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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, January 24, 2004

Napster also affected by European red tape

Reuters: [UPDATE] "Old-fashioned red tape is delaying the eagerly awaited European launches for iTunes and Napster, the two popular online music stores said on Saturday. A maze of licensing contracts, music release dates that differ by country and incompatible billing systems have combined to sidetrack the services, which many recording executives still hope will make their European debut in the first half of 2004."

[ Posted at 6:17 PM | Permalink ]

HP cuts Fiorina's pay

SFGate.com: "Hewlett-Packard has slashed the pay of chief executive Carly Fiorina after she missed some performance targets last year, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission ... Fiorina's total pay -- including salary, bonus and stock options -- dropped about 38 percent from $10.7 million in fiscal 2002 to $6.6 million last year."

If HP is smart, they'll cut Fiorina altogether, for her foolhardy move to embrace Apple's incompatible iPod and Protected AAC technology.

[ Posted at 6:16 PM | Permalink ]

Original Macintosh press release

Mac Daily News: "CUPERTINO, Calif., January 24, 1984--Apple Computer today unveiled its much-anticipated Macintosh computer, a sophisticated, affordably priced personal computer designed for business people, professionals and students in a broad range of fields. Macintosh is available in all dealerships now. Based on the advanced, 32-bit architecture developed for Apple's Lisa computer, Macintosh combines extraordinary computing power with exceptional ease of use--in a unit that is smaller and lighter than most transportable computers. The suggested retail price for Macintosh is $2,495, which during the introductory period also includes a word-processing program and graphics package."

[ Posted at 6:11 PM | Permalink ]

Happy 20th anniversary, Mac: Part three

Think Secret: "The update, which Apple is expected to publicly release on Monday, January 26, will include a number of OS X security improvements and enhancements. The patch will deliver security tweaks to Mail, Classic, Safari, Windows file sharing, and Apache 1.3, sources said."

It's astonishing how many updates Apple has shipped since releasing Mac OS X 10.2.3 Panther.

[ Posted at 6:10 PM | Permalink ]

Apple not making enterprise moves

Infoworld: "On the heels of Apple's introduction of the two-way, 2GHz, G5 Xserve; the 3.5TB capacity Xserve RAID; and Xgrid technology, one might think that Apple was interested in the greater enterprise and, therefore, that the greater enterprise might be interested in Apple. But if you take Apple at its word, the company has no long-term strategy of aiming its products beyond its traditional markets. That message was repeated every which way I posed the question to Jon Rubinstein, Apple's senior vice president of hardware engineering, when we sat down at the 2004 Macworld Conference & Expo."

Well, duh. Apple is a consumer company with strong ties to the educational and creative markets. End of story.

Or is it? Server Pipeline highlights Apple's pursuit of the enterprise customer and interviews Apple's Doug Brooks. LOL.

[ Posted at 6:02 PM | Permalink ]

Happy 20th anniversary, Mac: Part three

CNN.com: "Its dedicated users are so passionate they're often described as religious about their love for the machine ... With such an innovative and intuitive product, then why is Apple's market share just 3 percent to 5 percent, with Microsoft Windows claiming more than 90 percent worldwide?" [Note: Apple's marketshare is actually 1.88 percent, with Windows at just over 95 percent. Notice how "perceived facts" even make their way into CNN stories --Paul]

[ Posted at 6:01 PM | Permalink ]

Apple's iTunes efforts held up by red tape

Reuters: "Old-fashioned red tape is delaying the eagerly awaited European launch of Apple Computers' Internet music store iTunes, a company official said on Saturday. A maze of licensing contracts, music release dates that differ by country and incompatible billing systems have combined to sidetrack the service, which many recording executives still hope will make its European debut in the first half of 2004 ... Cue said one hurdle Apple has run into is the age-old practice of staggered release cycles, meaning some songs would not be available to all European consumers at the same time."

[ Posted at 5:58 PM | Permalink ]

Happy 20th anniversary, Mac: Part two

Silicon.com: "Is Apple still relevant? Of course it is ... Along with MacOS, Apple is rightly celebrated for its hardware design. The friendly, high-tech shapes of the original Macintosh were designed by Hartmut Esslinger's frogdesign and contributed to users feeling that the computer was approachable."

[ Posted at 2:59 PM | Permalink ]

Happy 20th anniversary, Mac: Part one

PC World: "It was insanely great, the computer for the rest of us, and out to change the world. The Apple Macintosh marks its twentieth birthday this week, and--hubris and hype aside--the Mac has made an acknowledged impact on personal computing ... PC World asked many longtime industry players, including some involved in the Mac's early days, what the Macintosh has taught the PC--and, essentially, the computing industry. And, on the flip side, what has the PC taught the Macintosh?"

[ Posted at 2:57 PM | Permalink ]

Simpleton comparison of Apple and Microsoft digital media

A reader noted the mutual exclusiveness of two comments I posted here:

1. Personally, I'd love to see iLife come to Windows. Then Apple could kick Microsoft's butt in photos, movies, and DVDs too.

2. Both Apple and Microsoft have done a great job with digital media technologies. The notion that Apple is leading the way or being copied, however, is ludicrous.

And asked which was true. It's a good question. My overly simple response was:

Apple is kicking Microsoft's butt in getting out updated retail packages of iLife on a regular basis. Microsoft's add-ons tend to be free, or very low cost, and few people know about them. Comparing them head to head:

Photos: iPhoto is better than Microsoft's free shell-based offering but is performance-challenged. Microsoft's Digital Image Suite, naturally, is much more full-featured than iPhoto, but it's $50-$120 depending on the version.

Movies: Windows Movie Maker 2 is much, much better than iMovie, and it does instantaneous rendering of effects, transitions and titles.

Music: I like iTunes better than Windows Media Player, but WMP is much more full-featured, and the music stuff in the Windows shell (automatic album art for folders and other meta-data stuff) is unparalleled on the Mac.

DVD - iDVD is excellent, if slow, and Microsoft has nothing like it. Third party utilities like Sonic MyDVD and Nero are excellent, but cost as much as the entire iLife does.

So it's a toss up from what I can see.

Also, he asked if Microsoft was so instrumental in designing the Mac OS, why did it take them over 10 years to come up with a comparable OS of their own?

I noted that Microsoft released Windows 1.0 in 1985, about a year after the Mac. It didn't become popular until 1990 or so.

Arguably, that isn't a great answer, as the important word in that question was "comparable."

The answer there is complicated. But obviously, Microsoft had an installed base of millions of text-based IBM-compatible machines to worry about. Unlike Apple, which essentially abandoned its Apple II installed base when it developed the Mac from scratch, Microsoft wisely chose to keep its customer base when moving the PC world to the GUI. It took a while, and by the mid-1990's there were still people chugging away on DOS because they liked WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, or other text-mode applications. I should note that Apple wised up to this strategy by the mid-1990's too: When it released it's PowerMac systems (and later, OS X), the company was very careful to bring with them compatibility modes that allowed older 68K and "Classic" applications to run in each environment, respectively. Also, one might argue that with each version of Mac OS X, Apple has carefully re-added key "Classic" Mac OS features back to the OS (spring-loaded folders, etc.). Heck, the initial OS X release didn't even include DVD movie playback capabilities.

So one might also ask, why isn't Mac OS X yet comparable to their older OS? There are still key missing features.

[ Posted at 11:40 AM | Permalink ]

Intel-based PCs continue to thump G4s, G5s

Rob Galbraith, Digital Photography Insights: "Ultimately, the Mac tied or led the PC in 19 of the 77 tests that comprise this report. Put another way, the PC was faster in 58 of 77 benchmarks ... The 15-inch Powerbook G4, powered by a G4/1.25GHz processor, was thumped in every test by a Dell Inspiron 8500 and its P4-M processor running at 2.6GHz. Laptops aside, the combination of faster hardware and better software has brought about a significant performance jump for pro digital photographers using the Mac. And while the PC is still quicker overall, the Mac is at least back in the race."

[ Posted at 9:22 AM | Permalink ]

Friday, January 23, 2004

Macworld's Jobs interview raises questions

But wait, there's more.

In MacWorld's exclusive interview (which is painfully short) with Steve Jobs, His Royal Reality Field passes out a few whoppers. Let's take a look at the art of lying.

Steve: All I can say is, I think the Mac reinvented the personal-computer industries in the eighties, and Microsoft copied it in the nineties--and that's been a big success for them too.

Response: The "Microsoft copied Apple" thing is so well-accepted in the industry that it's taken on the air of truth. But I will take the time to pass on a barely-understood truth that is so often glossed over by Mac advocates, but clearly described in the first issue of Macworld from 1984, which the magazine was nice enough to include on the bundled CD in the 20th anniversary issue: Microsoft actually did much of the design work on the first Mac. In fact, both Apple and Microsoft described Microsoft's participation in the Mac's development over the two years leading up to its introduction as "an extension" of the Mac team in Cupertino.

Bill Gates, interviewed in that first issue, and long before he was perceived as Enemy Number One by the Mac community, had this to say: "We've had very in-depth involvement [with the development of the Mac]. Whenever you get involved with prototype machines that early on, you're essentially part of the engineering team; you're help to find bugs and making suggestions for design changes. Microsoft has been an extension of the internal Mac software team for the last few years. We've had a close working relationship with the Mac team that has been beneficial for both sides. We've learned a great deal about doing graphics applications, and we've made sure that their subsystem, dialog boxes, and memory manager fit in properly. If you compared the Mac to what it was two years ago, you probably wouldn't recognize it. Steve's vision of where the machine should go ... has been preserved. But the disk, the memory, the code in ROM, the number of bits onscreen, they're all different. We didn't realize that we needed to do so much work with the memory manager, menus, and dialog boxes. Nor did we know how we were going to make the Finder work or how the desktop tools would work. All of these things eventually got built into the software that Apple includes with the system.

So there you go. Microsoft at least partially designed the Mac's Finder, memory manager, menus, dialog boxes, and other subsystems. Gates was upfront that they learned about creating graphical systems during the process. And yet Microsoft "stole" stuff from Apple. It's funny when you think about it.

And the line, "[personal computers have] been a big success for [Microsoft] too" is rich. Microsoft's earnings over the past twenty years outrank Apple's by about 100-to-1. The company just had its first $10 billion quarter ($1.48 billion in profit), a quarter during which Apple made just $63 million on sales of $2 billion. The two companies basically don't even compete.

Steve: We finally got out ahead again with OS X, and I think you'll see Microsoft copying that in the future.

Response: I've already documented the number of ways in which OS X steals concepts, technologies, and interfaces from Windows. That's a ludicrous statement. Windows XP has sold over 150 million copies worldwide, compared to less than 10 million for OS X; again, these two companies technically don't even compete.

Steve: The Power Mac G5 [is] the most powerful personal computer out there.

Response: This has been refuted a number of times, in a number of places, since Jobs first made this claim. But I'll point to a Mac-friendly source for this refutation, which is also the most recent comparison I've seen. In the 20th anniversary collector's issue of MacAddict, an article titled "Mac vs. PC Smackdown" concludes that "the [Pentium 4] handled the G5" in all of the application tests they performed. After laying down some caveats, the magazine notes that "there is no irrefutable answer to the [G5 vs. PC] question--it depends on which tests you're running and how you define personal computer. However, there's no arguing the fact that the G5 is one damn fast chip and that the Dual 2GHz Power Mac G5 is one damn fast personal computer." Indeed. It's funny that it's so clear-cut to Jobs though.

Steve: We declared that we thought that the next big thing for the personal computer was the digital hub three years ago, right?
Macworld: And now you see Microsoft, HP, and the rest--
Steve: Oh, everybody's copying us now. And we're quite a ways ahead of everybody.

Response: I love this bit of history rewriting. Three years ago, and three days before Jobs announced his company's digital hub strategy, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates announced Microsoft's "digital lifestyle" strategy. Go ahead, look it up. Gates announced the strategy on January 6, 2001. Jobs announced his company's strategy on January 9, 2001. And since then, Microsoft has kicked butt with a free new MovieMaker 2.0 application that requires no effects, titling, or transition rendering at all (compared to iMovie's slow rendering) and a Photo Story tool, which also shipped before it's Apple counterpart, the Ken Burns effect, in 2003) that blows away Apple's tools. Don't get me wrong: Both Apple and Microsoft have done a great job with digital media technologies. The notion that Apple is leading the way or being copied, however, is ludicrous.

Steve: [PCs and computers] want to link sometimes ... But most of these [integrated PC/TV products] ... have failed. All of them have failed."

Response: Curious. The TiVo, which popularized digital video recording (DVR), is actually a Linux box that you can telnet to if you want, and the Media Center PCs, based on Windows XP, are selling quite well. I use my Media Center PC to record TV shows in glorious 720 x 480 high resolution video, transcode them to WMV format, and then watch them on a laptop while I'm traveling. Too bad you can't do that with a Mac, eh?

Of course, Apple can only do so much, so it behooves Steve to downplay a product category he didn't invent and can't compete in. It will be curious to see how Apple fans react to the amazing Portable Media Center devices that various companies will ship this year.

Steve: Apple's market share is bigger than BMW's or Mercedes' or Porsche's in the automotive market. What's wrong with being BMW or Mercedes?

Response: Nothing. But BMW doesn't compete against a single competitor that controls over 95 percent of the market. BMW competes against a slew of other brands, offered by dozens of companies, in different markets all around the world. Apple cannot be fairly compared to BMW at all. But hey, I love that he compares Apple to luxury car brands and not, say, Kia, with which they have a lot more in common.

[ Posted at 5:19 PM | Permalink ]

Macworld bungles 20th anniversary of the Mac

So this is infuriating. I picked up a copy of Macworld Magazine in the airport the other day because it was advertised as the 20th anninversary issue. But Macworld totally screwed up the anniversary, with a cover that somehow managed not to put an original 128 KB Mac next to a modern G5, a terrible timeline that leaves out key dates in the Mac's history, and a set of bizarre interviews and mini-columns involving people who were around during the Mac's earliest days, most of which include outright lies or misinformation. It was really depressing, and the bundled CD, which includes a PDF scan (itself rinky-dink: It's a cheap scan of an actual magazine, often misaligned) of the original Macworld issue, further highlights the problems with both the magazine and the Mac itself. Reading about the original goals for the magazine--a publication that woudln't just be about mindlessly cheerleading everything Apple does, but would rather criticize when appropriate as well. Obviously, that ended a long time ago. But on my return flight, I was further amazed to see the MacAddict magazine celebrating the Mac's 20th anniversary: Needless to say, those guys (mindless cheerleaders in their own right) got it right, right down to the obvious Mac 128/G5 photo on the cover. Shame on Macworld.

[ Posted at 4:26 PM | Permalink ]

More .Mac goodness

I've been a .Mac subscriber since the service started, and I'm always pleasantly surprised when Apple periodically adds a few new benefits to the package. This week, the company gave subscribers a $30 coupon toward the purchase of Keynote (dropping the price from $99 to $69) and seven additional Keynote themes (worth $100). I'm not ever going to use Keynote, but this is the kind of thing that keeps subscribers happy, and resubscribing. Smart.

[ Posted at 10:09 AM | Permalink ]

2004 is the year of Linux, part seven

New Zealand Herald: "Linux marks slow progress in taking over desktops ... As never before, corporate customers are turning to Linux software instead of Microsoft Windows to run big business operations. Now, if only they could get the word processor's basic 'cut and paste' feature to work."

[ Posted at 10:06 AM | Permalink ]

The Click Heard Round The World

Wired: It was December 1968. An obscure scientist from Stanford Research Institute stood before a hushed San Francisco crowd and blew every mind in the room. His 90-minute demo rolled out virtually all that would come to define modern computing: videoconferencing, hyperlinks, networked collaboration, digital text editing, and something called a "mouse." Doug Engelbart tells writer Ken Jordan what it felt like to launch the point-and-click revolution 15 years before the Mac.

[ Posted at 10:04 AM | Permalink ]

Microsoft: Mac market share will grow

MacWorld: "Microsoft's group marketing manager for home and retail products, Jonathan Hulse, said: 'We anticipate a growth in Mac sales over the next two to three years.' He clarified that this means Microsoft expects Apple's market share to increase, but said: 'We don't expect a huge resurgence to the market share (Apple) had in the eighties, but we see the platform as heading in a positive direction ... We see the Mac productivity software market growing. Our research shows that half of Mac users use Office, sometimes three or four times a day. We know Mac users depend on Office, and that's how we justify the major investment we are making in the product.'"

On a related note, I spoke with the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft this week about Mac Office 2004 and Virtual PC 7, both due this spring. Both products look excellent, and I'll review them when they say it's OK.

[ Posted at 9:59 AM | Permalink ]

iLife: Slow, buggy, disappointing

So I was really pumped up about Apple's new iLife '04. But why does it suck so hard? The application suite took 45 minutes to install on both of my Macs, and two of the Apple--iPhoto 4 and iMovie 4 are buggy beyond belief and crash constantly. IPhoto is particularly bad, with some options related to slideshows almost always causing a crash. And performance-wise, this thing is a joke, with iMovie rendering times and iPhoto photo importing still particularly bad. Seriously, did they test this thing before they sent it out the door?

[ Posted at 9:57 AM | Permalink ]

Apple adds RSS feeds to iTunes Music Store

OK, this is just excellent. Apple is now offering a RSS generator for the iTunes Music Store, making it possible to get a feed for virtually any information the store lists, including such things as the top 10 New Releases, iTunes top songs, and so on. You can customize the feed length, type, music genre, and the ability to display explicit content to instantly create a custom feed, which can be consumed by aggregators such as Newsgator.

[ Posted at 9:55 AM | Permalink ]

Apple releases iCal update

This week, Apple updated iCal to version 1.5.2, which now supports to ability to view your calendar, event, or To Do information in a drawer or in a separate window, and includes a number of performance and reliability enhancements. It is available via the Software Update in Mac OS X.

[ Posted at 9:53 AM | Permalink ]