When the fat lady sings for the mobile web, is it the end of the Opera Mini?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Android, Cloud, Web browser, Mobile on
We’ve been helping a friend get to grips with mobile browsing on his aging BlackBerry. It’s one that’s old enough that it doesn’t get the new browser that arrived with the Bold, so he’d been using Opera Mini to at least get something that approached a decent browsing experience. Even so he was hitting what I think of as the mobile browsing wall: the mobile web is not the web we get on our desktops.
Our friend uses a lot of online forums, and Opera Mini was starting to show its limitations. Most of the social aspects of the sites were lost as he was redirected to mobile versions of the sites - with drastically cut down user interfaces. The in-cloud reformatting the Opera Mini was doing wasn’t helping, either…
Opera recently sent us a whole pile of statistics about how people are using their Mini browser. The numbers make interesting reading, with impressive numbers of people using the service to view huge numbers of web pages. But if I was running Opera I would be getting very worried about my mobile business indeed…
“Nokia phones continue to be the handsets of preference for Opera Mini users, with Sony Ericsson claiming second place. BlackBerry and Samsung phones are the preference in the United States.”
Nokia is in the process of rolling out a WebKit-based browser, which should bring iPhone class browsing to much of its Symbian platform. Sony Ericsson is enroute to Android, and while its Java-based feature phone platform works well for Opera, new Java-based platforms like Bolt are rolling out that give users access to a much more powerful in-cloud browser, with support for Flash and for Silverlight. BlackBerry will get a significant browser upgrade in the autumn with the release of BlackBerry OS 5.0, and our Windows Mobile in-cloud browser of choice SkyFire is currently testing its own BlackBerry version. Samsung’s own browser is also in the middle of upgrading.
The foundations of the Opera Mini business model are crumbling. What was a story of broken browsers and unsatisfying online experiences is changing into one where high end devices like the iPhone are changing the way users think about mobile browsing - and mobile device manufacturers are having to follow. Opera needs to make a jump that takes its desktop rendering engine into the cloud, rather than the current service.
It’ll be interesting to see if Opera Mini can evolve to deal with the demands of its users.
Oh, and our friend?
He’s now using the beta of Bolt and finding the mobile web a much more desktop-like place.
Rated: 20% (1 votes)
Loading ...
Windows 7 upgrades – will they or won’t they?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Windows 7, operating systems, Licensing, Web browser, Microsoft on
And do you even want them to? Yes, Microsoft is planning to offer Windows 7 with IE built in in Europe so users don’t have to jump through hoops to get a browser (and avoiding millions of CDs that go straight into landfill after one installation is a good thing). It keeps the EU happy by popping up a ‘ballot screen’ that lets you pick from a list of browsers - here’s the sample screen Microsoft is showing off.
Incidentally, Opera - who started this whole debacle by complaining to the EU - still isn’t happy. Microsoft says the ballot screen will “in a horizontal line and in an unbiased way display icons of and basic identifying information on the Web browsers.” Opera says that’s still biased, because the IE logo is just so recognisable. Newsflash: the reason Opera isn’t the most popular browser isn’t the logo (and making it harder for people who want IE because they’re comfortable with it to find it isn’t the best way to grow your market share).
And “Yes,” confirms a Microsoft spokesperson, “the proposals will also cover boxed copies of Windows sold in Europe”. Does that mean that we don’t have to have an ‘upgrade’ version of Windows that only does a clean install? After all, the reason for the E version is to offer a browser choice to people who have previously had a built-in IE; surely the upgrade install process could offer the same ballot screen and not force you to vape your system in the name of choice? (At least if you’ve got Vista; XP users are stuck with a clean install because it’s too different). Ah, says the spokesperson. “Everything’s just at proposal stage, so specifics of how the upgrade process would work would just be speculation right now.”
And actually, with the relatively low numbers of people who have Vista compared to Windows XP, the current plan of E versions Windows 7 that mean you can buy the full version of Windows for the cost of an upgrade may be a better bargain. Yes, you lose the convenience of an in-place upgrade but a clean install will often give you better performance - and with a full version there are no restrictions on installing on another machine and you don’t have to faff around providing proof that you have a previous version of Windows first. That’s probably worth the time it takes to back up your settings and re-install your apps.
-Mary
Not yet rated
Loading ...
Windows 7 goes RTM - but when can you get it?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Windows 7, operating systems, Beta, Futures, Microsoft on
Microsoft announced RTM today (Wednesday 22nd), but that doesn’t mean you can get the code right now. Depending on how you get Windows, you’ll see it anytime from August to October. Courtesy of the Windows Team blog, here are the dates. All dates are for the initial English version; other languages will follow by the end of October at the latest.
When Who
Right now Gullible downloaders risking malware to get a leaked version on Russian sites that appears to have significant problems.
now to 2 days after RTM PC manufacturers
’shortly’ after RTM IT pros who want the evaluation version from Springboard
August 6th software and hardware developers who use Microsoft Connect and MSDN
TechNet and MSDN subscribers
August 7th Volume Licence customers with SA
August 16th Microsoft Partner Program Gold/Certified Members who use the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) Portal
August 23rd Microsoft Action Pack Subscribers
September 1st Volume licence customers without SA
October 22nd Consumers buying a boxed copy or a new PC
Not yet rated
Loading ...
Change ends: Microsoft opening up to open source, Google opening up to DoJ?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Business, Licensing, linux, Adobe, Microsoft, Google, Apple on
Have Google and Microsoft swapped places? Are Microsoft and Adobe going to race each other to open source key technologies as Google gets bogged down by antitrust investigations over Google Books? Not really – but Google is in line for some antitrust grief.
Welcome as the open source announcements this week are, don’t read the wrong things into them. This isn’t religion.
Adobe doesn’t want to open source Flash; it’s a huge business for them. They want phone manufacturers to pay to put Flash on mobile; but Apple said no and Mozilla and Google said ‘video on HTML 5, in Android and Fennec’. Adobe’s response was the Open Screen Project, starting with getting the chip vendors to support Flash and offering a ‘pre-integrated’ version of the Flash run-time. Taking it down to the chip level isn’t just about the multimedia support; it means that none of the hardware guys will want to miss out on a feature their competitors are going to have.
Adobe is swapping licence revenues on phones for ubiquity on phones; as Adobe’s Zeke Koch puts it “now you can have it for free - in return you have to make it open.” That’s open as in ‘Adobe gets to check it’ rather than open as in source. And it means users don’t go off Flash because of shoddy implementation, Flash stays in demand and Adobe can make money on the Flash development tools – and get in a few digs at anyone who doesn’t support Flash as not being open.
And while releasing Linux drivers under the GPL is a good thing both for Hyper-V and anyone who is fed up with the religious debates over operating systems and licence philosophies and Microsoft deserves credit for working through the problems, it’s possible Microsoft didn’t originally plan to release its drivers under the GPL. Supporting Linux in enlightened mode on Hyper-V is crucial; without it VMware can boast better support for more server OS’s. But according to a blogger who calls himself Linux Network Plumber, in the first version “the driver had both open-source components which were under GPL, and statically linked to several binary parts. The GPL does not permit mixing of closed and open source parts, so this was an obvious violation of the license.”
And actually, the most credit here goes to the anonymous Plumber who, rather than “creating noise” (and you can imagine the noise if Microsoft had been accused of violating the GPL) contacted Novell to find the right person to approach at Microsoft. Result: less of a news story, more of an actual result, grown-up behaviour all round.
As for Google, the EU has a hearing on Google’s acquisition on publishing rights scheduled for September 7th (expect the estate of George Orwell to have an opinion); the House Judiciary Committee might meet sooner than that. Google brushes both off as ‘fact finding exercises’ but Christine Varney predicts “a repeat of Microsoft”. As the attorney who got Netscape’s case all the way to the anti-trust settlement, she should know.
-Mary
Not yet rated
Loading ...
Is your information management as good as Amazon?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Amazon’s withdrawal of ebooks by George Orwell seems positively Orwellian; ‘owners’ of the ebooks on Kindle woke up last week to discover that they should have read the small print. All they had was a licence for the ebooks and when it turned out that the publisher didn’t have the rights to sell that licence to Amazon to sell on to customers , Amazon revoked the licences and issued automatic refunds. A seamless if disturbing experience that proves that one cheap ebook reader from Elonex does not a mass market make. But if you needed to update a company price list or redact internal guidelines, could you do it with anything approaching the same efficiency?
A rich permissions-based licence system (as opposed to a simple encrypted, here’s one key and don’t lose it DRM system) gives content owners a lot of control. A writer could give away a free chapter with a discount code, give away a 3-month ready copy that you had to pay to keep or have their backlist turn free for a month every year or whatever incentive model they wanted to try out – and they could change it if it didn’t work. Can you even block last month’s price list from being sent out by accident?
The Windows Rights Management service in Windows Server is a start, coupled with Office and SharePoint (one of the reasons Google Docs isn’t as scary to Microsoft as the free Office 2010 Web apps might make you think). Keep pricelists in a SharePoint library set to expire after 30 days and people will have to go to a lot more trouble (extracting and resaving the information) to use out of date prices than to get current ones. Sure people can photograph the screen or read the document out to an accomplice over the phone. At that point you’re dealing with malicious behaviour rather than the simple desire to do your job that is responsible for the majority of information leaks and technology isn’t the right solution. But if you’re doing modern security and reperimeterisation (the perimeter isn’t gone, it’s just around the data itself), you need to think about information in terms of rights and licences, not bits and bytes and firewalls.
-Mary
Not yet rated
Loading ...
Don’t like the ribbon? You will
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Applications, Office, Microsoft on
You have to get used to the Office 2010 ribbon - and now it’s a lot easier to get used to.
The statistics from Office 2007 users show that the ribbon does what it was designed to do in terms of exposing more of the features that are in the application (because 80% of new feature requests were for features that are already in Office, just not where people were finding them). More people use more of the features in Office 2007 than ever before, says Chris Bryant from the Office team.
Not everyone likes the ribbon and for some people, Microsoft learned the lesson of how multiple interface options increase support costs rather too well with Office 2007 and Windows 7. Having gone to the effort of developing a logical user interface that’s more productive than the old muddle, Microsoft didn’t allow users to stay with old and inferior if they wanted the features that went with the new and improved interface. Quite where users who want new versions of Office without the ribbon think the new features would go is a mystery - and personally speaking, I embraced the ribbon, even though not all of the commands were quite where I thought they should be, on the grounds that I’d been nagging Microsoft for years to tidy up the old Office interface and find logical places for the extra commands and features they’d been cramming in to the old dialogs like pushing socks into a drawer you haven’t been able to close for months.
I know where every feature in the old Office interface was and sometimes I have to look in two tabs to find a specific command so you might expect me to complain about it - but I don’t (much). In Office 2003 the ribbon isn’t perfect but it is still a huge improvement and if a feature is in the wrong place on the ribbon I put it on the quick access toolbar.
And Office 2010 addresses almost every complaint about the ribbon (although if you’re one of the people who hate the ribbon because you have laboriously learned the obscure location of commands that are now clearly and logically arranged in the tabs, then your issue is more about forgiving Microsoft for past sins, abandoning the time you invested and stepping out of your comfort zone - and Microsoft can’t do much about that). If you don’t like features you never use taking up screen space, you can remove commands from tabs - or entire tabs. If your issue was that, say, proofing tools don’t belong under Review with the tools for working with comments on someone else’s document, then you can either move them to the tab where you think they fit better or create a whole new tab and put those commands in what you think is a logical group. And if you dislike the ribbon because you have to switch between tabs (which is no more work that opening menus and dialog boxes, but may feel like more work because you’re comparing it to clicking buttons that are right there in front of you on the ribbon), you can make your own ‘home’ tab for each application that has the tools you use at the full size of the ribbon rather than crammed onto the quick access toolbar. You can completely customise the ribbon and make something that increases productivity generally increase your own productivity too.
Mary
Not yet rated
Loading ...
Chrome OS: what happens when “always connected”, isn’t?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in operating systems, Cloud, Web browser, Wireless, Mobile, Google, Microsoft on
We recently met up with Jon Lilly, Mozilla’s CEO. During our conversation he talked about the philosophical difference between Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. Chrome, he suggested was “A window into the web”, marked by its lack of toolbars and its integration of Google’s web services.
This morning we woke up to the news that Chrome the browser is also the front end to Chrome the OS, a thin Linux kernel with a browser intended for netbooks. It’s not Android, but it shares some key concepts - and will run on Intel and ARM processors. There’s still a lot missing from what Google’s said, and much remains to be revealed when Chrome OS finally arrives on hardware - but part of me is wondering if Google has fallen into what I think of as “The Gilder Trap”.
George Gilder was sort of famous in the early days of the Internet. He wrote a couple of popular economics textbooks, and one of his suggestions was that wired and wireless would swap places. Data would flow through the airwaves, into pocket devices and all manner of mobile computing hardware. After all, in the air bandwidth was essentially free. Sadly he missed a trick or two. Bandwidth may be free, but the hardware needed to support it certainly wasn’t - and the back haul from base stations to the wider network needs to be hefty. Copper and fibre still remain the most bandwidth efficient way of delivering that last mile, and wireless data is really only just starting to get significant traction - and is already starting to creak at the seams, especially in busy city centres, as well as in the country. Even so, people still believe his 1990s words…
You may think the 50:1 contention ratio for your home DSL connection is high, but that’s nothing compared to the connectivity at a central London cellular base station. Your 3G data card may well be connected at 3 or even 7Mbps, but there’s often not more than a 1Mbps SDSL connection from the base station to the net - and you’re sharing that with everyone else. Trying to get email over a 3G dongle can be trial, especially at peak hours.
Now imagine having to do that with a million other people using Chrome OS-powered netbooks.
Sure, many of them will be hooked up to “free” WiFi connections, but don’t expect them to remain free for long when the costs of running the services increase with a sudden massive leap in demand. Cloud services are bandwidth hungry, pushing expensive UI functionality down to local devices. Google’s Chrome OS’s reliance on Google’s online services (even with Gears’ offline web functionality) will fundamentally change the economics of offering wireless services - and not in a good way for the network operators.
Gilder, like many of the proponents of free services, was right to say that the digital world makes many things essentially free to the end user. However, again like many of today’s freevangelists, he was wrong to ignore the costs of infrastructure. Yes, 0.01p is almost zero, but when a hundred million people are using that low cost service, that fraction of a penny quickly adds up into sizable amounts of pounds.
That’s why there’s minimal cellular data service in huge parts of the world, and why travelling on the Tube cuts you off. It’s just too expensive.
We won’t be “always connected” as much as we want to be - especially in the current economic climate. Capital and operating expenses are being slashed across the board, and even giants like Vodafone are looking to buy other networks just to get access to their base stations. Rolling out the network needed for Chrome OS to be everything that Google wants will take time, and will also take truckloads of money.
Always on and always connected are wonderful ideals - but that’s all they are. It took me a long time to realise this, even as I spent years consulting on massive wireless Internet projects. Chrome OS needs free wireless bandwidth, and that’s not something that’s going to happen for a long time - and a massive spike in demand is something that could push it even further away.
I’d like to be wrong. I like Chrome the browser, I like the Chrome OS concept - and I’m especially fond of many of the HTML 5 features that Google is building into its latest applications and services. The web needs an upgrade, and Google is driving that upgrade.
The web isn’t the only thing that needs an upgrade - wireless data networks (as much as Telstra and the like talk about HSPA+ deployments) need a massive amount of work. However I’ve come to know the restrictions of the mobile networks, and the economic realities facing their operators. Without substantial infusions of cash, that upgrade is a long long way off.
It’s a problem that affects us all - not just Google and Chrome OS. We’re being sold a hyper-connected online world where everything’s available 24 hours a day, wherever we are - what we used to call “Martini computing”: any time, any place. What we’re actually getting is wireless networks like AT&T and O2 which are struggling to cope with the minimal demands of iPhone users. How are they going to cope with bandwidth hungry Chrome OS users running their entire lives through online services?
Google could just have fallen into an old, old hype trap.
Google is a company that’s built itself on a basis of abundance - cheap CPU, cheap memory, cheap disk. Mobile operators manage a world of scarcity, and work hard to make sure that things remain scarce and expensive. They’re two diametrically opposed views - and Chrome OS is where they’re going to collide.
The real war isn’t Google vs Microsoft. It’s going to be Google vs the mobile operators. I’m just not sure that Google is going to win.
–Simon
Rated: 82.86% (7 votes)
Loading ...
Mozilla CEO says it’s too soon for the next Google
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Business, Futures, Microsoft on
No-one has made a business out of Web 2.0 - not in the traditional sense of business success, the IPO. Nearly $30 billion has gone into Web 2.0 startups since 2001; why haven’t we seen a business success there? Mozilla CEO John Lilly thinks we’re looking for the wrong things and asking the wrong questions about what it means for a business to succeed today.
“I would say this is one of the questions of our time,” he told us; “like what does it mean to have a career, what does it mean to do meaningful work?” He’d count Mozilla as a success; they might be fish out of water” at big-name events like Google IO and All Things Digital (where he says “we were the only non profit that went up on stage”) but that’s not the important thing. “For Mozilla, we made the decisions be a public benefit because we thought the Web was too important to leave just to purely commercial interests. We created what’s effectively a hybrid company; we compete in the market but we have this non profit mission and I think we’re pretty successful by any measure other than our revenues. ”
Mozilla Labs is probably unique; Lilly doesn’t expect exactly the same model to work for any other company, but there are plenty of opportunities, even in this financial climate. “I believe there will be more companies that start on less money and require less cash flow to be successful. I believe you’ll see those. Craigslist is one of them.” Anyone else? Yes, he says. “OpenTable went up and did IPO. Craigslist is a going concern; they’re dominant and being incredibly influential. Facebook is minting money. In China you’ve got Tencent QQ. You’ve got any number of companies that have changed the world and are making reasonable cash flow.”
But what about the big success that all the venture capitalists were hoping for, with those $30 billion. That’s a coded question, he says, and what thinks it really means is “Will we see another Google or Microsoft? Well, we hadn’t seen another Microsoft till we saw Google. Microsoft emerged and got giant in the mid 80s; Google emerged and got giant in the mid 2000s. Before that, I’m not sure what you look at before Microsoft, maybe Data General or maybe DEC but it’s probably in the 60s or the 50s. These are once-a-generation companies. Asking ‘where the hell is the next Google, why hasn’t it shown up yet?’, I think, is premature.”
-Mary
Rated: 20% (1 votes)
Loading ...
Windows 7 gets a (sort of) 70 program limit
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Windows 7, Microsoft, Uncategorized on
I found an interesting Windows 7 bug today.
The other day I took my workhorse Windows Vista desktop machine over to Windows 7. It was a move that was somewhat overdue - but one that would finally put my desktop on the same level as my regular HP tablet. My usual way of working is to drive Vista and 7 through the search box - so it took me a couple of days to realise that the All Programs section of the Start Menu was blank.
All the shortcuts were there, just nothing showing.
Odd, I thought.
Annoying, I thought.
Ooops, I thought.
Search was still working, but I was trying to remember the name of a program for a friend who needed an unarchiver for a Windows PC he was setting up - and of course search doesn’t work if you don’t know what you’re looking for…
Hmmm.
Google showed that I wasn’t the first person affected by the problem, but most of the solutions people were suggesting (a) didn’t work and (b) could have left me reinstalling Windows again. It’s never a good idea to wholesale copy the registry from one PC to another.
Finally I found this blog post.
It turns out that there’s a bug in Windows 7 upgrade installs, where it limits the number of items in the All Users program menu to 70. While you can transfer items to a hierarchical directory structure (which will then let you see all your items as you open folders in the start menu), you could also do what I did - clear out the cruft of an untold number of installs of the odd downloaded utility or 30.
The result of the uninstallfest?
I can see all my applications again - and I’ve got a cleaner, less crufty PC.
It’s a fairly innocuous bug as bugs go, but it’s still annoying. Hopefully it’ll be fixed by the time Microsoft releases Windows 7 - but as we in the EU (unless we’re signed up to SA) won’t be able to do upgrade installs, we won’t know…
Not yet rated
Loading ...
Tag cloud
Archives
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
Most commented posts
- Java's SSVAGENT.EXE: training the monkey
128 comments
- When Windows 7 upgrades won’t hibernate (the solution)
- Do you need IPv6 for DirectAccess? Yes and No
- Chrome OS: what happens when "always connected", isn't?
- The ColdFusion Renaissance
- Make Adobe Acrobat Pro deactivate
- Is there a showstopper bug in Windows 7 CHKDSK?
- There’s a reason smartphones are locked down
- At sixes and Windows 7s
- The LHC isn
Highest Rated Blog Posts
- Songs of distant satellites (100%)
- Nobody knows what Web 2.0 really is (100%)
- Log in and lock in (100%)
- Top tips for speeding up Vista (100%)
- Mommy, why is there a home server in the office? (100%)
- Employees are our most valuable asset (snigger) (100%)
- Locking down IT or blocking creativity (100%)
- Consumer BlackBerrys are good for business (100%)
- HD Trek (100%)
- Join the (beta) community (100%)
