I have been thinking about this topic for a while now. Enterprise 2.0 book from Andrew McAfee chapter 8  (Looking ahead), a nice twitter conversation with @oscarberg, and a New York Times article about Microsoft Creative Destruction : all combine to convince me there was some room for a blog post. Snip from the NYT article :

Internal competition is common at great companies. It can be wisely encouraged to force ideas to compete. The problem comes when the competition becomes uncontrolled and destructive. At Microsoft, it has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence. It’s not an accident that almost all the executives in charge of Microsoft’s music, e-books, phone, online, search and tablet efforts over the past decade have left.

As Wikipedia defines it :

“Office politics is the use of one’s individual or assigned power within an employing organization for the purpose of obtaining advantages beyond one’s legitimate authority. Those advantages may include access to tangible assets, or intangible benefits such as status or pseudo-authority that influences the behavior of others. Both individuals and groups may engage in Office Politics.”

One has to be extremely pedagogic to explain me how on earth this may help the company in being more profitable, increasing customers satisfaction and being a better place for employees, the three goals of any company according to Eliyahu Goldratt.

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To those people that have followed my writing these last two months, I’ve been exposed to virtualisation more than I would like, due to an incompatibility between my Macbook, a Java Virtualbox I’m running on it, and the Windows 2003 server managing our company network. As a result, I’ve been booting a lot into Windows via Boot Camp, got hooked on Windows Live Writer, and have been using Parallels frequently just for that app (I need a Crossover fix for .NET apps badly).

The second consequence is that I’ve been thinking a lot about the implications of virtual OSs. With Google OS recently having been announced, which is supposed to integrate flawlessly with Macs and Windows, assumably Android, as well as being designed for Netbooks, I wonder if Intel, with it’s multi-core processors, has not created a situation where nothing else matters, hardware-wise, except to have a powerful enough processor? In other words, have hardware-manufacturers like Sony, Samsung, and to some extent, Apple simply become irrelevant?

Take Sony for instance, which has just announced its first “Netbook.” It’s one selling point?

“Like other netbooks the Vaio W has a 10-inch screen, but its display has a resolution of 1,366 by 768 pixels rather than the more common 1,024 by 600 pixels. That means more of a Web site can be fitted onto the screen, and the user will have to scroll less, the company said at a launch event in Tokyo on Tuesday.” (emphasis my own)

Not much to write home about, except if you absolutely need to use a Sony, and bear in mind that that company was at some point a premium manufacturer of technology. The PC market has long been commoditised of course, ever since IBM opened its hardware up to the world, but with the rise of ultra-cheap PCs & laptops, I think they are digging their own grave.

I think that, as I wrote in a comment to a recent post, Netbooks are a failed experiment and, to add to that, unless either drastic changes in the cost-structure can be made to increase profit-margins, or new business models can be found (e.g. a similar hardware-service bundling to what has been happening in the mobile phone space), I think that we won’t be hearing from netbooks after 2010 onwards.

What also seems clear is that software companies, with their much more favourable profit margins, are winning this war, and, pretty soon, they won’t have to think about hardware at all any more. Instead of writing for a “spec,” you just need to write for a virtual space, which can run anywhere or everywhere.

Arguably, hardware has always been enslaved to software (except for one company), but I see the Sony’s & Samsung’s of today becoming the Nokia’s & Motorola’s of the future.

Since I’m not a technologist (more of a technology philosopher), I may be drastically oversimplifying. What do you think?
P.S. going to stop signing my name for a while. I’ll see if that makes a difference. V.

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Couple of days ago there was some “inside rumors” about Nokia working on an Android phone. This rumor was pretty quickly denied by the Finnish giant.

Full QWERTY and dual screens. Eat that iPhone. Also works as a fishing net weight.

It was a good rumor because it sounded plausible until one starts to seriously think about it. Yes, Nokia is one of the few handset manufacturers who doesn’t have Android plans so it just a matter of time, right? Not exactly. Sure, some might think Android is a better platform than S60 and yes, in my opinion, the current S60 UI and user experience are a crapfest but at least it’s Nokia’s own crapfest. And that’s the important thing.

The reason why other traditional cell phone manufacturers are pushing out Android phones is that it doesn’t really matter what software runs in their phones as long as it sells. And of course Android sells, because carriers finally get to bill for data usage when mobile users discover the web.

Does SonyEricsson, Samsung, HTC have a smartphone that matters? They all pump out smartphones on different platforms and don’t really focus on building an ecosystem across their phones. Their main customers are phone operators, who’ll eventually brand the phones and fill them with their own software and sell them to their customers. This is ture for Nokia too as far as Nokia the mobile phone manufacturer goes. Nokia, however, isn’t just about manufacturing hardware. Take SonyEricsson as a counterexample. As a part of Sony, SonyEricsson is more about extending Sony’s brands (Walkman, Cybershot) and not solely about mobile phones. Same goes for Samsung. Nokia, on the other hand, is a brand on its own and has interests in all aspects of mobile communication.

SonyEricsson is a good example also because it shows what would happen to Nokia if it’d adopt Android. Those who remember time when it was just called Ericsson, the company actually did have pretty nice technologies and phones. Today, that history is pretty much nonexistent in their phones.

Unlike the other phone manufacturers, but like Apple and Google, Nokia has a wide application ecosystem. Nokia is betting a lot on services, even though Ovi Store and other Ovi services haven’t caused similar nerdgasms like Apple’s Apps Store. In fact, one might say that Ovi services are a source of a lot of nerdrage instead. Nokia would also need to port its Nokia Maps and Mail for Exchange support over to Android, just to mention few. Also, why invest in Qt if you’re going Java?

The only way for Nokia to remain relevant in the marketplace is to own the software its phones and services run on. It’s about vertical integration and it’s about mattering in the smartphone market. This vertical integration is why Google and Apple suddenly matter in smartphone business. Vertical integration is why Apple still matters in the computer business.

This is also why no other mobile phone manufacturer has taken Symbian seriously. It would give Nokia, their #1 competitor, immense strategic power. The reason Windows Mobile has zero traction in mobile phones follows the same logic.

As Trip Hawkins, whose Electronic Arts was first to bypass the game resellers and went straight to retailers, has put it, “it’s all about leverage. If you don’t have it, you lose”. With Google’s recent announcement of Chrome OS for netbooks, there are many unhappy netbook manufacturers who decided to build something on Android. On the other hand, by bypassing the need for a real OS and focusing on the Web, netbook manufacturers can try to cut costs – at the expense of becoming dependent on Google.

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From the Official Google Blog:

Today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

I have nothing to say that I haven’t already said before.

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It’s around that time again. First of all, I’d again like to note that I am, for the moment, the producer of 99% of the junk, eh, I mean Gold that appears before your eyes on Tech IT Easy. So, for the moment, these are favourite posts that I wrote.

If you are interested in contributing to Tech IT Easy, either as a blogger or guest writer, please write to us!

This month, I’d like to thank Georgia for writing about guerrilla marketing. Last month, I forgot to thank Jeremy for publishing his interview with social marketeer, Michelle Greer, and Georgia, for writing about Mint.com.

Let’s get to the favourites (in no particular order):

• The “captain’s chair” phenomenon, in which I identify a problem that many one-person-companies-growing-into-SMEs face, the centralisation of leadership around the founder, and the lack of processes that facilitate delegation. Expect more posts about this.
• A short guide for surviving Windows [aimed at Mac-users], in which in a series of a few posts, I start discussing how to survive that “traumatic” move. While I have certainly managed to, I am now happily back on my Mac at work. Even so, I am writing this post on Windows Live Writer, through Parallels (it’s what I call an anchor-app, something that ties you to an environment). Related: Awakening from the OS X vs. Windows War and Battles in the Virtualization Space.
• Media’s Basic Duty to tell the Truth (P.S. Blogs are not Media), in which I, again in a series of posts,  defend Techcrunch’s reputation, in regards to their accusation towards Last.fm. My premise: blogs (like ours) are not media, but some professional blogs, like Techcrunch, have become its equivalent and thus (have to) respect the same principle of reporting the news as accurately and honestly. I don’t want to generalise though, I think that Arrington’s posts in particular, can be much too emotional, provocative, and definitely more blog than pro-media.
• Where do Good Ideas come from?, in which I propose four areas and write about the ease of implementing these ideas. Two supplement posts: On having Heroes in your Craft and The Right Mix between Idea and Execution and One reason not to blog (at least not to blog about your plans) (I sure do blog a lot about idea generation… ).
• What would an Always-On Device look like? Do we even want it?, which comes down to that I would like a device that records everything that I do, in whatever format needed. Some complications: a. do we even want it? How would we process the information? I think that suitable devices already exist, from your camera phone to more specialised and expensive methods.

That’s it for this month. May’s recap can be found here. Until the next time, on Tech IT Easy.

Vincent

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I’ll spell it American… happy, blogosphere? Here’s a few interesting examples of how the battle is being waged in terms of virtualisation of software:

• I can’t run Windows Live Writer—simply the best blogging software on both the Mac and Windows—through Crossover, because it was built in .Net. And .Net apps don’t work in Crossover.
• You can use the free Virtualbox from Sun to run your virtual OSs (a great development environment!), but if you want to launch Windows apps from your Mac, you need to pay for either Parallels, Fusion, Crossover, or any other commercial variants for this purpose. Basically, a software like Parallels allows you to place a shortcut to a Windows app onto the Dock or the Desktop, which will launch Windows + the app, when you click it.
• The best Windows user-experience on the Mac is through Boot Camp. It would be a million times quicker to boot if you were able to hibernate on the Windows side and safe sleep on the Mac side. If you don’t want to risk losing your unsaved data however (why would it be unsaved?), you’re probably better off booting the traditional way (3-5 min. out the window right there). Well actually, it used to be an official feature, now it isn’t.
• Sharing your OS X documents with your Windows ones (in other words, using the same folder for both OSs) is very possible when you use Parallels. When you use boot camp however, it all of a sudden gives you a convenient error.

Georgia, in response to my post about the OS War being over, wrote that she thought that this whole discussion is about standards. I think that the edges are getting very blurry and I eventually see hardware, on the PC-side at least, becoming pretty irrelevant. In the meantime, however, you get these little annoyances, beyond stuff like Office for Mac being inferior to Office for Windows, which make me wonder if they are here by design or because they haven’t gotten around to fixing it yet. I’m betting on the first.

Standards, for now at least, are still causing wars.

Vincent

(Picture is of course of the game Virtua Tennis 3, and has absolutely zero to do with this post)

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If you want to hear some interesting perspectives on the hardware and software business and/or starting businesses in general, check out the Stanford entrepreneurial thought leader lectures held by Jeff Hawking, co-founder of Palm, and Steve Balmer, employee no. 30 & current CEO at Microsoft.

Jeff Hawking is also the author of “On Intelligence,” and describes his development-path of creating neuro-scientific solutions towards interfacing with technologies (which is, I think, the right perspective towards interface-design). He’s doing some pretty interesting things in the field, also through his foundation called Numenta, but I expect also through future hardware coming out (I’m not sure if he’s involved in the Palm Pre, but he was in the Foleo). He describes some crisis-moments in Palm’s past, including how to compete with Microsoft (the irony!). Very worth checking out and I love the title: “Inside the mind of a reluctant entrepreneur.”

Steve Balmer, what a character! I found him to be thoughtful and concise, whilst never forgetting to pimp the universe that is Microsoft and how that is important for startups… He shares a bunch of stories, like why he decided to drop out of Stanford and join Microsoft as employee no. 30, the current economy and its opportunities, the future of computing, and even makes a few jokes about (not mentioning) Vista.

I thoroughly enjoyed both lectures and think you will too.
Vincent

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I want to keep this short and leave the floor to you mostly, as I’m not a software developer or smart enough for this topic, I’m just a consumer and user of the product. On the train to my parents for this Easter weekend, two young guys were eying me and my Macbook and, seeing that I was wearing earphones perhaps, discussing the mac. One guy said to the other: “those Macs look like they’re taking over the world. Did you see the new one, it looks slick, but it costs € 1500.” And the other guy responded: “How dare they?” Whereas the other guy said: “Well, they look pretty cool, but interface-wise, I could never get used to them.” And the conversation died after that.

So what makes Macs so cool. Rather than discuss the superficial, the hardware, I just want to briefly write about why I like the Mac OS “interface,” and then leave the floor to you, answering the question: “What makes OS X so damn great?”

My impression: I don’t know how to explain it exactly, maybe it’s because OS X is Unix based. But what I really dig about OS X (Tiger & Leopard) is that every menu-function, every possible action you’d want to undertake, can somehow be translated into a script or service, and thus entered in Quicksilver or another “launcher.” That means that my hands rarely have to leave the keyboard, which I think saves me a few seconds vs. going for the mouse/trackpad, point & clicking. It also means that my Dock [Apple's application launcher] and desktop are clean most of the time, as I don’t need a “visible” shortcut to get to the destination I want.

I could never get that same workflow going on Windows, and perhaps it’s because of the architecture, that it just isn’t written to be that open. Sure, things like SizeUp and Fresh, both of which I discussed last week, are not part of the Leopard interface, but the fact that they exist, the fact that Quicksilver exists, is actually what makes OS X 10 times as effective an OS to me. Once again, I don’t know why exactly this is the case, I attribute it to the open architecture of Unix.

So, now it’s your turn: why makes OS X so damn great (or not, if that’s where you want to take it)?

Have a nice Easter weekend!
Vincent

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There’s been a lot of discussions over the year about how to protect your pictures’ copyright (e.g.). The number one method appears to be watermarking, which makes sense, though it really won’t prevent anyone from still sticking that picture on a random site. I, personally, haven’t thought much about copyright, but of course, I am not making money from photography.

As I am buying my first SLR camera (a Canon Rebel XSI) pretty soon, I thought a little what I want and don’t want out of photography. I like to make good pictures of course. I like to become a master of the medium. I like to express myself. And, I’d like to be able to take pictures whenever I want to. But one thing I noticed, from taking over 5000 pictures with a Canon Ixus, with less than 5% with me in it, is that I also like to be a part of the picture-experience.

What inspired my idea was my recent upgrade to an Intel Mac with my very first webcam—that’s right, I never saw the attraction until now. It rules! To anyone used to video-Skyping, you’re familiar with the huge video of your friend, and the tiny video of yourself at the bottom.

So, I’m thinking, why not have the same thing for pictures? Taking a picture would then look like this:

Instead of having a pesky and rather ugly watermark, you can see who actually made that picture. You could of course have a little mini-cam in your camera, pointed at you and taking an up-to-date shot of what you look like — that one was taken while I had the flu, some months ago — but a static picture will do the trick most of the time.

What do you think? Should photo-pubishers like Picasa, iPhoto, Flickr, etc. integrate such a feature? Would it have any useful function to you, as a photographer or as a viewer? Share your thoughts!

Vincent

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I attended LeWeb, a conference dedicated to…the Web industry, almost 2 weeks ago in Paris. I apologize not to have blogged before, but December was a frantic month, business-wise, and I wish I could blog during the conference but as you may have read on the blogosphere, there was no Internet. On top of that, I wanted to leave some time before I blogged to check whether my words would soften.

I arrived at Le Web, investing a lot of time (2 full days) and money (more than EUR 800, that is to say around USD 1100 – which is a lot of money for what I got), with very high expectations, and I have to say that this conference was a huge disappointment to me. Actually, it was more of a disappointment: I actually found Le Web ‘08 conference to be a huge piece of crap. Here’s why.

The organizers: Loïc & Géraldine Le Meur

Prior to the conference, I was a big fan of Loïc Le Meur. The guy looked like Midas to me: everything he touched became gold. The guy gets people lining up to invest in his startups (look at his list of investors in his last startup Seesmic here, impressive). Loïc understood that blogging was going to be big before everyone, and positioned himself accordingly (a huge blogger and founder of Six Apart, the editor of TypePad). Loïc is also an early investor in LinkedIn, my favorite web app, and recently founded and funded Seesmic that I find to be a very cool video conversation platform. Well, the guy seemed to be the perfect investee for VCs, and the perfect investor for entrepreneurs. However, when it comes to organizing conferences, I would tend to say it’s not there yet. Loïc and his wife Géraldine have been organizing the Le Web event for something like four years. Last year already, criticism had emerged, but overall comments were positive. Well, after attending one Le Web conference, I can only blame myself for not having due diligenced better: I wasted my time and my startup’s money.

The theme

Love. This year’s Le Web conference was about love. At first sight, I found this theme brilliant – too bad the idea wasn’t well executed. Love is a universal value that is only discussed in novels and Vogue. Plus, Love is the perfect theme if you want to think an outside-the-box conference program. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case at all. Although there were a number of supposedly quality speakers, most didn’t actually mention the theme, and I guess some didn’t even know that the theme was Love (Marissa Meyer of Google, Didier Lombard of France Telecom, Maurice Levy of Publicis, to name some of them…). I think it’s a big waste, because having a truly deeply-thought consistent program around Love, with at least some continuity between speakers, could’ve made of Le Web a truly mainstream event rather than just a reunion self-proclamed visionaries.

The speakers

Speaking of self-proclamed visionaries, I had a hard time looking for new ’stars’ on Le Web panels. Or even just interesting content.

Paulo Coelho is a brilliant man, but he had nothing to do at Le Web: his speech didn’t bring anything new, it was self-promotion, and an uninteresting one as a matter of fact. Same with Susan Wu from Ohai, preaching her church (virtual goods): boring slides, boring intervention.

Didier Lombard was absolutely out of scope too. He basically paid to get on stage. And you could feel it.

I was very disappointed by Maurice Levy from Publicis (and by the questions asked by Loïc Le Meur: boring) – the guy could’ve given us interesting insights on web advertising. Instead, we had a boring “fireside chat”, as they say. I liked one thing about Maurice Levy though, he publicly gave his email address saying he was looking for startups to invest in.

Startup competition updates were extremely repetitive; the only thing you could here was “despite the crisis, there are still a lot of innovation around; I’m thrilled by what I saw in the startup competition room”. Except that when you looked at the jury in the room, they were all on their Blackberry or iPhone aswering emails.

I liked Yossi Vardi, Chris Anderson, John Buckman (good tips for entrepreneurs), Marissa Meyer (a few insights on the Google roadmap, like wanting to take Chrome out of Beta) & Joi Ito though.

The sponsors

Le Web’s official sponsor was no company else than Microsoft, the tech giant that probably least understands the Web provided the very poor quality of its online applications, like Hotmail, or its total absence of the collaborative web apps landscape outside its expensive minority stake in Facebook. The good news is, Microsoft folks are smart asses and let some selected startups (some of them embedding no single Microsoft technology) demo their applications rather than demo Microsoft products. Microsoft alone paid Le Web USD 110,000 or EUR 80,000 to get its brand on top of others, rent a lounge space, and get speaking time.

Google also was a sponsor of Le Web – they had Microsoft move first when it came to getting the “official sponsor” title. Google had a special room dedicated to presenting its own stuff during day 1. Nothing new there, except that Google brought in speakers on a number of topics like Adwords, APIs, etc. I guess the fee also included the 2 keynotes Google got. If I were Google, I would, to ensure a maximum buzz around my brand, not attend or sponsor Le Web. That would make the entire conference speak about the absence of Google whilst the whole web revolves around the Google search engine. Google being a sponsor amongst others makes of it a regular company. Too bad.

There were other partners, like SwissCom that sucks big time (they had a booth, and did not manage to make the Internet work during the entire conference + Loïc Le Meur says they got paid more than USD 100,000! to make nothing work), Facebook (?), SixApart & Seesmic who got it for free obviously,…and a number of others that are not worth talking about in this not-so-long post.

The budget, the price

1,400 participants x an average of EUR 1,000 per entrance

Sponsoring & demo room for at least EUR 200,000

The overall budget for this 2-day conference amounted to EUR 1,500,000. Yet, there was no wifi running, definitely not enough food for all participants (I had to go grab a sandwich each 2 days), no consistent editorial line, a crowd of people investing time and a lot of money to listen to the same self-called visionaries on stage.

I haven’t paid myself in one year (I live on my fiancée’s salary), every since I started Verteego. I bought myself a ticket to Le Web almost as a Christmas gift, hoping to enjoy a lot. It was a sort of sacrifice (EUR 850 + 2 days of turnover for Verteego – I’m the sales guy there – is hell of a lot of money! the price of a superb laptop or a great long weekend, say, in Venice) but I was plenty of hopes. The least I could say even 2 weeks after the conference is that I have a very angry feeling at myself: I feel I’ve been financially abused. And I lost two days of hard work during an important period.

The place, and the temperature…

Well, it was free-zing. Which is okay for me, except that with so many people inside, there must have been a sort of natural warmth, which wasn’t the case. I felt this place had the worst energetic efficiency in Paris. This absence of environmental awareness stroke me: the second day, it was warmer. I couldn’t believe how much energy was used to heat the place. I am very disappointed by the overall lack of consciousness of web entrepreneurs for environmental issues: if you are really about changing the world, then you should think about measuring their environmental footprint and take action to reduce it from one year to another & compensate the remainings. But they sure didn’t. And I’m not writing this just to sell Verteego Carbon here: I just don’t understand entrepreneurs to pretend they want to change the World and who don’t care about behaving socially & environmentally responsibly. I think that Le Web, an event that took place in Europe at the same time as the Poznan conference (pre next Kyoto talks in Poland) AND which theme was Love, was just perfect place to ensure Social Responsibility and Sustainability became buzz words in the blogging, startups & VC microcosm. Géraldine & Loïc completely missed the train here.

The startup competition

I didn’t apply to the startup competition. I felt it wasn’t right to make startups pay EUR 1,500 for just a pitch. I was wrong in doing so. The startup competition was probably the only interesting thing during this conference. I paid, as I said, EUR 800+ to go to Le Web Paris ‘08 and basically meet with friends. It would’ve been worth paying the double to try and get 7 minutes to pitch Verteego in front of around 300 people. That makes it 5 euros per viewer’s attention, + the backlinks, visibility, and blog coverage you could get later on. Not applying to the startup competition was perhaps my only regret. And that would probably be the only reason I would attend next year.

The food

It was a shame. There’s no other word for it. I could get no food at all, not during the first day, not during the second day. The first day because there was none left. The second because there was no vegetarian food! Both days I went outside for a sandwich. I could then make friends because people were coming to me to ask where I had gotten this.

Worse: during Day 2, I needed to drink water during the day because I caught a cough during Day 1, because of the cold. And I was basically given a negative answer, because the bar was opened neither at 11am, nor at 3pm (which actually made me leave the place). You get 1500 people pay EUR 1000 on average, and there’s no food, and no water???

The Internet

There was very little Internet during the whole conference. Here’s a recap of this lousy situation: not only were you locked in with boring old speakers & because of the price you paid, you couldn’t answer client requests, or blog because of this.

Loïc Le Meur wrote an apologetic post, but I found this post actually ridiculous for him: Le Web gave EUR 100,000+ to SwissCom not to get a service. The excuse is: no provider is used to so many attendants. This is untrue: the very week before Le Web,  I attended a huge (20,000 visitors per day!) Trade Show, Pollutec, in Lyon. And there was perfect Wifi.

The attendants

Obviously, I met with many of my existing friends, and I was glad to. I also met with new people from everywhere around the world. Lots of great people there, from everywhere around the World. But come on, at what price…Furthermore, the mindset was rather negative: people weren’t ambitious or optimistic. They should be: the crisis is a great opportunity to move fast whilst remaining lean.

The TechCrunch party

It was so-so, I was disappointed and angry: 1) I had bought my business partner (who hadn’t attended Le Web) a EUR 30 ticket, to be told at the entrance that a pass to Le Web was worth 2 entrances. I think it should’ve been explained somewhere because I basically wasted EUR 30 with no possibility to get a refund. 2) I waited for 30 minutes outside, in line, to get in. And during this time I saw 2 groups of people showing up in front and squeezing the line: I found this very abnormal, because the Web is about democracy, having all the same access to information. 3) the place was very small, but this is less of an issue.

Conclusion

For the price I paid, I got very little value back (basically, the only benefit of Le Web was that I got to see many of my friends in very little time). Rather than apologizing, and provided the HUGE profits this conference made, I believe not reimbursing participants for providing no wifi, no heating, and no food services is irresponsible at that cost. I repeat: rather than blame their food supplier, Swisscom or the Cent Quatre (for the heating), I think Loïc & Géraldine Le Meur should’ve refunded participants for providing such a low standard service rather than making this huge profit (I also think they should display publicly the P&L of the conference). This is the least they could’ve done since giving me back 2 days of work isn’t physically possible. Loïc and Géraldine Le Meur didn’t show any social responsibility here, no respect for their customers.

Last, but not least, those who are not going to complain about Le Web ‘08, both in terms of organization and content, are either those who didn’t pay anything to attend, or those who paid so much that blaming the event would make them look stupid.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

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So some short thoughts. Plenty of people have been criticising both the Seinfeld+Gates ads and now the crowdsourced variant of “I’m a PC.” I’ve only really read three points of view, namely Micheal Arrington’s (a media guy), John Gruber’s (a Mac-head), and Jason Kottke’s (an (alternative internet-)culture guy). All three have been fairly negative about it.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkZdkHylJ3w&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&fs=1]

Jason writes:

“That’s the problem with Microsoft’s ads. They’re still #1 and the bigger company, but by referencing Apple’s successful ad campaign, they’re acting like Apple is #1.”

I think this pretty much echoes John’s point of view.

The problem here is that both treat PCs as being one market… the Apple-one, which is students, “stupid users (like me) who don’t want to know what’s under the hood,” and a certain type of individualistic professional. In that market, yes, Apple appears to be doing quite well.

Microsoft has a somewhat different segmentation of customers. It has the three above, it also has the cheapskate (those that have it pre-installed with a $400 PC or those that pirate it), the business-traveller, and the Dell-crowd (lot’s and lot’s of grey machines in big equally grey buildings).

What has Microsoft done with the “I’m a PC” advert? It has attacked a strong player in one segment that it and Apple are both competing for. Apple’s “I’m a Mac” has been promoting Macs as the easy and elegant solution, while Microsoft-PCs are the clunky and slightly psychotic alternative that nobody wants. By showing a diverse set of PC-users, Microsoft simply removed the foundation that Apple built this last year and a half, and has levelled the playing-field.

Is it a me-too ad? Definitely! But we all know about Apple by now and there’s no use pretending it doesn’t exist. Will it affect Apple’s bottom-line? I’m not much of a believer in advertising, but at the very least Apple will have to change their game. I think that Micheal Arrington makes a similar point here.

Does this have any effect at all on Microsoft’s no. 1 market, the Dell-one? It does if you believe that students, “stupid users,” and individualistic professionals will bring about a revolution in the work-place, which may happen eventually. In the short-to-medium term (the one the stock-market cares most about) however, my gut tells me that all of this is pretty irrelevant to that business-only segment, which cares about creating products that work on a massive scale, and about buying PCs that become cheaper with economies of scale.

Vincent

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If there’s one job I hate, it’s digging into Excel. I can read formulas as well as the next guy and can put a financial or marketing spreadsheet together easily enough. But man, it’s just such a chore!

The problem is, I believe, related to my own preference, which is definitely visual. I like drawing things out, I don’t like calculating them. I like seeing the effect that numbers have, I believe in the power of numbers, but I don’t really want to see the math. I know there’s other people that prefer the complete opposite, but we all get confronted with Excel-related tasks in our lives.

I’ve been thinking for about 5 minutes about this, but I’ve already come up with three improvements I want to see in Excel and other spreadsheet-packages. They are:

1. Instant zooming in when dragging

Sometimes, e.g. for a pivot-table, you need to select a very specific region on your spreadsheet. It sucks to drag the selection down together with scrolling the screen. Instead, it would be much nicer to just have the screen change, according to the action that you’re doing. Does that make sense? Anyway, here’s a picture. Excel also usually shows a little pop-up with the exact co-ordinates of where you’re at.

2. Visually displaying data

I think what I like the least about Excel is that I eventually lose the overview, especially after crunching away for a few hours. I’d like insta-graph™, by which I mean, I’d like to have instant graphical feedback on the effect that a change in inputs has on the whole. Just inserting a graph already does this, but is generally something you do after you finish your sheet. Instead, I’d like it to be in the sidebar, which both Excel and Numbers are using in Mac OSX.

3. Just drawing the line

No picture this time, but imagine just drawing a line on a graph and Excel filling in the numbers. Or, adjusting a bar-chart, by pulling bars up and down and having Excel doing the rest. Now that would be heaven for me!

Give me another hour, and I’d probably come up with another 10 suggestions. What it comes down to is that, right now, much of software is designed with a “my way or the highway” attitude, and especially things like Excel have shown little in terms of innovation over the years. I’d really like there to be more catering for the rest of us (probably a majority) that wants nothing to do with Excel, but is somehow forced into it. Excel is important after all, especially when trying to plan out your finances, which we all have to do at some point. Apple’s Numbers was promising, but didn’t really deliver either.

So where’s our salvation? And what would you like to see changed in Excel?

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I recently read a ‘filler’-article in Fortune Magazine, entitled “The luxury of choice.” It’s about how more and more products today are being customised for picky end-consumers. The way society is evolving, I think that such ‘pickiness’ is something that is more and more on the rise.

I wonder if such a thing also applies to software, by which I mean anything that can be coded and presented to someone on a screen (so web-apps as well). Traditionally, the power of software has certainly been to mass-produce the same thing, save on storage, reproduction, and distribution, and collect the cash.

But for certain people, like me for instance (more right-brained than left) it’s often quite frustrating that I can’t shift software around the way I want. To me, Excel should be 3d, mapping not only the co-evolution of variables over time, but also how different forces, on a Z-bar affect these variables. I’m also a Visio guy and would love for that to integrate well with the numbers.

Beyond that there’s certainly the promise of multi-touch that I find exciting, not because I want to shake things around on the iPhone, but because it’s often much simpler to communicate with a drawing. Instead I’m forced to type this text into an editor and hope you can read between the lines.

I’m sure that companies can have all kinds of things customised these days. I was reading an interview with Micheal Dell (from 1998), who talked about how Dell pre-installed custom-software for companies at the factory already, to save the sys-admins the hassle. These days, I’m sure the magic of networks changed much of that, though the principle remains the same.

But the core of my thinking is that customers, individuals like you and me, are becoming more and more conscious of their rights. They are able to become activists at the click of a button. The internet and the media is making what is and what should be more and more transparent.

When I visualise “luxurious” software, I don’t necessarily see it as expensive either. It only takes a single company to realise that there is a market out there for doing things differently, without charging much for it. All it takes is a smart way to collect information about a customer and an equally smart way to translate that into a customised piece of software for you and me.

Vincent

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“Ouch, it hurts, it hurts!” … “Oh yeah, that feels good, so good!” Guess which one is all other browsers moaning collectively (Microsoft & Firefox no. 1), and which one is the geeks…

Let me start by saying that Google Chrome rocks! OK, it crashed about 2 mins after I started it, and I think it has a process running in the background, which speeds up the launch, but which I hate, and it is Windows-only, which I hate 100x, but… it rocks! It’s simple, love that, it completely takes in all the bookmarks you had in Firefox, love that, and Gmail, man, Gmail loads like lightning! The browser loads like lightning too, because of the background process, can’t be any other reason.

Gmail’s loading speed confirms it: Google Chrome is Not a browser. Repeat: it is not a browser. It is a Google app-launcher. It is meant to bring the Google ecosystem to Joe Schmoe on Windows, who may know Google, but hasn’t thought about using its calendar, office-suite, or email, for that matter.

It is, to use a buzz-term, an in-the-cloud facilitator, bringing us one step closer to no longer needing computer-processing and storage, but just doing everything (essential) through an internet-connection. I don’t think, I’ve been this excited about a browser since Phoenix (what Firefox used to be called), which was in 2002, 6 years ago.

What’s different? Or what did Phoenix and now Chrome have in common? Phoenix had tabs, it introduced extensions, it blocked the pop-ups that IE never would. It was an evolution over the status quo. Google Chrome is just a browser, built on Safari’s Webkit-engine, with no extensions, but it helps us do what we were already doing, better. Because the world has evolved from the extension-model, it has gone way beyond what a company like Microsoft has even imagined. We live in a world where web-services matter!

I don’t use an rss-reader, I use Netvibes. I don’t use a mail-app, I use Gmail or Facebook. I don’t use a blogging-app (well actually I do, but the majority doesn’t), I use Wordpress.com. I don’t use MSN, I use Twitter or FriendFeed. When I’m on my PC, I’m in fact on the web, and the desktop only exists for work-documents and multimedia.

Google bites right into that trend, it executed well (ok, unstable browser, but localised in my language), it is a window in a world that 100s of thousands, if not millions, have accepted as their modus operandi.

Strategic angles

The love for strategy is really just the love for competition, disguised by fancy words.

Microsoft’s unbreakable chain?
Microsoft’s strength in the 90s was its software-platform. It was strong on multiple levels: market leader in OS, market leader in Office. And consequently, and still, market leader in browsers. It was able to build all these pieces of software on top of each other, tie them together, so that it would be an automatic choice to use them all. This is still the case today, as it is, by default, installed on 80% of computers out there (don’t quote me on this). Backwards integration, which also made it the number one choice for businesses, who like having the same software installed on 1000s of machines at once. And forward integration, through Office and IE, which add functionality in the value chain towards the consumer. From IE, Microsoft could build towards ActiveX and .Net, Silverlight, and other web-services that it was selling/giving to consumers.

Displacement by Firefox?
Yes and no… For displacement to occur there needs to be some kind of commercial angle. Firefox was built on top of open source principles, which is definitely disruptive, but it wasn’t until Google came into play, that Firefox became a commercial success. Google, these last few years, became the cash-cow for Firefox and other browsers, through affiliate fees it was paying for the use of the search-box.

While that’s cool, it also placed Google into a power-position. It knew that there was money to be made with browsers, it knew how much money there was to be made, so it just had to make the right move at the right time.

Google power
I already raved on why I think Chrome rocks, but for Google, the situation is actually pretty similar to Microsoft, except from the web towards the desktop, instead of the other way around. It is the market-leader in search, which some say is the operation system on the web. Nothing happens, without it going by Google, which can make or break a business. As is the case for browsers depending on Google cash as well.

Where Google leads is the web, and it has a pretty good read on where user-models are evolving too: web-services, with some anchoring on the desktop. So building a browser makes sense, it’s a step in bridging the value chain from web to desktop. Where it gets scary for Microsoft (which also collects Google cash through IE, I think), is when Chrome-users start getting the hint that Gmail works great, that Google Docs will hopefully work great (offline), etc. etc.

And I’m completely leaving Android out of this, whose future I still find hard to read… but I’m hopeful. Chrome definitely proves that Google can build software.

Doesn’t vertical integration rock? Doesn’t Chrome rock? I think they both do.

Vincent, the fanboy. Out.

P.S. I’m also not commenting on Firefox’s Ubiquity, it’ll be interesting to see where that goes… also largely built on Google-tech.

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Last night, I was called in to check on a friend’s Vista-PC, which kept showing blue screens of death, at sporadic moments. The error-codes were just a collection of numbers and letters, and a Google-search just revealed that it could be a ‘hardware or software problem.’

I’m not going to go into the problem here, but I’ll just say that we tried to run the Windows system restore disks, which crashed half-way through, in the midst of formatting the drive. Vista PCs have, as you know, not been sold with the actual installation-CDs, though I understand that this is a right right now and the owner will go to the store and ask for them. After which, I will install Vista (my first time), as well as all the apps she needs for her productive day.

I’m angered that things like this are still happening! Having been a Windows user since 3.1, the only version that I’ve never had problems with was 2000, and XP now runs fairly good too. Vista, I’ve never tried, but I understand there were some driver-related problems, much like the 64-bit version of XP.

Typically, diagnosing and repairing a system like my friends will cost several hundred euros, if not more. And that is… if the store actually knew what it was doing! The error-codes, as mentioned, don’t point to a specific problem, and they previously suggested replacing the hard-drive, which she did and which didn’t fix the problem. Right now, the way I see it, I’m going to be installing a new Vista on it, the drivers, and the software. I’ll see if that holds. If it doesn’t, I’ll assume it’s a hardware-problem, and one piece of hardware will have to be removed after the other, to diagnose the cause.

Total time used to fix: 1 hour last night, 2 hours Vista CD pick-up, 2-3 hours installation & restore. And that isn’t counting that there’s 3 people involved, some gasoline, not to mention the months of trauma that she’s been experiencing through this problem. As well as whatever store-time + hardware-replacement-costs may be involved.

But why does it have to be so hard????!!!!! It really mystifies me how much of mess the open PC-architecure, in combination a fairly open ecosystem of hardware & software, is. You literarily have no idea, if there’s a piece of dust on a RAM-stick, if there’s a faulty driver, if an app is causing the mayhem, or if the problem is a Windows-update that went wrong. And, in case you are wondering, this is a HP-machine.

So, I ask once again, what the frustration-cost of Windows is? In my estimation, it’s pretty damn high, and I already suggested to them to get a Mac. It may be 50% more expensive and non-upgradeable, but the fact that I don’t have to worry about things like BSODs, is priceless.

I should disclose that I’ve been a Mac-user for 3 years now, which was both a hardware- and software-based decision.

Vincent

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