People are going to look back at the last couple of years as a prime example of how not to roll out and promote a major product - Vista. Microsoft seems to have addressed all (or at least most) of the technical problems with Vista - I know people running it who don't have complaints.
However, the perception that "Vista Sucks" has been successfully transmitted, both by the initial failures from MS (and their lackluster response), and the highly successful Mac/PC ads put out by Apple. Apple rode the "Vista Sucks" wave to better Mac sales, and to a successful product definition. Now it looks like Microsoft has realized they have lost this particular battle:
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer kicked off the 2009 International Consumer Electronics Show on Wednesday with an impassioned endorsement of PCs and a sneak peek at the company's future Windows 7 operating system.
Without mentioning the security and compatibility issues that have dogged Vista, Ballmer promised that Windows 7 will make PCs faster and easier to use. He didn't offer a timetable for its official release, although Windows Vista went on sale more than two years after it was issued in beta form.
It looks like they've given up on the "Mojave" idea, and gone straight to Windows 7. Now they need to get it from beta to product faster than the two year timespan Vista took to make that run. It will probably happen; by all accounts, Windows 7 is more or less Vista SP2 - making this largely a re-branding effort.
With scifi shows and Fox, this is always a safe bet, from an interview with Dekker (who plays the young John Connor on "Sarah Connor Chronicles":
He also said the show will become more serialized and more "science fiction" for the rest of the season (Woo Hoo!). Surely that means we'll get nine awesome new episodes then Fox will immediately cancel it and replace it with something that has the word "Dancing" in the title.
Over the years, it's been a pretty safe bet - bet against any scifi show Fox puts on. They must have some staff that likes scifi, and ad sellers who dislike the demographic...
The embattled SCO Group Inc. is proposing to auction off its core products and use proceeds to continue its controversial lawsuits over the alleged violations of its copyrights in Linux open-source software. The Lindon company has filed a new reorganization plan with the federal court in Delaware where it sought bankruptcy protection from creditors after an adverse ruling in the Linux litigation. If approved by a bankruptcy judge, the plan could mean SCO's server software and mobile products lines are owned by other parties while SCO itself remained largely to pursue the lawsuits under the leadership of CEO Darl McBride.
I don't think "leadership" is the word they're looking for...
Eli looked like a great QB last season, and again up until Burress took himself out this season. Today? He took a quick trip back to 2006, and helped throw the game away (literally) with interceptions. What a disappointing end to a 12-4 season.
This week, Michael and I discussed how we build the products at Cincom: ObjectStudio, VisualWorks, and Web Velocity. In the process of doing that, we talked about how that process has changed over the course of the last few years, and where we need to take it. Download the podcast here.
If you have feedback, send it to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com - or visit us on Facebook or Ning - you can vote for the Podcast Alley, and subscribe on iTunes. If you enjoy the podcast, pass the word - we would love to have more people hear about Smalltalk!
On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at a package in the public repository that adds JPG writing capability to the library. To watch, click the image below:
Today's been one of those days where I end up on the phone all day :) During the rare intervals when I haven't been on the phone, I've been working on a website refresh. We are planning to launch a new look and feel for the site within a few days; all I really need at this point is a bit of content that needs to be added in. I think you'll like what we've been up to.
Now Listening to: The River Sings by Enya from: Amarantine
Last week I took a trip to Dallas, and I spoke to the Ruby User Group while I was there. It was a good session - I covered Seaside and Web Velocity, and the crowd seemed impressed. I have the video up now - click on the image below to watch:
Scoble got some interesting video of the rendering of virtual people. Right now, it's being used for things like games and special effects, but I'm thinking that this is going to move into things like "resurrected" actors: I wonder if anyone is looking to buy the rights to use the likeness of people like Gable, Cagney (etc, etc). Things are going to get interesting in this area...
If you watch "24", you'll know what I mean while you watch tonight's episode. I won't give away any more spoilers - and what the title means will only be clear partway into tonight's show anyway :)
Sling Media announced today that they've lost their top executives, including co-founders (and brothers) Blake and Jason Krikorian, CEO and SVP of business development respectively. Also on the way out is Jason Hirschhorn and Ben White, President and Cheif Creative Officer of Sling Media Entertainment Group, and Greg Wilkes the VP of sales
THere's no way that can be a good sign. And I was starting to get interested in their products...
Now Listening to: Flying Sorcery by Al Stewart from: Year Of The Cat
Mathew Ingram explains why there won't be an iTunes like model for news. The summary: you'll listen to the same song over and over (and pay for the ability to do so) - but you simply won't do that for an ephemeral thing like news or opinion. The iTunes model isn't going to work.
Now Listening to: Sleeping And Waking by 'Til Tuesday from: Welcome Home
Today's Smalltalk Daily wraps up our look at the JPEG Bundle (warning: it's GPL, which may prevent some of you from using it). To watch, click on the image below:
Steve Rubel brings up a well known and popular example to demonstrate the limitations of video plays:
So what's Scoble's problem? Well a lot. The videos don't generate a lot of in-bound links from bloggers, conversations on Twitter or mentions on aggregators like Techmeme. "None of my 1,000+ videos has ever made it to Techmeme," Scoble said. He's right. A quick analysis reveals some get no links, others get a couple. However, when he surrounds them with text, it's a different story. Why? Text! It provides context and I suspect for many it's a proxy for the video.
You still need the meta-information in text to make this stuff findable. I should really go through the podcasts and videos I've posted and see if there's a correlation between the textual descriptions (quality, size) and the download rates...
I've been doing Smalltalk Daily since September 2006, and there's a lot of content available there now. As we produce new versions of the products, there's going to be normal turnover of the introductory/tools screencasts; those need to be up to date in order to be useful. Beyond that, I could use some suggestions:
What would you like to see? What have I not covered, or not covered well enough? Send me feedback, or just add a comment to this post. Thanks!
The TiVo senior programmer from San Jose spent a week modifying his 25-year-old washing machine to send a message to Twitter when his laundry is ready. Rose, 35, admits his less-than-reliable memory has been to blame for the mildewed clothes that have piled up after he's left a load sitting in his machine too long.
There are full details if you follow the link; to quote Mathew Ingram: "finally, someone has come up with an actual use for Twitter"
The new Netgear router is in place, and it works - The N support is fast, and reliable. However, I can't get AIM to work at all - it connects and disconnects constantly, and never shows anyone as being online. I could do port forwarding of the relevant ports, but there are two problems with that:
My IP changes whenever I switch from my office (wire) to the living room (wifi)
What if someone else in the house (wife, daughter) wanted to use AIM?
So - anyone have any suggestions? I've got the WNR3500.
Now, the MacBook Pro complaint? It seems that it loses track of SMB network shares if the network changes (even after it gets back online). The iMac doesn't have this problem, my Windows boxes don't seem to, and even the lowly G4 based mini and my wife's white plastic MacBook deal with this issue just fine. My MBP? It seems to periodically lose its mind and require a reboot. If it were Linux, I'd just kill Samba and restart it. Is there a simple way to do the equivalent thing in OS X that I just don't know about?
I guess a downturn has a way of concentrating a VC dependent company's mind:
Twitter receives a crushing amount of partnership opportunities on a regular basis—it's a good problem to have yet until now there has been nobody on staff dedicated solely to business development. Things are changing. We hired Kevin Thau as our Director of Mobile Business Development late last month. Although his title includes the word "mobile" Kevin is digging in on several fronts since he's our first official business development guru.
With the end of the various investment bubbles, the "support it all with ads" model isn't looking so hot. I'm not sure what they'll come up with, but I don't think any ad based model is going to cut it. I just don't see Twitter being able to define targetable niches very easily...
Over in the UK, they are trying to filter out illegal content at the ISP level. The problem? The blacklist filters cast way, way too big a net over things:
According to multiple customers of Demon Internet - now owned by Brit telecom Thus - the London-based ISP is blocking access to all sites stored in the archive. When they query the Wayback Machine, hoping to retrieve archived pages, customers are met with generic "not found" error pages. But judging from their urls, these pages are generated by a web filter based on the blacklist compiled by the Internet Watch Foundation, a government-backed organization charged with policing online pornography.
This is where well intentioned - but too simple - schemes go awry. I've seen this kind of thing myself. I have a simple minded filter for comments on the blogs here, and it's been known to block legitimate comments based on accidental matches against poorly chosen keywords. Basically, when you decide to filter, you have to decide what level of false positive you're willing to put up with. Sure, Baysian filters do a better job - but heck, even there, I have to continually go in and check the junk folder. For awhile, my mail client had decided that everything our company President sent was spam. None of these systems are perfect.
This is pretty cool: BottomFeeder is in a "top ten Linux Aggregators" list. Pretty cool stuff. BottomFeeder is the Smalltalk RSS/Atom reader I started writing back in 2002. You can download and try it yourself here.
Now Listening to: Magnum Opus by Kansas from: Leftoverture
Local Media may be having problems, but they still seem to have more pull than a paying customer - the Consumerist chronicles the year long saga of cables being left lying across driveways and gutters:
Ms. Franz tried showing the cables to some techs who came to repair her family's service over the summer. They didn't fix it. She also tried contacting Comcast's Twitter team - they at least called her back - but didn't fix the problem. Finally, it took a call from the Baltimore Sun before any Comcast trucks showed up.
There are times when you have to get someone in the PR department to notice before anything happens and - for good or ill - local media can get their attention, while normal people just can't. There are bloggers that have the same level of pull that the old media has, but not many. And most of them aren't paying attention to small scale stuff like this.
Here's where a nice matchup between local bloggers and local media could work though. It's unlikely that an entity like the Baltimore Sun is going to notice something like this story - but a local blogger might, and, if he/she is working with the Sun on an ad-hoc basis then boom - you get fairly complete local coverage, from top to bottom. The Sun can get the meetings with local powers (governments, etc) that the bloggers can't, while the bloggers can stream in leads that the Sun is simply not going to find.
Now Listening to: If It Makes You Happy by Sheryl Crow from: Sheryl Crow
Wow, Apple has actually released its all too common death grip on a technology and allowed it to become a standard? Seems un-possible, but there it is: the stock mini-display port on the new Macs is going to be an industry standard:
The Video Electronics Standards Association, or VESA, said last week as CES began that DisplayPort 1.2 should include Mini DisplayPort as part of the DisplayPort 1.2 specification.
...
It's not known whether the officially approved Mini DisplayPort will involve the full range of features from 1.2, but it will let any company building a computer or graphics card adopt the port with the blessing of the standards group and know that it will work with other 1.2-supporting hardware.
I'd say that means Apple is continuing to move into the consumer space - they need to have lots of devices that work with their stuff if they want to make that play.
Now Listening to: Monsters by Blue Öyster Cult from: Cultosaurus Erectus
Today's Smalltalk Daily covers a topic that lots of people are interested in: scripting the build of a runtime image. I give a simple example of that today, without using Runtime Packager. To watch, click on the image below:
Apparently, the transition to Digital TV is caught up in a whole morass of conflicting interests and agendas - Ars Technica has the details. It doesn't look like a simple disagreement.
In order to take myself out of the limelight and focus on my health, and to allow everyone at Apple to focus on delivering extraordinary products, I have decided to take a medical leave of absence until the end of June.
You can tell that things are tough all over: Google is starting to clean house a little. They are shuttering a bunch of services that have either been superseded (Google Video), or been eclipsed by the competition (Jaiku):
Google’s announced they’re closing or ceasing development of a variety of products as part of an already continuing move to keep efforts focused on other products with greater usage. These include an end to video uploads to Google Video, closure of Google Catalog Search, Google Notebook, Dodgeball, the microblogging service Jaiku and the Google Mashup Editor.
And, they are laying off a bunch of people who do hiring for them as well. Not a huge surprise; even a generally successful company like Google has to be seeing problems in this economy.
Pioneer is ceasing production of their three remaining LaserDisc players, marking the end of major manufacture for players of the giant, shiny, long-obsolete format.
Supposedly, there was a market in Japan for these things until recently. I seriously had no idea that format was still viable...
Now Listening to: Hope Has A Place by Enya from: The Memory Of Trees
Today's Smalltalk Daily continues from yesterday's screencast - we add a custom emergency handler for the runtime, and set up a default log file for capturing error reports. To watch it, click on the image below:
I decided to stop pounding my head against the walls of port 5190 (the default port for AIM), and looked at what possibilities there are for using alternate ports. A quick search showed that you can specify a few other possibilities, and one of those worked for me - so, using iChat, I'm back on the service.
It's always something...
Now Listening to: California Dreamin' by The Mamas & The Papas from: 16 Greatest Hits
You might get bad results for the main Smalltalk site on an on/off basis for a bit - I'm preparing to swap over to a new site design, and there's always the possibility of hiccups...
Here's Phillippe Marschall at ESUG 2008, issuing a "call to action" - he wants to see Smalltalk application deployment made easier. There should be a link to his presentation here, but the link isn't resolving right now. To watch, click on the image below:
Update: Presentation has been removed at the speaker's request
According to NPD Group statistics, Nintendo sold a record 10.17 million Wii consoles to US Americans in 2008. That trumps Nintendo's own record of 9.95 million consoles sold in the relatively healthy 2007 economic climate. Nintendo added to its money pile by hawking 9.95 million DS handhelds for the year compared to the 8.52 million sold in 2007. Those tallies represent 55% of all consoles and 72% of all handheld consoles sold in the US.
To really grasp how much Nintendo is winning, follow the link to see the pie chart. It's amazing.
On today's Smalltalk Daily, we finish up the small series on scripting a runtime image build. Instead of stripping down, we use a base image (provided by Cincom) to do a "build up" approach. You can find "base.im" in $VISUALWORKS/preview/packaging.
Looks like Microsoft needed to give a tighter set of instructions to the ad agency that produced the web ad shown here; they are using a thinly veiled MacBook Pro instead of a recognizable PC. This is the kind of gaffe that any vendor needs to look out for.
PC World is reporting that VisualHub is being (kind of) resurrected in open source form. It sounds like it's a not terribly well connected set of pieces yet, but this is good news. VisualHub is a really, really nice little app.
Update: I should mention that I happily bought VisualHub a few years ago, and love the product.
PCWorld reports that our new President intends to hold onto his BlackBerry:
President-elect Barack Obama told CNN today he had a plan to "hang onto" his beloved BlackBerry, but did not explain how he would overcome legal and security concerns
I find this fascinating - Bush gave up email in 2001, due to concerns about private communications being caught up in the public records laws. It'll be interesting to see how modern communications technology interfaces with all of that.
On a side note - can you imagine how ecstatic the folks at RIM must be over this? You can't buy better publicity...
I hadn't really noticed, but there were some changes to the code critic between VW 7.5 and 7.6. Here are two screenshots - the first being 7.5, the second being 7.6:
You'll notice that the "Miscellaneous" category is missing in 7.6, and, if you look through and compare, there's been a general reorganization. It's also the case that four checks have been deprecated, amongst them the "long method" check. I'm not claiming that these are great checks; for instance, the "long methods" check calls anything over 10 lines "long" - kind of a subjective thing.
Having said that, I recently received a question from a colleague, who was relaying a concern from an academic customer. For teaching purposes, he liked the "long methods" check. So the question arose, how do you bring those rules back into play? As it happens, it's not hard - you need to make two small changes
First, modify BasicLintRule class>>protocols to look like this:
That's almost enough. Now you need to go to class BlockLintRule and rename the protocol category "deprecated" to "miscellaneous". Alternatively, you could just use the name "deprecated" in the #protocols method above and leave everything else alone. After doing that, you'll see this in 7.6:
In general, if you want to add new rules you can look in class BlockLintRule - the class methods are the rules, and the categories are the rule category names that show up in the Code Critic tab of the browser.
If you want an example of what not to do, here it is: don't pay people to post positive reviews of your product, whether they own it or not. For extra stupid points, don't pay people to mark as "not helpful" the bad reviews of your product. Unless, of course, you want to end up looking very, very stupid.
Update:Mathew Ingram explains just how this kind of thing backfires:
As I've often said when I talk to groups of marketing people about social media, this kind of strategy -- or even Wal-Mart's disastrous motor-home adventure -- seem like a great idea, right up until someone finds out about it and blows the whistle (and surely by now everyone knows that's going to happen eventually, the Internet being what it is). And when that happens, you will not only lose whatever goodwill you thought you were buying with your 65-cent reviews, but you will lose a bunch more besides. You will wind up in a hole, since people will now believe that even things you didn't pay for were either paid for or fraudulent in some way.
TechCrunch has a bunch of emails (with identifying information pulled out) from people explaining why they left Google. There's nothing telling in there, but I did find this interesting - from one of the emails:
One last thing: Google also thinks inside a box (the browser). I felt this a lot, and was another reason I left. (too constrained) It'€™s no surprise that they push to extend what the browser can do. (Gears, Earth plugin)
I think every large company (and many smaller ones, for that matter) end up engaging in "in the box" thinking. It might start as outside thinking, but in the end, it results in a new box inside of which company culture lives. That's not necessarily a bad thing until the company gets so big that the box actively prevents new ideas (Microsoft may have reached this point, and the IBM of the early 80's was deeply in that state).
Short of a corporate crisis, this just seems to be the norm. Apple managed to escape that - the question being, was that a function of Steve Jobs alone? We'll find out over the next few months.
For most PR people, it used to be a 9 to 5 job - unless you worked for a truly large company (the kind that attracted network/cable news coverage), you could safely ignore the world from Friday evening to Monday morning. That's gone now - it hasn't been the case for a few years. This point is made pretty well in an article about the demise of print news:
In the meantime, public relations professionals need to recognize that the days of daily deadlines are also coming to an end. Sooner rather than later, virtually every publication will be deadline-free, because no journalist will ever have to say, "We're going to press at 7:00 P.M." This will change the playing field, giving public relations pros more time to respond to some stories, but less time to deal with breaking news, especially bad news.
Especially for bad news, there's no time lag anymore - you simply have to deal with it in real time. We now live in a world where things can go viral on blogs, on YouTube, on Twitter - the list is endless. At the same time, getting news out that puts you in a positive light is getting harder. The old world of a handful of trade press people you needed to deal with is gone - and the new outlets are doing at least national, and probably global, reporting.
I really don't want to start sounding like a "get off my lawn" type, but plugging TV stuff in just seemed easier back when the options consisted of coax and/or RCA cables:
Unless you're selling something that needs no explanation (like, say, socks), you have to pay attention to your value adds - something a lot of retailers seem to have forgotten. As Don Tennant of ComputerWorld points out:
What killed Circuit City is precisely the same thing that killed CompUSA a year ago: Its only real value-add -- knowledgeable sales and support staff with the expertise to explain the technology to customers -- was long gone. Specialty stores like Circuit City lost their appeal when they stopped investing in proper hiring practices and training programs. There was no longer any reason to venture out to Circuit City for electronics and computer gadgets and peripherals when you could get the same merchandise, probably at lower prices, while you were at Wal-Mart buying underwear and razor blades.
That nickle you save in the expertise department could cost you your business. If people expect expertise to come with your product, then they need to actually find expertise.
This week James and Michael discussed the Code Critic (which I posted on recently, here). It's an interesting - if under-utilized and not well understood - tool, with a lot of potential. To listen, click on the image below:
There's some older, possibly out of date information on the Code Critic here.
