Archive for the ‘Tech Trends’ Category

Forget Monitoring, Just Check Twitter!

Tonight Facebook seems to be having some issues. It has been resetting connections from my browser and is almost as reliable as my workout schedule. How do I know it’s not just me? I searched Twitter, of course, and seem to have found a significant amount of others having similar problems. At the beginning of this month, Gmail had a fairly major outage and Twitter was alive with comments about Gmail being down as well.

This concept really isn’t all that new, but it’s amazing how much visibility one can have into what’s going on in the world. The last two issues that I’ve experienced with large services, I found out that thousands of others were having problems within moments. Of course, that’s only the tip of the iceberg of things that Twitter can be useful for. Being able to see what’s being said about your product all the time is incredibly useful as well. I suppose the system works, however, only until Twitter breaks down and we have to find some out-of-band tool to check on it (which, given Twitter’s track record, we may need that fairly often).

Update: Ha! Just after posting, I had problems logging in to my Adsense account. Guess where the first place I looked for and found others having the same problem? :)

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Sep 19th, 2009

Is Microsoft Supporting Old Products Only When It Feels Like It?

It was barely a month ago that the web development community watched in horror as Microsoft told the world that dropping support for Internet Explorer 6 was not an option. I completely understand and would agree with the rationale here. They released Windows XP with IE6, so a freshly re-installed desktop would be unsupported if they had dropped support for IE6, which is certainly a bad plan. However, that doesn’t seem to be the same Microsoft that we saw this week when they told us that they won’t be patching the critical TCP/IP flaw found in all versions, but patched in Vista.

What really leaves me scratching my head about these two circumstances is that Windows XP is used by far more users than Internet Explorer 6. It’s commendable that they continue to support IE6 even after some very serious push from the community to try and force users out, but Windows XP market share is still extremely high while IE6 market share is waning. Perhaps the Windows team has been a bit busy lately with patching new vulnerabilities being discovered (though disclosure of the last one was pretty irresponsible assuming it really was released publicly first) as well as finishing off Windows 7.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Sep 16th, 2009

The $10 Free App

I don’t think it’s fair to talk about my Snow Leopard experience this weekend without talking about the hosing I took from the iTunes App Store this weekend. A coworker of mine and Digg both told me about the new Facebook app for the iPhone. My wife uses Facebook incessantly and I thought that she would be excited about it, but she never said a word. When I asked her about it she checked for updates on her iPod Touch and it said there were none.

Not one to give up easily, I checked the article that was posted on Digg and found out that others had had problems with their devices finding the update and the recommendation was to remove and reinstall to get the new version. So.. we quickly removed the old Facebook app and went to install the new one. Sadly, we were disappointed (more like she was mad and I was in trouble..) to find out that it required the iPhone 3.0 upgrade (her iPod was a gen 2 without the upgrade). Since the iTunes App Store is so closed and wont’ allow to get the older version, Facebook 3.0 did end up being the $10 free app for us..

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Sep 1st, 2009

The Difference Between an Apple and Microsoft Upgrade

Like a good little Apple fan, I went out and purchased a copy of the new Snow Leopard OS from my local Mac store yesterday. I got it home, popped open the box, popped the DVD into my MacBook, told it to upgrade and in 45 minutes or so I was playing with the new features of Snow Leopard. This really was my first operating system upgrade as an Apple fan and I have to say I was impressed. I was an Apple fan before the Leopard release, but I didn’t do an in-place upgrade for other reasons at the time.

Why is this cool or even worth noting? Because that was all I did. I didn’t look at some chart to see which copy of Snow Leopard was right for my computer. I didn’t have to double-check that I was running the 32-bit version instead of 64-bit. I didn’t run my computer and peripherals through some software to make sure they were compatible. All I cared about was that I had a MacBook running Leopard, so I purchased Snow Leopard and popped the DVD in the drive. And guess what? My computer now runs faster! In fact, I am now using something like 6 GB less disk space than before.

The other cool part was that I didn’t reinstall any software, nor did I re-activate anything. Unlike doing an upgrade with Microsoft software involved, I wasn’t treated like a pirate and required to jump through hoops to use my software again. I just loaded it again. The user experience from the store to upgrade complete was very smooth and straight-forward.

While it’s certainly true that the upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard was far less of a jump than Windows XP to Vista or even Vista to 7, but it really doesn’t matter. I had to put far less care into the upgrade and just did it. And that (among a few other things) is why I do, and will continue to do for the foreseeable future, recommend Apple products to those who ask me their opinion on what computer to buy.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (4) : Aug 29th, 2009

Linux Vendors: United They Will Stand?

Ever since reading OStatic’s article about how Linux netbook returns really aren’t the problem with Linux market share, I can’t seem to quite get over the conclusion. They make an excellent point. Microsoft has lots of money and can afford to throw a lot of it at marketing. And Linux vendors? Not so much. To ‘requote’ (RQ?) Joe Brockmeier from Novell:

“If you took the marketing budgets of all the Linux vendors combined, and then doubled that figure, and then added a zero, you might start approaching what Microsoft spends on marketing Windows. Maybe.”

Wow. That’s one heck of a deficit to overcome. The funny thing about the software business is that as long as your technology is ‘good enough’, often that’s all it takes. From there it’s marketing. It’s sad, but true. It’s not that one has to match dollar-for-dollar, but that’s certainly not a difference that’s easily compensated for.

Okay, so there’s a problem. What’s the solution? Let’s read on in Brockmeier’s quote:

“The ad councils for various industries have the right idea — it’s a good idea to pool your money to grow the market when you’re jointly competing with another industry.”

This is where I have to disagree. Pooling money for marketing from Canonical, Red Hat, and Novell (and perhaps some lesser-known Linux vendors) for the benefit of whom? Linux? What Linux? Ubuntu? Red Hat? SUSE? If I were a Red Hat shareholder, I wouldn’t exactly appreciate my dollars being spent marketing ‘Linux’. While I like Linux, Red Hat needs to market Red Hat.

Is this what Linux has come to? A charity that vendors can pool their money into with the hopes of getting something out of it? Now, it is true that these vendors rely upon Linux upstream to have a product to sell, but as long as there are differences in distributions, there will be different marketing strategies. And that’s for good reason. Ubuntu is popular on desktops and laptops. Red Hat is not. In fact, Red Hat appears to not even care about the desktop market. SUSE fits somewhere in the middle there.

Can the three combine marketing strategies? Maybe. While I definitely like the idea of Linux dominating both the server and client operating system market shares, I would hate to see tension created between vendors because advertising doesn’t help out each equally. That would just serve to hurt all three. As a community, Linux vendors can’t even agree on a sound subsystem, let along a marketing strategy.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Aug 16th, 2009

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