Computer’s as appliances..?

With all the news about Sony clogging up the airwaves (can you say that it internet parlance? how about blogwaves?, interwaves? webwaves? whatever). Anyway Sony – all the bad press Sony has been getting recently has made me think about another one of Sony’s cash cows – home appliances; specifically TV’s, VCR’s & DVD players.

I have recently bought all three of these appliances, and I can tell you, all the talk that computers (especially Apple’s) are nearing the nirvana of an appliance are way off the mark, in fact completely missing the mark. It is in fact, the other way around.

I don’t know about your experiences, but as far as I was concerned, you could buy a TV in 1995, turn it on, watch it, switch it off thousands of times over the years without a hitch. Then buy a brand new VCR or a DVD player a decade later, plug it in and guess what? with minimal configuration it would work. Very Apple like, everybody’s happy.

Then came the problem, (in my experience anyway), digital TV. I’m talking from a UK perspective here.

About a year ago I bought a Sony DVD player, my first DVD player (I know I’m late to the game, but I don’t watch a lot of TV). I hooked it up to my Tatung TV (about 10 years old), this TV also had a Samsung VCR (about 5 years old), and it did work fine. Watching TV, VCR’s or DVD’s was easy, recording TV as easy as it ever was.

Then, unfortunately the TV died, and by coincidence so did the VCR (however the VCR was never the same after having food pushed into it – I have a child under 2 you understand).
So I was in the market for a new TV & DVD player. I decided (with hindsight a mistake) to go all-Sony. After all I had a Sony 12″ TV from my university years that still worked fine, so my decision was made. It was made at a great price as well, a new VCR & 28″ Sony TV (with Freeview) for £500.

After the inevitable purchase of a new aerial to get Freeview, I settled down with the new set-up, happy that I was cutting-edge (well as sharp as you can be for £500).
Then almost straight away things started to go wrong. For some reason the DVD player stopped working. Usually opening and closing the DVD drawer would switch the TV to the DVD channel (again, very nice, very Apple). For some reason this no longer happened. DVD’s played (I could see and hear the actual DVD spinning up and down & counting), but no picture.

Then I realised that the VCR wasn’t recording. At least wasn’t recording the digital channels. Analogue channels recorded fine. It would record the digital channels, as long as you didn’t change channel, or turn the TV off, or turn the sound down (now I ask, what is the point of that?).

So I look round the back of the TV at the cables. This originally had been reasonably straight forward when first setting up the TV. It took a while, but following the manuals I had it hooked up as they specified. However, it was a cable mess. No longer is there just a couple of cables going from analogue, through the VCR to the TV, you now have almost a dozen cables, all going in different directions, god knows what any of them do.

So I check all the cables to see whether anything has popped out, but this in itself is difficult. The icons & writing on the back of the TV, telling you what each port is for are black, embossed onto a black background. Impossible to see, even in daylight without a torch. There are 3 different manuals, one for VCR, DVD & TV. This you would expect if they were all from different suppliers, but these all all Sony products. These products can be used with other products, so you do need separate manuals, but you would expect the manuals to look the same, be structured the same, and use the same names for each port – they do not, so you have to always translate between them.

After a lot of trial and error, I realise that the Sony scart cable supplied with the DVD is faulty, so I purchase the a new & better one, from a local independent electrical supplier. That’s the DVD sorted, but I find out that recording digital channels is purposely disabled in this way. Not taking no for an answer, I resort looking on the internet. There is a work around, but here it is:

Can you believe this? I’m still not sure this will work (I need to put aside an entire evening to find out, and guess what? I have slightly more important things to do with my time than translate the above diagram into reality).

All this reminds me of the original iMac campaign. One of the selling points of the iMac was it’s ease of setting up to the internet, and its lack of cables. One of the TV ads that was used shows this perfectly:

That PC is exactly what my TV, VCR & DVD set-up looks like.

Imagine if the above iMac was translated into an Apple branded TV/VCR/DVD…

The idea that computers need to become like appliances is misguided. Today’s appliances are just as complicated to set up as a Windows PC, but there’s an opportunity here for Apple. I really wish that Apple would enter the home appliance market because if they followed the same ease of use in both hardware & software that they do with the iPod & Mac, they would wipe the floor with companies such as Sony, and change the face of home technology for ever.

Sony are a huge company, it should be perfectly possible with today’s technology, to have 3 appliances, a TV, DVD player & VCR, and have 1 power cable, 1 cable going from the wall to the TV and the 2 more cables from the TV to the DVD & VCR. Apple does exactly this with all their technology why cannot everybody else? Why does no other company get this simple premise?

It’d be nice as well if the software they used to drive the settings for these 3 appliances was Apple-like as well, but I do not believe it is possible to do this outside Apple’s campus.

The interfaces used to drive these 3 devices are all different, break just about every GUI guideline there is, you have to learn different skills for each one, etc, etc, etc. It’s like Apple Human Interface Department never existed.

Is Front Row and the new iMac a move in this direction? Maybe. Just think for a moment about these words, iMac, Powermac, Xserve. Now think of the differences between them. Now think about iPod, powerPod & xPod, a pod for the consumer, professional and administrator?

I for one would put my Sony products on eBay, and buy the Apple equivalents in a heartbeat.

Sony, don’t bite the hand that feeds you…

One of my favourite authors is the late, great Douglas Adams. His humourous insights into any topic that caught his eye made him an immensely enjoyable read. The book (or books) he is most famous for of course are the Hitch-hiker books and one of his observations is pertinent to a situation that has recently rocked the tech world.

Now, bear with me, ‘cos if you haven’t read the books, this isn’t going to make much sense. Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect have just ridden on the back of a Perfectly Normal Beast and have gone through some sort of hyperspace rift into a new world, one that is populated by (amongst other things) a transport café, which they visit in order to gain some refreshments, and to see The King (yes THE King). There’s some REALLY funny bits about a credit card, restaurant write-ups and nibbling fingers, but I digress.

Once entering, the author remarks on the customers of this café. The establishment is a dark and moody place, full of dingy corners and shadowy, nasty ne’er-do-wells, such as drug dealers, murderers, assassins and record company executives.

This small observation, made in jest perfectly sums up the people we are dealing with here in connection with the Sony rootkit scenario.

The problem here is one of control. The record companies know that at some point in the future (not to far away either), all media will at some point in it’s journey from producer to consumer, pass through a computer.

Now the consumer sees this as an opportunity to transform & manipulate that media into whatever they want, in order to transfer it anywhere for their convenience. After all, they bought the media and they should have the right to do whatever they want with their property, correct?

The producer (in this case it is not the musician, it is the record company), sees this opportunity in a completely different light. Previous forms of media transportation (such as cassette, LP), had little in the way of copy protection because you could never make a perfect recording, the same applies to VHS. The record companies were not too bothered by this, and there was little they could do about it anyway, the technology didn’t exist that would have allowed them to stop it, so they grudingly lived with the situation.

CD’s took them by surprise. From what I can see, record companies are run by people who have little understanding of technology. They failed to see the upcoming danger of personal computers and ripping CD’s to MP3, and are now playing catch up.

This ‘catching up’ basically consists of making up for all the (apparent) lost revenue they saw since VHS Video cassettes first came onto the market. In their eyes, when you buy a CD or DVD, you are not buying the contents of that media. What you are buying is a licence (details of which varies from country to country), to experience that media under the conditions of that licence, and to a certain extent, they are right.

Now the conditions of that licence have changed little over the years, but what is different now, is the Record Companies see that with the potential use of technology (Black Hat Rootkits), they can enforce that licence in a way they have never been able to do before, and even change the conditions of that licence when they see fit. They see this as their last chance to enforce something they’ve wanted all along, potentially make a pot load of cash in the process and they are not going to let go of it easily.

There are a number of problems with this viewpoint, they do not see them, but we do:

1) A pirate is not a potential customer, and never will be. The record companies think that every pirated copy of a song is a lost sale. This is obviously incorrect and ignores a basic understanding of how consumers operate. Bill Gates once said in connection to piracy rates of his software in China, (and I’m paraphrasing here), “If they’re going to pirate software, let’s make sure it’s ours. We’ll figure out a way to collect later.”

2) Fair use. Now this little loophole in the licensing conditions differs from country to country. Where the law applies, you can make a back-up of the CD’s you have bought for your own usage. Some countrys are less than flexible (such as the UK), and other laws state that you cannot broadcast the songs you have bought to other people. The law regarding fair use is badly thought out and confusing. Consumers need a simple, fair system that takes into account their listenting & watching habits, plus takes into account the use of new technology. Until this happens, consumers will feel it is their right to treat their music in any way they want.

3) Respect for the consumer. What the record companys don’t understand, is that by tighteneing the grip on the listening conditions of their media, they will squeeze all the life out of it, and kill it stone dead. The consumer will not agree to (for instance), buying another copy of their music CD to give to their friend. They will simply copy it using iTunes, as they did before with LP’s and cassettes. The record companies have not lost a sale, because their friend would not have bought it anyway. The tenuous relationship that exists in this licence is the best they are going to get. If they push too hard, sales will go DOWN, not up.

What they should be doing is introducing fair DRM, like iTunes, on their CD’s. (Apple – a chance to licence FairPlay here please?). How about lowering their prices, and giving better value for money with these CD’s in terms of discounted tickets for live events, fan clubs & merchandise? This would give added value to the physical CD, and is something that is impossible to pirate.

Record companies, and all media companies have a problem with piracy, but this is not a new phenomenon. Their business model is totally reliant on a flexible approach to usage rights and if they try to alter this approach to the detriment of their customers, these customers will simply walk away, (probably in the direction of BitTorrent). The best way to fight it is by treating this threat as a competitor for your customers, not by treating your customers as criminals.

If you haven’t read the passage in Hitch-hikers as described above, the following won’t make any sense either, but a statement in this book sums up the attitude that media companies should have towards us:

“You should never bite the hand that feeds you. Nibble it occasionally, even suck on it really hard sometimes, but not actually bite it.”

What switches a switcher..?

There’s a process of thought in marketing that outlines the different strategies in which businesses can operate. You can be ’sales orientated’. This means that you go out to your customers and you target anyone who may want to buy your product, and hard sell them.

Another is ‘marketing oriented’. This means you perform extensive market research and find out what it is your customer wants and you fill that market. Another (and quite outdated) is ‘production oriented’. This means that you create a great product, regardless of whether you know the market wants it, and you advertise that product, hoping the market will come to you. This approach is commonly known as, “build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.”

Now, which approach do you think that Apple ought to follow?

Let’s face it, the first (sales) ain’t Apple strong point. They’re famous for making great ‘brand-awareness’ advertising, but when it comes to product, their adverts are strong on concept, but lacking in hard-sell. The reasons for that a partly down to the long-term plan they have for the brand. Put simply, they do not wish to cheapen the product line. I can see the idea behind this, as they are not a mass-market supplier, they fill a niche and fill it well. This isn’t the best approach to increase market share however.

What’s next – the marketing approach. Apple are famous for abhorring ‘focus groups’, instead relying on gut instinct. Interesting. You can argue the business sense of this, but hey, the are the original ‘crazy ones’.

Thirdly we have the ‘production’ orientatated approach. This approach is all but dead in modern business practices, but Apple generally follow this plan with good success. The idea being is that you create best-of-breed product and hope that the market will notice and beat a path to your door.

You’d think that this approach would not work as people simply buy what advertised to them strongly enough (i.e. Windows). It doesn’t matter if it’s an inferior product, there is a hugely strong ‘herd’ instinct in buying all high-tech products where a degree of knowledge is required to make an informed purchase. Most people lack the courage to go against the flow. Everybody else chooses this computer, so it must be right. It’s tragic I know, but Apple has something else up their sleeve that backs up this production orientated approach (hardware) and that’s SOFTWARE and it’s effective.

Let me impart a story that shows how it’s effective.

A work colleague of mine has used PC all his life. He’s never come across a Macintosh at all. His opinion is like most PC users – indifference, he’s no power user. He’s never used a Mac, doesn’t see what all the fuss is about and doesn’t have an opinion either way.

Anyway, this colleague was brought into my design department in order to help out with some simple graphics work. After a hasty crash course in Quark Xpress & InDesign, he’s pretty well up to speed, and has helped a great deal in the more mundane work in the studio.

After showing him the obvious, (such as how to do forward deletes, where all the applications are in the dock, the menubar is always at the top of the screen etc.), he, like most Mac newbies has picked up the Mac basics pretty quickly, and it’s been interesting to see a virgin Mac user up close, going through some of the trials & tribulations that most new switchers must go through.

It has taken him about 3-4 weeks to realise he can experiment with his system without breaking it. It’s taken him about 3-4 weeks to suddenly realise that his computer hasn’t crashed or frozen. It’s taken him about 3-4 weeks to realise that all the viruses we get sent via our company-wide emails don’t affect his computer at all. It’s taken him about 3-4 weeks to suddenly realise that he’s had no problems printing. I could go on, but you get the picture.

I first saw the glimmers of a switcher when he saw my iBook, which I bring into work. He asked the price, he asked what it could do, whether it could run Office, Adobe CS etc.

One day he brought in a DVD. This DVD was a DVD that a local company had created showing a wedding that a member of his family had attended. He wanted to know whether it could be copied as the company that created it was going to charge £200 for this, on top of the £1000 it took to create it.

His father (who owns his own PC-based photography business), had tried to copy it, but to no avail, and he said that it looked like ‘one of those Mac-DVD’s’. I wasn’t sure what he meant by that but I took a look at it.

Straight away I realised that it was created in iDVD. It used the ‘flowing curtains’ effect and looked really impressive to the layman. I realised that it was OK, but certainly didn’t push iDVD at all in the effects department, and was quite amateurish actually.

I pointed this out and showed my colleague iDVD. He was stunned. “So this DVD was created using software that comes free with all Mac’s?” he said. I answered in the positive. It turns out that his father had seen this DVD, and wanted a slice of this business. He had looked around for a PC-based program that could do this, but to no avail.

I left my colleague with this information and thought no more of it until a few weeks later when I was asked by my work colleague which Mac I would recommend to create these sort of wedding DVD’s. I gave a few suggestions and now his father is the proud owner of a top of the range iMac G5, with DVD Studio Pro. It doesn’t stop there however.

All this happened about 6-12 months ago, and at this point he has all but transferred his entire business over to Mac’s, and guess what gave him the final impetus to switch totally? it’s Apeture, the latest software from Apple that’s directly targeted at his sort of business.

And what of my work colleague? Well he’s just offered to buy my iBook from me for a very good price. It means I can replace this iBook with a brand new one for a couple of hundred pounds.

So there you have it. The reasons for these 2 PC-users switching were exposure to the hardware (my work colleague), and exposure to the software (his father). This approach by Apple is an approach that is unique in the computer industry and I can tell you now that it IS working.

Applescript to the rescue again…

I have over 4000 sheets of perforated A4 paper that need to have printed on to them a 2 colour graphic in specific places. This will then be put through a special ink-jet label printing device which will print out tickets that reference a database of descriptions & prices.

Simple you’d think, however here’s the problem. The paper is of low quality (I did not purchase it, it’s for a client), and the high volume laser-printer I am using simply jams after a couple of prints. I assume it’s because of the way the paper is heated as it prints.

The solution (as I found out the hard way with trial and error) is to only send 1 print, let the printer cool down and then send another – 4000 times.

Having realised that it wasn’t practical to babysit InDesign, pressing command P every 50 seconds, I realised that Applescript could do this. After a quick search on the internet to get the code structure correct, I came up with this:

repeat 4000 times
set CR to ASCII character of 13
tell application “System Events”
tell application “InDesign CS” to activate
keystroke “p” using {command down}
keystroke CR
end tell
delay 50
beep
end repeat

In case you don’t know the wonders of Applescript, what this script does is to set character 13 (which is return on your keyboard) to the variable CR, it then tells the background application “System Events” to tell “InDesign” to come to the front, System

Events then types “command-P” and “return”. InDesign is already set up to print just one print to the correct printer. It then waits 50 seconds and does it again, 500 times.
If you don’t know Applescript I suggest you try it out. I have only basic knowledge of the code, however in my view it’s perfect for solving repetitive tasks just like this.

G5 firmware update at last..?

This fly in Apple’s ointment has been brewing for the best part of a year now but I did not experience it until about 6 months ago.

The studio that I run is part of a larger PC-based company that is expanding rapidly and various internal developments necessitated a purchase of another Mac for the studio.

In the end I decided upon the single processor G5 (1.8ghz), and upon delivery everything seemed fine. I transferred over the user’s account from his old Mac (an 800mhz G4 which is now used as a print server), installed an extra 160gb internal hard drive for the user’s work and off he went into G5 heaven, extremely pleased that he cold now use InDesign at an acceptable speed.

After a few days several odd things began to happen. Occasionally and without warning the spinning beachball would occur, usually in Illustrator or the Finder.

So I did what I would normally do in this situation, I tried to force quit these applications – but they wouldn’t force quit. I tried quitting all other applications first and then trying to force quit the Finder – still no dice.

I then tried force quitting from the Activity Monitor and then the command-line – still nothing. I couldn’t even shut the Mac down – I had to press and hold the power button to restart the Mac.

Now, I did not know about the G5 freezing problem back then so I approached the problem in much the same way as any other, repairing permissions & running disk utility from the CD, all to no avail.

After this happened numerous times I tried to find out exactly what the user was doing in each occurrence and what I narrowed it down to was when the user was saving something to the extra internal hard drive. Taking the hard drive out completely, and moving the work folder to the boot drive seemed to make the problem go away.

I then ran tests on the hard drive but it was fine. It was at this point that I happened to listen to the MacCast and a chance article advertising a web-site (www.G5freeze.com), alerted me to the fact that I wasn’t alone in this problem. I registered my complaint with them and we all waited with baited-breath, waiting for Apple to notice us.

And, 6 months later Apple seemed to have noticed. The G5 System Firmware update has just been released. I have yet to install and test this update, I’m going to wait few days yet as this is a production machine and I do not want to risk anything, but initial feedback from the Apple forums seems to point to everything being okay.

However, this has been a troubling affair for all those people who have had working hours lost because of this anomaly. Apparently a lot of the early complaints were ignored, and some users were accused of lying about their problems. Many G5’s have been returned several times, and eventually were replaced with a dual G5.

This does not bode well for Apple’s crowning glories, i.e. the Mac’s reliability and great customer support, those crowns now need a lot of polishing. These kinds of problems should not affect Mac’s, and the fact that they do, point to a few problems in quality control at Apple.

Somebody is to blame for this, and I hope that lessons have been learnt. I also hope that this does not give us an insight to any future problems with the Mactel’s because once we’re all on the same hardware, and speed is no longer an issue, reliability and customer service will be the only thing Apple has left in hardware terms to differentiate themselves from the competition.

Mactel… this changes everything…

Apple dropping the PPC platform and embracing Intel chips shocked a great number of people, and for several, quite different reasons.

Some people expected it all along. The Marklar project was one of the most talked about rumours for years, and although when you thought it through it did make sense, (Apple would have been very foolish not to have had this as a back-up plan), it still surprised numerous respected Apple commentators.

Next, (which is the OS that Mac OS X was based upon), was originally coded for Intel. Xcode is built from the ground up to be platform independent, (a simple tick box compiles you code for PPC or Intel) and Apple have been encouraging developers to embrace Xcode for years.

With these points in mind, in my opinion, Steve Jobs has been planning this ever since he came back to Apple. I think though that the failure of the PPC platform surprised even him. Failure? Yes that is a harsh word, but in terms of what matters, (i.e. consumer perception of your product), the PPC platform has been holding Apple back for years.

Yes, there are great things coming from IBM (apparently), but if the latest dual core chips are anything to go by, then all the old problems remain. We now have a dual core chip that is actually slower (in GHz terms) than the previous version. Yes I know it is faster in real terms, but try telling that to Joe Public. The portable version of this chip is non existent. Freescale just cannot deliver. Look at the latest offering for the Powerbook’s. For the very first time in the Powerbook’s history, there is NO speed increase in the latest refresh.

Freescale may have upped the speed a little if Apple had not announced the move to Intel, but I doubt it would have been by much.

No, what matters is speed & production volumes. IBM & Freescale do not have this and never will. Your only option is Intel and their roadmap looks very exciting indeed. Their speed increases look very impressive (especially for the laptops), and Apple will never have to worry about production volumes ever again.

One aspect of Apple that has astounded me, is that they cannot get their products produced quickly enough, there is always a holdup in getting chips from IBM, and they just cannot ramp up production quickly enough. Imagine how many sales have been lost due to this one annoying bottleneck. Imagine the lost sales and subsequent lost market share increase.

So, you can argue forever the finer points of IBM chips versus Intel chips, but it will happen anyway, we are all moving to Intel, and it looks like the transition will be swift and relatively painless now that Apple have decent emulation for the legacy PPC chip.

But the ramifications of this transition have not really been realised yet. Broadly speaking, is this positive or negative news for the Mac? Well I think it’s positive, very positive.

When Apple’s transition is complete and the whole product line has moved over to Intel and all major applications have been converted you will effectively have Apple branded hardware that comes installed with Mac OSX, all wrapped up in some sort of DRM that will make it difficult to transfer this OS to a standard Intel box.

You can purchase it as a normal Mac and not even realise that the chip inside is different.

You could if you wanted install either Linux or Windows on this Apple hardware and simply run it as you old Windows PC if you want, Apple will not prevent you (but they won’t support you either).

This isn’t as bad as it sounds because remember, it makes no difference what OS your running on this Mactel, the market share numbers will regsiter a Mac sale. I guarantee that a great number of Windows users will do this straight away (as I bet that the hardware will be very competitively priced) and Apple’s market share will skyrocket, even though a significant number of users will install Windows on it.

This will continue for a while until you have a situation where a large number of Windows users have hardware that is capable of running Mac OS X. All you then need to do to make these Windows users switch to the Mac, is convince them to move to the Mac partition – for free. This is much easier than it was before because there is no need to purchase new hardware or software.

But what will be the carrot to lure them to move to the Mac partition for good? One word – software.

This is why Apple has been beefing up its Applications Division since Steve Jobs took over. Apple make the best set of applications – bar none. the iLife suite, and their collection of Pro Apps are best of breed and will never be released for Windows.

This will encourage Windows users to come over, but the thing that will totally convince them is Office. Apple will either bundle Office with the Mactel’s or they will adapt Appleworks, cross it with the open source version of Office and bundle that for free.

And where is Microsoft in all this? Well they’ll be happy because they still get the OS sale and the Office sale (less happy if Apple release an Office competitor), but I’d worry more about Dell, HP & other hardware manufacturer’s. They are not in a very good position for future growth. Why would anyone buy their products when you can get similar priced hardware from Apple that runs more OS’s, more best of breed applications, looks better and is more reliable?

I look forward to the transition being complete and 5 years from now, the tech industry will look totally different. This really does change everything.