The original iPad was an interesting device, and was great for consuming media. Tech pundits pointed this out numerous times and pondered whether Apple was intentionally trying to stifle ‘creation’ by popularising such a device. I can see now the rationale behind the functionality of the first generation iPad. They wanted to create, for starters, a media consumption device, which they nailed. Once that was done, they could focus on adding other functionality, instead of doing both of those at the same time and failing.

It’s an incremental update, much like the updates to the iPod touch and iPhone line. What started as a phone with web browsing and music ended up being the mainstream platform for mobile computing. I’m writing this on my iPod touch and publishing it without the need of a computer, which is pretty awesome for what was 2 years ago an mp3 player. In a way posting from my iPod touch is better than posting from my computer; Safari managed to crash on me while I was writing in WordPress more than once. PlainText has an auto-save feature that automatically syncs what I’m writing to my Dropbox folder.

Once again Apple has successfully pushed computing in the right direction, towards innovation. For all it’s failures in App Store revenue policy, I still think Apple is doing technology and us a big favour.

It saddens me greatly to hear that for the first time in more than a decade, Stargate will not be on air anymore. Although every series had its strong points and faults, it always managed to capture my attention unlike any other show on television. In my opinion, the Stargate franchise is up there with Star Trek, Firefly, Star Wars. It’s in a very exclusive club in the mind of most fans of science fiction. Although all good things must come to an end, I don’t believe it’s time to give up on Stargate.

With Stargate Universe, the writers and producers made a leap of faith, and brought something new and fresh to the storytelling. I believe this is no small feat to accomplish. The fact is that Stargate Universe put the characters in the foreground, bringing up morality, values into the mix, not just great space adventure. It certainly makes for a more interesting journey.

There will always be a push back from people used to the old approach. Insert Galileo Galilei’s struggle here. This is not to condemn the criticism as pointless, as there were a few instances where the focus shifted too heavily to human drama. Every side has reasonable reasons to support their stance.

If anything, the shift in the way we consume media is at fault for the seemingly low ratings. Its audience tends to be at the cutting edge of technology trends, and advertisers are lagging in realising the potential of online distribution methods. Sticking with this series might be a leap of faith from an economic standpoint, but one that will surely pay off in the long-run. Giving up on a great show like SGU might make sense in the short-term, but how can you afford to give up on an audience that’s been there, more or less growing with Stargate, for more than 10 years?

An audience that’s still there, a community.

I use a mid-2009 unibody MacBook Pro 13-inch, which has a 2.5Ghz Core 2 Duo, 250GB hard drive, 4GB of RAM, an LED-backlit keyboard and display, with around 5 hours of battery life doing actual work. I use this machine to write for MakeUseOf and Tux Geek, for school assignments, for listening to music and watching movies.

I need to be able to review applications that run on various Linux distributions (mainly Ubuntu) as well as Windows, so having enough horsepower to run another instance of an OS turns out to be very useful. There’s another advantage to using a virtual machine instead of a dual or triple boot setup – I can easily review operating systems, no need to mess with partitions, boot-loaders and corrupted data. I also very much enjoy taking photos and editing them in Adobe’s Lightroom.

I also need Photoshop on a daily basis for cropping, adjusting and compressing screenshots for articles. And while I do all this, I like to have the possibility of listening to music and having a web browser run at a decent speed. So you see, I do actually benefit from having that extra horsepower. Even if I don’t use it to the max today, it’s future-proof. Or at least that’s what I tell myself.

• For writing short pieces, mostly under 1000 words, I seldom use anything other than TextMate. TextMate is also the prima-ballerina when it comes to writing any kind of code – CSS, C++ or Python – mainly because of its excellent markup capabilities.
• However, I write longer essays and ebooks in Microsoft Word 2008 because of the extended formatting functionality.
• Apple’s Keynote is a must have for anyone who wants to create beautiful presentations in a snap.
• For web browsing I strongly recommend Google Chrome which works incredibly well on the Mac despite its current beta status. It’s fast, minimal and can be themed.
• Adium is by far your best option if you’re looking for a multi-protocol, versatile instant messaging client. It supports all the major protocols and services you could possibly want. Of course, if you’re looking for VOiP, you’ll want to download Skype.
• Backup?! Who needs backup? Apparently I do. I’ve lost data so many times due to partition errors and various misguided experiments that I lost count. I use Wuala to back up my photos and documents to the cloud for free. I also have Mozy running and doing the same thing. In the unlikely case something happens to the data-center of one of the services, I’m in the clear.
• Parallels 4 works like a charm with the latest versions of Ubuntu and Vista, and that’s just what I need. It’s a bit expensive but you do get the best performance available.

• Staying true to the faith, I manage my own web-server and thus need a capable FTP client. Cyberduck is free, open source and absolutely great.
• Caffeine keeps the computer from going to sleep when you don’t want it to. I wind up using this little app more than I thought at first. It’s free and comes in handy.
• ShoveBox, another permanent resident in the Finder bar, is a fantastic little app that can store snippets of information you need to remember but don’t need right now. I use it to store little bits of text and bookmarks when researching articles. It can also store photos and files.

• Transmission is the best bit torrent client on the Mac and a trusty companion when you visit the pirate bays, with its integrated IP blacklist feature, great UI and performance.
• The Unarchiver handles all your RAR and ZIP needs without the overhead of Stuffit Expander. Double-click to de-archive, that’s all it does.
• TuneUp Companion fixes your music tags and automatically adds cover art.
• I also use Perian (handles 99% of audio/video codecs), Twitterrific, Last.fm and Appfresh (updates your software). iStat Pro monitors various system indicators within the Dashboard. For my limited scheduling needs, iCal suffices. And lastly, NTFS 3G ensures I can mount, swap and write to NTFS volumes.

I also have a 1st generation iPod touch which I absolutely love, and a Microsoft Arc notebook mouse. While its design is so beautiful it’s uncharacteristic of Microsoft, it sometimes disconnects for no apparent reason. Battery life is somewhere around 2 months and it is very accurate even on glossy surfaces. It works on the Mac without drivers – unlike Apple’s own Magic Mouse. The only major downside is the wireless dongle – which blocks one USB port.

For articles larger than 1500+ words I usually pull out the low-end Microsoft ergonomic keyboard from the closet. Nothing fancy, but it is a lot more comfortable than the integrated keyboard.

I’d like to give a warm plug to MinimalMac, SimpleDesktops, and Prettify, sites which will guide you on the path of minimal geek nirvana.

I would first look at the general look and feel of the blog. Is it logically organised? Are the topics clearly delineated? Is the design eye and user friendly? Does it cater to people that are potential buyers? I would also check for grammar, spelling and clarity of language. Is the content original? Does the blog use a regular posting schedule? Is the reader base stable, or does it spike for just a few of the articles?

I’d like to think that Tux Geek scores well on all points except maybe at the  regular post schedule. I personally consider that writing an interesting article is more important than sticking to a rigid schedule.

Is popularity a measure of value? I’ve had articles that had many thousands of pageviews and articles with mere hundreds. The ones that made it to sites like Digg and Reddit aren’t necessarily what I consider to be the best. They aren’t necessarily the most well written either. I wish I could say it’s one way or the other, but I really can’t make up my mind.

As a boutique ad agency, Fusion Ads has to hand pick sites for its closed publishing network. Although small in comparison to other more conventional ad agencies, they feature some great sites like note&point. Chris Bowler, ‘the man behind the curtain’ shares some of his insight into the matter of perceived value:

We receive about ten times as many requests as we could ever accept. The idea of a boutique ad agency means that we simply cannot grow for the sake of growth. We would lose the things that give us our value: quality and relevancy. Add too many sites and suddenly you have to earn a lot more revenue. In order to do that, you have to start accepting advertisers that don’t meet your standards.

And then you are on the slippery slope to where your users/readers view you like all the other advertisers — in a poor light.

A big part of accepting a site is whether or not we’ve heard of it. We can make a much quicker decision if we’re familiar with author (and therefore some of the items you mention in your article: post regularity, quality of writing, subject matter). If we are not familiar with the site, than we take a quick look around.

And to be perfectly honest, we can often disregard a site in 20-30 seconds. If the overall look and feel of the site is not aesthetically pleasing or does not speak “quality”, than it’s safe to say that the overall quality of the body of work is poor. But if the design looks clean and the content looks like it fits with our audience, we’ll dig deeper.

The last thing we look for is sphere of influence. Seeing as our model is more cost-per-influence (stealing this term from the Deck) rather than cost per click, it makes sense that we look for industry leaders. How many twitter followers does this person have? Who are their followers? Are they respected in the design/development community?

If we can answer some of these questions, then the decision is easier.

Overall, because we get such a high volume of requests, the answer is “no, but thanks” 90% of the time. But I tell people this: the best way to get an invitation to be on our network is to produce great work. You’ll get noticed if you focus on that.

— Chris Bowler, Fusion Ads @ 05/01/2010

I can say that the review model is sound from my point of view, and I hope we learn something from it. Ultimately, it’s the reader who measures value. What’s the most important thing for you?

Today’s article is a bit technical and abstract but nonetheless interesting. Read our interview with David Zhao from Zumo Drive.

S.N.: What prompted you to start ZumoDrive?

D.Z.: We started ZumoDrive because online storage wasn’t usable. Most of the storage services consist of a web page with a upload button. We saw the vision where online storage would be seamless integrated with the operating system so that all of the applications can connect to the cloud.

S.N.: What are the primary goals for your product in terms of user interaction?

Our primary goal is to provide transparent access to the cloud to the users. We want to free people from thinking about backup, syncing files across different machines, and running out of space on their devices. They should be able to install ZumoDrive and be able to take full benefit of the cloud right away.

S.N.: Could you give us some info on the back end tech/logistics/team of running ZumoDrive?

D.Z.: We’ve built our technology from the ground up. One of the key piece of it is a virtual file system that integrates directly with the OS. It handles caching, random access, and direct streaming from the cloud. The server side is built on top of Ruby and other open source technologies. We use Amazon as the backend cloud.

S.N.: The proportion of free/paid accounts?

D.Z.: We have a very healthy paying to free ratio.

S.N.: What effect did Techcrunch have on the service in terms of new accounts and user retention afterwards?

D.Z.: TechCrunch was great, it introduced ZumoDrive to a huge number of people. While I can’t disclose numbers, I can say that retention ratio for the service is very good.

S.N.: Plans you could share for future developments of the service?

D.Z.: Better web interface, better performance on the client, Linux, and more mobile devices soon.

S.N.: Who do you think are your primary competitors in this space? What’s Zumo’s advantage in your opinion?

D.Z.: There are a few players in the space, namely Dropbox and SugarSync. One of our main advantages is the ability to provide access to files without having to first download them onto the device. This creates a unique value proposition for devices that don’t have a lot of local storage. We also have a stronger focus around media and have unique capabilities for dealing with these type of files.

S.N.: Is the PaaS concept going to affect ZumoDrive or is it already implemented?

D.Z.: Yes, it definitely will be. It’s of great interest to us. More information about ZumoDrive is available here.

Aardvark communicates with you through an instant messenger bot that is  currently compatible with Google Talk, AIM and MSN/Live! Chat. The bot approaches you in a very conversational style, using full sentences, thanking you and replying with ‘no problem’ when you decline to answer a question. It’s cute, in a Terminator-style way.

Aardvark let’s you customize your profile by adding tags, like technology or programming, and then sends you only questions that match those tags. This way, questions are routed to persons that are best suited to answer them.

Instead of posting your question on a page like Yahoo! Answers does, Aardvark checks to see if people in your network of friends have know-how in the subject you’re inquiring about. If it doesn’t find anyone, it goes on and searches for the same tag on the whole Aardvark database of users looking for people that are currently online. When it finds a person, it pops up a new IM windows with the respective question.

The user can choose to answer, pass or just ignore the question by typing ‘Busy’. If you’d like to make Aardvark leave you alone for a while, just type in ‘Away’.

If you’re not satisfied with the first answer,you can choose to resubmit the question, or if you don’t need answers anymore, cancel the search.

All the conversations are kept for later reference in the History tab on your site – and each question has its unique URL.

Aardvark, because it makes use of your network of friends and targets questions to knowledgeable people, gets absolutely fantastic answers, the best I’ve seen in a free service.

I’ve got 19 invites to give away, so if you want one, just leave a comment saying what’s your favorite Linux OS.

Google already has a social network, called Orkut, since October 2006, which is pretty big in Brazil but not so much elsewhere. This article is about Google Profiles, an entirely different service,  that duplicates some of the functionality of Orkut.

Turns out, that it’s indeed similar to LinkedIn. It allows you to add current and past work positions, skills, a short introduction, education information, links to your other profiles, as well as photos from Google Picasa or Flickr.

It also allows you to add detailed contact information and control privacy settings.

Its too early too tell at the moment, but if Google decides to go forward with creating a social network, it’s going to be huge.

Google is the start page for the whole world at the moment, and they have millions of registered users – not to mention the people they could bring in through a campaign on the Google.com .

Google is also known to create extremely simple, easy to use interfaces; this could allow more mainstream users to sign up for social networking which could mean that this service could gain the largest user base  – effectively becoming the phone book of the world.

The introduction on Google Profiles says:

The more information you provide, the easier it will be for friends to find you.

While the help web page omits such references:

A Google profile is simply how you present yourself on Google products to other Google users. It allows you to control how you appear on Google and tell others a bit more about who you are. With a Google profile, you can easily share your web content on one central location. You can include, for example, links to your blog, online photos, and other profiles such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and more. You have control over what others see. Your profile won’t display any private information unless you’ve explicitly added it. –Google Help

If you think about it, Google Profiles is the obvious development, as it would integrate with other Google services like Chat, Reader, Gmail, Sites, etc. to provide a common base.

Although there’s no beta logo, Google Profiles is far from complete if it wants to compete with the likes of Facebook or LinkedIn. At the moment, it doesn’t have a way of adding friends. This can’t be very hard to add since this functionality already exists in Google Reader.

This is a consistent upgrade to the previous version of Google Profiles that was very limited and was covered by Google Operating System. This was also observed by Labnol, but without any implications toward social networking. Techcrunch said:

Google looks to be essentially creating a de-facto social network profile page, without having an actual social network around it. Apparently, Google, and all its services, are the social network.

Do you think Google will finish Google Profiles and create a full-fledged  social network? What do you think are the implications of this happening?

Let’s take a logical approach. For starters, let’s talk about usefulness. It’s hard to say if Twitter is actually useful. In theory, everyone should connect with their close group of friends that share common interests, and maybe add a couple of celebrities. In this case, Twitter would let you stay on top of your real friends activity, easily communicate information and plans. How much does knowing what your friends are doing matter? I guess it depends from person to person. Does this have real value for you? I, personally, couldn’t care less that Joe is out having a picnic.

I would, however, care about an interesting article on my area of interest, a new web app or a linux hack. And to get that kind of information, I don’t necessarily need to add my real life friends – a total stranger could do that. So, you see, theory and real life don’t always match. Twitter is really useful when other people, who share your interests, post information that you want.

Maybe my approach was too cynical, but I do think this is why many people are using Twitter. We were all looking at Twitter the wrong way; It’s not about connecting with people you know, it’s about connecting with people who share your interests.

What would make Twitter even popular than it is now? An engine that could assess your interests and recommend you people based on that. Because people who use Twitter for a purpose, not just passing the time, would find it even more useful. It could become the ‘de facto’ way to share information – without censorship, instantly, to a targeted audience of people who care about what you’re saying.

I could count my real life friends on Twitter with the fingers on one hand. I follow 69 people; Journalists, bloggers, geeks and fellow writers from MakeUseOf. The stream of information is manageable and usually contains real value. It also allows me to get in touch with some of the most influential writers out there with just an ‘@’ sign.

I do admit to following Leo Laporte, the podcasting mogul and a couple of other tech celebrities like Kevin Rose. They rarely post actual useful stuff, but as a journalist (or ‘wanna-be’ as they would say), I fell that it’s important to know what the ‘thought leaders’ are saying.

I’m apparently breaking one of the Twitter Laws. I don’t automatically follow every one who follows me; Some people may be offended, some will most likely remove me after a week. But I’d rather get real information in a manageable size, than having a thousand followers saying absolutely nothing, just clogging up the screen, making the real important information hard to find.

We’re 500 words in, and we successfully established why and how Twitter is useful. There are still a few important questions to be answered, and we’ll discuss the importance of the design, word of mouth promotion and how Twitter exploits one of humans’ basic emotions, in a future article.

I want to hear from you the answer to this article’s main question: Is Twitter useful? What does it do for you?

Reviewing all sorts of web 2.0 start-ups and more recently, cloud operating systems I’ve realized what Microsoft is so scared about. Microsoft is scared about losing marketshare; losing Outlook customers to webmail services such as GMail or Yahoo! Mail, losing Word and Excel customers to Zoho and Google Docs. The trend is more than obvious.

What is less obvious to end-users at this time is the existence of cloud operating systems, of which EyeOS, an open source solution, is the most advanced. EyeOS provides enough functionality to sustain a work environment, with productivity applications, integrated compatibility with Office documents and easy import/export of files. It doesn’t support Photoshop yet, but in a couple of years it might support Gimp, an open-source alternative to Photoshop.

The emergence of the ‘cloud computer’ metaphor urged, in my opinion, the creation of MinWin:

Its most recent and most well-known variation as a minimalistic, self-contained set of Windows components.

MinWin is Microsoft’s response to small Linux OS’s – and is significantly crippled compared to DamnSmallLinux, assuming that what I got from several sources was correct. Microsoft might just kill itself if this statement from Eric Traut is correct:

MinWin would not be offered as a stand-alone product, but would instead be used as the basis for future operating system releases.

As much as I like writing really long sentences, a diagram will better explain what I think will become a standard in the future. First of all, we have a low-powered netbook; this netbook comes preloaded with a very small operating system; this operating system loads the drivers for the hardware, such as networking and graphics and starts Mozilla Prism. Inside Prism will appear the login screen for Eye OS. You’d never know the difference by just looking at the computer.

Once connected to EyeOS, all the magic happens on the server side: checking email, viewing a movie or adding an appointment, all the processes take place on the server. The only requirement of this model is a decent internet connection; we already have some great wireless options at the moment: 3G, wireless 802.11n and soon WiMax.

End-users demand portability. Portability of document formats, data, music, pictures, their computer. You could have, and this is what is amazing, the power of a server machine in something as small as a MacBook Air. Why wouldn’t you want that extra power in your photo editing program?

Thin client computing is not new by far; first available in the late 1980’s, it was confined to corporate environments because of the lack of long range, high-speed connectivity. It had and still has some important benefits. For example, there are 3 computers in your household; when you’re working at your computer you can’t normally use the other two computers’ resources – but the server client architecture let’s you dynamically adjust performance; if you’re the only one connected you’ll get the power of 3 computers!

It will become increasingly hard to justify a product like Windows, as more and more advanced applications are coded and are available for free on EyeOS.

Like always with these kind of predictions, I could be right, or terribly wrong; while the benefits of this architecture are undeniable, nobody except John C. Dvorak, can be totally sure about this. But I do hope this will happen. Your comments are always welcomed and I really look forward to hearing what you think about cloud computing; how do you think it will improve your computing experience and your predictions.

I took lots of interesting CS classes in college, but I wanted to learn about real software, like how a word processor stores text. I knew you couldn’t just store text in one big array, because typing text at the beginning of a document would be very slow as it shifted down all of subsequent characters in the memory buffer. I wanted to see production code and learn the craft of programming, and I felt MS would be the best place to do it.

Microsoft’s reputation has taken a massive hit over these last 15 years, but at the time, Microsoft impressed me because of their reputation for smart people and an expansive view of the power of the PC. They had people working on every aspect of software: kernels, languages, word processors, databases, and researchers doing fancy things — and they were just getting going!

In 1993, I got a job as a summer intern in the FoxPro group. It took me a day of hard interviews, where I had to write little routines to do bit manipulation, and so forth, and be generally grilled by experienced programmers, but I passed and got hired as an intern programmer in FoxPro. At the end of the summer, I asked if I could stay on and not go back to school, and they offered me a full-time job, which I accepted.

I worked for my first two years of MS in that team. I got paid, while I was learning more about programming that I could possibly have learned in my last year of school. Getting paid to learn is not a bad thing!

I absorbed a lot from my team, and from people working on other teams. I remember spending late nights browsing through the source code to NT, porting our software to the MIPS processor, reading the interesting discussions on the internal perf alias, etc.

After that, I left and worked for five years on text engines, two years in Sweden on mobility and server software, where I also learned about C# and .Net, which was a major epiphany for me, and then returned to Redmond to work on the watch and accompanying data network, Spot.

All were interesting and my experience gave me a flavor of many aspects of software technology, from embedded to internationalization to databases and services.

Leaving the Empire

One day it just hit me — I should quit. There were no big reasons, only a lot of little ones. I had just launched v1 of the client and server side of Spot, and while it contained sophisticated technologies, I didn’t really believe it would take off in the marketplace. I had gained lots of knowledge yet only understood the Microsoft world. I had made some good money, but I had no time to enjoy it. Though my boss was happy with me, I was losing motivation to just keep doing the same thing I had been doing for over a decade. I looked around the company and saw a lot of ancient codebases and unprofitable ventures.
A few weeks after leaving, I decided just to try Linux. I had played with Firefox and OpenOffice for a few hours while at the company, and even wrote an e-mail to our legal team telling them that my friend Alex Mogilevsky’s patented work on background spell-checking had been stolen by OpenOffice. (I no longer believe in software patents, and discuss them in the book.) But I had never used those apps beyond my brief testing, and had never run Linux.

I have forgotten more about Windows than most people will ever bother to learn, so I was extremely scared about setting Linux up, because I didn’t want this little experiment to screw up my main environment. Every little decision was big for me: do I dual boot or should I be safe and get another machine? Which distro? Will it corrupt my hard drive or should I get another hard drive? I got some tips and assurance from a former co-worker who had installed Fedora, and with that help I proceeded with the installation.

What is this Linux thing, anyway?

While I came to not be all that thrilled with Fedora Core 3 itself, I was floored merely by the installation process.

It contained a graphical installer that ran all the way to completion, it resized my NTFS partition, setup dual boot, and actually did boot, and let me surf the Web. I didn’t have a clue what to do next, but the mere fact that this all worked told me more about the potential of Linux than anything I had read so far.

Before I had started this, I told myself that I would force myself to boot into Linux to try it out even though it meant losing my place, waiting for the reboot, and not being nearly as comfortable. But several months later — and by this time I had started using Ubuntu Breezy Badger — I was using Linux full-time.

I ran into various stumbling blocks along the way: I had to learn about the xorg.conf file, dig into superuser and Linux file permissions, learn about SSH, and compile Intel wireless drivers. But each stumbling block gave me a worthy challenge, and also newfound knowledge, and the fact that I was able to succeed every time — with the help of Google and the community — gave me courage to continue.

And what impressed me was the power of it all. Linux came with tons of applications: OpenOffice, GIMP, Audacity, Nvu, Eclipse, Apache, MySQL, and thousands more for me to discover. I could spend years in the command line and never learn all of the tools and capabilities. Installing Apache took just a few seconds, and gave me access to a vast world of PHP. Installing WordPress took me 15 minutes the first time, but I knew when I became better at things, I could do it in one.

I came to understand that beyond its poorly debugged device drivers, a Windows computer is a sad joke. By mid-2005, I was in love with computers again!

However, I had also started to realize that while Linux had lots of amazing capabilities, it was not on a trajectory to kill Windows very fast. I wrote a post on my blog on October 2005, listing a bunch of bugs I had found and filed, but I also started to notice that the bugs weren’t getting fixed. How the Borg came to be.

As a side note, while Microsoft doesn’t have a great reputation right now, especially because of Vista and malware, there is a lot of clever code and brilliant engineers inside the company. I was fortunate to learn with a bunch of great people, in particular groups that fostered cultures of very high quality software. (In the Office team, we looked down on the MSN team.) Don’t blame me for Vista driver bugs!

When Microsoft got serious about Internet Explorer, Netscape’s small team of kids just out of college didn’t have a chance. MS took some of their top engineers in text engines, networking, forms, internationalization, performance, object models, and other areas, and built a large, world-class team. Microsoft’s institutional knowledge of so many areas of software could be applied to any effort.
People forget all that, but this is why the reviewers consistently would say that Windows was better than OS/2, Microsoft Word was easier to use WordPerfect, IE was faster than Netscape, Excel was richer than Lotus 1-2-3 3, ad infinitum. PC Magazine wrote in 1997: “Microsoft’s Java environment was the fastest and most compatible on our tests.” Microsoft had built a better runtime than Sun, the creator of the language! In that case, it is because they had leveraged the experience of their compiler team to pioneer JIT compilers for Java.

Many think Microsoft won all these battles merely because they somehow magically became a monopoly, but the atriums in the buildings at Microsoft in the early 1990′s had shelves overflowing with awards from PC Magazine and many other independent reviewers. Microsoft succeeded in all these areas because they used their success with DOS to hire an enormous army of smart programmers working in all areas of software, which could be applied to new areas, and passed on to new employees, like me! And every time I switched groups, I’d take the knowledge and best practices I had learned in my previous groups.

I am not an apologist for Microsoft, and I think they are in deep trouble today, but the idea that Microsoft came to utterly dominate the computer industry and lay waste to countless competitors was not merely chance. Microsoft is not famous because they are famous.

The last time Bill got lucky was when he signed the deal with IBM for DOS. Everything else was hard work. What did Dave Cutler, Ander Hejlsberg, and countless other geniuses, recruited from all over the world, whose name you will never know, do all day? And why do companies like Google staff some of their top technical positions with ex-Microsofties like Adam Bosworth and Mark Lucovsky? The key to understanding Microsoft’s success is to understand the vast amount of institutional knowledge of all aspects of computing. And their tremendous focus. Many of the bugs that languish in Ubuntu for release after release would never happen at Microsoft!

Microsoft’s biggest problem today is they are overwhelmed with the complexity of their software and hampered by their ancient code and old tools.

Windows, Office, SQL Server, and many other codebases are 20 years old and written in C and C++. (Likewise, the greatest threat to the free software movement is Microsoft’s efforts in C# and .Net. I talk a lot about tools in my book.) The point of all of this here is to make clear that in order to defeat Microsoft it is important to understand that it will require hard work and attention to detail. To beat Microsoft, Linux has to be significantly better.

Anyway, as I got more comfortable with free software, I saw all of these bugs and became frantic. What was the problem? Where was everybody? Why was Ubuntu shipping with 10,000 (now 40,000) active bugs? Why was Debian’s big team not helping Ubuntu on them, and why were they even split off in the first place? It seemed to Ubuntu, the bug list was a potentially useful management tool, not the single most important thing their entire organization could possibly be focused on.

Linux World Domination not fait acompli yet

I started writing several blog entries describing my thoughts on the state of Linux and what steps it needed to do to take over, like this one (about Linux’s bugs), this one (about challenges for Debian), and this one (about challenges for Ubuntu). I eventually decided to put all of my thoughts together into a book, which I have just finished.

It took me quite a while to get all of this together. I went to many conferences, talked to hundreds of programmers, read lots of source code, magazines and books, visited many websites, did a little hacking, and otherwise gathered a ton of data. (In fact, I’m still working on the Web chapter! If you read it, feel free to send me your thoughts.)

Free software could have become the dominant model years or decades ago. Some wonder whether free software and proprietary software will live in some indefinite détente. I think it is the sort of détente that exists between a farmer and his turkey — until Thanksgiving. Let’s eat! A 21st century renaissance beckons, with free software at the center of it.

The book isn’t really about Microsoft as much as it is about the Microsoft proprietary development model that has pervaded or even infected computing. Microsoft could even be a part of this future, a topic I take up in the book’s Afterword. Although Microsoft as a free software company would be something we would not recognize today, and one reader suggested this Microsoft as a free software company was more like science fiction than the book’s section on driverless cars.

Past is Prolog

Well, this is all the prologue. The book discusses itself why the Linux development model is superior, why World Domination is not a bad thing, why it is simply a matter of time and effort, why our current tools situation is a crisis, why Java should be killed, how we can have cars the drive us around, why we will build a space elevator and enter a 21^st century Renaissance, biotechnology patents, and many other things I discovered as important or interesting along the way. Anyone who reads the book will understand why Microsoft is toast, and I’m looking forward to the reaction when copies eventually seep into Redmond. (I also trash Sun, Apple, Google, Dell, Intel, IBM, Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc.)

You can get the book, or download an excerpt, here: After the Software Wars. We thank Keith Curtis for this post.

How long did the development take?

Boxee is based on the open source XBMC project which has been in development since 2002.  Boxee specifically has been in development for a little over a year and a half.

What is the number 1 priority for Boxee at the moment?

Our current focus is on our Windows release and enabling Netflix on the AppleTV.

How do you plan on monetizing this service?

While the software is free, Boxee’s revenue sources will be:

• Revenue sharing with premium content providers like Neflix, Hulu, Amazon and others.
• Premium features (applications and plug-ins) for the platform much like iPhone applications. These applications and plug-ins will be available in an Application Directory hosted by Boxee.
• Licensing fees from hardware manufacturers (set top box manufacturers) who would like to include boxee in their platform.

How did you come up with the idea for Boxee?

The idea fom Boxee came out of the original Xbox Media Player (later renamed to XBMC).   Avner bought a $,2000 Windows Media Center PC to run digital media in his living room.

After inviting a few friends to come over and check it out, a close friend, mentioned he could have done the same thing with his Xbox using XBMC.  The idea for Boxee was born and over the next few years as they became avid XBMC users and contributors to the XBMC community.

In 2007, they decided to take the XBMC code and build a platform that included content available on the Internet as well as social networking functionality on top of XBMC’s great feature-set.

How many people work on the development team?

There are 11  Boxee employees. Avner Ronen, the CEO, and Gidon Coussin, VP of Business Development, both work in NY.  The other 9 employees are based in Israel and are focused on development.

Editor’s note: Thanks to Andrew from StageTwoConsulting for getting us in touch with Boxee.  Photo courtesy of joepitkin.

Windows 7 mock-up from xazac.

Deconstructing the marketing

In the eve of PDC(Professional Developers Conference), a lot of people are starting to talk about Windows 7: features, release dates, and of course deciphering Steve Ballmer’s  comments.

It appears that Microsoft is taking the Apple approach – creating hype and expectations, columns on major publications and flame wars on forums.

They’re keeping the tech world on its toes, not a good thing to do if you don’t have something worthwhile coming out:

Customers are prepared to walk if you don’t deliver when you promise. So, in order to meet these demands, for the last 20 years or so, we’ve all been applying the mantra: “Under Promise & Over Deliver”.

Their current strategy would indicate that they’re going to launch something pretty impressive. Of course, if they don’t deliver (aka Vista), the first to be disappointed are the nerds and tech journalists, both with huge influence on the mainstream users.

They’re doing the same mistakes over and over again.

Windows 7: More than an operating system

Windows 7 is more than an operating system, its a 3-5 year strategy that affects billions of dollars of revenue, millions of people and companies around the world. It represents the lion share cut of Microsoft’s revenue.

Just imagine what would happen if people just stopped buying new versions of Windows. Profits would collapse and the huge costs of running such a big corporation would bring the balance to red fast.

Courtesy of ZDNET

In many ways this phenomenon has already started. A lot of people, myself included, are running the same copy of Windows XP they bought back in 2002, over 5 years ago.

And even with its huge marketing campaigns and deals with manufacturers  people downgrade to XP because it’s faster, less bloated (700MB CD – 4,7GB DVD) and less bling-bling style. Why would I want to run Photoshop slower? Or wait 2 minutes for the system to start up?

Features such as 3D rendering of the desktop are nice from a technological standpoint, but not very useful. This kind of feature-creep should be avoided for Windows 7 – and instead try to make it as lightweight as possible and let the users chose the features they want at installation.

Bottom line

People don’t care about Microsoft’s profits – if Windows 7 proves to be a flop, they will just stick with XP for a while longer. And, considering the tremendous efforts from both Apple and Canonical, it wouldn’t come as a surprise if more and more people bought Apple computers and PC’s with Linux preinstalled.

Microsoft is not going to go away soon – they sit on very large pile of cash – and in a worst case scenario they’ll become an IBM-type company.

While the demise of Windows may bring some smiles to the open source community and Steve Jobs, it will actually be a loss for the consumers: basic economics tell us that the more competition, the lower prices and better quality of the products.

Let’s hear it in the comments: What do you think about Windows 7 and the future of Microsoft? How would it affect you personally?