do everything they need very cleanly. That allows the vendor to make changes on their side of the API curtain without causing any compatibility problems for software on the other side. In reality, nearly every change and update has significant impacts for third party developers. The more complex and low level of an API being exposed, the more difficult it is to manage significant changes without introducing problems for third party partners. 

Apple has worked to develop objective APIs that are stable and resilient to internal changes, but if developers are unsatisfied with the level of performance or portability provided, they will work around the API boundary, almost guaranteeing that any significant changes made on Apple’s side will break their applications in the future. 

Microsoft has often accommodated such “bad programming�? by expanding APIs and creating new ones, and lugging around a legacy of old APIs to retain broad compatibility with existing applications. The result is that it is very difficult for Microsoft to actually innovate, or to offer OS level enhancements that upgrade existing applications. 

This is particularly a problem for Windows Vista, which is hamstrung between the problem of providing entirely new hardware driver APIs on one hand while also maintaining a boatload of crufty legacy APIs on the other. It is absolutely the worst of both worlds. 

[Five Windows Flaws]
[Leopard vs Vista 5: Development Challenges]
Sixth, as is the case with software APIs, closed hardware platforms offer a vendor open flexibility for future expansion, portability, and upgrades. 

With the Xbox, Microsoft didn’t provide a wide open set of APIs for developers, only a subset for building very similar types of games. This closed API allowed Microsoft to move the console from Intel to PowerPC hardware in the Xbox 360 without extreme problems, something the company was unable to maintain earlier when it tried to deliver Windows NT for various hardware platforms in the late 90s. 

Apple has already benefitted from the flexibility of a closed hardware platform on the iPod. Had Apple allowed developers to write applications for the iPod, it would have to string along support for those old applications across every new generation of the iPod. Having to do that would complicate Apple’s own efforts to deliver new iPods. 

Additionally, customers would be upset with Apple’s iPod if the apps they downloaded crashed, installed spyware, or caused performance problems. While a rogue Mac app isn’t likely to drain a laptop battery down dead, power management is far more critical on handheld mobile devices like the 11 mm thick iPhone. 

Given that many consumers are already flummoxed by the reality that batteries wear out after a few years, imagine their rage at finding out that Apple allowed them to install a some worthless Tamagotchi pet that destroyed their battery early. 

Similar problems plague Palm OS and Windows Mobile devices. In particular, Microsoft’s attempts to provide a “one size fits all�? solution and broadly license it to hardware developers results in API constraints that limit supported screen size resolutions, break compatibility with existing versions of applications, and severely limit the power management performance of those devices and their ability to deliver acceptable battery life. 

If there were any meaningful installed base of Windows Mobile phones, it would also be plagued with spyware and viruses, just as Windows is on the desktop. 

[Inside the iPhone: UI, Stability, and Software]
[Device Problems In Search of a Solution]
[David Sessions Tries to Milk iPhone Battery Panic in Slate]A Safe API Boundary for Third Party Development.The simple solution to all these issues is to not offer a custom, wide open API at all, and instead leave third party developers to build applications that make use of open web standards. Nothing new to learn, no barriers to adoption, no proprietary development tools to maintain, no pleading with developers to support a new platform that remains unproven in the marketplace, and no third party crisis to manage when the hardware and software are significantly upgraded.No API, no problem! Hackers can discover how to install tools and handy mini-apps, but Apple’s next software update or hardware revision won't have to figure out how to maintain compatibility with those hacks. That allows the hackers to hack without holding things back. Meanwhile, Apple can reserve the right to offer highly integrated applications of its own that take full advantage of the underlying system without revealing or sharing its intellectual property secrets with third parties that may choose to use those secrets against it--just as Microsoft did to Apple with Windows in the late 80s, or as Sony did to Nintendo with the original PlayStation just a few years afterward.[Mobile Disruption: Apple's iPhone and Third Party Software]Closed Development Involving Third Parties is Not Open.Incidentally, this is the same closed model that resulted in great success for Microsoft and Sony after they betrayed and then supplanted their former partners. Microsoft set up the illusion of an open, developer-friendly platform with Windows, but then used its home field advantage to plot out the assassinations of any and all of the potential rivals it didn’t want to compete against: WordPerfect, Lotus, Ashton-Tate, Borland, Netscape, Sun, and today’s targets such as Google and Symantec.The unsurprising result was that Windows users ended up using Microsoft’s Word, Excel, Access, Fox Pro, language tools, web browser, media software, desktop search, anti-virus, spyware management, etc ad nauseam. With Windows users completely enslaved to Microsoft’s own applications, it was easy to erect significant barriers to prevent the emergence of any new competitive applications from rivals. Clearly, Windows is only an “open platform�? in areas where it suits Microsoft. Further, Microsoft’s idea of who a “competitor�? is can change. For example, Windows desktop search wasn’t a rival feature for Microsoft to kill until it decided it wanted Google’s business.[Office Wars 3 - How Microsoft Got Its Office Monopoly]Windows Enthusiasts’ Slavery to a Vicious Master. Whether Microsoft’s closed Windows platform is a bad thing is a matter of debate; Windows Enthusiasts celebrate their enslavement. It is my opinion that Microsoft’s closed Windows platform isn’t bad simply because it is closed, but rather because Microsoft’s insatiable greed is holding back innovation that would otherwise flourish. One example is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser, which rapidly advanced until Microsoft destroyed Netscape. After that, it went into maintenance mode hibernation and didn’t budge until Firefox began to threaten Microsoft’s position years later. That’s anti-consumer; Microsoft won’t do anything for its enslaved users until a would-be savior threatens to set them free. Microsoft isn’t bad because it is closed; it is bad because it is disgustingly greedy. Windows Enthusiasts need to stop deluding themselves into thinking that they live in a free world of an open platform. They are slaves, and their master is not only vicious, but also incompetent and has no taste. [Safari on Windows? Apple and the Origins of the Web][Apple in the Web Browser Wars: Netscape vs Internet Explorer][The Web Browser Renaissance: Firefox and Safari]Closed Without Pretense.At the same time, it is possible to voluntarily join a closed platform and benefit from its advantages. Nintendo carved out a closed video gaming empire that required third party developers to pay it licensing fees in order to develop any games to sell for its system. Nintendo’s closed business model worked better than Atari’s with the 2600, which had earlier allowed third party games developers to glut the market with bad games, resulting in the video game crash of 1983. Consumers were left thinking that home video games were done to death and would never recover.Sega, Sony, and Microsoft’s Xbox group have all similarly managed closed gaming platforms to deliver high quality expectations, even subsidizing game consoles to establish user interest. The only differences for Apple’s closed iPhone may be that:Apple’s iPhone hardware sells at a sustainable profit without a desperate subsidy, removing risk and allowing for regular feature upgrades. 
Apple is likely to use software downloads as a way to integrate the iPhone into Mac hardware sales and its online services, rather than simply trying to make a killing selling $50 to $75 game software titles as the console makers do.[Mac OS X vs Linux: Third Party Software and Security]Software as a Great Differentiator.By offering free or low cost software in the model of $5 iPod games, Apple will be able to use its closed platform to deliver software designed to:attract more iPhone and iPod Touch hardware buyers.earn iPhone mobile service revenue fees.earn commissions from WiFi iTunes sales and related deals. direct new iPhone users to iTunes and Apple TV.draw attention to the Mac, which will offer iPhone integrated features Windows does not. Microsoft does some of the same things with Windows Mobile, which ties into the company’s Windows Server products--including Exchange Server--and is also deeply integrated with the desktop sync services of Windows and its Office applications. The problem for Microsoft is that it does not sell phones or make money on service revenues as Apple does. Microsoft charges expensive client access and software licensing fees, but still can’t make a sustainable profit on its Windows Mobile business. It’s also stuck with lame vendors such as HTC, which make poorly integrated hardware that is embarrassing to use. Microsoft could make its own phone, but like the Zune it would alienate its existing hardware partners; further, the Zune disaster indicated that hardware sales isn’t a core competency of the company anyway. [Phone Wars: iPhone vs TyTN, Treo, Pearl, E62, P990, Q][iPhone Sales vs Zune, Palm, RIM, Symbian, Windows Mobile]Selling Hardware with Software vs Selling Software Licenses.Using software to sell hardware fits in with Apple’s past and present use of free or low cost software to differentiate the Mac. In the distant past, that included HyperCard and QuickTime; today it includes the shareware-priced but highly regarded iLife and iWork apps. The full version of Mac OS X costs $129, while Microsoft’s Ultimate Windows Vista is an absurd $400, the same price as an iPhone!Apple’s strategy of using low cost, high quality software to differentiate its hardware plays well against the fact that consumers simply don’t want to pay for software, while they think nothing of paying big money for desirable hardware. Nobody would pay much for an iPod “OS�? or a software music player, but millions of people have paid hundreds of dollars for an iPod.That principle has worked in Microsoft’s favor in the past, as it hides the cost of Windows by invisibly bundling it into PC sales. However, its recent fantasy that consumers will widely upgrade their PCs to more expensive versions of Vista indicates Microsoft is highly delusional. Pro-Microsoft wags can chart out their predictions of “impressive Vista adoption�? based entirely upon OEM bundled copies, but consumers don’t want it, and no significant number of people are going to pay big money to upgrade to the $400 Vista Ultimatum. [Windows 95 and Vista: Why 2007 Won't Be Like 1995]The Commodity Future of PC Software.What will happen instead is an increasing commoditization of the consumer PC and its software, driven towards standards by an industry that demands interoperability. Microsoft couldn’t hold back the web with its proprietary MSN a decade ago, and companies that once pushed Windows are now behind Linux, including Novell and IBM. PC OEMs are also rethinking their unilateral relationship with Microsoft as they struggle to survive in the shadow of Microsoft’s vast profits. Rather than paying $400 for a PC with a $50 OEM copy of Windows running IE and Outlook, nagging you to verify your software as Genuine and to upgrade to the $400 version of Vista and to hand your credit card number to the dancing paperclip recommending a subscription to Windows Live OneCare terrorism protection, the $250 PC of the near future will come with a standards based web browser and email client. It will be called an iPhone, and it won’t run Microsoft Office.What do you think? I really like to hear from readers. Comment in the Forum or email me with your ideas. Like reading RoughlyDrafted? Share articles with your friends, link from your blog, and subscribe to my podcast! Submit to Reddit or Slashdot, or consider making a small donation supporting this site. Thanks!

• on September 11, 2007
• More Details
• Related News

Leopard and the History and Future of Mac OS X on PowerPC

Daniel Eran DilgerHow long will Apple continue to support existing models of Macs in the latest version of Mac OS X? Previous versions of Apple’s OS have drawn the line for officially supported Macs based on practical considerations, rather than just being arbitrary or artificial. Here's what the past suggests for Mac OS X Leopard and the version that comes after it.The Post-Copland Crisis.Apple carried along official support for the 1986 Mac Plus through Mac System 7.5.5 in 1996. That established an expectation for Mac users that any new Mac System Software would be able to run across a decade long generation of old hardware. Further, Apple had only begun officially selling System 7 as a retail product a few years earlier; many Mac users continued to think of the Mac operating system as something that was available for free, as it had been in the past. That unreasonable support expectation combined with the sense of entitlement held by Mac users had helped to complicate Apple’s mid-90s failure to deliver Copland as a successor to System 7 between 1993 and 1995, and would continue to dog the company in its plans to provide a significant system software update after Copland was mothballed. Faced with the task of maintaining full backward compatibility for both existing applications and a wide range of hardware--but without any assurance that a significant number of Mac users would actually pay for the upgrade--it’s no wonder why Apple was stuck at System 7 for over a decade (Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9 were only retoolings of the System 7 operating system released in 1991), and why plans to completely overhaul System 7 with Copland and Gershwin failed.If Apple had the luxury of operating outside of a real market economy and could simply rely on guaranteed future sales at high retail prices, it could have plowed along for twice as long and eventually released something, as Microsoft did a decade later with Windows Vista. As Windows Enthusiasts like to point out, Vista will eventually get deployed no matter how bad it is. [The Secrets of Pink, Taligent and Copland][Has Leopard Fallen into a Copland-Vista Conundrum?][SCO, Linux, and Microsoft in the History of OS: 1990s]Spindler’s Complications.By 1990, Apple CEO John Sculley had recognized that Apple needed to set a reasonable minimum hardware threshold for its operating system releases and to figure out a way to get Mac users to fund the expensive operating system development the company was doing. At that time, both Microsoft and IBM were charging PC users around $100 for retail copies of Windows or OS/2, neither of which were even really usable.Figuring out how to actually accomplish those goals never got done at Apple. Instead, Sculley’s successor Michael Spindler attempted to imitate Sony by releasing ranges of Mac hardware under a variety of vaguely Latin sounding names--Quadra, Centris, and Performa--and a series of confusing, nondescript model numbers. Starting in early 1994, Apple also underwent a complex transition from its original 680x0 Macs to PowerPC hardware. Since much of the original Mac software was written in assembly language, the transition relied on emulation of the existing Mac System Software, which further complicated efforts to deliver significant new features without breaking existing software or prematurely cutting off support for existing machines. Non-PowerPC Macs continued to be sold into 1996.Spindler’s Apple also began plans to license the Mac software to other hardware makers in late 1994, including APS, Bandai, DayStar, Motorola, Pioneer, Power Computing, Radius, and UMAX. That effort skimmed off the cream of Apple’s profitability and handed it to the cloners, leaving Apple to service the low end of the market at Sears with its Performas while also funding the development of nearly profitless Mac System Software to support an increasingly wide range of hardware. [Why Apple Failed]Simplifying the Mac Hardware Lineup Around the G3.When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company's product line was all over the place, although efforts were already underway to simplify things. Apple had only just discontinued the last of its 680x0-based Macs a year earlier. Under Spindler replacement Gil Ameilo, Apple had also scraped together a "Unity" release of System 7, newly rebranded as Mac OS 7.6. That release officially extended support back to all "32-bit clean" Macs, which included the eight year old Mac IIci from 1989.The installed base of Mac hardware not only spanned across two hardware platforms--680x0 and Power PC--but nearly each individual Mac model from Apple had also used its own highly customized and often uniquely quirky hardware design. The cloners were also introducing subtle differences in their own machines, too.Despite using the very modern PowerPC processors and Open Firmware, Macs in 1997 still incorporated old Mac ROMs to maintain software compatibility with the existing Mac OS. After taking control of Apple in the middle of that year, Jobs announced the release of a highly simplified product line using the new G3 processor. The G3 was such a significant leap over earlier PowerPC processors that even the entry level G3s were faster than the top of the line models Apple had been selling. So while Apple had a confusing array of eight different major PowerMac models at the beginning of 1997, by the end of the year it only had two: a desktop G3 and a tower G3. It also shipped a G3 PowerBook.[How CPR Saved Apple]Mac OS X 10.0 - 10.2: G3 Only.The introduction of the G3 processor created a clean line between it and the wide array of odd PowerPC hardware designed prior to 1997. The G3 also signaled the end of the line for the various models built by Mac cloners, who all refused to license new versions of the Mac OS at terms Jobs deemed reasonable. The G3 was also the first PowerPC processor optimized to run Mac software. That made it an easy minimum target for Mac OS X, which remained in development through 2001. In the meantime, Jobs bought out Power Computing--the largest Mac cloner--for $100 million, and terminated other clone agreements by releasing Mac OS 7.7 as “Mac OS 8�? in mid 1997. That revision also became the first edition of the Mac OS to really be successfully sold at retail; over 1.2 million copies were sold within the first two weeks. The next fall in 1998, Apple released Mac OS 8.5, which was the first version to be PowerPC-only, limiting support to Macs sold over the last five years. In 1999, Apple shipped Mac OS 9. The new Apple had proved it could plan, ship, and sell regular releases of an operation system. The next task would be shipping Mac OS X as a major new leap past the classic System 7.Between 2001 and 2002, the 10.0 to 10.2 versions of Mac OS X limited support to the G3 desktop Macs, including those first introduced in late 1997. It did not support the original PowerBook G3 unveiled alongside the G3 desktops however. The first supported PowerBook was the "WallStreet" revision introduced in May of 1998. That maintained the roughly five year support window for machines to be updated with new versions of Mac operating system software. [Apple Sells 1.2 Million Copies of Mac OS 8 - Apple][Leopard, Vista and the iPhone OS X Architecture]Mac OS X 10.3: New World Macs Only.After moving its hardware line to the G3, Apple next delivered a revised "New World" platform which modernized the Mac's hardware and removed its old hardware ROMs, replacing them with “ROM in RAM�? software loaded from disk. The first New World model was the first iMac in 1998. The beige G3 Macs from 1997 were replaced with a single new "blue and white" G3 in early 1999, which used the same translucent plastic as the iMac. Apple shipped its first "New World" laptop in the Lombard PowerBook G3, distinguished by its translucent bronze keyboard. In July 1999, Apple released the iBook.The release of Mac OS X Panther 10.3 in 2003 extended support back to Macs with G3 processors and built-in support for USB. This wasn't due to an actual requirement for USB, but rather a shorthand way to describe a cutoff for the support of the significantly different architecture of "Old World" Macs designed prior to the iMac, as all New World Macs also provided support for USB. Panther retained a roughly five year support window for existing Mac models.Mac OS X 10.4: Modern New World Macs Only.In 2004, Mac OS X Tiger 10.4 retained support for most New World Macs using G3 processors, but required support for built-in FireWire. Again, this wasn't related to a need for FireWire ports, but rather a way to exclude support for the earliest of the now five year old New World Macs, which Apple decided would not run Tiger acceptably, including: the original 1998 iMac.the original 1999 iBook.the 1999 "Lombard" PowerBook G3.These five year old machines can still run Tiger using XPostFacto, a third party enabler designed to force Mac OS X to run on earlier systems. However, significant differences in their hardware--coupled with their limited performance--prevented Apple from officially supporting them.In the case of the Lombard PowerBook, its DVD drive was never supported for movie playback under Mac OS X because the system did not have the power to decode DVD video in software; under Mac OS 9, it relied on a hardware decoder. Rather than holding up Mac OS X to develop custom support for the obsolete hardware decoder in the now half-decade old Lombard PowerBooks, Apple told its users to continue using the playback software it came with. [XPostFacto: OS X for Legacy Macs - Other World Computing]Mac OS X 10.5: 867 MHz Processor Required.For Leopard, Apple is specifying an 867 MHz G4. That excludes support for the now functionally obsolete G3s, and draws a line down the middle of the 2001 "Quicksilver" PowerMac G4s, excluding support for the 2001 G4 Cube and the first three generations of the Titanium PowerBook G4 up to late 2002. This again maintains official support for five to six years of Mac models.This break roughly corresponds to the arrival of the G4+, a revised version of the G4 with support for L3 cache and improvements to AltiVec. It is also near the line for supporting Quartz Extreme and the higher end Core Image, both of which are technologies used to delegate graphics work to the video card. However, Core Image is not a requirement for using Leopard; such a requirement would exclude support for all G4 desktops and laptops prior to 2003. Leopard Looms Large.That indicates Apple is being fairly liberal in officially supporting older models in Leopard. The obvious reason for this is that Apple wants to sell Leopard to as many Mac users as possible, even more than it wants to use Leopard to sell new Macs. Between 2001 and 2002, Apple sold just over 6 million Macs. From 2003 to the present, Apple has sold about 23 million Macs. Apple wants to target the broadest possible market for Leopard, so excluding support for older machines is done with some hesitation. By extending support back into 2001, Apple is selling to an audience of nearly 30 million versus 23 million.At the same time however, the likelihood of selling retail copies of Leopard to users of older Macs begins to drop as six year old machines go out of service or are no longer viewed by their owners as needing brand new software. This spring, analysts estimated an installed base of around 22 million active Mac users, an increase of 6 million over their figures from 2005.[Mac install base estimated at 22 million pre-Leopard - AppleInsider][Market Share vs Installed Base: iPod vs Zune, Mac vs PC]Is Leopard the Last Hurrah for Power PC Macs?The reports of PowerPC's obsolescence have been greatly exaggerated. Last year, the rumor was that Leopard would be released only for Intel Macs. This year, with Leopard looming on the horizon, the new rumor is that Mac OS X 10.6--possibly named Lynx or Cougar--will be Intel-only. However this is only uninformed speculation. When this rumor came up earlier about Leopard, I posted the article, “Unraveling The PowerPC Obsolescence Myth.�? It pointed out that Apple would not release an Intel-only Leopard for an audience of the roughly 3 million new Intel Macs sold in 2006 when it could reach an installed base of around 20 million Macs with a Universal Leopard.It noted, “If Apple continues to sell new Macs at current rates, it will be 2008 before Intel Macs begin to outnumber PowerPCs, and that assumes that every year, 4 million old PowerPC Macs will be destroyed. There will be a significant proportion of PowerPC Macs still buying software well into 2010, and the market will accommodate them.�?[Unraveling The PowerPC Obsolescence Myth]Why the Mac OS X Backward Compatibility Window May Increase.Apple’s Mac OS support troubles back in 1996 related to the support of multiple platforms, a wide variety of different models, and an inability to effectively market the Mac OS. Those issues are no longer factors today. Despite Apple’s maintenance of dual platforms since the transition to Intel began in 2006, technology has erased the barrier as a real problem.The majority of the installed base of around 22 million Macs is PowerPC; less than 10 million are Intel Macs. Apple has started to sell dramatically more new Macs at a faster rate over the last couple years--displacing the PowerPC majority more rapidly--but there will still be a lot of PowerPC Macs well into 2010. Worrying about 10.6 or even 10.7 being Intel-only shouldn't be among anyone's greatest concerns. By 2009, the likely ballpark release date of Leopard's successor, the trailing end of officially supported Macs would include over 8 million PowerPC Macs sold since 2004, even more machines--and more recent models--than Apple is targeting now by reaching back into 2001 to support QuickSilver G4s in Leopard. Further, supporting machines from 2003--including the first G5s--will be no difficult stretch, because the Mac architecture didn't change dramatically between 2003 and 2005 in the way that it rapidly did between 1997 and 2000. In addition, Mac OS X hardware dependancies have been designed to degrade gracefully. For example, the acceleration framework and Core Graphics libraries make use of specialized hardware if available, or simply run on the general purpose CPU if it isn’t.It's also interesting to note that prior to 2000, Macs weren't sold with Mac OS X because it didn't yet exist. That means earlier versions of Mac OS X supported years of Macs that were never really designed to run it, while Leopard still supports the vast majority of the machines anyone ever bought with the expectation to actually use Mac OS X. New generations of Mac OS X will have fewer reasons to exclude support for existing hardware, leaving the support line tied to practical performance.[Why Apple hasn't used Intel processors before]Intel-Only Not Necessary.Around 11 million Macs were sold between 2003 and 2005, and all of them were PowerPC. It would be foolish for Apple to simply exclude that audience in the next revision of Mac OS X without good reason. As it works out, there really isn't any good reason for Apple to ditch PowerPC. Apple's Universal Binaries architecture makes it relatively easy to maintain support across multiple platforms. It's not like the move from Motorola 680x0 classic Macs to PowerPC, where old 680x0 software was emulated at significant cost on PowerPC, and new PowerPC code couldn't run at all on 680x0 Macs. That situation left developers to wonder which they should invest their support in and for how long. Universal Binaries means there isn't any tough choice to make.Universal Binaries not only support PowerPC and Intel, but also make supporting 32 and 64 bit architectures easy. Leopard supports all four Mac platforms in the same software release:32 bit PowerPC G464 bit PowerPC G532 bit Intel64 bit Intel Microsoft faces big problems in migrating its users to 64 bits, because it has no seamless architecture to waltz its 32 bit Intel users onto 64 bit hardware. Instead, Windows users have to obtain a separate 64 bit edition of their operating system, new 64 bit drivers, and new 64 bit applications. Supporting both is problematic, and deploying software across both is also trouble. Even Microsoft hasn’t delivered its portfolio of applications for its 64 bit versions of Windows. Microsoft faces enough troubles selling Vista, let alone its deferred plan to deal with 64 bits and EFI at some point in the future. Apple already has both issues covered, allowing it to concentrate on more interesting tasks. [How Apple’s Firmware Leapfrogs BIOS PCs]Applications that are Intel-Only.For Apple and third party developers using Apple's Xcode tools, supporting both Intel and PowerPC architectures is really no more difficult than supporting just Intel Macs. In fact, Apple has also ported Mac OS X to the ARM architecture for use in the iPhone and the iPod Touch, demonstrating that it can flex its multi-platform muscle in several directions, not just as one-time, disposable transition plan. Universal Binaries isn’t a crutch, its a powerful deployment technology.There are only three types of developers that will have any reason to deliver Intel-only Mac apps:Companies like Adobe, which base their applications on their own custom, internal cross platform architecture. Since Adobe maintains its own system that is based on Intel-centric development, its new apps such as Soundbooth aren't ever going to appear for PowerPC. If it used Xcode’s Universal Binaries, this would not be a problem. Xcode doesn't target Windows though (at least not in a way Adobe can use!), so Adobe rolled its own system.
Software designed for Windows and ported to Intel Macs using a WINE-like engine. This is how EA is porting its new games to the Mac. They are actually Windows games running on a thin portability layer that emulates the Windows APIs. Since games don't integrate into the desktop UI, a full Mac port isn't very valuable for users or worth doing for the developer, particularly since the Mac gaming market is still pretty small. Porting over Windows games is far faster and keeps new releases in sync so that Mac gamers will have access to new titles sooner, and won't miss features such as network play. 
Environment emulators and other software tied directly to the x86 architecture, including Parallels. These can't be ported to PowerPC for the same reason that it makes no sense to port Virtual PC to Intel. Apart from running Windows--which is tightly bound to the 32-bit x86 architecture--there is really very little software that needs to run on a specific processor.For most other software, including the vast majority of what makes up Mac OS X, it really isn't difficult to deliver both PowerPC and Intel versions, so as long as there are PowerPC Macs around, there'll be PowerPC software. That makes it extremely unlikely that Apple would drop support for PowerPC in the next generation of Mac OS X after Leopard.Maintaining and Growing the Mac Installed Base.What about the argument that Apple would prefer to “force�? users to buy a new Mac to get the latest system rather than simply upgrade their existing hardware? Consider that Apple’s Mac profit margins are around 20% or less, while its Mac OS X margins are closer to Microsoft’s 80% Windows margins. [Office Wars 2 - Microsoft’s Outrageous Office Profits]Mac users paying to upgrade to Mac OS X are likely to buy a new Mac eventually as a replacement, so Apple’s delaying that hardware sale for a profitable software upgrade makes more sense than forcing existing Mac users to go out and buy new hardware, which might involve comparing a new Mac against a PC running Windows.The more Macs that can run the most recent version of Mac OS X, the more attractive the target is for third party developers. Apple wants to maintain the majority of Mac users on the latest version of its software. In contrast, Windows Vista is competing against Windows XP, and the fact that Microsoft only earns 20% of its revenues from (the much more expensive) retail box sales indicates that most PC users upgrade when buying a new PC. More Mac users pay to upgrade their software.That fact contributes toward making the Mac platform far more valuable than Windows; despite having only 3% market share of the entire world’s production of PCs, Apple makes more money on hardware sales than Dell with its 15% share of the market, and--after including Microsoft’s tremendous losses from its non-monopoly businesses--made half as much money in software as Microsoft did with its 98% share. Windows Enthusiast prefer not to think about this.Even stripping Apple of its iPod revenues, which PC pundits love to do, the company still earned $4.4 billion on its Macintosh business last year, over a third as much Microsoft brought in from its entire Windows, Office, and server operations combined. Apple’s 2% of the PC market doesn’t seem so small anymore. [Can Apple Take Microsoft in the Battle for the Desktop?][Market Share vs Installed Base: iPod vs Zune, Mac vs PC]What do you think? I really like to hear from readers. Comment in the Forum or email me with your ideas. Like reading RoughlyDrafted? Share articles with your friends, link from your blog, and subscribe to my podcast! Submit to Reddit or Slashdot, or consider making a small donation supporting this site. Thanks!

• on September 30, 2007
• More Details
• Related News

The Next Killer App

Any successful information technology requires a killer app — an application so compelling that it can, all by itself, justify the purchase of a given device. When it comes to personal computers, there have been many killer apps, starting with the spreadsheet, but there haven’t been any new ones in a long time, which is a problem. This column is about a potential new killer app for the PC platform, perhaps its last one. What do you know about telepresence? I have for the last several months been shooting for Maryland Public Television a new PBS documentary about how information technology has transformed our lives and businesses. It is an esoteric and very close look at a few technologies. Some, like the rise of office automation and the personal computer, are obvious: secretaries and telephone operators have disappeared while all the rest of us learned to type. Others, like RFID (radio-frequency identification) chips, are harder to see but just as transforming by creating a real-time distribution system in which we can know where everything is moving all the time, taking just-in-time inventory from a goal to a reality. One of the most striking of these technologies, which has yet to achieve wide use, is telepresence — high-definition video conferencing as a substitute for business travel. Telepresence is not far from being here on a wide scale and the effects — even beyond business — should be profound. I see telepresence shortly invading our homes. The way vendors tend to implement telepresence today is fairly uniform if inconsistently interoperable. A special conference room is built that is actually half a conference room, half of a table set against a wall that is all video screens. Typically three big projection or LCD displays are side by side in landscape mode with a third landscape screen mounted higher on the wall above the middle lower screen. The three lower screens are used to show the remote participants in the meeting. Sometimes all three screens are devoted to participants at a single location, but up to four locations can be linked if needed. The top screen is used for meeting materials like PowerPoint presentations or videos intended to be seen by all the participants. A couple weeks ago I used a system of this type (in this case it was from Hewlett-Packard but there are similar systems from Cisco and other vendors) to interview the people who designed it. I was in Palo Alto and they were in Corvallis, Oregon. In addition to the telepresence system (called Halo, whatever that means) I had a camera crew at both ends to record the action in each room. These rooms are not cheap to build or run. The HP systems cost either $249,000 or $349,000 to build, depending on the model, and $18,000 per month to operate. This gets you a DS3 connection (45 megabits per second) to a low-latency global network and 24/7 support. Each of the lower screens uses six megabits per second, with the remaining 27 megabits per second for that fourth upper screen. If this seems like bandwidth overkill for PowerPoint, understand that this HP system was co-developed with the Dreamworks movie studio specifically to allow dispersed groups of executives to review 1080p HD footage from upcoming films and for dispersed editors to actually work together to edit films without having to be in the same city. With feature film production budgets now averaging $50 million, $18,000 per month for editing support is nothing. With just over 100 such rooms now in operation for HP, part of the high price is also simply investment recovery. If HP were selling 10,000 of these rooms per month the price would be substantially lower. Video conferencing has been around for a couple decades, but telepresence is different from that. You can see the entire other side of the conference table, for example, and the people who are sitting across from you appear to be life sized. They can see you and you can see them. When another person speaks to you they can look you in the eye. Body language and emotions are easy to detect and the sound of each participant seems to come from his or her direction. You can watch the people who aren’t talking to see if they are even paying attention. It really is tele-PRESENCE and the fact that you are looking in a video screen is forgotten after a minute or two. Here are some lessons I learned from the experience. For one thing, size really does matter. The big screens changed for me the entire experience, though I think a home telepresence system could do fine with a single big HD screen instead of three. Eye contact is important, too, and that is generally accomplished through two techniques — mounting the camera as far as possible from the subject then using some subtle video morphing software to make it seem as though the camera was actually mounted behind the screen. For a home system I believe most of this effect could be achieved by simply increasing the distance from subject to camera, reducing the angle at which the camera is seen above the screen. This is the major failing in video chat systems where the camera is mounted on the display. Using the system I quickly came to understand that the real power wasn’t in bringing together groups of big shots for huge powwows at which sweeping global decisions would be made. The quintessential telepresence meeting lasts 10 minutes and involves a group of people at any level who simply need to come to a concensus. Nobody flies 10,000 miles for a 10 minute meeting yet everybody walks down the hall for one. Being able to hold such a meeting is what can make a widely distributed group of workers function like people in the same building, which has been one of the nagging problems of global development and outsourcing. The fact that it already has eight rooms up and running in India may give HP some advantage in that respect. We’re early in this process, but I think telepresece is going to be a big deal. It comes down to a big, high-resolution screen, good sound, mounting the camera far enough away to simulate eye contact, and of course throwing lots of bandwidth at the problem. Some of these components, like relatively cheap high-def big screens, are here today. The processing power required is here, too. The only significant obstacle to us having our own telepresence systems is bandwidth, and we can predict with some accuracy when we’ll have that. This bandwidth calculation involves applying some variation of Moore’s Law in two dimensions. Available bandwidth at a reasonable price is always increasing over time. The second dimension involves changes in compression technology and increases in processor power that over time reduce the amount of bandwidth that will be required to carry a high-res video signal. With the passage of time, then, available bandwidth increases while, at the same time, bandwidth requirements decrease. This has the effect of amplifying Moore’s Law, accelerating that point at which telepresence at a reasonable cost is possible. So when will it happen? When will we have telepresence capability in our homes? Some of us are there already and don’t even know it, the only remaining problem being one of integration. The home embodiment of that HP Halo system would be a single big screen, which using even the current HP technology would require six megabits-per-second. Millions of Internet users in Asia and Europe already have that kind of upstream bandwidth and hundreds of thousands of U.S. residential customers (mainly Verizon FiOS users) do too. But HP’s Halo system is old-tech, using MPEG-2 compression that is more than a decade old. A home system built around a more powerful codec like H.264 and using more powerful hardware could reduce the required bandwidth for home telepresence by at least half, making the likely barrier three megabits-per-second. That kind of bandwidth is nothing to users in Korea or Japan and it is nothing, too, for fiber-to-the-home users in the U.S. (mainly Verizon) and wouldn’t be that much of a stretch, either, for fiber-to-the-curb vendors like AT&T. Giving two megabits upstream to every cable modem user wouldn’t be trivial, but it is possible and could be — I think WILL BE — spurred by competitive pressures from DSL. So the bandwidth is coming and millions of people will have it, even in America, by 2008. What’s missing is both consumer demand and painless satisfaction of that demand through easy-to-use high-volume products, which come down to big screens, cameras, and PC systems running the right software. The part of this that is both hardest and easiest is stimulating demand. People aren’t demanding telepresence because they have never experienced telepresence. If you show them they will come. This is 100 percent analogous to the introduction of color TV in the 1950s. People didn’t know they wanted color TV until they saw color TV. But once they saw it, the lure of color TV was instant and obvious. What was difficult with color TV was that it required a large and very expensive video production and distribution infrastructure that cost tens of billions of dollars and required major financial commitments from vendors like RCA, which had to build transmitters, receivers, cameras, an entire TV network (NBC) and even subsidize the production of color programs like Bonanza to seed the system. Home telepresence requires almost none of that and, in fact, actually leverages the huge investment already made in HDTV, since that’s what those big telepresence screens will no doubt be used for when nobody wants to visit with Grandma or play video strip poker. All that’s required to sell consumers on home or small business telepresence, then, is allowing them to experience it. And, of course, making it affordable. I think Apple will be the first PC-only vendor to embrace the telepresence business. Steve Jobs would like another killer app. His last attempt at creating one — video editing — was only somewhat successful. The iPod of course qualifies for killer app status, but I don’t think it has actually sold many computers, though lots of iPods. Apple had big screen TVs ready to introduce a year and a half ago but cancelled them at the last moment as too mundane. You could buy an HDTV from HP or Dell and Apple apparently didn’t have that much more to offer. But this time it will be different. Imagine one of the new aluminum and glass iMacs only instead of a 24-inch screen make it 42 inches. The familiar iSight camera will be there in the bezel. but this time the camera will have HD resolution. This hang-it-on-the-wall iMac would establish yet another category of computers, which is what Apple loves to do. They’ll sell a million units to the faithful and all it will take is putting an active telepresence system in every Apple store connected to every other Apple store for prospective users to play with. This gets Apple into the big screen TV business with a system that has higher margins simply because it isn’t just a TV but is also a Mac. Look for all this after Christmas along with refreshed Macs featuring the H.264 encoder chip I pre-announced a number of months ago. Look for Apple to also facilitate telepresence by turning it into a service as it has more and more wanted to do. Then imagine that system connected to a 3G iPhone. For Apple the point is to create a platform to allow more natural implementation of “lean back” content. Apple TV was the first push in this direction, but this telepresence system will be both easier to use and more expensive, two attributes near to Steve Jobs’s heart.

• I, Cringely . The Pulpit |... on August 31, 2007
• More Details
• Related News

Under The Radar News - Friday

Move over Intel, AMD... Via Technologies upcoming Isaiah CPU could put an end to the Intel (INTC)/AMD (AMD) duopoly. Isaiah consumes 3.5 watts to Atom's 0.6-2.5, but its Superscalar design should allow it higher performance. Wal-Mart (WMT) will sell a $398 Everex gBook using the chip. From Blockbuster's earnings call. Blockbuster (BBI) CEO Jimmy Keyes on proposed acquisition of Circuit City (CC): "We will not proceed with the transaction unless it makes sense both strategically and financially and also creates significant value for our shareholders... We remain confident that our core business is healthy and we remain confident in our ability to transform Blockbuster with or without this transaction. We see it as a potential accelerator for our stated strategy, but the transaction is not critical to our continued transformation." Nicht wahr. Apple (AAPL) is not making a larger-screened iPhone with an Intel (INTC) Atom processor, as had been rumored. Widespread headlines trumpeting the new device were based on a mistranslated sloppy dispatch in the German-language version of ZDnet. Mobile maitre-d'. A new patent filing for an "iPhone (AAPL) server" suggests Apple may one day use the device to serve local content like interactive restaurant menus or museum information. Upcoming software may also have the ability to monitor your health and physical activity. Bubble prevention. New research suggests economic bubbles can be restrained by Fed action, contrary to the belief of former governor Alan Greenspan. Fill 'er up -- with diesel. Prices for diesel fuel are rising even faster than those of gasoline, leading refiners like Tesoro (TSO) and Valero (VLO) to max out diesel production while cutting back on gas. The trend may not have a direct effect on gas prices, which seem to be taking their cue from crude, but the demand for crude-oil supplies to produce diesel fuel is further pressuring the crude complex. CW network outlook bleak. Ratings at CW Network (CBS) (TWX) are down about 22% as its youthful audience prefers to spend its time surfing the net. Industry insiders wonder whether the upcoming fall season is the network's last chance. With only three new shows on slate, a massive rebound seems unlikely. Less ads, more money? Fox Entertainment (NWS) unveiled a plan to run fewer ads in two of its new dramas (Fringe and Dollhouse) in the hope of hooking viewers. Fox thinks it can get advertisers to pay more per commercial. Yahoo, WPP forge multi-year deal. Yahoo (YHOO) and WPP Group (WPPGY) unveiled an online, advertising partnership to develop technology to connect to Yahoo's Right Media online ad exchange -- an open-ended electronic system for advertisers and websites to buy and sell online advertising space. $10B infrastructure fund. A new KKR fund will focus on infrastructure investments. KKR hopes to raise $10B for the initiative. (Editor: See Matthew D. McCall's "Comparing the Two Infrastructure ETFs" -- IGF and GII.) Getting your feet wet with water stocks. Water ETFs and stocks are gaining popularity among money managers. ETFs such as PowerShares Water Resources ETF (PHO), Claymore S&P Global Water (CGW) and PowerShares Global Water Portfolio (PIO) are one way to play a global water shortage. Companies like GE (GE), Itron (ITRI) and Valmont Industries (VMI) are another. Keep in mind it takes 62,000 gallons of water to make a ton of steel; 39,000 gallons to manufacture a car; and 3,000 gallons to produce a single semiconductor. Fannie relaxes downpayment rules. Fannie Mae (FNM) will no longer required larger down payments on properties in areas where home prices are declining. It will accept up to 97% loan-to-value ratios on conforming mortgages, and 95% on non-conforming loans. Too big to fall? "Both these companies (Fannie (FNM) and Freddie (FRE)) are clearly going to be insolvent by the end of the year, but everyone knows that Congress will do anything to keep them afloat, because if Fannie and Freddie go under, the entire global financial system will melt down," Christopher Whalen, founder of Institutional Risk Analytics, says. "These companies’ earnings don’t matter. Their accounting hardly matters. People buy the stock because they believe the federal government will bail them both out if things get really bad." Maybe, but that doesn't mean investors will get a good deal. Extreme climbs on takeover speculation. Shares of enterprise technology vendor Extreme Networks (EXTR) are moving up after JMP Securities analyst Samuel Wilson said the company is in serious negotiations with at least one potential suitor. Industry sources think Enterasys (ETS), which is looking to compete with Cisco (CSCO), is a likely acquirer. Profit or bust. Sources in IDT (IDT) say if IDT Global Services doesn't break even by July, it will be closed down. IDT Global Services CEO Eli Ninio is said to have acquired the bulk of the unit's ownership from the parent company.

• AAPL - News and Analysis... on May 16, 2008
• More Details
• Related News

RF Modules Planned for Future Apple Gadgets?

A new proposal from Apple, highlighted today by AppleInsider, hints at their desire to provide ubiquitous connectivity to the internet through a series of tiny RF modules. At present, the only device in Apple's lineup capable of providing wireless connectivity anywhere is the iPhone, supporting Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPRS, 3G and other wireless data technologies. An RF transmitter could — in theory — perform a very similar function, passing the connection on to all your nearby short range devices (such as laptops, iPods etc). The vision is that these devices would be present in your home, car, clothing and workplace to ensure that you're never without a connection to the internet. Apple suggest that “When the user moves from one location to another, the host device may determine which RF module to access when requiring use of a long-range communications protocol.” One potential use would be to provide a robust VoIP network, passing your call data from one transmitter to another as you move around with no loss of connection. They won't necessarily be simply inanimate network devices either — other proposed features include a microphone, display (an iPhone controlling watch anyone?), or the ability to control nearby devices. The possibilities here do seem endless. It would provide a real new wave of innovation in terms of connectivity and re-write the book on how devices can interact with each other. That said, it's also a very complex and ambitious technology to pursue — leading the field in a system such as this doesn't fit with what Apple have done in the past. Their oft used approach favors watching other companies fumble around with a new technology before launching their own competition which alleviates all the problems posed by competing devices. It's a ground breaking concept, and a space worth watching, but I don't foresee any physical products in the near future.

• TheAppleBlog on October 23, 2008
• More Details
• Related News

★ BlackBerry vs. iPhone

1: Wherein Neither ‘RIM’ Nor ‘BlackBerry’ Are Even Mentioned, but Rather the Stage Is Set for Showing Why They Might Be Seriously Screwed Along the lines of can’t-really-be-answered-but-gosh-they’re-fun-to-ponder questions like, say, “Who’d win in a fight, Batman or Spider-Man?” or “Star Destroyer vs. U.S.S. Enterprise?”,1 here’s one regarding the iPhone: What historical Mac is a current iPhone most analogous to, spec-wise? I.e, complete this sentence: “An iPhone is like having a tiny ____ in your pocket?” Now of course the comparison can’t be precise. Different software, different use cases, different purposes. But there’s no denying that an iPhone is a computer. And unless you’re really young, it’s faster — a lot faster — than the computers you owned not so long ago. So, seriously, stop here for a moment and think about it. My first answer, pulled simply from recollection of how fast machines felt to use, was the original iMac. But that machine — announced 10 years ago this week — had a 233 MHz G3 and, by default, a paltry 32 MB of RAM. Apple has never officially released the CPU specs of the iPhone, but Craig Hockenberry poked around with undocumented system APIs which indicated the iPhone’s CPU runs at 400 MHz with a bus speed of 100 MHz, and that there’s 128 MB of RAM. As we all recall from the PowerPC era, MHz is not a precise metric for comparing the performance of CPUs across different architectures; I wouldn’t be surprised in the least to find out that a 400 MHz PowerPC G3 is a faster chip than the 400 MHz ARMwhatever that’s in the iPhone, if only because of the power constraints. But, still, it’s something. So, my answer to the question: the original “Pismo” G3 PowerBook. The numbers match up pretty closely: 400 MHz CPU, 100 MHz bus speed, 64 MB of RAM. (The higher-end Pismo had a 500 MHz CPU and 128 MB of RAM.) Even storage sizes are similar: hard drive options for the Pismo were 6, 12, or 18 GB. Another possible answer: the original blue-and-white Power Mac G3 — again, 400 MHz CPU, 100 MHz bus speed, 64-128 MB of RAM, and 6-12 GB hard drives. Think about that — in just nine years, the specs that then described Apple’s top-of-the-line desktop computer now describe their phone. One thing that makes this comparison hard is that there’s not much software in common. You can’t use most of the real-world tasks commonly used for ballpark benchmarking, like, say, Photoshop image processing or ripping MP3s from AIFFs, because the iPhone doesn’t do them. But there is one processor intensive task we can compare: web page rendering. In the early days of the web, it took a while for even moderately large web pages to render in a browser, even when you were loading them from HTML files right on your hard drive. If you were to plop yourself down in front of one of these vintage 1999-2000 Macs for an afternoon of web browsing, even with a decent Ethernet connection to the Internet you’d find the experience pretty damn slow by current standards. For all the incessant chatter about the demand for and purported certainty of 3G wireless networking in the next generation of iPhone hardware, the truth is that current iPhones are held back, web-surfing-wise, by more than just the speed of EDGE (which admittedly, is indeed pretty slow). Recall this video pitting a 3G Nokia E61i against an iPhone on EDGE — total rendering time was more or less the same, and in a few cases, the iPhone came out ahead. You can see that browsing speed — which is what matters — depends on more than just networking speed simply by comparing how long it takes to render a web page on the iPhone using Wi-Fi: a lot longer than it takes to load the same page in using Safari on a Mac. For example, it takes about two or three seconds for Safari to load the Daring Fireball home page on my new MacBook Pro. Using the same Wi-Fi network, it takes my iPhone about 15 seconds. (Using EDGE, it takes about 60 seconds to completely load, although you can start reading much sooner than that.) Point being that even if 3G wireless networking were as fast as Wi-Fi — which it’s not — browsing on an iPhone would still be pretty slow compared to browsing on a modern desktop or laptop. If you frequently use Wi-Fi on your iPhone, a faster processor in the next-generation hardware would make a bigger difference to the overall experience than faster phone-carrier networking. And so here’s the point I’m driving at. If a 2007 iPhone is loosely equivalent in terms of computing power to a 2000 PowerBook or 1999 Power Mac, that puts the spread at around seven or eight years. Extrapolate forward, and it’s therefore not at all unreasonable to think that a 2014 iPhone will pack the computing power of today’s MacBook Pro. Or, nearer term, that an iPhone introduced two years from now might pack the punch of a 2003 Aluminum PowerBook G4 — quite a difference from the Pismo. Even if your estimate of the iPhone’s equivalent-horsepower Mac is further back in time than mine, there’s no denying that Moore’s Law applies to handhelds, too. Eventually there will be a computer that fits in your pocket that is more powerful than today’s Mac Pros. But the path from here to there is riddled with difficult engineering problems — heat dissipation, battery life, and OS integration chief among them. There is marketing. There most certainly is design. But at the core of this market — by which I mean the market for handheld multitasking web-surfing networked-everywhere “phones” which are really computers — is engineering. Apple is the best handheld computer engineering company in the world today, hands down. They’re also the best handheld computer user experience design company. And they’re not sharing. 2: Why RIM Is Screwed When the iPhone was announced, I saw Apple as staking out ground far afield from the territory RIM occupies with the BlackBerry. Last year, I didn’t see Apple implementing Exchange support in the iPhone OS, and clearly that was, well, completely wrong. The “enterprise” features Apple has announced for the imminent 2.0 release of the iPhone OS — remote wipe, push email, automatic calendar and contact synching — pretty much encompass every single feature that’s been held up as a reason the iPhone wouldn’t sell to enterprise users. It remains to be seen how well these new iPhone features will actually work, but if the answer is “as well as promised”, and if the iPhone’s Mail app is improved in ways targeting people who receive a high number of messages, it’s hard to see a single software advantage in the BlackBerry’s favor. Which leaves hardware, which leaves the keyboard. Two Sundays ago, the New York Times