Incremental Blogger

Happy Birthday to my brother Layne!

Today is Bill Gates’ transition day from employee to community member.

Well, actually, Bill Gates will still be inexoribly connected with the company. He’s still a major shareholder, chairman of the board, and will be working on a couple projects within the company. But let’s play along with the game that he’s leaving–in part because physchologically people inside and outside Microsoft are seeing this as a seminal event. It is.

So with that, here are the top 10 things you’ll love about being part of the community rather than a Microsoft employee. Consider it your Community Survival Guide.

1. Now you can start a blog and say–uhm, rant–all you want. A few blog post suggestions: “Why Education Sucks in the United States,” “Top 10 ways to Improve World Health,” or “What I would do if I were 16 Today.” Tell ‘em like you see it. Why blog? Because it’s about participating. Not only will it create a record for your thoughts on what’s important to you, but it’s a great way to build and maintain your network. Expanding your network is a great way to learn, which is especially useful during a career change like you’ll be going through.

2. Parties. Yep, we have parties and tech gatherings at most major events. SXSW is the kind of the crop here. My style though is more geared around the Tablet PC Gatherings at CES. I’ll be sure to send you an invite.

3. After you start your blog (might I recommend a Wordpress blog by the way) definitely sign up for Twitter and I guess if you have to FriendFeed. Robert Scoble will give you props for signing up for FriendFeed, but personally it’s a bit over the top for me. You might enjoy it though. As Johnny Five might say, it’s lot’s of input.

4. Get a Nokia N95 phone and start streaming live on Qik. It’s the thing now. You don’t have to try to outdo Robert Scoble’s Qik interviews with heads of state, but that would be cool too. A Qik stream of you driving to the airport would be fine. We don’t care. Just interact, anwser some of the chat questions, and remember to have fun.

5. As a community member you’ll also probably change your reading habits. I recommend reading TechMeme, Robert Scoble (though more and more he’s on FriendFeed), and TechCrunch. When you can’t read anymore you can look at the pictures on Engadget and Gizmodo. And if you’re in an argumentative mood, there’s always Digg, but I recommend not using your real name as your sign on name.

6. Oh, yeah, get an iPhone. You’ll love it.

7. If you want to go to any industry events, be sure to sign up early. For instance, Microsoft’s Mix event has sold out the last couple times and they don’t make allowances for handling more people. For that matter Apple’s WorldWide Developer Conference sold out this year too. I’m not sure if the same fate is awaiting Microsoft’s PDC, but if you’re interested, again I recommend signing up for the early bird special. It’s expensive at $2195, but generally the event is pretty good. Oh, the other conference you may want to attend this summer is Siggraph. It’s sure to inspire. I guess Michael Arrington and the rest of the Web 2.0 crowd would give you a long list of other must-attend conferences; maybe you ought to check with them or watch Upcomming for other ideas.

8. Watch your identity. What do I mean? I suggest using your real name (or a consistent identity tied to your name) on your blog, when posting comments on other people’s blogs, on Twitter and the like. Anonymous blogs and postings are too much like kids dropping water balloons from midrises. It may be a blast for 10 seconds, but it really doesn’t do anyone a bit of good. And if you can’t sign your name to it, it’s probably not worth saying. Just keep it to yourself. Believe me, you’ll find lots of other things to post about.

9. Don’t take the flamers personally–especially the anonymous ones. This might be pretty hard to do, but all I can suggest is hang in there. Moderating comments on your blog is probably a good idea. Make firm rules and let everyone know what they are. If someone goes over the line, just delete their comment and leave it at that. Maybe because of your unique position, maybe you ought to hire someone to scrape out the unruly posts. Hmmm. Now that I think about it, maybe you ought to leave some of them in so while you blog about your philanthropic efforts around the world, people can see the contrast and judge for themselves. I’m so-so on this idea, but it might work for you. Just don’t get dragged into a flame fight. It’s not worth it and to those that don’t follow every jab, it seems petty.

10. The most important thing: Have fun. Do what’s of interest to you and don’t let anyone else get you down.

Yesterday was the first monsoon storm here in the Phoenix area and left in its wake is a lightening strike started grass fire. The fire is on the West end of town about 60 miles away from where I’m at and is spewing a huge smoke cloud. When I went out this afternoon the sun was peeking through the smoke cloud with a copperish glow. Quite impressive. I tried to take a picture with my iPhone, but the sun didn’t quite come out as impressive in color as the real thing, but it was fun nonetheless so I’m posting it here.

In a post today on another topic, Ed Bott makes the claim, “Intel’s decision makers no doubt have a pretty good idea what’s in Windows 7 and when it’s likely to be released. Their decision to skip Vista tells me that the next version of Windows is further along than most outsiders think.”

A couple of things here.

First, my gutt tells me Ed is probably right though it makes me bummed. I’m a long-time Windows developer and I know very little about Windows 7 outside of that in some form there’s going to be multi-touch support–but exactly how it’s going to be implemented I have no idea. The result? I can’t plan nor write anything for it. All I can do is watch the hardware and guesstimate that Microsoft is going to provide a standardized way to interact with the hardware that’s bubbling up in the marketplace. (Heck, even Google has a multi-touch API now.) This concerns me a little–especially as I see Apple and the web chomp away at Microsoft’s innovation mindshare–but I know I can keep on moving on whatever Microsoft does. They’re way too big for me to worry about too much, if you know what I mean.

Second, it’s already public as to when the next version of Windows will be available–sometime in late 2009 or 2010. Nothing else has been said about 7 although we now know that Windows 7 will be at least discussed at PDC.

Third, Microsoft has stated that it’s talking with some partners about Windows 7 of which Intel is probably on that list since it works with hardware vendors. So Ed Bott might be correct in that Intel knows quite a bit about 7 and that outsiders are in the dark.

And finally, it’s clear to me that Microsoft’s don’t talk strategy with Windows 7 is more about not talking with the end user and developer community than anyone else. This will probably change–at least a little–when the first beta comes out–though wouldn’t it be Saturday Night Live funny if Microsoft never talked about Windows 7? Heh.

How boring the tech “news” sites would be if they couldn’t pick on Vista? This time around the Inquirer suggests that Vista isn’t all that since Intel continues to pass on standardizing its enterprise on Vista. Couldn’t be more wrong. As Ed Bott points out this is nothing new. Intel has made similar decisions in the past with previous versions of Windows. Point is, there’s lots more going on here than whether the current generation of Windows is worthwhile.

Let’s face it, good businesses keep costs down. And setting aside the cost of the licenses, moving a whole organization to a new OS is going to be expensive. So maximizing the use of what you already have is a good idea.

This is the case for Intel and its true for my doctor’s office that still runs Windows 2000. Recently I asked them why they still used 2000. Their responses? Number one: cost. Number two: They really don’t use the OS that much; they stay within the confines of their office medical app. Think about it. For most of what they do, they only need two or three applications and the rest is there for their farmed out IT staff. This is the reality for many in specialized jobs that use computers. The OS has long since been sufficient for them. Isn’t that why Linux has had its opening in the market? Exactly.

Now Microsoft’s challenge is to continue to ease the management of their OS for the little doctors office, the mega-enterprise, and for my neighbor. Why? Because that’s where there’s been too much pain and expense to date. Isn’t that in large part why many of us are migrating our content and work to the Net? It is for me. I don’t like to re-install the OS to clean up a mess I didn’t create. I don’t like spending a half dozen hours adjusting settings to get machines to work together so I can share some particular content. I don’t like managing a network or an email system or on and on. I’ll do it if I have to, but I’d rather spend my time working on what I really want to use computers for.

Microsoft and Apple are continuing to make strides in these regards, but there is still room to go. That’s why I’m sure that when Windows XYZ comes out, the enterprises will eventually move to them too, even if it does take them awhile.

Jason Perlow of ZDNet may want to stick with XP, but I’m more than ready to say goodbye to my remaining XP machines. In fact, the other day I had to do a clean install of XP and ugh I can’t tell you how awkward it felt.

Some of this is that we all get used to whatever OS we’re using and anything else doesn’t seem right. The XP users think that of Vista and I to a degree think that way of XP.

When I have to use XP again–and I mean use the OS not just run programs in the OS–I can’t help but realize how much I like Vista better.

Whether it’s configuring the networks (which still needs more room to improve–especially with EVDO-DUN support) or searching for a file, Vista has the edge.

I can survive in XP just fine, but I like doing more than surviving. I don’t care what people say–outside of the driver problems and a few bugs that were fixed in SP1–Vista is a better OS than XP. Yes, it’s a hog so as it stands now it’s not the right choice for small systems. But otherwise, it’s the winner.

I do have to admit though, Vista is more at home on a desktop than a notebook. There is one exception to this, however. Vista on a Tablet PC trumps Vista on a desktop. The stylus and handwriting features make the difference.

There’s no doubt that the web has changed and will continue to change commerce. However, the current notion that I’m going to go to sites to search for a product to buy has a fundamental flaw. A flaw that makes shopping more inefficient than it needs to be.

Here’s the problem. Most of the time I don’t think people are trying to buy one thing. Yet all of the online shopping tools have this in mind. Here’s a single line text field and type what you’re looking for. It’s wrong.

Shopping–the real kind of shopping that I want my computer to help me with–is an optimization problem more akin to scheduling than single-text entry searching.

Of course, the challenge here is to design a shopping “scheduling” service that’s no more difficult to use than say searching for something online.

Here’s one of several problems that the current shopping search tools bubble up: They over emphasize price. This is not a good thing for the store, nor do I think it’s a good thing for the consumer. Price at any cost is not always a good thing. What about product delivery times? Ability to return a product? And so on.

It makes complete sense, therefore, for shopping tools to help me focus on more than price. This is particularly true if I need to purchase more than one thing.

Now Amazon has done OK with its integrated customer reviews and “you might also be interested in XYZ” suggestions, however, this isn’t what I think most people want–unless they are truly wanting to buy only one thing. Now stores can leverage getting you in the door and into their walled garden with one good product price and then try to upsell you, but as a consumer that’s not what I want.

Put another way, I think most of the shopping search sites should focus more and more on shopping as a goal. I want this type of product to solve this type of problem. I may think I know what I want, but maybe I’m not right. Maybe I can be persuaded otherwise. Help me out.

And then let’s say I understand what I need better, then help me get what I need in an optimized way. Can I purchase everything locally in one trip to a single store within 10 miles of where I’m at? Can I “purchase” from one place that then manages the delivery of my items so I get them all on the same day so I don’t have to worry about packages arriving over three days? Or what about sales and coupons and best times to buy either historically or based on current price opportunities?

On the flip side to all of this, I think most shopping search sites need to rethink how they facilitate grazzing. Why aren’t more sites about images than text? Shouldn’t the images be the lead and the text secondary? Sure for the computer it’s the other way around, but it shouldn’t be for the human. Just look at any printed catalog.

Lastly, I think there’s another whole opportunity that’s way underserved for shopping on the go. When I have my shopping list, tell me where everything is in the store. When I’m looking for something point me to where I might find it. When I’m stuck and can’t find something in a store, give me an online chat person if nothing else–it would be faster than trying to track down someone and asking them where something is.

Anyway, lots to do. That’s for sure.

If a Tablet PC is so good, what about a napkin PC?

Check out these design winners for the NextGen PC Design Competition. Pretty slick.

Mary Jo Foley speculates on some Windows 7 features.

As a developer it sure would be nice to know if there’s a new set of capabilities forthcoming in Windows 7.

I continue not to be a fan of Microsoft’s Don’t promise, Don’t tell policy–an unfortunate overreaction to the wrong lesson learned from Vista. But what do I know. I’ve never been in their shoes. So I’ll just step over here to the corner and sit quietly….well, maybe I’ll groan every now and then….but I’ll try to be quiet.

Uhm, who said Vista SKUs are a mess? Read some of these partial details on how AT&T and Apple are going to handle iPhone 3G sales.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is par for the course. Carriers are a not-so-consumer friendly group.

This is how you bait Windows developers into commenting on your blog.

Besides the obvious bias of this posting, there is something interesting in this general area of what Windows developers are using. First, I think most programmers today are Intranet developers. They leverage the browser. They leverage database tools. They write code that will be used internal to an organization, rather than external. And for those outward facing apps, they’re almost always browser based apps.

So although I don’t think the point of the article was this: I do think that for most Windows development per se–let’s call it the old Win32 style of development–is dead. I’d even go further in saying that for all practical purposes .NET is the Microsoft API now. There are some of us that still develop for the Windows platform as a platform, but there aren’t many of us. Most could just as easily be writing for anything if the tools they were using were cross platform. It’s just that the tools they are using are themselves Windows targetted. Silverlight is the exception here. And, yes, Novell is working on a port of the .NET Framework to Linux, but I’m so-so on whether this will pan out the way people are thinking it will. My view is that Microsoft should be doing the work. How hard is it anyway?

So here’s how I see it (in an oversimplified and overdramatic way):

* C++ is dead
* The Windows API is dead
* The .NET Framework is the API to target
* If you want to get a programming job today, focus on web development and databases
* Scripting is sufficient for many tasks and is something more and more people can do

And here are the general trends I think we’re seeing when it comes to programming:

* Learn how to design. Design tools will continue to improve and programmers will become more designers than just programmers. Likewise, designers will gain more powerful tools that will enable them to do more programming.
* Tools will improve so that more people can do programming.
* More “things” will move to the database.

This is way oversimplified, I know, but I think these are general trends that are true. What do you think?

Jkkmobile has a video review of the just released Origami Experience 2.0.

By the way, you can download Origami Experience and run it on a UMPC or a desktop. Of course, it really makes the mose sense on a UMPC and some features won’t be available if you don’t have a touch display. The Windows Vista Blogs lists some of the caveats:

The Origami Experience 2.0 is designed for Ultra-Mobile PCs that run Windows Vista. To run the Origami Experience 2.0, a UMPC with the following specifications is recommended:

Minimum 100 MB of available hard disk space
Minimum 1 GB of system memory
Touch panel display (required for Origami Picture Password)
The Origami Experience 2.0 requires the following software installed:

Windows Internet Explorer 7. Origami Experience 2.0 requires Internet Explorer 7 for its RSS platform.
Windows Media Player 11. Origami Central requires Windows Media Player 11 in order to manage and play media.
Microsoft Office Outlook 2007. The calendar tile in Origami Now works only with Office Outlook 2007 Calendar. The mail tile in Origami Now works with Office Outlook 2007 Mail and Windows Mail.
The Windows update available here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932406 . This update is highly recommended if you use the mail tile in Origami Now with Microsoft Office Outlook 2007.

The Vista blog also has a couple additional postings on Web Browsing optimizations in OE2 and it’s RSS support. Believe me, there’s lots more to OE2. Definitely worth checking out.

The NYTimes has an interesting article on digital interuptions and productivity. The suggestion passed on in the article: Check your email less often. How often? Hmmm. Those details will be passed on in a forthcoming email :-).

Twitter client writers need to up their game. We all know you can write to the Twitter API and display 14-character tweets for those who I follow and maybe each user’s thumbnail, and a couple icons here and there to show whether a message is a reply or something I authored, and so on.

But none of the Twitter clients go far enough I think. None.

As you know, I’ve been a long time advocate of Twitter thinking beyond text. I accept the fact that it’s not going to happen. However, it doesn’t stop Twitter clients from working around the text biased limitation and emulating a richer experience. So here’s what I’m asking for: Add support for inline images and possibly audio or video in the clients. If you see a URL to flickr, show the flickr image in the tweet. If you see a URL in a tweet. Show a thumbnail preview of the site. If you see a link to an audio file, include an embedded audio player so I can listen to whatever it is without having to click out of the Twitter client experience. And if you see a link to a video site, see if you can embed a video preview in the message. For those of you interested in watching live videos like those by Robert Scoble and the like, just image what could be done here too. It could bring a whole new mindset to tracking news on Twitter too, I bet.

The arguments for and against supporting non-text media natively in Twitter is kind of like the original web arguments as to whether images should be rendered in a browser or whether images should be embedded within email messages or provided as external links. By and large I think those arguments are over. For the vast majority of users the answer is yes. For a handful of others who don’t want it, the answer is to turn off images or use a text only browser. These people, however, are in the minority. Let’s just accept this fact and move on. The Twitter client authors need to make this happen.

Of all the Twitter clients, GTalk is probably the closest to providing a good media experience for Twitter messages. Depending on whether you point to Flickr let’s say, it’ll give you access to your Flickr image. (Last time I checked though the link has to be a real Flickr URL, not a tinyurl.) The problem is the approach is Flash biased and doesn’t go far enough. There’s lots more to support direct Flickr content as well as content from other sites.

Unfortunately, most tweets don’t contain the full address at all. Many use tinyurl or some other URL shortening services. So what GTalk and all the other Twitter clients ought to be doing is following through links. If you see a tinyurl or similar, you have to chase it down. You have to see what it really points to and then render something more meaningful in the tweet message area if it makes sense.

OK, here’s what the Snitter client typically looks like for me what I’m wathing Twitter messages:

Note that there are two URLs mentioned in two different tweets. This happens all the time. People are pointing to one of their most recent posts or sometimes some breaking news. But URLs being URLs many times I can’t tell what the paths point to. Give me a thumbnail preview of the site to help me out in deciding whether I should click on a link rather than me having to play URL roulette. Is this another link to truemors, or a link to actual news? I want to know.

So here’s one cobbled of idea of what these tweets ought to look like in my book:

Both tweets that reference URLs have thumbnail previews substituted or supplied for them. Isn’t this more interesting to read and give you a quicker and better idea as to what the person is pointing to?

There are lots of interesting questions here as to how thumbnail previews or images or audio or video and the like ought to be rendered inline with tweets. For instance, should the images be placed at the end of the tweets or the urls substituted with images with text wrapped around or the images right justified or what? Or maybe site thumbnails shouldn’t be used, but rather thredr or Techmeme style image excerpts ought to be extracted from the sites and right justified? Or maybe only take image excerpts on certain news sites or from blog posts? And if site previews are used, should tinyurls at the end of posts be displayed or simply dropped? Lots of possibilities.

Let’s face it, thumbnail previews for sites make complete sense. So do replacing Flickr URLs with the images they are pointing to.

During the next major earthquake or flood or storm don’t you want to see an embedded Twitter image rather than just the link to a page that you have to visit to find out if it’s a link to an image or a news website you’ve already read or to a blog that links to a blog that links to the image you want to see? And I think a compelling argument can be made that live videos ought to be embedded too. Maybe I do or don’t want to watch the video. Give me a few seconds at least of content to decide.

There’s more to it than this, though. I think we’re missing some great non-text conversations. I can’t remember what debate was going on the other day, but it was something silly and although I wanted to respond with something appropriately silly and pointing out some irony yet I decided not to post anything because in such a short text message it’s so easy to be misunderstood. So I said nothing. But it struck me at the time, that what I really would have liked to do was share my thoughts in a cartoon. There’s a reason why political cartoons are so popular in print media. Why can’t they be too in the Twitter community? I’d love to see Hugh Macleod’s drawings inplace. They’d be perfect. And I think we’d see lots more creative types joining in with their edgy commentary if Twitter clients would work better to support non-text.

I think we’re missing some terrific opportunities for quick visual commentary. Some of these might be photos snapped at the most recent Apple event, or someone sharing a sunny day in their backyard, or someone drawing a cartoon that more poignently than any sequence of 140 characters gets to the real point of an issue. Yes, sometimes things are better said in wiggles than words.

Of course, all of this should be a feature so those that don’t want it can turn it off. However, I’m convinced that if we broke out of this text bias we’d see lots of interesting use of non-text content.

What do you say Twitter client authors? How about it? It’s not that hard.

Some companies are famous for being paranoid. As Andy Grove of Intel has said many time, “Only the paranoid survive.” So, you decide that if escorting the press to the restroom at Apple’s WWDC event is being too paranoid or not?

Doesn’t this sound like a great story for a cartoon? Too bad Twitter doesn’t support images, because that’s where it belongs.