All Things

I just left a comment on Rex Hammock’s blog rexblog, where he questions whether Marc Andreessen is right to say the demise of the New York Times is inevitable.

It’s probably safe to assume the Times will end up quite different from what it’s been in the past, which very well may upset a lot of folks, but that’s not to say it’s a doomed enterprise. I see two key issues to their survival: how willing are they to embrace new technology (& kill off the old when necessary) and - as I’ve already suggested - will they aggressively look for ways to combat information overload?

Marc Andreessen’s blog is certainly one of the best, nevertheless I’m not so sure it’s wise to write off the NY Times. They appear to be one of the few old-media companies that really seems to get the first requirement, embracing new technology, especially in the time since they became an early adopter of RSS.

Since then, they’ve added some video, made their content free, and now become an investor in Automattic (purveyor of WordPress). Besides, they’ve got a great global brand.

I recall someone arguing about a decade ago that as technology improves, most all colleges (as with textbooks) will end up using lectures by just a few star professors from top schools, that the internet would effectively raise the value of the top “global” brands, while lowering the value of most local brands.

I’m not sure if this is correct, but if so, it might seem to likewise apply to top media outlets, provided they were aggressive about adopting new technologies to spread their content. At the same time, all media players need to be looking hard at how to better package/deliver/archive their content, so that users can access and recall it as efficiently as possible.

Otherwise, the entire media biz is going to have a hard time growing, as we rapidly reach a limit to how much more information we can absorb in this new attention economy.

Dana Blankenhorn has posted an interesting article discussing how open source software is being divvied up among top software companies (IBM, Google, Microsoft) in a way reminiscent of Japanese keiretsus. She argues that only these three seem to have the “size, scope and ambition” to play in this space, though Sun also continues to seek such a dominant position.

According to the article, in American usage “keiretsu” has become a term describing a much looser form of business association, with one large company and a number of smaller ones beholden to it in various ways. The Mozilla Foundation’s dependence on Google would be a good example, a relationship of substantial ties between independent entities.

Years ago, I was thinking open source might end up being its own “keiretsu”. Nevertheless, I guess it was inevitable that it would instead end up fragmented and mostly beholden to big companies. Blankenhorn cites the examples of IBM-Red Hat and Microsoft-Novell as other instances of such ties.

On the other hand, if these big companies do things right, open source software can advance and still end up producing a thriving ecosystem. IBM’s relationship with the Eclipse Foundation is a prime example.

It seems that key to the whole process is how a Big Co. views the software product lifecycle. If it accepts that functionality gradually will become commoditized, it will view open source as the likely end-point for most proprietary software. Such a strategy/outlook will result in the Big Co.’s typically releasing the source after some years/decades, with the intent of building still-proprietary software and services on top of it.

IBM did that with VisualAge (now Eclipse), and has also worked hard at promoting the open-source Linux operating system. On the other hand, Microsoft seems to want to milk its Windows operating system forever, which makes it hard to play well in the open-source world.

While it may seem wasteful, companies such as Apple have shown that a steady discarding of old technology can do a lot to promote innovation. I keep waiting for more companies to follow their example.

Evidence continues to mount that “creative destruction” is indeed a key process in a healthy economy. Peter Drucker argued that companies ought to continually make way for the new by killing off old products, rather than waiting for the market to do it for them. Henry Ford’s reluctance to part with the Model T, and its nearly destroying Ford in the process, is the classic case study on this.

With software, however, there’s a difference, since many software products are foundations for other systems (software or hardware), or integral to the use/retention of valuable data produced by them. For this reason, it’s not as simple a matter to remove a program from the market. Software may be used for many different purposes by different customers. Some may be able to switch quickly to new products, but others would incur great cost.

Consequently, it seems inevitable that users are eventually going to demand some kind of protection from software vendors - or else from government regulators - that a software product’s source code be made open source if the product is abandoned. At the least users would be protected, and possibly the product might see further development by others (WordPress, successor to b2, is in some respects an example of this).

More interesting, however, are the more state-of-the-art open-source projects such as Linux and Eclipse, that promise innovation and a product that is “built right” for the future in a platform-agnostic way. Knowing that a software product will be here to stay, because the source is available, seems to be such a strong draw that many of these best-of-breed projects have been able to attract top talent to contribute, often on a volunteer basis, as well as substantial support from Big Co.’s such as IBM.

For the software industry to thrive and not just reinvent the wheel, we need strong and viable foundations to build on. If these Big Co.’s are willing to kill off the revenue streams from their old software somewhat before it dries up, their code may well retain importance, or even grow in dominance as Eclipse has. This can offer a strong foundation both for services and for additional products higher up the stack.

Moreover, it will produce an overall healthier software industry ecosystem, since the underlying code will continue to be developed, increasing the value of it and everything higher up on the stack, due both to stability and to greater innovation.

Internet Duct Tape (formerly EngTech) has an interesting post about proper use of categories and tags in WordPress. Eric says:

“One of my first and longstanding complaints of WordPress is that it does not understand the fundamental difference between tagging and categorizing. Categorizing is like taking all of your socks and putting them into drawers based on colours. Tagging is like sewing a little label on your socks that says when you bought them, how to wash them, … Categories add organization and tags add semantic information. A category can be a tag, but if you use your tags as categories you’ll eventually have a right old mess.”

This is an interesting question because in my experience, there’s never just “one” right way of organizing or presenting information. To find an appropriate way to organize something, you must consider the use and the user.

The goal with tags, categories or whatever scheme is to organize the information in a way that you or another familiar user can find everything, while presenting it to a new user in a way which allows them to easily assess what all is there and then navigate through it to access what they’re particularly looking for. Consequently, I think it depends on the blog how many categories or tags are appropriate.

In my WordPress blogs, I use multiple categories with each post, so I guess that means I’m using them like tags, not true categories. This and my other Blogsome (WordPress) blog, RealCurrents, each have a few dozen categories, used like tags, but it’s not too hard to scan them all as they’re listed on the right side of the page.

My personal blog Light Side on Live Spaces is only allowed one category per post, but that’s OK for a simple blog like that, though I still find myself wanting to add a category every once in a while. If I had a lot of photos on that site, then I’d certainly want a good tagging system, however.

Closer to the other extreme is my aerospace blog (currently still on Xanga), in which I like to note all kinds of esoteric things and so have close to 200 tags,

http://www.xanga.com/AeroGo/tags

so folks can look up specific aircraft, certain famous individuals, manufacturers, etc. This tag cloud really functions more like an index.

For those who want to use categories more properly, as unique groupings, Eric’s post links to an interesting and fairly lengthy discussion by Lorelle VanFossen, Putting Some Thought Into Blog Categories and Tags. She says that

“In the simplest of terms, I think of categories as the table of contents for your blog, a kind of general outline that directs visitors to general topics that you blog about. Tags are more like the index page of a book, a list of key words people will use to search for specific terms.”

She also includes a helpful discussion of how limiting yourself to a small set of categories can help you focus and really think through the purpose for your blog. Nevertheless she notes that she ended up including one category as a sort of “catch-all”, giving it a vague name, “Web Wise”.

Regarding tag clouds, I’ve noticed several ways of presenting them on various sites, typically with the more popular tags in larger type. While that’s a good idea, many times the tags are organized in a rather unhelpful way. I even saw one site where they were in a spiral!

For a site like AeroGo, where it’s likely that the average user is not looking for one of the top 10 tags, it would be better if Xanga presented the tags not only alphabetically as currently, but also in orderly columns, as in a book’s index, though keeping the varying font sizes. This might be overdoing it for many sites, but it would be interesting to see an experiment on a big site like Flickr of several different tag cloud presentations and the resulting click-through rates.

Like Google’s simple but (truly) helpful index, I wonder if on a lot of sites an alphabetical, index-like tag cloud might produce better results, though a simple tag module added to a page wouldn’t have room for all that. In any event, as the “semantic web” becomes more of a reality, I suspect more detailed tagging systems will gain value and prominence, as they help users drill down to the specific information they’re looking for.

I wrote last fall about how Apple Needs Better Support for Mac Printer/Scanner Problems. Thankfully, it appears Apple may be aiming to invest more in printer functionality, as it has reportedly acquired the rights to CUPS, the Common Unix Printing System.

My previous post described how I’d continued to see occasional problems with printers on OS X, noting a particularly difficult problem I was having at that time with my HP 1320, that ended up taking up more than a day of my time and several weeks to get resolved. I still get fairly regular hits from Google searches for “hppostprocessing” error messages, so if that’s you, check out the comments to the previous post.

One of my main complaints involved the lack of diagnostics. While Mac OS X printing support through the Printer Setup Utility is fairly automatic, when there is a problem, there’s virtually no diagnostics to help you sort it out. I’d hope that improving such diagnostic support would be a priority for Apple.

Besides that, I’m still noticing various little quirks with printing on OS X (and am still running 10.4.8). Usually these aren’t showstoppers, but the system is doing something unexpected, which makes you wonder if there are lingering bugs. The bugs do occasionally bite, as they did the other day when everything kept printing with my 2 pages/page preset, regardless of what I entered in the print dialog (restarting resolved that).

As I wrote before, I hope Apple will put somebody in charge of this, say a “driver evangelist”, who will work with peripherals providers to iron problems out. The Ars Technica article does suggest that “The purchase could also be a good thing for CUPS, since Apple’s support for the project could lead to further improvements (if Apple chooses to release them) and to more pressure being placed on printer manufacturers.”

In any event, it’d be a lot more efficient for Apple and the peripherals folks to get together and iron things out, before millions of users have to scratch their heads - and then bang them against the keyboard in frustration.

I’ve been reading about the rekindled Microsoft/Yahoo talks; perhaps it’s a good sign. It just seems so obvious that Microsoft doesn’t yet understand the internet, and so inevitably can’t really take it seriously enough. It’s got a dozen years of half-hearted efforts under its belt and not much to show for it, other than the dominance of Internet Explorer, which continues to slowly lose share to Firefox.

A BBC report quotes one analyst, Matt Rosoff, as saying, "I do not understand what Yahoo would get out of the deal, including that there are people there who don’t want to work for Microsoft." Well, that really says it all!

Nowadays, there are a lot of people who are trying to get away from Microsoft. After 27 years of being their customer, and 23 years of using a Mac, I’ve learned to pick and choose their offerings, rather than just drink their kool-aid and swallow the whole enchilada. I don’t at all want them to go away, but it would be really nice if they would be honest with themselves, accept what their true strengths and weaknesses are, and stop trying to be all things to all people, in order to keep most all the pie to themselves. That strategy is just not working anymore, and after years of disappointments, the reality is starting to be generally acknowledged.

As I’ve noted before, I thought MSN Spaces (where I have my personal blog) was one of the better things they’ve done, but they’ve made it increasingly Windows-centric as the Live Spaces rollout has continued, which has made it clunkier and more difficult to use, at least for non-Windows/IE users. I don’t expect Microsoft to be Apple, but after all their years of vaunted usability testing, they still don’t get basic design principles.

Everyone knows that Toyota’s cars aren’t that stylish, but they’re well-made, and Toyota (as it has recently) will put the brakes on to ensure a consistently high-quality product. Microsoft isn’t going to have the style of Apple, but they need to develop some decent processes like Toyota, so they can produce a quality product that meets customers’ needs.

Quality is a long-view strategy. In the short run, Toyota sells a bit fewer cars because they last longer, but in the long run, they sell a lot more, and pretty soon even more than GM. Bill Gates once said that his favorite business book was Alfred Sloan’s My Years With General Motors, but the days when one company could dominate a global market and put out mediocre products, in a strategy of planned obsolescence, are long past.

At least Microsoft is reaching out to a company that has some insight. I’ve always thought Yahoo was a bit clunky itself, but they are innovative and do understand the potential of the internet. Maybe Microsoft is at last acknowledging that they don’t get it, and that their culture needs to change.

I suggest that they start by returning to a more inclusive strategy on their online offerings. Don’t automatically expect users to be running all Microsoft software (e.g. IE and Windows), and so don’t penalize users who are using some MS software, just because they aren’t using all Microsoft software! In an era of open source and global markets, all that strategy will do is ensure that eventually no one will be using any Microsoft software.

Microsoft has to accept that they can no longer expect to get the whole pie, except for the crumbs, and that they better be glad for whatever share than can get, without coercion. They still have a lot of talented people; if they revitalize their culture and get their processes right, they could still do really well, and I hope they manage to pull it off.

Back in March, I wrote a post entitled My Own Ten Peeves About the Mac. The last of the ten was the need for Apple to tackle printer/scanner/etc. driver issues more aggressively:

“10. Third-party driver issues. I know this, too, isn’t really Apple’s fault, but I’ve read of so many people having problems with scanners, multi-function devices, etc., that the plug-and-play capability of the Mac seems seriously threatened. I hope Apple will put somebody in charge of this, say a “driver evangelist” who will work with peripherals providers to iron problems out. I also wonder if the Intel transition will make this situation better or worse.”

In the eight months since I wrote that, I’ve continued to see problems with printers. I’ve recently upgraded my Mac to one running the newest OS X (10.4.8), and still haven’t managed to get my laser printer to work. It isn’t some odd-ball model either, but an HP 1320. I had to mess with it a fair amount as well on my last Mac, which ran 10.2.

The key point here is that chasing down driver problems is a huge waste of time. I’ve spent probably 12 or more hours on the latest case, over the course of a week, which is worse than usual, but not as much as you might think. Other problems have typically drained an afternoon or so of my time, maybe once a year in recent years, something which never used to happen with the Mac in times past.

What’s particularly frustrating is that in theory, it’s supposed to be very easy (pretty much automatic in many cases) to set up a printer on a Mac, using the Printer Setup Utility or Print Center (as it used to be called). Unfortunately, the diagnostics are extremely weak.

If you do run into a problem, there’s almost nothing to help you on the Mac itself. The latest problem apparently - this message only appears intermittently - involves some sort of stoppage of “hppostprocessing, status 2″. I’ve checked the Apple Discussions and other places on the net, tried perhaps a half dozen or more things, with no success so far.

I’m fairly technically inclined, though not a computer geek, and wonder what average Mac users do in this sort of situation. Even the technical types on the forums often claim to have spent many hours troubleshooting their printer problems.

If others have had similar experiences, I’d like to hear about them. This seems like a situation that is getting worse rather than better. It’s also made me very reluctant to take the plunge on a scanner, even though my wife has been bugging me to get one for some time. Scanners are fairly cheap now, but I really don’t want to get stuck troubleshooting another bunch of problems!

I just want it to work, without getting in my way, which is why I bought a Mac in the first place.

Owen Linzmayer got me thinking again about the Mac with two recent articles at informit.com, Ten Things I Hate About Mac OS X and Ten More Things I Hate About Mac OS X. Some of the items on his lists don’t really affect me. Nevertheless, as a Mac user from the beginning, you can be assured that I’ve had time to come up with a list of my own. Maybe it will be helpful to actually write it down here. I don’t know if Apple will find my list, but since Linzmayer is a Mac author I hope they will at least take his suggestions to heart.

I’m sure some will find fault with what I write here, but hey, this is my list, and after suffering through the valley in the 1990s I’ve got a right to my opinion. If there is a crazy part, it’s that I still sort of hope Apple will take us to the personal computing mountaintop! Well, here are at least ten of my top peeves with the Mac, mainly OS X:

1. OK, I’m going to cut right to the chase. Without a doubt, my Number One Pet Peeve is that after 22 years, Apple still hasn’t delivered on its vision for making the Mac easy to program. Originally, there was a whole group of components/aspects to the Mac revolution. These included the Mac itself (as an information appliance), an automated factory in Fremont, California, which was to crank them out inexpensively (so they could be sold to the masses), a capable serial network - AppleTalk - with many possibilities for expandibility (even though the initial hardware wasn’t expandable), and Macintosh Basic.

Macintosh Basic?? Yes, that long-lost but highly-touted language, rumored to have been sold to Microsoft to get it to renew the Apple II Basic license, was a key piece of the original vision. I’ve long wondered if Visual Basic has its roots in Mac Basic. I really don’t know, but did read once that it just kind of emerged in Microsoft, and was a surprise success for them. In all the years of press coverage on Microsoft’s alleged anti-competitive practices, I’ve never once seen Macintosh Basic mentioned. Since Microsoft is often criticized that it isn’t truly an innovator, it’s odd that they haven’t held up Visual Basic as an example of innovation.

Anyway, the vision for programming by the masses, a key part of the original Mac vision, didn’t die completely at Apple after Mac Basic disappeared. Bill Atkinson developed HyperCard, which was introduced in 1987 and was a huge success, probably the most popular thing Apple did between the Apple II and the iPod. Unfortunately, HyperCard languished, perhaps because Atkinson insisted it be given away for free. Eventually just the reader was given away, and the programming tool was priced around $100. It was obvious Apple management didn’t share the vision of programming for the masses, and HyperCard remained in limbo throughout the 1990s, until Steve Jobs pretty much killed it when Apple refused to carbonize it or let anyone else do it either (now that Apple is switching to Intel and Classic is being abandoned, HyperCard won’t run at all on the new hardware).

Around 1990, Dave Winer created a scripting language, Frontier, for the Mac. Apparently Frontier wasn’t visual or really all that simple (I don’t know what Winer’s vision for it was), but Apple management woke up long enough to scuttle Frontier by creating AppleScript, a supposedly easy-to-use scripting language for the Mac. Several years ago, after refusing to heed the pleas of HyperCard devotees, Jobs seemed to hold up AppleScript as an entry-level programming language for the Mac by creating AppleScript Studio.

This is just my bias, I suppose, but I’ve always been rather skeptical of AppleScript, and have never wanted to mess with it. Even Matt Neuberg, who wrote the book, has noted that “AppleScript is a curious language, to say the least. It’s a dinosaur, an almost unchanged survival of code written in 1993 to run on a slow computer with a mere speck of RAM. The language suffers from peculiarities of architecture and design, from a dearth of accurate documentation (which my book is intended to correct), and from the fact that all scriptable applications are utterly different from one another.”

Maybe AppleScript will somehow end up being a great language, but Apple still has AppleScript Studio hidden away from users, which hardly helps to make it a programming tool for the masses. On the other hand, with OS X 10.4 (Tiger) there is now Automator, a much more visible and simpler tool than Studio that some seem to like, so maybe this is progress. Nevertheless, I’m still waiting for Apple, as the vendor of choice for creative types, to exhibit a real devotion to the vision of programming by end users.

Well, moving right along …

2. Doesn’t run Windows apps. Need I say more? OK, I guess I ought to mention that now with Intel, perhaps a future version of Virtual PC (or just OS X?) might finally do this efficiently.

3. Wasted screen real estate. Screens are huge compared to the original Mac’s 512x342 monochrome display, yet as screens have grown, Apple seems to have wasted a lot of that space, with bigger icons, etc. It’s nice that you can have big icons and fonts, and some things are adjustable, but I wish Apple would put more thought into making the most of the screen, since it’s still a major limit to productivity.

4. Folder panes. This is related to #3. I don’t use Windows, but one of the things I notice is that folder panes, which are in my opinion a highly-productive interface, seem to be used more commonly, and the listings are smaller, so more can be seen at once. Entourage uses a folder pane, but I can never fit enough on the screen at once. When I was recently trying to decide between a new eMac or 17″ iMac, my choice was made once I realized the 17″ LCD (because of its different aspect ratio) actually would display less vertically. That would make the Entourage folder pane even less visible at once, and I can barely stand it as it is!

5. Drawers. This seems to have been Apple’s answer for a ubiquitous folder pane interface. When I first read about drawers, I thought I would love them, but as they’ve been implemented, I hate them, because they impact window positioning (see #6) and the listed items are too big (see #4). What would be better would be a reallocation of window real estate, rather than having to reposition to see the drawer, etc.

6. Sloppiness with window positioning. To be fair, this is mostly an application programming issue, but I wish Apple could find some way to get applications to always remember precisely how windows have been positioned and to return them when they are reopened. Dave Winer’s outlining program More, for example, offered a great deal of control over window positioning, which again is important in order to make the most of screen real estate. More also had a Resume file that would save the exact state of opened files, so when you restarted you were returned to just where you were. I know some programs have something like that, but it would be nice if Apple standardized it somehow.

With OS X, apps aren’t restarted as often, but I hate wasting time getting started on something, when the computer could easily do that for me. Besides, unlike Apple’s mostly visual types, I’m the kind of person who looks at the edge of things, so misaligned edges look messy and distracting to me. I know this will sound like a rather minor quibble to most folks, but to me it isn’t.

7. Small/clunky open/save dialogs. I agree with Linzmayer on this one. One of the most obvious things about using an old program such as More in Classic is the tiny size of the open/save dialog boxes. On the early Macs this was done both because the screen was small and also so if the program crashed you might be able to retrieve (by hand) some of what you just wrote (well, it worked for me a number of times). The new dialog boxes are a vast improvement, but as with window management, resizing them is an unnecessary recurring annoyance.

8. The spinning pizza/beachball. The pizza is cute for the first couple of times you see it, but it’s all downhill after that. One culprit behind this is Apple’s longstanding policy of not packing Macs with enough RAM (or even room to add enough RAM). This prompted the accusation that the Mac was underpowered and continues to feed that perception. The problem has persisted with the recent Mac Mini.

9. Inconsistent strategy for a low-end Mac. Here I’m not talking about Apple clones. That’s a separate debate and maybe Jobs was right on that one. In any case, Apple’s market share, and Apple’s user base, have both suffered tremendously over the years from Apple’s lack of commitment to having a competitive value-priced Mac in its product lineup. At times Apple has had a strong entry at the low end, such as the Mac Classic or the first-generation iMacs, and these have just about always sold well. At other times, there has been little or nothing for someone on a budget.

Right now we are unfortunately in the latter situation. To be fair, Apple is in a transition to Intel which is ostensibly going to lead to lower-cost hardware, but right now prices are going up. The Mac Mini was raised to $599, but this isn’t really the kind of computer that would appeal to a budget user. Its frame-rate benchmarks are pretty bad, so it wouldn’t appeal to kids, and it isn’t really suitable for a home office either.

I think the magic price point is somewhere around $649-699 for a full system. If Apple could hit that target with something that did well playing games, they could probably sell a ton of Macs (even the Mini sells for a lot more than this once you add in the memory, display, etc.). Even if they can’t reach it, a price void all the way to about $1000 is just too much. The iMac and eMac used to fill this void, but the iMac is now way above that range and the eMac has been discontinued.

This kind of thing would never happen in other industries. Can you imagine Honda discontinuing the Civic? As with the Mac, the Civic isn’t the cheapest small car, but in the same way Apple needs to stake a claim at the low end of its market and stick with it.

10. Third-party driver issues. I know this, too, isn’t really Apple’s fault, but I’ve read of so many people having problems with scanners, multi-function devices, etc., that the plug-and-play capability of the Mac seems seriously threatened. I hope Apple will put somebody in charge of this, say a “driver evangelist” who will work with peripherals providers to iron problems out. I also wonder if the Intel transition will make this situation better or worse.

Bonus Peeve: Yes, Owen, those eternally-bouncing dock items are downright irritating! Like the pizza, the physics of computer-screen motion is fascinating for a brief while, but when you’re deep in concentration enough is enough. At least I was fortunate to discover recently that Entourage has a preference to turn that off. Now I don’t get that bouncing icon every 10 minutes when my email comes in.

Someone ought to design a widget to shoot those bouncing dock items, and provide some needed comic relief. Well, maybe you could make it an arcade game and shoot them all!

Now that even MSN Spaces has a book, Share Your Story by Katherine Murray and Mike Torres (due out March 15th), you’d think there would be several good WordPress books available, but a search of Amazon yields next to nothing.

There is Building Online Communities With Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress, by Robert T. Douglass, Mike Little and Jared W. Smith, but its Amazon reviews were very uneven, and only a third of the book is about WordPress, anyway. So, is there a good, take-it-from-the-beginning WordPress book in the works anywhere?

Apparently I’m not the first to ask this question. Judging from the many comments to this post, about half the folks think it’s pointless, everything is available in the WordPress Codex and other online sources. On the other hand, a substantial fraction think a book would nevertheless be helpful, either because they like having a printed reference, or they want someone to organize all this information in a straightforward package. As for myself, I’d like a book for both reasons.

I can’t help notice that the Spaces book is being published by Microsoft Press. Microsoft has had its own publishing arm for a long time, at least since the mid ’80s, and it seems like their software has done pretty well. My point is that a book is traditionally a basic component of marketing any sophisticated software. Maybe that time is passing, but I’m not sure it’s past yet.

There was a database package, Omnis, that was developed initially for the Mac, and stayed in development for many years. At one point a few years ago I looked into it, but couldn’t get past the fact that after all those years, as far as I could tell it still didn’t have a single substantial book published about it. I just didn’t feel comfortable making an investment in such an important type of software like that.

WordPress seems to be growing in popularity anyway, but it still might help to have a book on it. Considering all the arcane programming topics that get written about, the lack of a book is surprising. I’m going to try to get what I need out of the Codex, which does seem well organized.

In recent years, for most regular folks the standard way of starting to learn (or evaluate) sophisticated software has been to find a book about it, maybe one of the proliferating Dummies or O’Reilly titles, or some other publisher’s, to help get yourself down the initial learning curve. If we’re going to move to online-only documentation, which may be OK, then we need to make up for the marketing shortfall by initiating an appropriate way to point newcomers to the proper starting point.

I suggest the WordPress software have some kind of built-in link to the Codex Main Page that clearly indicates to anyone that lands upon a WordPress blog where they should go to get started. Of course, folks could modify this default setup if they want, but if most every blog pointed uniformly to the correct starting point, then folks would get to the Codex even before they ever start wondering about a book.

In this case, online documentation might actually be preferable to a book, from a marketing perspective. But every little extra difficulty that a potential “customer” has to overcome is so costly to a marketing effort, and every point of confusion or uncertainty presents such a difficulty. Right now, even the WordPress Development Blog, as good as it is, doesn’t make this plain enough.

Geeks will think I am totally nit-picking about this, but considering how fast blogging is growing, and how much work has already been put into WordPress, it would be a shame for people to pass it over for a less capable solution. Blogsome isn’t worried about overstating the obvious, and puts an ad to their starting point twice on each blog page, both prominently on the side and at the bottom. The link should be a distinct one, saying something like, “Get started blogging with WordPress right here.” If we all added that to our WordPress blogs, I bet WordPress would grow even faster.

IBM is once again giving away some software; after donating its VisualAge tool to Eclipse and so many other products to greatly invigorate the open source movement, this isn’t so surprising. What’s more interesting is that these donations seem to be moving higher up the value chain, as IBM will reportedly begin giving away a Universal Database Express-C version of its high-end DB2 database that will run on up to two-chip systems.

It seems to me that a sign of a healthy software ecosystem is the gradual price decline of particular packages as they grow more complex. One example would be Microsoft’s bundling of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and various other packages into Office, which doesn’t cost nearly as much as the total prices of individual packages 15 years ago, especially after adjusting for inflation. Excel itself, when introduced on the Mac, had consolidated functions previously handled by Multiplan, Chart and some other programs.

One of the common signs that a particular software ecosystem is declining is that this trend of generosity on the part of the ISV reverses, and it starts to look for ways to increase unit revenues. This is one of the reasons why I suspect that much of Microsoft’s software business isn’t as healthy as it once was, as they have at least begun to make changes in their licensing/pricing that for some customers might be viewed as an effective price increase.

Some vendors, such as Computer Associates, seem to have done fairly well by buying up aging software and gleaning what they can from the remaining user base, many of whom may prefer to stay with what they have been using for quite a few years. Though potentially an opportunity for exploitation, if managed with restraint such a business can provide a valuable service, by keeping users from languishing without vendor support.

Nevertheless, in a healthy, growing software ecosystem the price of packages should normally decline, since the user base is growing (allowing development costs to be spread over more units) while development costs should be moderating as the product matures. Actually, while the first effect is often realized, for some reason (perhaps Parkinson’s Second Law - expenditures rise to meet income) the second is more difficult to achieve.

As sales of its software rises, a successful software vendor will typically add features while keeping steady or lowering the price. Though holding the line on costs, in the real world the size of programming staffs generally seems to balloon, which gradually works to reverse the virtuous cycle of generosity. This excessive growth in programming staff is a curious outcome which I suspect results from management’s desire to speed development in response to competition, despite Fred Brooks’ showing over thirty years ago, in his classic essay “The Mythical Man-Month“, that such an approach is generally counterproductive.

Peter Drucker frequently argued (e.g. Managing for Results, Ch. 9) that one of the biggest problems in business is vendors’ unwillingness to kill off their own aging products, thereby retarding innovation and eventually causing loss of markets to more innovative upstarts. I suspect a software ecosystem requires a modified form of systematic abandonment, where products gradually decline in price and eventually are given away, either as open source or as an inducement to attract new users who may upgrade a to a vendor’s more advanced offerings.

Vendors also ought to consider still selling at a lowered price older versions and upgrades of their software (at least as long as these are supported) since this might be a good approach to segmenting the market between higher-spending customers with newer hardware and budget-conscious buyers using older hardware (and might induce additional upgrades as the cost declined).

Of course, much of the business motivation for open source comes from recognition both of the need to continue stimulating a software ecosystem to attract new users (as many are attempting to do now with Java) and that much of the revenue opportunity comes from services and other add-ons, which seem also to be a fairly effective way to segment the market.

Every industry has its own unique economics. I remember a database seminar once in which a vendor rep described how he had worked with grocers, where the prices, discounts and other factors changed constantly. Airline economics, with which I’ve been fascinated for years, is another very difficult area.

Software, too, has its own sort of economics, driven by the vendors’ desire to smooth out the revenue stream (development is steady but revenues tend to bunch around releases), the extremely low unit marginal cost, and intense competition amidst constant technological change. I’m surprised there doesn’t seem to be more active discussion of the unique economics of software, as this might help to reconcile vendors and the open source community.

Software has been the “sick man of technology” for some years now, with disappointing advancement (despite incredible gains in hardware) and recurrent schedule slips. A better understanding of the underlying economics might go a long way in producing a newly healthy software industry.

One of the things I’ve thought about doing with All Things is adding a list of various things I want to learn about. Actually, it would have to be limited only to top priority things, since there’s always a million things that I’d like to learn about, if only I had the time.

Two things that would be near the top of such a list would be the X-Plane flight simulator, which I do have but rarely can find the time to use, and the Eclipse software development tools framework, which I keep deferring downloading and installing, waiting until I’m ready to start so I get the latest version, since it keeps getting better and better.

As the title indicates, this post is about Eclipse, not X-Plane, though my reasons for wanting to learn them share some similarities. Both packages take a broad view, with an architecture that is intentionally very extendible, allowing the toolset to be used in a lot of different ways. Both continue to rapidly improve, and both seem to already perhaps be the best toolset available.

While X-Plane is limited to flight simulation, it allows a lot of manipulation of aircraft, flight dynamics, etc., to where it’s becoming possible to do serious engineering with the package. Hopefully it will continue to grow in scope and capability.

With Eclipse, scope is perhaps the key word to use in describing it. As I understand it, its newly-redesigned plug-in architecture and general design make it suitable for use with most any language, potentially, and all kinds of add-on tools.

It’s starting to look like, outside the Microsoft .NET/Visual Studio ecosystem, that most all software development tools vendors are either moving to Eclipse or risking marginalization. Borland, long viewed as one of the best tool vendors, is now embracing Eclipse. Others such as Sun and JetBrains still seem to be holding out, but I wonder why.

I can’t help but think Eclipse might be the best opportunity to come along in software in a long time (and a potential threat to Microsoft). Rather than fighting, tools vendors should realize it’s what customers want. It’s certainly very interesting to me, the kind of person who needs more structure than the average programmer type, but doesn’t want to be limited by just a few choices. Now, if I can just find some time to learn Eclipse!

Software giant Microsoft is a subject I’ve wanted to write about for some time, but since it seems like everyone is quick to voice an opinion about them, usually either harsh criticism or fawning adoration, I’ve been reluctant to do so. Nevertheless, it does seem like we may be reaching a turning point in public perception of the company, so maybe this is a good time to contribute to the discussion.

What’s been lacking is a balanced view of Microsoft. People outside the tech industry often hold them up as a paragon of American innovation and a poster child of capitalism. Most folks inside the industry seem to scowl at the incredible naivete of such a perception of Microsoft, maintaining that it is actually an 800-pound gorilla fast-follower and a monopolist. While I tend to agree more with the second view, these arguments have become well-worn and not very useful.

My perspective is that of a long-term Microsoft customer, but non-Windows user. I’ve been watching Microsoft ever since I bought Level II Basic for my TRS-80 Model I in 1980. Way back then, I noticed there was a certain professionalism about that product, and the assembler software I bought soon after, that impressed me. It was certainly untypical for the time.

Because of that professionalism, I was not at all surprised Microsoft thrived in following years; in those early years it seemed they were succeeding from having a superior product. In the mid 80s, it seems to me their success started to stem as much from taking advantage of other companies’ missteps, which were many as these grew and often went out of control, typically by trying to do a major rewrite of their software that seemed to never ship.

Microsoft has always been adept at acquiring good software from the outside, and its purchase of the Excel package in the mid 80s was probably one of their best moves. If I remember correctly, it was offered on the Mac by late 1985, long before it took over the DOS market (Lotus never did well on the Mac), and I have used it ever since.

Having made the jump to Mac in Spring 1984, I am well aware of how Apple squandered its early advantage in operating systems. Today, however, the situation is very different. Apple is executing well and has a coherent, forward-looking strategy, whereas Microsoft seems rooted in the past, unable to move beyond its Windows franchise and embrace change from the outside world.

Peter Drucker has often commented on how companies need to kill off the past before they have to, in order to preserve their position in the market for the future. I can’t help but wonder if this is the point Microsoft has reached regarding Windows. Apple spent years trying to build a great operating system from the ground up and finally threw in the towel, bought NeXT and moved to Unix.

I wonder if Microsoft is really not doing that much better. Maybe they should embrace Linux or Unix or something rather than fight it. In any case, Windows is their past, not their future, and their recent enhanced emphasis on MSN as a platform is a long-overdue step away from Windows and toward the internet.

By making everything revolve around Windows, they are stifling product development. They need to gradually wean themselves off their Windows monopoly and put more resources into Office, which despite new competition could have a bright future, Visio, and many of their other productivity packages, as well as MSN and various internet opportunities.

Perhaps one of the greatest threats long-term to Microsoft is the Eclipse tools platform, which continues to rapidly gain momentum. If the theory holds that whoever attracts developers ultimately gets users, then Eclipse’s growth relative to Microsoft’s Visual Studio toolset could have a long-term impact.

In general, while Microsoft prides itself on the billions it spends each year on research and development, I suspect years from now it will be regarded as a case study on how not to do R&D investment. It’s not at all obvious that they have gotten much for their billions. For years they have been touting natural language and usability testing, for example, but there seems to be little to show for it in the first area and still a lot of frustrations at times in the second.

One concept Microsoft needs to embrace is the realization that usability ultimately revolves around proper interoperation with other vendor’s tools, both on the device and the web. Microsoft’s strategy of relying on lock-in at the expense (often deliberate, it would seem) of interoperability has worn out its usefulness as more and more innovation comes from outside the Windows platform. As technology and life in general continues to get more complex, user expectations for interop, security, and other types of stability will continue to increase.

Ultimately, what Microsoft needs to do is to grow up. Gates and Ballmer have long touted the need to be “paranoid” in order to survive in the tech industry. This may have worked when Microsoft was small and IBM was the giant, but now that Microsoft is dominant, the idea of a paranoid 800-pound gorilla doesn’t bode well for the industry as a whole or for the users.

Like a teenager, Microsoft shows much promise in an industry that is entering a new era of innovation, but it must mature and come to grips with its own limitations. It can’t be everything to everyone and must learn to coexist with other independent players who aren’t chained to Windows, such as Google and Adobe/Macromedia. Microsoft must conscientiously incorporate standards from the outside and adjust its business model to one that acknowledges users may want to use its products in a mixed environment with those of other vendors.

The pace of change in the software business is speeding up again and Microsoft will be left behind unless it embraces the change, rather than trying to control it.

Since my last post on note-taking software, I have run across another program, Curio, which claims to be “the ultimate brainstorming and document management environment”. While I’m not sold on all this yet, and haven’t yet checked Curio out, their assertions attempting to differentiate it from note-taking software brings up an interesting idea.

Zengobi, Curio’s developer, asserts on its web page that Curio’s free-form design allows you more freedom to put things wherever you want, so that your creativity is enhanced. This doesn’t seem like such a big deal to me, but it brings up an interesting controversy. Most design novices seem to think that a wide-ranging lack of constraint is what stimulates good design, but I strongly disagree. This is at root a philosophical issue - does greater freedom alone invigorate something, or not?

I would say that greater freedom does add life to something, to a point. But without some boundaries to constrain a design, the choices become so limitless that only internal limits of the designer will keep the design on track. A good example of this is what happened in the early years with the Mac when font choices exploded. Only those with a great deal of good taste managed to minimize font usage to the few that were really needed. Apple’s original Mac documentation was an early example of tasteful font usage.

So in other words, most people, even average creative people, need a considerable amount of constraints in order to produce quality designs, and even top designers will probably find limits helpful most of the time.

The point of all this is that in looking for software that helps me think, write, and plan other creative work, I’m generally not looking for some totally free-form approach (this may be where Microsoft is missing it with the Tablet PC). As I reflect more on this, it’s dawning on me that what I really need is an array of tools that all allow creative expression in differing ways but that can be integrated together (unified search, project management, templates, etc.).

It seems to me that most really creative designers have quite a range of tools at their disposal. Susan once worked for a successful industrial designer and he had all sorts of “toys” in his office. Probably the most creative person I’ve ever met, my friend Dave, always amazed me at the wide range of media in which he worked. Maybe the constraint that software should be trying to lift is that of being limited to just the several tools any single program is likely to implement well.

This makes me wonder if what would really fill the bill for idea software would be something like an Eclipse (programming) environment oriented toward creativity, rather than programming. Eclipse allows many plug-in tools to be used together while managing various projects.

The next question I can’t help but ask is, Is there any fundamental reason why the Eclipse environment itself wouldn’t be suited for this? I’m not familiar enough with Eclipse to assess this (maybe the GUI would be a problem for drawing, etc.?), but I wonder if at least parts of it could be used in this way. Then all these different drawing, outlining, note-taking, search/agent functions might be made into Eclipse plug-ins (as is happening with all the programming tools now), and we could work much creatively.

I’ve also done some more checking on HyperCard replacements since the earlier post. I tried out HyperCard Dissolver, which integrates with HyperStudio, a Win/Mac product I’m surprised I didn’t know about, though it is aimed at schools, not individual users.

The problem with HyperCard dissolver is that it saves every single field (for each card) as a separate text file, which is not of much use (except for HyperStudio, which imports these). What I’d like is a single tab-delimited text file that I could import into any number of programs. Maybe that wouldn’t be so hard to script, actually. If anyone knows of a tool that has already been made for this, I’d like to know about it.

The simplest and most obvious solution for moving HyperCard to MacTel is Runtime Revolution or its new variant DreamCard, both of which are Win/Mac/Linux and still being vigorously developed. As I understand it, these two programs, which are based on the earlier MetaCard, can directly import HyperCard stacks.

In any case, I’d like a way to get a tab-delimited text output, or some format that I could put into a full database program down the road. Maybe Revolution offers such an export option.

Since I wrote the previous post on the MacTel hardware apparently killing Classic and so two commonly used (by me and apparently a lot of folks) Classic apps, More and HyperCard, I’ve done a little more investigating.

I still haven’t found an application that will definitely import More files correctly. There are a number of More replacements available now, including NoteTaker, NoteBook, DevonThink/DevonNote, and the new TAO outliner. Some of these are more oriented toward outlining, some toward notes. If anyone has experience importing More files into these, I’d like to hear about it.

So far I think (judging only from screenshots) DevonThink is the closest to the sort of interface I’m looking for. I clearly need a pane on the left to access and group multiple writing files (as DevonThink has) to manage my writing, but I also really like the tabbed notebook style interface that NoteTaker and NoteBook have. I’m surprised how hard it is to find a writing program for the Mac that has the file pane on the left (not a pop-out drawer - the worst feature of Aqua - by making me have to move my window around). I guess you could create something like this in NoteTaker, but it should be a standard interface. Again, if any NoteTaker/Notebook users have implemented a left file pane, I’d like to know how you did it.

I guess the issue on the interface really revolves around the fact that you’re trying to do three different things in a notetaking program - create content/writing/notes, manage/find content, and then present content. The real appeal of an outliner is its ability to help organize one’s thinking, but an outline document is far too limiting for this. An overall notes program is needed, but it should have a good outliner in it.

One other program that may eventually make it to the Mac is EverNote. Some folks seem to like it. Its chronological memory could be very handy for finding stuff.

In my own case, I really don’t want to have to use two different programs for writing (and organizing my writing) and for storing notes, and I’d really like what I have to integrate with my Palm. In this category (for the Mac; Microsoft’s OneNote isn’t available for Mac, at least yet), it seems that NoteTaker is the leader right now, and I like the direction they’re taking with adding programmability, which could make NoteTaker a powerful tool. So I’m inclined to go with them, but I want a good writing interface.

I guess I need to try converting some of my More files with Brad Pettit’s More2XML (see last post) and then seeing if any of the note programs can import that fairly well. That might be a good two-step solution.

In all the discussion about Intel chips coming to the Mac, I haven’t seen a single specific mention of what will happen to the Classic environment (one of two legacy Mac OS X environments, which runs Mac OS 9 & previous software; the other is Carbon). One or two articles seemed to imply that Classic is doomed, but never even mentioned it directly. These articles indicated that all software was going to have to be moved to Cocoa, which would mean Carbon is apparently doomed, and Classic with it.

I know this will seem irrelevant to a lot of folks, but with 21 years on the Mac, sometimes I’m amazed I don’t use Classic more than I do. I have really only used it for two programs, More (outliner) and HyperCard, but I use it for these two nearly every day. Obviously, I have a LOT of files in these formats, not so many HyperCard stacks but probably hundreds of More outlines, most of which I will need to convert eventually if More is no longer available (or, more accurately, need to convert BEFORE More is no longer available). While I use just a handful of stacks, some have a lot of data in them (up to 925 cards), so I will need to convert these somehow.

Obviously, this looks like a lot of work, so I’m not likely to want to move to MacTel anytime soon (if Classic will be lost). Fortunately, when the time comes, there are some tools that might help. For More, there are two programs, More2Text and More2XML that I downloaded long ago just in case but haven’t yet tried out.

I didn’t bother trying them because I was hoping I could convert to a notes organizing program like NoteTaker and have it simply import all my More files. Unfortunately, I recently tried out NoteTaker and it did an awful job on one outline. I’m curious if others have gotten it to import More outlines successfully or have found another package that does the job well.

For HyperCard, there’s a program called HyperCard Dissolver that may be of some use. I don’t recall what format it outputs in.

In my own case, the timing should actually work out pretty well for me. I’m on about a 3-year upgrade cycle, which I might compress down the road to 2 or so if the updating software intro’d in 10.3 (which moves all your files, etc., to the new machine) works well when I try it out next purchase. With my current Mac 2 years old, I was planning to buy next in mid-2006, right about at the beginning of the switch-over. So maybe I can get a good deal on a phased-out G4 (likely still good for a couple of years) or G5 machine.