Technovia

End of Tablet PC? Wrong

Chris De Herrera posts an excellent interview with Andrew Dixon, director of marketing for Microsoft's Tablet PC team, rebutting all the recent stuff about the death of Tablet PC. This quote sums it up:

We continue to be incredibly proud of and committed to the Tablet, and we are hard at work on developing those technologies for future versions of Windows.  In fact, not only do we have a significant development effort underway for Longhorn (we spoke directionally about this at WinHEC 2004), but we have a group of people focused on Tablet technologies for the version of Windows after that.

When's a scoop not a scoop

Glenn Fleishman: "It's a well-established practice as a journalist that if you find out about a story from another publication, not a source or your own research, you credit that source. If you don't know that another publication broke the news, you're off the hook, too, generally. But don't go taking my scoop away." [Via Scobleizer]

I agree with Glenn, but it's sometimes not that easy. For example, I wrote a story last week for eWeek on the the security holes in Apple's URI handling for the HelpViewer application. I first read about it on the MacNN forums, via a posting on a mailing list. The original source may have been a German Web site. And there's a user who claims he first notified Apple about it in February. Who do you credit? In this case, I gave a pointer to the user's site, and that's about all.

Sometimes, though, it IS easy. Macworld UK found and posted about the Word "Demo" trojan, and when I wrote about it I credited them - well done to Karen Haslem for breaking the story.

Surprise Surprise

So it seems like what everyone with half a brain suspected was true all along: Ahmed Chalabi was feeding the US government exactly what it wanted to hear about Iraq, in order to provoke a war. [Via Boing Boing]

More on Plaxo

Over the weekend, Plaxo released version 2.0 of its software, which allows users to synchornize their Outlook contacts with Plaxo's server, and request updates for contact information from users. I started using Plaxo last week, and - thanks largely to having more than one similar application installed at the same time - ran into some horrendous problems.

So it was with some trepidation that I installed version 2.0, having dumped the last version because, after my contacts database got corrupted, it would continually crash Outlook. So far, though, it's worked far more effectively than the previous version, so much so that I've installed it on two machines and actually got them to sync not only contacts, but also all my other Outlook data - something that I had on my Mac via iSync and .Mac, and deeply missed on Windows. If someone produced something that let me sync to the Mac as well, I'd be in deep joy.

Incidentally, a couple of people asked me to remove their details from Plaxo, over uncertainties about how the system could be used for spamming - something that (of course) I was happy to do (Plaxo 2.0 actually makes it easier to do this, with a single-button on each contact card which lets you remove the contact from their system). Although I can see the reasoning, I think there has to be a measure of trust involved in any system that handles personal data. I also suspect there's cheaper and easier ways to mine email addresses. As a journalist, I often have to find people's email addresses, and not once has Google and a bit of intelligence let me down - including for people who take steps to hide their addresses from their Web pages.

Another URI exploit in Mac OS X

For those of you who haven't seen it yet, there's another URI exploit in Mac OS X, this time involving the Telnet: command. Not so serious, although it can still be used to play a few tricks - and not patched by Friday's security update.

Napster UK: First impressions

Yesterday I downloaded and installed the UK version of the all-new, all-legal Napster. It's a Windows Media-based service which allows you, for £9.99 per month, to have unlimited albums streamed, with individual tracks and albums available for sale at either 99p per track or a variable amount per album - again, in copy protected WMA 9 format.
There's a free seven-day trial of the streaming service, and so far I've been pretty impressed with it. Audio quality is very good, as you'd expect from WMA (which in tests I've done, is better sounding that either MP3 or AAC), and the selection of albums is broad enough to cater for most tastes: any service that has both the Best of Vardis and just about every album Ministry ever made is going to appeal to me.
So will I be ponying up the the £9.99 per month at the end of the trial period? Bare in mind that I'm a Mac user half the time, and there's no Mac version of the service, and that I use an iPod, which doesn't support WMA so I can't - legally - download any music to it. On the basis of that, you'd think it wouldn't be attractive: but in fact, I'll probably subscribe. I view streamed services as a different market from paid-for ones where you own the music. Streaming gives me a chance to listen to music before I buy it, or to listen to things that I'd never bother putting on my iPod, or that I'd listen to so rarely that I don't care about owning it. If you think of Napster as a £9.99 per month "super radio" that you have complete control over, it starts to make sense.
Of course, when the iTunes Music Store comes along - and despite the lock-in to iPod - I'll probably be buying music from there as well. But I still envisage that most of my music will be bought in CD format and ripped to MP3, so that I can listen to it on any device.

When will Steve Jobs get a blog?

Mary Jo Foley reports on a Bill Gates speech to 100 top CEOs. Gates' point: that blogging, RSS and other collaborative technologies that expose companies directly to their customers bring real productivity benefits.

Gates understands something that Steve Jobs shows no evidence of seeing: that with blogging and RSS, companies can communicate directly to their customers in ways through their employees without losing any competitive advantage. Where Microsoft is positively encouraging its employees to talk to customers via blogs - and to listen to them through the comments - it appears to remain a fireable offence to even identify yourself as an Apple employee in a public forum.

Some posters have previously mentioned that this is for secrecy reasons: Apple doesn't want its employees talking about their work in public, as it might lead people to guess what future products it's coming out with. But Apple has NEVER had a problem with people talking in a public forum about their work: they had a problem with leaks to the press, which weren't done in a public space. It's obvious to anyone with a brain that you shouldn't blog about unannounced future products. That applies even to me: I don't mention anything that I'm working on for a magazine, as I know that editors often like to keep quiet what they're up to. It's no big deal for someone to decide that something is something they shouldn't be talking about: as long, of course, as you believe that your employees are smart.

The fact that Microsoft appears to have worked out that blogging is a great way of communicating with customers while Apple bans it is fairly typical of the differing corporate cultures, which - ironically enough - are the mirror images of their public image. Everyone I've known from Microsoft has consistently talked about the level of autonomy that individual business units and employees get. Of course, that doesn't mean you can do what you like (and there are still drones a-plenty in there) but it does mean that not every message has to be filtered through the top. Apple, on the other hand, is a top-down organisation in terms of its marketing: I've heard (although I've never been able to confirm this) that Jobs approves every press release. I've known marketing managers who had to get the final pricing of the product they were supposed to be preparing marketing plans for from the Apple Online Store, because no one in Cupertino would trust them with the information before the release of the product. And I've known senior marketing people who have been deliberately given false information by Cupertino, in order to check if they were "loyal" or not (ironically, they didn't tell any journalists about the information, but they sure as hell told them how angry they felt about being deceived like that).

I once heard a quote from Steve Jobs which sums this up: "Apple speaks with one voice - mine". So, Steve, if that's the case - and you're going to prevent your employees from speaking and listening to your customers - isn't it time you started blogging yourself?

And he screams for his Mac: A tale of Windows woe

Today we have a tale of woe, concerning what you'd think might be the easiest of things: getting your contacts up to date on more than one machine. I've been using Midentity for a while, and it's a very likeable service: the basic idea is simple, a kind of peer-to-peer application for keeping your contacts up to date, with some neat things like SMS'ing directly from your machine as well. You change your details on your machine, and anyone that's linked to you through Midentity automatically gets an update - without any server in the middle to post any privacy problems. It's well worth a look.

Then in the spirit of adventure, I decided to take a look at Plaxo, a similar sort of service that works through a Web page, allowing people to update their contact details on the Plaxo site and automatically distribute it to others. So I installed that.

Now, to complicate matters, I don't actually use Outlook for time management: I use TabletPlanner, which is a very very nice application which lets you do lots and lots of cool ink stuff and works really nicely. Crucially, it also synchronises with Outlook, and has always worked perfectly.

At first, everything went perfectly. Then, after a while, I synched with TabletPlanner, and all hell broke loose. Something in TabletPlanner's sync got messed up, which lead to an odd bug: I would delete a contact, only for it to reappear when I restarted Outlook. Twice. With the name missing, but all the other details intact. I'd delete them, and the two deleted contacts would reappear. Twice. Each. Within 20 mins I went from 380 contacts to 720. And I know I'm not that popular.

Eventually I worked out that it was actually Midentity that was putting the contacts back. Why? No idea. I suspect that TabletPlanner introduced some oddity into the Outlook database that Midentity couldn't handle, leading to it performing incorrectly. But either way, after the number of crashes I got, it introduced more problems into Outlook, which is a notoriously tempramental piece of software and hates anything messing with its files.

So now I have the grind of deleting Outlook, reinstalling it, reinstalling the plug ins, and pulling all the contacts down from a backup. And the irony of it is that this is one of those things that ridiculously simple to do on a Mac: simply use iSync with a .Mac account and you can keep the contacts and calendars for multiple machines in sync easily and reliably. Why isn't Apple screaming about this? With more and more individuals having two machines, it's a key thing to do - and on Windows, it's a pain in the posterior.

Of course, Microsoft is working on a grand synchronisation plan, having realised finally that it's actually important. But here's an example of Apple being far, far ahead, and yet not making the most of this advantage.

Next QuarkXPress to use Mono

One piece of news that slipped under a lot of people's radar: the next version of QuarkXPress will use Mono on the Mac, and presumably .Net on Windows.

PlayFair and the iPod lock-in

The PlayFair software, which strips out the FairPlay DRM from songs bought from the iTunes Music Store, has been kicked off its server again, after being evicted from SourceForge earlier this month. Leander Kahney thinks this is a good thing - and points at at post by Wincent Colaiuta in which Wincent pops a few of the bubbles blown around PlayFair by its advocates.

Except that some of the points are somewhat at odds with what most people would reasonably think they're getting from iTunes Music Store, given the public pronouncements of Steve Jobs. For example, in response to the idea that you own the music and can play it whevever you want, Wincent says:

"You didn't buy it. You don't own it. You entered into a license agreement with Apple permitting you to download the music file and use it under the terms dictated by the license and enforced by the FairPlay DRM technology. You yourself agreed to these terms. You yourself agreed that you wouldn't try to break the DRM. If you don't like the terms, then do your online music shopping elsewhere."

Well, that's not what Jobs says. As he put it in an interview with Rolling Stone:

"We said: These [music subscription] services that are out there now are going to fail. Music Net's gonna fail, Press Play's gonna fail. Here's why: People don't want to buy their music as a subscription. They bought 45's; then they bought LP's; then they bought cassettes; then they bought 8-tracks; then they bought CD's. They're going to want to buy downloads. People want to own their music. You don't want to rent your music -- and then, one day, if you stop paying, all your music goes away."

It's a point Jobs made again in a press conference to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the iTunes Music Store: "People want to own their music, not rent it."

Now that would lead me - and any other consumer - to think that you own the music you buy from the iTunes Store, and that means you have the same fair use rights as you have with a CD or a vinyl LP. What's worth noting about PlayFair - renamed Hymn and still available here if you want it - is that while it strips out the DRM, it leaves the Apple ID associated with your iTunes account in the file: if you're stupid enough to put it on a peer-to-peer service, Apple could simply prosecute you. As the author of the software puts it:

I don't believe the majority of the people who use my program will use it so that they can share their files on Kazaa, especially since their apple ID is embedded in the files. Anyway, in order to use my program, you had to pay for music on the iTunes Music Store to begin with.

Amen to that. So here we have Apple attempting to suppress a tool which allows people who've bought music from the iTunes store to use the music on any platform, while fingerprinting each file so it could be traced to them, making it effectively useless for piracy. Why would Apple do that? After all, you're still buying the music.

One possible reason is that Apple is trying to keep on the good side of the RIAA. But, again, given that Hymn makes it easy for the RIAA to trace pirates, that reason doesn't really hold water. There's always the possibility that someone would take the extra step and work out how to strip out the ID tag, but then surely it should be the program that does the stripping, rather than Hymn, that Apple goes after.

The answer becomes obvious if you consider the model of business that Apple is using in its music business. Apple makes little to no money on selling music from the iTunes Store: it's not a loss-maker, but neither is it a cash cow. Where Apple makes its money is from the iPod - and the iPod is the only device you can play music bought at the iTunes Store on. Hymn/PlayFair removes that link between iPod and iTMS, making it possible to buy music on the store while using it on a competing player. That lack of tie-in is what makes Hymn a threat to Apple.