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About this site

For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Saturday, August 17, 2002

Mozilla marches on
AOL's new client for Mac OS X uses the Gecko rendering engine from Mozilla, an interesting turn of events. And Mozilla 1.1 should be out any day now.

[ Posted at 12:29 AM | Permalink ]

Wednesday, August 14, 2002

Say no to pseudo-journalism
Man. Oh man. This kind of article literally makes me want to scream. So I wrote the jackass and his editors a little note. Here it is:

Subject: Arrogance, thy name is Charles

Mr. Haddad,

Can you kindly explain to me why the BW Online "Mac guy" is writing about Microsoft enterprise licensing? And who OK'd this horrible, misguided journey into one-side pseudo-journalism? If this makes the print edition, you will hear me screaming from your ivory tower (you know, the one with the cute Apple stickers on the window).

A few (obvious) inaccuracies:

- Windows Product Activation began in October 2001 with Windows XP, not this month. But product activation has been around for longer than that. Office XP had it in May 2001, and even Office 2000 had it, in certain markets like Australia, years earlier.

- Windows Product Activation does not require users to register before they use it. WPA is tied to Windows, not Office. Product Activation, which is in Office XP, requires you to ACTIVATE your copy of Office, which ties the product to specific hardware and doesn't transmit any personal information to Microsoft. You can use the product, however, dozens of times before you have to activate, and you NEVER need to register. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. The goal here is to prevent casual software piracy, but Microsoft still lets you activate one copy of Office XP on two PCs, one of which should be a laptop. That's actually not a horrible deal.

- You said that sales of Office have slowed "sharply" over the past few years. Too bad it's not true. And you can look it up. On the one year anniversary of Office XP, Microsoft announced that it had sold 60 million licenses to the product, making it the fastest selling Office version in history (link). But no need to believe a simple press release, let's look at the company's balance sheet for the past few years and see how Office did (you know, take the two minutes to actually do a little research). You can follow along at link. Here's what we find out with just a cursory look:

   * For fiscal 2002, "Desktop applications revenue also grew on the strength of continuing demand for Office by enterprise customers."

   * Desktop Software, of which Office is the primary component, earned $9.6 billion in 2002, up from $9.5 billion in fiscal 2001.

   * In fact, even year-over-year sales were up. For the quarter ending June 2002, the company made $2.52 billion in this area, compared to $2.5 billion during the same quarter a year ago. And this all happened during a recession. Nice.

   * Wanna go back a few more years? Why not? You seem to have a problem with simple math. Head on over to Microsoft's financial history page (1986-2002) and try--I dare you--to find a single year where Office sales were less than they were the year before. Go ahead, I'll wait. Can't do it? I didn't think so.

- The statement, "and the two best alternatives -- Apple's OS X and Linux platforms -- have never been stronger" is laughable, of course, because you could have said that at any time over the past two years (or more, if you include earlier Mac OS versions) and it would have been true. It's like saying, "Lemons are yellow." Hey, guess what? Windows has never been stronger than it is now too. But so what? Linux's share of the desktop market is non-existent, Linux's server market revenues actually shrank last year, and Apple's marketshare has shrunk--every single year--since Steve Jobs took over. Do the math, Charles. Fantasies are nice. But sometimes you gotta get your head out of the hole in the ground, looking into the sunny sky, and see the reality.

- Only an Apple guy would think the XServe is good for anything outside of Mac-oriented graphics shops and the like. Point to one actual instance of companies rolling out this product in volume, anywhere, in a production environment that doesn't represent a niche market, please. Anywhere. If you can't, it doesn't compete. BTW, you can't and it doesn't.

- Your IBM example, in which the company "initially closed its eyes to the revolution in personal computing" betrays your ignorance of the short history of this industry. IBM released its PC in 1981, a short few years after the Apple II, Commodore 64 and other proto-PCs paved the way. The IBM PC, in fact, still represents one of the shining success stories of that company, in that they were able to design and release a product in only a year, and have that product go on to great success.

And so on. Your columns remind me of an old Far Side cartoon, where the dog owner is yelling at the dog, and all the dog hears is "Blah blah blah Cindy," where the dog's name is Cindy. In your case, you have somehow managed to turn a Microsoft enterprise article into a plea for users to consider the Mac. That's crazy. And to the outside world, it just reads, "Blah blah blah Macintosh." Whatever. Yeah, might you get a little blurb on Apple's web site, of course, and the Mac advocates--mostly children, apparently--will eat it up and publish links to what "Business Week" wrote. But that's just a giant, self-replicating back-slapping experience, isn't it? Aren't we all so cute, here in the same little Apple club. Kumbaya, pass the Kool-Aid. What price your soul?

Take off the blinders and give the agenda a rest. It's boring, and it's wrong, and it's sad. And I can't believe BW would publish such tripe.

Paul

[ Posted at 8:55 AM | Permalink ]

Monday, August 12, 2002

One device to rule them all and in the darkness bind them...
PDA, cell phone, portable music player: Three devices. But they're coming together. The most recent and interesting example: The Apple iPod, which gains Contacts, Time/Date, and Calendaring functionality in update 1.2. That brings me down to two potential devices to travel with, but for one problem: The iPod is so expensive and so delicate that I'm not sure it can withstand regular use while traveling. I will test this, of course, and use the iPod as a PDA on my next Seattle trip. I will say this, though: The software interfaces to this new functionality, on both the Mac and iPod, are incredibly simple to use.

[ Posted at 9:54 AM | Permalink ]

More common knowledge goodness
This excellent NY Times Magazine article discusses how humans tend to see patterns and even conspiracy in simple coincidences, and is worth reading just for that (''We are hard-wired to overreact to coincidences,'' says Persi Diaconis. ''It goes back to primitive man. You look in the bush, it looks like stripes, you'd better get out of there before you determine the odds that you're looking at a tiger. The cost of being flattened by the tiger is high. Right now, people are noticing any kind of odd behavior and being nervous about it" ... If not for this ability, a child could not learn to speak). But the article also touches on my old pet peeve of "common knowledge," where arthritic people can forecast bad weather (not true) and basketball players get "hot hands" and can predictably keep scoring (also not true). Good stuff.

[ Posted at 9:51 AM | Permalink ]