For quite some years we already see the mobile web being promoted by carriers without a real breakthrough. The web on a mobile device so far meant an expensive service, in many cases a misfit of the content to be displayed on tiny screens and the lack of convincing (business) ideas for the web on the go.

This year things seem to change in many ways:

1. The market for portable navigation systems (especially in Germany) has grown since 3 years from the nearly non-existence to an estimated 1 billion euro business in 2007. This tremendous growth made companies like Nokia wake up and enter the market with their mobile phones (equipped with GPS). So from now on we will see an interesting contest between those stand alone navigation devices and mobile phones with GPS inbuilt. Older cellphones get help from the french startup BlueSky Positioning: They integrate GPS on the (normal) SIM card! So in my opinion it’s not difficult to forecast the market development in this field: Cellphones will gain the battle and navigation will be the breakthrough feature for the mobile web.
2. The Web 2.0 and its idea of social communities offers more and more applications for meeting oder making friends on the go. Most of them might fail sooner or later. But they will help a lot to establish the idea of web services especially designed for mobile devices. The Open Gardens Blog has some examples. In addition to that Geo Tagging is a growing business and one of its most prominent companies, Plazes, is located in Berlin. Mobile Tagging so far is very popular in Japan but still more or less unkown in Europe. Meanwhile Google is on the rush for Mobile Search. So in the past there was only browsing the “normal web”. Now we see more and more applications specially designed for the “mobile web” adressing needs for people on the way. Without doubt this will change people’s attitudes and habits.
3. In the longer run features like Mobile Gaming and Mobile Payment may also contribute significantly. So far only Mobile Gaming really is a (fast growing) market while solutions for Mobile Payment from PayPal or Google still wait for broader acceptance (Did you notice that Google seems to take part in nearly any of those new fields?).
4. Finally this article would not be complete without mentioning this week’s market launch of the iPhone. I am sure that the iPhone will alter the market of mobile phones a lot and bring an important shift from regarding mobile phones no longer as simple telephone devices (with some additional functions) but as multimedia machines that also can make telephone calls. Apple’s advertising strategy clearly shows how they want the iPhone to be used (although there will be no GPS on board).

But still we do have one major problem: Surfing the internet on a mobile device is (very) expensive compared to the fees for home computing. But here again the remedies are not far off: Apple’s famous iPhone counts on Wi-Fi and quite a few startup companies work on algorithms, that will be able to compress data into packages of bearable size. In Germany the market leading carriers, Vodafone and T-Mobile, started this month offering affordable flat-rate fees.

So in a few years time we might look back and declare 2007 as the real beginning of the mobile web and many mobile business models. But in the same time we also might (nervously) look forward to the start of the 4G mobile networks, that will bring us transmission capacities of 100 MB per second (or even more). And once again things will change dramatically. But that’s another story…

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I am really interested by how Internet contributes to give everyone access to art, being by stimulating new types of artistic creation or new types of artistic presentation.

But virtual worlds are accelerating this democratization at an unprecedented rhythm. Here is a review of the different types of artistic presence in Second Life.

Some artists or galleries just reproduce their exhibition on SL:

• Jen Berkman, who owns a gallery in NYC says that it is far much better than reproducing the paintings on a website.

• It is not at all limited to contemporary art: even the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen of Dresde has opened a virtual museum in SL, reproducing its famous gallery of Old Masters and its architectural environment.

Some other artists use SL to sell online some of their offline pieces of art thanks to scanning:

• Carla Chandrayaan is an amateur painter which sells for about 350 Lindens each piece of her scanned worked (about $1.25). With the boom of real estate in SL, it is not silly to think that the need for decorative art will follow the trend, but it remains hard to charge a high price for just an image.

• The “twins” Ysaline McKay et Kymi Mountain have also created a French art gallery in SL, which renew the concept of “originality”: they sell a unique item of each piece of art, which means that “scarcity marketing” can also be part of SL.

Finally, some artists use SL as a creative place in itself:

• Sasun Steinbeck has created specific SL pieces of art such as polymorphic sculptures: they are randomly generated (you will never see twice the same), with personalization options (music, shape) when you click on them, and have necessitated 8 months of programming in SL script!

• Dancoyote Antonelli (whose real-life name is DC Spensley) pioneered hyperformalism as “an art movement that creates abstract art in the digital world”. His work includes single paintings that can transform into others on command, a variety of giant moving sculptures.

• The Metaverse gallery is a project of University of Texas at Dallas Art and Technology, and I have loved their “glitches”, which are realized from pictures of SL characters (such as the one on the article’s picture). You can see more of them on Dean Terry (leader of the project and professor at UTD) Flickr space here.

I am not a sheer fan of SL (too slow, and I never find what I want), so my opinion is biased, which is why I would like to know:

What do you think of these initiatives? Do you consider those creations as “pieces of art”? Do you think that people will enjoy discovering art by this way? Do you like digital art based not only on digital tools (type of art which is more than common since the creation of Photoshop) but also on virtual communities? Do you think that there is a real benefit for an artist in being present on SL (in terms of visibility and profit he can make)?

Read more about Fidji SIMO here.

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“Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited my friend Steve to help me try to provide you, dear readership, with everyday better technology insights. Steve’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most here is to raise the right issues on underlying market trends, bringing to light new software, Internet services and consumer electronic devices. Steve, the floor is yours…”

OK folks, I must confess this post will surely be of little interest for most of our readers. Nonetheless, I felt like sharing with you a few personal thoughts about world’s leading CMS, Joomla.

To say it in a nutshell, I truly believe that these CMS (content management systems) are quite valuable, and could very well meet a wide success. More powerful than most wikis or blogging platforms, they already power corporate or community websites. Amongst all the existing solutions, Joomla! (formerly Mambo) seems to be more or less the best option, although I can only compare it with Wordpress and SPIP, having only a superficial knowledge of Drupal, the most serious contender. Wikipedia lists another 30 platforms, so please feel free to provide us information on those if necessary.

So here I go with ten points, some of them very favourable to Joomla, other being mere pains in the ass. Up to you to make your own overall opinion, mine remaining positive at the end of the day.

Here for the pros :

1) Joomla is both free & fully open-source. Even better, the developers are actually trying to make their little jewel GPL-compliant. Since according to Jeremy, all open-source developers cannot decently work with commercial stuff, that ensures at least a steady support from an important developer community.

2) Joomla has a large, growing user base. So that means: plenty of free advice, forums, feedbacks, suggestions, etc…Many forum threads are so active that should you report a problem, you might expect an answer within the next hours ! Great.

3) Joomla’s modular structure rocks. There are simply billions of additional components and modules available, some of them useless, other being swarmed with bugs, but then the important user base ensures a large documentation thanks to forum+evaluations. What’s more, installing/removing them is piece of cake, and guess what: entries on the database are kept, so you do not need to bother backuping/restoring the SQL database if you just feel like removing a component for a better one, then change your mind. (I have done this like 10K times. Maybe I am not well organized, though).

4) Security issues are now (fairly well) dealt with. OK, some security breaches are corrected every month or two, which is not very engaging. Nonetheless, Joomla’s latest version now tells you when you compromise your site security with risky settings (ever heard about chmod, globals.php…?). This is just plain cool.

5) Joomla’s administrator interface is damn good. Ever tried SPIP ? Well, its interface compares to Joomla pretty much like Windows 3.0’s compares to Ubuntu+Beryl (or Mac OS X, of course Vincent+Kari:-). Besides it is handy : while Wordpress is OK, and may be slightly more straightforward, I am quite sure it could not handle dozens of additional modules in its current form, while Joomla ’s usability would seem unaffected.

6) Templates are great. A single site can handle multiple templates, and each of thoses are quite easily customizable. Don’t bother too much though: hundreds of really nice templates have been designed, just make your choice…Drupal and Wordpress lag far behind there.

And the cons:

7) Online documentation is poor. Really, there are many things you ought to find out by yourself. Hopefully, forums are flooded with help topics (see point 2). But it’s not really the way one should proceed, right.

8 ) Installation is tough. Very tough sometimes, depending on your server. Of all the solutions I know, only MediaWiki can compete in terms of complexity – which is stupid since some wiki solutions are just as useful, without any hassle about Apache configuration, PHP/mySQL and all that jazz (PBWiki for eample). Anyway, I guess it’s the price to pay for running such a powerful software.

9) Upgrading from Mambo to Joomla is painful. Which is surprising since the source code is almost exactly the same. Nevertheless, you’ll have to reinstall all components and fiddle with some files (.htaccess, etc…). Not very user-friendly…

10) SEO is an absolute nightmare. This will be the subject of a forthcoming post….

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Most early stage software publishers or ISVs (independent software vendors) rightly focus on production (software development) and sales in the beginning of their growth curve, and hence seldom have a marketing department from scratch.

I believe this is the right approach: when facing a certain resource scarcity, focusing on generating revenues rather than deploying cost centers is key to short term survival.

On top of this, having none, and no product management & marketing department (handled by the executive committee) in between product development & the sales force allows for better interactions between these two species: sales people are able to better feedback software developers with client needs, helping them understand what their clients want and hedging against market risk. Collateral good: develops and sales guys actually..interact in a rather human manner!

In short, leaving sales people and software developers interact in the very beginning of an ISV growth curve can only be a good thing.

But soon, things get complicated if the management team doesn’t do something about these 2 issues:

i) avoiding sales people to sell functions and releases that are yet to be specified, developed, tested, implemented and deployed. Indeed, sales guys won’t hesitate (often right before bonus time when everybody’s busy) to sell product upgrades that aren’t even in the agenda – which jeopardizes the ISV from a reputational perspective.

ii) integrating competitive items in your product road map. As you grow, your competitors have noticed you and it’s very likely that new function developments won’t exclusively come from customer wills, but also from strategic moves by your competitors. And these will need to be prioritized and integrated: you would better not miss the train, wouldn’t you? Since neither software developers nor sales persons have the time and commitment to do competitive watch, someone has to do it. Right?

The answer to these issues is to bring in a product management (road map) and product marketing (product sheets, white papers, case studies, testimonials + trade marketing often separate from product marketing) group in the middle of the floor, between the sales department and R&D. In my opinion, product marketing management should, when the software publisher reaches a certain point of development (usually break even), become the only interface, a compulsory meeting point, between product developers (R&D) and business developers (sales persons).

To wind up: having a marketing dept. before the company breaks even might slow down your efforts to have your product match market expectations whilst not having a product marketing management dept. after the company breaks even will affect sales in the mid/long run. This goes for software vendors, but I’m pretty certain this way of thinking would perfectly apply to a number of industries other than software.

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I’m very glad to welcome Matthias Schwenk on Tech IT Easy. For the record, Matthias already is a prominent blogger in Germany. His personal blog (in German) appears #14 in the consulting section of the German business blogs ranking.

Matthias, who I met through the blogosphere, defines himself as a Web 2.0 evangelist. His vision is that many industrial companies could use Web 2.0 as a framework to enhance collaboration and hence competitiveness – the issue being that few people in Southern Germany know what Web 2.0 is. This is where Matthias comes in to explain to companies how Web 2.0 could be leveraged to compensate with the lack of engineering resources and the competition from Asia.

But let start all over again from the beginning: to make a long story short, Matthias studied business administration (Betriebswirtschaftslehre) not only at the University of Saarbrücken, but also for one year in France. He was at université Lyon II and got a Bachelor in Economics there right before the Berlin wall fell.

Well later on, Matthias worked in the banking-business and finally got self-employed as a consultant. Matthias worked on different new business projects (business planning) and some sales-related projects. This year (2007) he started evangelizing the web 2.0 in southern germany (and started blogging about it too). It is a difficult job: Matthias is an evangelist, but not many folks want to hear the good news! Southern Germany, with Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg (where Matthias lives), is a wealthy area with only litte unemployment and many sucessful companies. There you find the machinery industry nearly in every village: small places with small companies, but these companies sell about 80 % of their production on the world market – and have 80, 150 or 200 empoyees! In some cases the companies are “larger”. Then they count some 500 oder even 1.000 persons.

And now imagine: most of these successful industrial companies have never heard of the web 2.0! And they have difficulties to see what the web 2.0 would be able to do for them. So negotiating is difficult and takes time. Their problems lay in other fields: competing against China and finding enough young engineers – there is an incredible lack of well-skilled engineers and it’s getting worse. So Matthias Schwenk’s job is to make clear that the instruments and possibilities of the web 2.0 are a good help to compete china and to find young engineers.

The idea of having Matthias blogging here is that Tech IT Easy will be his English-speaking communication arm. All bloggers publishing in a language that’s not English and feeling like becoming visible in Shakespeare’s idiom are free to contact me if they like. We are extremely glad to have Matthias on board to share with us his vision and thoughts on the web and we already know this will be a fruitful collaboration.

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Tech IT Easy was born on June 23th 2006 in Barcelona. One year later, the blog accounts 9 bloggers, 420 posts, 2111 comments.

To all the people who, through their silent visits, valuable comments or interesting publications, have contributed in building this blog that we hope will keep on growing for a little while, the Tech IT Easy team would like to say ‘thank you‘.

As a reminder, Tech IT Easy intends to provide insightful analyses on the last developments of the high tech industry. Our domaines of predilection include all aspects of software (from both a market and a technological side), web apps, information system architecture, consumer electronic devices, human-machine interfaces, hardware, telecomunications, computer networking, digital media, entrepreneurship and venture capital finance.

If you want to join us, contact us. The only constraint: no constraint whatsoever. This blog is no professional venture, just a media ran by a bunch of passionate folks. All you have to do is share your drive for technology and your will to contribute to this blogging startup. Interested? Contact Jeremy here.

Again, thank you all for supporting the growth and content of Tech IT Easy during its first year of existence. Feedbacks will always be appreciated.

Fidji, Vincent, Leonard, Raphaël, Lucien, Steve, Kari, Alexandre, Jeremy

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Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited Vincent to write about innovative start ups based in the Netherlands, Apple, the media industry, incubators, business books and many other things that happen to interest him at the moment. Vince, they’re all yours!

Hi there,

I’m swamped with things at the moment, and therefore my input here on techiteasy. org has decreased drastically. My apologies, but here’s a little post anyway, and I hope to come back soon with more interesting stories.

You can learn a lot (but not everything) about leadership by talking to some of the greats. A second best is listening to an interview. Following are some podcast-interviews with interesting leaders from technology-based firms. Some of these will not discuss leadership specifically, but just listening to them gives you an insight into what made them get to where they are and where they see some of the future of technology. That’s an area, I hope, many of us will be active in.

Here goes.

• Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, discusses his managerial style but also comments on the strategies of other companies like Google and Microsoft (Also a great (and short) book on strategy I read by him is “Only the Paranoid Survive”.) – via iInnovate / Length: 21 mins.
• Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, discusses the company’s expansion into web-services like S3 and the mechanical Turk – via Talkcrunch / length: 17 mins..
• Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, discusses the challenge of running the chaos that is Google as well as the not-so-chaotic parts – via iInnovate / length: 20 mins.
• Reid Hoffman, former CEO of Linkedin, discusses entrepreneurship and strategy of Linkedin (which also convinced me to set up my profile there) – via Stanford / Length: 63 mins.

I hope you’ll enjoy those! The podcasts-series themselves are also quite amazing and of course available via iTunes. I do realise that I’m possibly giving away clues to future “guess who’s”, but that just means that the techiteasy-authors will have to become more creative in the future.

I’m of course curious whether our readers have stumbled across some interesting interviews as well. Audio, video, or text, even books, it doesn’t matter. Just let us know in the comments!

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The few software entrepreneurs who don’t know anything about software development think they can actually negotiate a release date with their R&D team.

This vision is dumb.

A release date is no bargain, it’s a fact. If you want to ship on time, reduce the functional scope. In other words, remove the ‘nice to have’ and leave the ‘must have’.

If you still want it all, then accept it’s going to be ready later – and not ready late as a release date is an R&D team fact and no top-down decision whatsoever.

All I can say is that if you’re a software developer in a company headed by a guy who negotiates release dates, prepare your CV (and send it to me btw, lots of opportunities @ top ISVs currently) and move on.

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I have the feeling that new ventures (why ’software organizations?’ I don’t know, it was all marketing) have to go through 5 major challenging and exciting times to be all set to play in the global league.

1. Partner with the right people

If you can do it alone (guts + will to face the ‘lonesome cowboy’ syndrom + both technical and sales skills) do it, but it is very likely that you can’t. How many people (2, 3, 4) on board? Which sort of people? If you don’t partner with them, how can you attract them later with an appropriate package (equity? stock options? salary? etc.)?

2. Early days: each time you hire one person, you need to change the entire organization

Indeed, I believe it is at least as complex to grow from 2 to 4 employees and then from 4 to 8 people, to 16, to 32, etc. than from 40,000 to 80,000 heads.

3. Hire and empower middle managers

I believe one single person may directly manage between 5 and 7 people max. So say you are 3 founders, you’ll need to introduce middle managers as soon as you hit 25 employees or so. Dude, this looks really complicated to me: how can you attract and retain people should be at least as smart as you (hiring top guns is critical at this stage of development) and still keep control of what’s going on on the deck?

4. Open the first business operations office abroad

Do it wrong and it’s very likely that going global will take much more time than predicted. Do it right and your DNA will be printed with the ‘global mindset’ stamp once and for all. Business Objects for instance opened a sales office in California a couple weeks after starting product development in Levallois, near Paris. I believe one way to open business operations abroad is to get a young smart ass aboard, ask her/him to put some of her/his own money against equity of the holding company, go for 20% fixed / 80% bonus salary and set ambitious commitments. Of course, there exist many different ways to open sales offices abroad. But again: I believe succeeding the first time is critical to a healthy global development of the company.

5. Introduction of processes and redtape that will kick your best talents out

Once the company has grown big (you made it!), your shareholders will require that your organization shifts to a reactive, startup sort of model to something that looks like a real corporation. It’s usually a good move for the company, that is often perceived as evil by these young and bright young managers you had recruited years ago. Remember? Your first middle managers? These will most often depart when you start introducing formal workflows and processes in your structure as initiative and innovation can only be constrained (that’s what is currently happening to Google, which is no startup anymore but has turned to a large ‘classical’ corporation). My point is that you’re never going to replace them: it’s very high to hire up when you grow big. At some point, the level of the people you hire decreases the overall level. Or put it that way: the derivative of the skill and drive curve will turn negative. The day you’ll bring in an HR person, it means you’ve passed the inflexion point: it’s the beginning of the end

Reading this post again before pushing the ‘publish’ button, I feel that I’ve smoked too much or so. But actually, although it may appear unclear, I believe in everything I wrote. From my humble view point, it remains extremely theoretical so I really can’t figure out whether what I’m saying is relevant or irrelevant. Feel free to share if you’ve gone through one or several of these organizational challenges (if it’s private information, then let’s go for a beer or coffee together: I can’t be more interested by any other topic than this one: ‘managing growth’).

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I tried to come up with a list of all existing Digital Marketing KPI. If you have an eCommerce or content website, try to pick 5 or 6 of them to build yourself a dashboard that will help you manage your performance better.

• turnover
• Click-through rate
• CPM / CPT
• eCPM
• CPI
• CPA
• CPC
• eCPC
• referrers
• key words
• profiles
• average cart
• cost per single visit
• direct convert rate
• indirect convert rate (comes back within 30 days to process purchase)
• retention rate
• churn rate
• top entry pages
• average number of clicks until purchase completed
• average time spent on the side before purchase completed
• average visit time
• abandon rate
• abandon rate on the first page
• number of whitepaper / testimonies / product data sheets downloards
• newsletter subscriptions
• abandon rate on the contact page
• number of detected projects
• number of leads transformed
• number of visits lasting less than 90 seconds
• main search engine request entry points
• typical path
• browsing scenario
• click rate
• most typed in requests
• most used search engines
• directory abandon rate
• search engine abandon rate
• recommendation engine abandon rate (eg Xinek, Zlio, Criteo, U.[Lik], etc.)
• escrow click rate
• emailing validated rate (= number of Emails on listing – mailer daemons received)
• emailing curiosity or opened rate
• emailing interest or click rate
• emailing effectiveness click rate (= interest / curiosity)

Can you think of other digital marketing or eCommerce key performance indicators?

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Tech IT Easy is dead, long live Tech IT Easy!

Today is our Independence Day: this blog is now fully accessible through www.techiteasy.org. All existing jeremyfain.wordpress.com/something trackbacks are automatically redirected to www.techiteasy.org/something. Our search engine referencing might suffer for a couple weeks, but since I noticed we have quite a captive audience (people coming back every single day are very, very numerous – like 600 / 900), it’s not going to get too bad.

Step by step, you will see my personal references (Flickr feed, CartoReso maybe, Developer Pages, Del.icio.us, blogroll) vanish to leave the Tech IT Easy community do what it has to do with this very blog.

When I find some time (most probably in July or August), the template will evolve and integrate external widgets.

Back to the Tech IT Easy vision:

A community blog where professionals passionate about technology (software, web, consumer electronics, eCommerce, media, hardware, robotics, telecommunications, computer networking – from both market & technology view points) share their thoughts and analyses with the world. The only rule that applies to all contributors is that there should be no rule whatsoever: no control, no hassle, no constraint. Once you’re in the community, you’re there forever unless you decide to leave it. The idea is not to go after TechCrunch, TechMeme, GigaOM, VentureBeat, Read/Write Web and their likes: rather than information, we deliver original content deeply rooted in the background of the authors. To say the least, we should complement existing tech information blogs rather than compete with them. On top of that, we are all amateurs and none of us blogging full-time, this should position us in quite a different way. Last but not least, we enjoy answering valuable comments and emails: one thing we all share is our willingness to stay close to our readers.

PS: just opened my personal blog in French, named Jeremy Fain in French. Accessible right here. I’ll be testing a new open source platform, after Wordpress for Tech IT Easy: DotClear2.

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Today I finished reading “Moneyball: the Art of Winning an Unfair Game” by Michael Lewis.

I wouldn’t say it’s my favourite management book ever, far from it – however, it was definitely worth going through. Moneyball is the story of baseball team Oakland Athletics, which, under the command of its general manager Billy Beane, won the league with the smallest budget in the league.

What I learnt:

Billy’s method: focus on facts rather than fame; trust statistics if and only if well interpreted; mix rookies with veterans to keep your cost structure low; understand the background of the people you hire and listen deep inside in their motivation locus; back up your leads; stay close to your most valuable assets: your people; you don’t build a team by hiring stars.

Why Moneyball hasn’t left an eternal print in my memory:

The book is as much about hiring and managing a team than about baseball. I happen to have a very limited baseball culture and I’m sure baseball fans willing to brush up their management skills would find in Moneyball the perfect book. I didn’t.

Click here to access Amazon and have a look at what other people think.

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I discovered (via Benjamin) the Microsoft Beginner Developer Learning Center. Back in computer science University this year, I was trained to hack code in Java, Matlab (signal processing), VHDL (electronics) and even in PHP / MySQL during a practical database session – but hardly in C# or on the .Net framework tools, which would be extremely useful considering 1) the company I’m working for; 2) the fact that many software entrepreneurs I meet tell me their choice in favor of the .Net framework + Visual Studio Team System helps them be 30% more productive than if they had chosen another environment like J2EE + Eclipse or (even worse) PHP + MySQL.

I browsed the site quite extensively today, and I decided I would try to spend 2 hours or so per week going through the tutorials which look really well devised. In terms of level, there are 3 tiers available: 1 (beginner), 2 (beginner-intermediate) and 3 (intermediate). As far as I’m concerned, I guess I’ll try to start with Tier 2.

There are also 2 tracks available: web development & software development. I find the latter track to be more sort of ’straight to the point’, but I may be mistaking.

Feel like doing like me? All you have to do to get started is download 2 free apps: Microsoft Visual Studio Express Edition, and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition.

Click here to access Microsoft’s Beginner Developer Learning Center. All feedbacks / pieces of advice appreciated.

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 Steve & I, both bloggers on Tech IT Easy, now recent graduates:

PS: Steve was hired yesterday as a strategy consultant with Michael Porter’s top-notch boutique, Monitor. Congrats to him!

On the right, Raphaël, a blogger on Tech IT Easy as well:

Henri Proglio, CEO @ Veolia Environment & Chairman @ Groupe HEC:

Ian Davis, General Managing Director @ McKinsey & Company:

Bernard Ramanantsoa, Dean of HEC Paris & an amazing guy:

Plenary (and this is just half of the room):

Our (not anymore) Their beautiful campus (lucky them):

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 “Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited my friend Steve to help me try to provide you, dear readership, with everyday better technology insights. Steve’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most here is to raise the right issues on underlying market trends, bringing to light new software, Internet services and consumer electronic devices. Steve, the floor is yours…”

 I have explained earlier why I believed in Leopard, a truly innovative system despite the apparent lack of “wow” features. In the same post I expressed sarcastically my criticism of Apple copying Microsoft, mainly when it came…to delivering their OS on time !

Now Apple has unveiled a newer version of their latest OS. And apparently a few things have been directly inspired…from Vista !

Here we go :

1) Semi-translucent menu bar. No comment there, this is a pure ”photocopy” of a feature from Vista.

2) 3D & translucent dock. Although the dock was originally developed by Apple, Microsoft has also launched a kind of dock in Vista (and so did Sun by the way, in their breakthrough Looking Glass interface). And, guess what ? The latest dock from Mac OS resembles Vista’s !

 3) QuickLook seems quite familiar to the users of Windows XP or Vista. Now there is an instant preview system in Mac OS. Apparently the system seems slightly superior in Leopard since you are now able to browse directly pages of a document without opening it. Nonetheless, listening a MP3 or viewing a video on the system was a Windows feature  for decades (at least 2001).

Let me tell you a last thing : actually,  I couldn’t care less about all these copycat games. In the end, these interface improvements benefit the end user, right ? So some kind of inspiration/copying is useful, and, dare I say, necessary for the progress of mankind.

Now, Kari, Vincent, and Marc, you can start firing in the comments section

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