Incremental Blogger

This week has had a lot of news about search engines. Cuil led the way with a slightly bumpy launch. And now Live Search has updated their search page with a pretty picture and graffiti-like hotsearches. Eh, doesn’t win me over at all. Search is the key not doodads.

I also did several quick searches of Live and at least to me the search quality has taken a step backwards. Yuk. Just try “Tablet PC” and if you know anything about this space you’ll know it’s so-so results. After all this time I would have thought the results would be getting better. These aren’t. Here’s the thing: the results are looking very product or commerce biased. I thought I’d never say it but Microsoft needs to acquire Mahalo and work on their search results for the first couple pages until they work out a better algorithm. They need as much focus on authority as commerce. Maybe it’s what I’m searching for. Web 2.0 doesn’t look so hot either. Oh well, I guess that’s why we need more search engines.

Hopefully these things are just little experiments that will fade away fast. This is complete idle spectulation, but it looks to me like the engineers are losing the battle here. Live Search is turning into mush right before our eyes.

OK, OK, in trying to get back to a positive, constructive tone, here’s my suggestion on how Microsoft can salvage this. Here’s the thing: Make the Live picture relative to the user’s domains of interest. For instance, if I’m into Tablet PCs, leverage photos about news or events going on right now that might be of interest. Maybe a chat with Dave Winer and some of what he’s learned about pulling photos down might be in order. Or maybe just show pictures on special occassions. Don’t try to gimmick Live Search to an extreme. Do I really think this all of this is really necessary? No. But at least it might make the pictures more relevant and maybe something I might click on. After all, isn’t that the game here–to try to get people to click once or twice more?

Microsoft has a new online ad campaign in which they get the impressions from various people about Vista, then show them the great new “Mojave” OS (which is actually Vista), and they get them to talk up the features they like. Like any good infomercial the results are positive.

It’s a clever enough idea–since what most people know about Vista is just what they’ve heard–and not much more. They don’t know what they’re really missing.

Over the last year I’ve been careful in who I recommend Vista to. If I can see potential driver issues, I’ve been doubly careful. However, as time passes and people upgrade their hardware–which most often has adequate Vista drivers–my concerns pretty much vanish. I do think if you take away the driver issue and you have a relatively new notebook, Vista is the much preferred OS. With SP1 it’s simply better. It has better WIFI management, sleeps better, and with a couple config tweaks I think runs better. In terms of security, it’s an incremental step beyond XPs massive security leap with SP2. All in all Vista is in the right direction.

One thing I would add here, is that for technical folks I usually go over with them technical reasons for the “bad” things they hear about Vista. For instance, if some says display drivers are a problem, I explain to them how Vista is a step forward with its compositing engine and securiy changes. For the most part it’s not Vista that messed up its the driver writers. The way I usually present it is to go back to Windows 95 or when the transition happened from 16-bit to 32-bit Windows. It was during this company-saving effort that Windows graphics engine was left behind. Although there has been progress with the graphics layer, I don’t consider any of the changes as great as the one from Windows XP to Vista. And as engineers we all know what transitions mean in terms of getting everyone on the right boat. Point is, what Microsoft did with Vista was the right direction.

I give a similar argument with stability or compatibility of apps and describe how Vista even bends over backwards to try to be compatible with things such as XORing bits on the screen. Point is, Microsoft thought through how to mitigate display problems. Face it engineers employeed clever tricks over the years and some of those tricks have been replaced by techniques that actually have a design about them. Again, Vista is going in the right direction.

Shutdown/startup is another area that has many changes in Vista. These were needed because quite frankly the old ways would not guarantee proper shutdown of apps if you put a notebook to sleep/hibernate. This had to be fixed. Unfortunately, as engineers we all know that whenever you change something you tend to open yourself up for bugs and incompatiblity issues. Sure enough Vista got hit here. Maybe a bit better beta testing would have solved these problems before release. Possibly.

Lastly, people complain about how things have been changed or moved around. I know what they mean. Changes for changes sake can be frustrating. However, after using Vista for awhile, I think most changes are good ones. They do increase my productivity or reduce my management times. I will admit though that I’m still getting used to everything.

On the change side, I always show my engineering friends the integrated search and the better WIFI management. They always get it, even if they are a bit skeptical at first.

So anyway, for the mass market this “Mojave Experiment” might be fine, but for the technically minded people I know I like to give them the technical scoop. They appreciate it. A lot.

I would ask, was anyone shown the Tablet features in Vista? Or once again, were these “premium features” ignored. Oh, when or when, will Microsoft just admit that the Tablet features are mass-market features and make them available to everyone no matter what version of the OS they have.

PS. Notice that the mojaveexperiment.com site is Flash based. That means I couldn’t view it on the iPhone. Sorry guys, plain old HTML would have been fine for this or at least they could have had a plain site for mobile devices. Yeah, and this means going with Silverlight wouldn’t have worked too.

PSS. I think this focus group test really points out how important early adopter, blogger, and press voices are in successfully marketing a big product. I hope Microsoft doesn’t continue to over-react to its past mistakes with Vista here when they go into talking more about the next version of Windows.

After watching JKKMobile have some much success at adding touch to Eee PCs, I wonder if someone is going to try changing the case and essentially making a ModBook. I guess that would be a ModEee? Sounds good to me.

Hmmm. I wonder if someone did this if they’d go with an active digitzer or maybe a dual active/capacitive sensor. That would get my interest for sure.

As I blogged the other day, I think the iPhone is the platform to develop on right now. I think it trumps all others. If a developer isn’t looking at the iPhone and how their product or service is best expressed on it, I think they’re not doing all that they should. That’s just me take.

With this being said, I see that Robert Scoble today is shaming those in the VC community, large companies and the like, for not taking the iPhone more seriously. Right now.

That’s OK, Robert. The fact that the established players are more cautious with something new like the iPhone is exactly why it opens up opportunities for others. So I don’t see this as a bad thing. It’s just the nature of changing markets.

I will add a key point that many industry people need to start paying attention to: I find more and more of my browsing migrating to the iPhone. Even with the display being too small, I find I check more things and read more content more often on the iPhone than I have with any other small device. Not only that, but the browsing time has eaten into my browsing time on my notebook or desktop. This is a point I’d pound into any VCs head that isn’t too sure about the iPhone as a different platform. The iPhone is not simply canabilizing other phone sales, it’s eating into desktop consumption. With better apps on the iPhone I only see this trend getting bigger.

One other key point I think industry players need to pay attention to here is how security is being expressed on phone like devices vs desktop OS devices. Put simply, security is going to kill the user experience in traditional OSes if they’re not careful. Here’s the thing. I can pick up my iPhone, wake it up with a click, slide the unlock gadget, and then without any further logging in, get access to the web, check the news, weather data, stock prices, etc, etc, etc. To get to other content or install an app, I might need to sign in. But generally, there are good things I can do just by turning the device on. Yes, I can set my desktop to do the same, but because of security reasons I don’t. It’s not that everything I have on my system needs to be locked down, it’s just that that’s the model desktop OSes have. I think the iPhone shows that either the desktop players are going to have to tweak their security models, or their market share is going to get eaten more and more by easier to use non-big-OS devices. I think part of the reason that more and more of my browsing is migrating to the iPhone is in part because of this.

For all my praise for the iPhone there are some things I think Apple and AT&T have terribly missed:

* WIFI-based calling. I don’t care what AT&T says, there are many dead or poor cell coverage areas–and when these spots are in a home with great WIFI, there’s absolutely no reason that the phone shouldn’t auto switch to VOIP. To do otherwise creates a poor experience. The iPhone is wrong not to support this natively and transparently. A great phone wood.
* The phone–actually mainly the apps, such as Safari–crash way too much. A great iPhone would not do this, at least not as much.
* Not only is the iPhone missing great travel apps as Robert points out (why can’t I track a flight easily?), there’s still not a great weather radar app, and I’m sure I could list a half a dozen other must have apps that the iPhone really should have. If these apps existed I bet, the iPhone would become mainstream faster than any competitor could come up with a great clone.
* The iPhone’s battery life is going to be an issue for quite a while it appears. Clever charging scenarios are going to be the workaround. These don’t exist yet.
* Free iPhone apps are good, but of course people need to make a living. However, what price should iPhone apps be? I’m thinking in the 99 cent range. Why? Because they actually are quite temporal. Developers need to get comfortable with 10x less expensive apps on the iPhone and potentially 100x more market size for their programs.

Those Apple Tablet rumors keep churning and churning. Today ABC News sums up what’s going on in the Mac Tablet rumor space. There’s nothing new here though. Just idle speculation and the repetition of rumors.

Like many, I’ve had some supposedly second and third-hand sources tell me an Apple touchish-tabletish device is in the works. But that’s only a couple people spread out over more than one year of time. In other words, Apple may be working on something, but who knows if it’s going to be released as a product.

My guess–and this is only a guess based on no tips or anything–is that Apple will make a larger iPhone-slash-iPod touch-ish like device and this may or may not be what people are hearing about.

Maybe Apple has something more revolutionary in the works, maybe something more Tablet PC like. However, I doubt it. It wouldn’t fit into Apple’s product line. I’d love to see one and I’d buy one in an instant, but I just don’t see it happening yet. Apple would need to dramatically improve its handwriting, gesture, and shape recognition. That wouldn’t be that hard to do, but I just don’t see it happening. Now maybe, just maybe, the education market is so compelling to Apple that they’re going to rethink their engineering efforts and build a notebook with integrated handwriting support. Maybe.

Anyway, even ABCNews.rumor.com isn’t enough for you, there’s always Jason O’Grady over at The Apple Core or MacRumors to keep the rumor mill primed.

Isn’t this fun?

One thing is predictably true here though: If Apple releases a Tablet–that’s even slightly close to the approach Microsoft has taken–the Tablet market will finally take off like we’ve all figured it would. There’s no doubt in my mind that Apple would release a quality product–whatever it does–and the arguments over whether a Tablet makes sense will all be over. Then it will turn into one of who has a Tablet that better matches your needs. For the sake of the overall Tablet market, I hope this is what happens.

By the way, same thing can be said for the MID market too, which at this time is owned by the iPhone.

Mary Jo Foley is reporting that Microsoft has “released to manufacturing the version of Windows XP that it has tweaked to run on the One Laptop Per Child XO computer.”

Cool.

Now maybe someone can sneak the Tablet bits in. Maybe if everyone looks the other way? Hehehe.

CNet is reporting that Microsoft and researchers have developed an algorithm that ranks search results not simply on link patterns, but on the browsing patterns of users. They call it BrowseRank. This is in contrast to Google’s PageRank algorithm that in part ranks search results on the links pertaining to content. You can read the original paper here: http://research.microsoft.com/users/tyliu/files/fp032-Liu.pdf

I think the researchers are wrong about their view that BrowseRank trumps PageRank.

Here are the key problems with this approach:

* BrowseRank is transparent. No one else but the people implementing the algorithm can see what the browsing patterns are. With links I can see within Google’s search results a bit of what’s going on. Links are public. Browsing patterns on the other hand aren’t. With links others can build and verify. How do we verify browsing patterns? All of the data would have to be public. No way does that make sense. I wouldn’t go for it. Links yes. Browsing patterns no.

* There’s a huge difference between taking content I select and showcase/post and collecting and organizing all my utterances (more akin to browse linking). The latter may be interesting–even to myself, but it’s not where we should be at right now in search.

* Imagine this algorithm implemented in China versus let’s say the US.

* If there’s one thing the web has taught us about public anonymity is that it is not to be trusted and BrowseRank is all about doing just this. What do I mean? Look at comments. Who do you trust more? A comment left and signed by Robert Scoble? Or one by “Anonymous?” This is exactly why services like Twitter and FriendFeed are finding more interesting conversations–because people attach their digital identities and reputations to them. If I put a link on my blog it’ll mean something because I put that link there. Other people can see it. Other people can confirm it (by linking) or not. If someone browses to a site, what does it mean? Is it a spam bot? An attack? A sign of agreement? Scoffing? Boredom? You’re going to have a trust ranking of the browsers. And where’s the archive of this behavior so it can be audited? And then who’s going to stand behind this? Will all Microsoft employees and partners make up this pool? Will all Slashdotters? Will it be opt in? See the problem?

* Browsing pattern analysis is like the Nielsen Ratings for websites. Leave it at that.

* With BrowseRank there is going to be spamming. It’s so obvious that spammers will develop bots and fake identities to taint the results. Just because spammers are going to design for it doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea, but here again, I’m concerned about the transparency of the implementation. The paper provides some details on why it thinks its algorithm can be used to prune spam, but obviously there’s a huge difference between applying an algorithm in vitro with one in the wild.

Now I have no problem with the algorithm being applied for marketing analysis or to Digg-like commenting sites and ranking their comments (comments written by people who really consumed the link content rise higher than those you just comment), or given a collection of XRank/Wikipedia content authors, just follow their browsing patterns and re-rank XRank. These are fine ways to use browse ranking in the wild. And then within contained environments (let’s say a company) it’s fine to rank content as I’ve blogged before by editing or consumption patterns. That makes sense. However, as a basis for all search results? Uhm.

I’m sorry, I don’t see how BrowseRank will scale well with human nature. In this alone, PageRank still trumps it.

News is spreading that Windows Live Photo Gallery is going to be including face recognition for “family members and friends.”

Seems like an interesting feature, however, Microsoft needs to be careful here. I’m betting they’re talking about matching among a current set of commonly familiar faces over a given period of time. In other words, train the system to let’s say five people as they look today and then match subsequent photos around this time frame with those faces. You’re probably not going to be able to go back much in time to match with these faces–even for the same people. Kids grow too fast. Distant relatives change too rapidly with regards to sparse frequency in which you take photos of them. And frankly, even with your own photos of those closest to you, you’ll have the largest number of photos over the greatest period of time and yet one set of facial matching criteria probably won’t work across all of them. People change.

Any useful desktop facial recognition software is going to account for this. Anything else will be a demo toy.

Now here’s the thing. There are perfectly good uses of facial recognition, which can design around these issues. In no way am I saying not to use facial recognition. What I am saying is that a great product is going to make sense with regards to how people use photos (and may I suggest webcams). Whatever Microsoft implements, I hope its design makes sense and is not just a college-grade, gee-wiz app. OK, OK, one more hint. Think about something called mesh. A real solution along the direction I think Microsoft is going is going to use this.

Oh, and one more thing. Microsoft needs to beef up its computer vision support across its OSes and devices. Where’s the .NET library for all this? Where’s the support for webcams in Silverlight? Or when you open up your brand new notebook for the first time that most likely includes a webcam, where’s the camera support in Windows? Where’s the virtual camera driver? etc, etc, etc. If you ask me, all of these are much more important to be spending resources on than something that will be shown in a demo and then that’s about it. Otherwise it makes Windows or Windows Live look more like a bag of stuff than a well designed product or service. If this helps anyone, think like Apple. Scratch that, just think.

It’s time to go beyond thinking of WIFI access points as single entities. It’s time to go the next step and leverage access points as part of a location-aware network.

Here’s the thing: Access points broadcast and receive signals omni-directionally. That’s fine for many situations. You want coverage in as many places as you can from a single point. However, drop by any apartment building or maybe even your own home or office, and there are sure to be lots of WIFI signals eminating from the area.

In these signal crowded areas even if you did supply an open network for visitors or customers, who would know which network to join? Good naming is OK, but the issue suggests a solution that partially solves the public network issues but also provides other opportunities too. It’s all about multiple access points working as a location-aware based network.

Here’s the idea in a nutshell: Let’s say you want to provide open WIFI to those in your store. And I mean inside your store. Not the store next door. Not those standing out front blocking the door. Just the customers indoors. You can’t easily do this right now. Yes, you can have public networks, but they can look like any other network. If instead we had location-aware public networks that our devices are tuned to, we could readily separate out the private from the public. And as long as networks spaces don’t overlap, you can only be in one place at a time, so you’re only going to be concerned about one network. Joining a private network will take an extra step. A public one shouldn’t.

Location is King. Not the signal. Especially in public.

Don’t misunderstand. This idea isn’t about creating the ultimate security feature. It would be defeatable. You could spoof location. However, for the baseline system it provides one more way to better manage public access. A doctor might provide one public network for its waiting area and let’s say another for current patients in a chemo room. Other office networks wouldn’t even appear, because by definition they aren’t open, because they’re not location aware.

And then let’s take something like a school room as an alternative twist. One room could have access turned on, another off. Same goes for an office building. Maybe open WIFI is only available in certain conference rooms or the lobby. Everywhere else it’s not available.

Notice how an approach like this changes WIFI usage from the user’s perspective. When you visit a store, you know the WIFI is coming from that store. When you visit a doctor’s office, you know it’s coming from that office.

When you walk into an area you won’t see a slew of WIFI networks that you don’t have the passwords for anyway and you may never be sure who’s providing what.

To me, it’s not just about easier managed public access. A location-aware system like this opens up new possibilities for all kinds of devices. How? By leveraging parts of this system we could have the backbone of indoor positioning systems that any WIFI-based device (ranging from cameras to Robots) could use to determine its exact location and heading within the access points.

We already have crude indoor positioning systems, but bring in the ability to measure a device’s location within inches and heading within degrees and you have some new possibilities with intelligently tagging content as I’ve blogged before. This could be a huge game changer in organizing indoor generated content and yes, search.

How would this work? I’ll defer to the EEs. To work well, it would require some changes to how the radios currently operate. But with the right silicon you have some very interesting and practical possibilities.

TechCrunch is reporting that Google is looking into acquiring Digg. I have no idea one way or another, but I can imagine that Google is considering the possibilities. It has to, as do all companies.

However, I hope Google doesn’t fall into the Digg trap. Here’s why: The raucous nature of its commenters. Sorry folks, but Digg has fostered a community of commenters that’s just wrong. Let someone else play in the mud, but my recommendation is for Google to stay above and out of it.

Now, I realize things can be tamed. Microsoft has done a pretty good job with Hotmail. It’s nothing like it initially was back in the early days. Anyone doing ecommerce back when Hotmail started knows what I’m talking about.

My concern here is that Google is already playing on the edge with commenters on YouTube. It’s getting pretty trashy there. So adding Digg might not be too much of big deal to them. But it would be to me. And I think it will eventually be to advertisers.

I’ll put it this way: Along with Google’s “do no evil” mantra, I think Google ought to add a “be responsible” clause too.

By the way, same advice to Microsoft. I don’t care how big it gets. It’s not worth it. Just because you can make a few bucks off of something doesn’t make it right. Let someone else pick it up as an edgy novelty. You don’t have to. There are so many more things you can focus on that can make our lives better. Put your energies there instead.

With the news that JKOnTheRun is joining GigaOM, James Kendrick takes a moment to reflect on this past year’s loss of a great fellow contributor and one of the most warm-hearted persons you’d ever meet, Marc Orchant. Reading through the comments on James’ post it looks like quite a few people have been thinking about Marc recently too. I’m included in that group.

I’ve thought about Marc quite a bit over the last several months. I’ve thought about the conversations we would have had about the latest iPhone or about using tech in new and interesting ways. I’ve thought about how he’d approach this or that particular situation. And most of all I’ve thought about the hug he gave me after I finished my first round of chemo and radiation. His pure enthusiasm and warm nature is sorely missed–in person and I think among the A-list. It’s not the same, particularly when the tussles are louder than the tech.

I miss you Marc.

The number of people predicting a forthcoming Apple Tablet keeps growing.

Dave Winer thinks we’ll see one soon too as the next generation of Apple systems make their way to market:

In the next round you’ll see one with two or three USB ports and a removable battery as well as a tablet version. Both will run the iPhone software at least as an option. The tablet might run it as its only option.

Dave also sees the Apple Air notebook as a harbinger of thin things to come. I think he’s correct on this. Wha t Apple has going for it in its designs is not just a little bit of metal or well placed plastic or fancy graphics. Apple’s key design wins have recently been its thinness. It scored well here with the iPhone in comparison to other Internet browsing devices. It scored well here with the Air and even the MacBook Pro for that matter.

If Apple can bring together thin mobile devices with relatively low cost, then Apple’s going to continue to take market share.

My prediction a year or so back was that we’d see 30% market share of Apple devices. Forget about the PC as a single system sitting on a desk. What it’s really about now is a combination of connected devices. Signs continue to look like it’s going to happen. I imagine in the next year or so we’ll see analysts talking not just about PC market share, but connected device market share. What will matter is if the device can get to the cloud. If so, it counts in the pile. And if Apple can bring together its OSes even more across its devices (phones, iPods, PCs), then Apple’s going to wind up with a significant market share even in the OS category compared to other “PC” manufacturers.

In this game, Microsoft may want to rethink its strategy of “hiding” the OS in its game consoles or Zunes or even consolidating better the notion of an OS in its phones and the OS in small notebooks. The lines are blurring. Fact is, 10 million here and a 100 million there of competing devices that belong to the same OS family and its going to raise some competitive feathers.

Now one could argue that the OS can be hidden just fine, particularly the smaller the device gets. However, as the iPhone has shown it’s still about the developer, developer, developer. Do you think we’d see the same amount of interest in the iPhone today without all the developer efforts–official or not–around the iPhone? Nope.

This is a test post from the new Wordpress app on the iPhone. The app is quite minimal and missing some obvious features, but one feature is great: It can post images taken with the iPhone to the blog. This is a photo I took last night at sunset.

I rediscovered SketchBook Pro yesterday. What a great drawing experience on a Tablet PC! Even if you’re as bad at drawing as I am, it’s a great app to try out. If nothing else, you can scribble, erase, scribble, erase without wasting any paper.

I used to own a license to SketchBook, but after switching machines, migrating to the latest OSes and the like it has been one of the many apps I’ve lost track of over the years. So it wasn’t until yesterday when I was showing Lan’s niece the Tablet PC and how you can draw with it, that I redownloaded Sketchbook from Autodesk. Point blank: It’s an awesome application. I’d forgotten how realisitic and natural the drawing experience is. Hands down it should be in every drawing class in the world.

Once upon a time Sketchbook was more prevalent in the Tablet world. It was one of the first really slick Tablet apps. But Tablet sales being Tablet sales eventually the company making it (Alias) sold to Autodesk.

In my mind Microsoft made a terrible, terrible mistake by not bringing this program in house. Tsk, tsk. Don Dodge, Dan’l Lewin, sorry, but this was one of your top missed opportunities to properly nurture the Tabletsphere. I’d put this right up there with Microsoft not bringing in Josh Einstein’s apps either. What a set of poor decisions. (Sorry to point out these two–I’ve never met either though I follow them online–because I know there’s more to it than this, but it’s something that’s so disappointed me about Microsoft’s approach to nurturing the Tablet market. Some decisions cost millions–possibly billions in total market over a handful of years–in lost opportunity. These are two of them.)

Now the program is locked behind an overly combersome sign up sheet on the Autodesk site. What a shame. Really, Microsoft should be giving away an introductory version of this app for free as well as integrating its capabilities into Vista and Silverlight.

I met one of the SketchBook developers awhile back at a conference–I think Siggraph. I was quite impressed with his approach to the app and drawing itself and I can guess why Microsoft didn’t go for it. Thing is, the program doesn’t really use Microsoft’s core ink API. Here’s the thing though, the ink support in Tablets is not where it should be. It needs to be augmented and SketchBook’s capablities would have been a good start.

If you ask me, the Tablet PC’s notion of ink is still circa 1996. Microsoft really needs to think more carefully about “What is ink?” It’s not just about ink for business handwriting. It’s about replacing the paper exerience and making it even better by leveraging the digital world. And it’s not just an OS issue. There’s this whole thing called the web too.

I can’t help but think of what could have been. Imagine a quality drawing experience like in SketchBook available in Vista, on the Mac, in Silverlight. Imagine, imagine, imagine. Yeah, you can purchase Sketchbook now for Windows and the Mac (though no web support), but this misses the point about how valuable nurturing a growing market can be.

MacDailyNews is reporting another Mac Tabletish rumor. Supposedly there might be something coming by October. Who knows. At some point we have to say “Deliver or Step Aside.” I’m leaning towards the latter.