Apple computing can change the end user computer landscape for ever.

As a long time computer professional, I have lived and worked through the mainframe, mini computer , LAN based and now cloud computer eras. I have seen them all, large and small, and the changes that have affected our industry, which does love to evolve, sometimes rapidly. It also tends to have very painful outcomes for the incumbents - just ask IBM about OS/2.

There is absolutely no doubt we are living through one of these large changes at the moment and it is coming in several forms , that all point to a post-PC era - reference below. This blog post is being typed on a Google Chomebook from Samsung, and a lot of the research for the article was done using my iPad and Google Nexus 4 phone. No PC involved at all. I fully accept that I embrace technologies faster than most, but I never jump to join technologies and think carefully before I act. So if you are reading this on your trusty old PC with windows XP installed , then bear with me, you will get to this future faster than you think.

Apple really did push a large boulder over a cliff when they introduced the iPhone, intentionally or not they really did change the industry. Google could see the wisdom in this move and jumped on the bandwagon and built its' own operating system and infrastructure to compete, Microsoft did nothing but release another tired old version of Windows phone which crashed horribly.

At the same time Amazon introduced the world to the concept of cloud computing for the enterprise, which was first seen as a curiosity, but is now in any good CTO's strategic planning as the way forward. Google also saw this as an opportunity and introduced fairly quickly the concept of their cloud applications, and Dropbox showed the way for cloud storage. Microsoft was not so badly placed here, but really did not execute on its' good start with Hotmail, and basically seemed to do nothing, until this year when they released Office365 - years behind its' competitors. Its' cloud offering is not that amazing or different , but does offer some good features.

Microsoft have always been strong on the desktop, which they have owned for a decade, but with another badly received release with Windows 8 in all its' forms, it is currently very vulnerable  PC sales are dropping off dramatically while tablet and smartphone sales are booming. Microsoft is very badly positioned in both these markets and that is where the end user industry is heading. They will be fine in the corporate landscape for many years to come on the server side, but the desktop will change. The cloud means you can use anything as a client access device. Why pay $500 dollars per employee device when you can pay $200 - simple economics. Even better encourage your staff to bring their own - BYOD - even cheaper. If you are paying $100-$200 for a client device - why would you spend $200 on Microsoft office, when most apps are $5 for you Apple or free from Google?

Another cash cow slaughtered.

If Apple wished to grab this once-in-a-generation opportunity all they need to do is have a re-think about prices and product ranges, and simply introduce a budget range - nothing smarter than that. Google are already trying with their Chromebook, but they are not for everyone. They are having a lot more success with their Android smartphones - just see the sales figures and all the very cheap Chinese clones. If Apple were to partner with HTC,Asus or Dell and bring out a budget range of laptops, tablets and smartphones - cheap iPhone is already rumoured - just think how disruptive this would be. Google would have a real fight on its' hands and the competition would be fierce. Microsoft, and in truth a lot of other players would be next to pointless. Their tiny share in the smartphone market would evaporate and the their tablets which are already dying on their feet would disappear. They would become significantly less relevant in the new era, and we would at last have two decent competitors.

This would mean Apple going against a lot of its' historical DNA, and it has always sworn they would not do this, but this strategy is what nearly bankrupted them in the 1990's. They need to be very careful about how they proceed from here. Google is now their main competitor, and not just for devices but for the cloud experience that they are offering to their customers, and Google is a lot more open, and offers most of its' products for free.

I personally hope they do, as we have seen significantly more innovation since Apple and Google really got stuck in, as Microsoft had become stale. Internet explorer was a prime example. Once Mozilla, Google and Apple started to innovate IE became a much smaller player in the field.

Here is a link I read recently on the topic, but there are literally hundreds of other examples - just Google it ;-)

Research from Gartner on post PC era

Setting up an Adhoc wifi hotspot for your iPad using Ubuntu Linux

Well, since moving into my flat in Berlin, I have been stuck without wifi, which has rendered my iPad a little less useful than it was before. The flats just supply you with an RJ45 socket in the wall and an Ethernet cable.

So knowing how flexible Ubuntu Linux is, I thought I would have a look around and see if there was a way to set it up. There were lots of very good articles, a blog posts on the topic, and the truth is with Linux it couldn't be easier.

You basically just have to click on you network connection icon in the Gnome panel, and select "Create new wireless network" , give it a name and select the security type.



The only thing I have read, and found with my wifi network adapter is that they don't always support all forms of security, so you will need to test.

I started with no security, then WEP 40bit, then WEP 128bit and finally WPA. Your mileage may vary, so test them all.

It works perfectly, and I was able to download my newspapers , books, films etc etc.

The Computer Tablet revolution?

Have you bought an iPad already, is it the best thing since sliced bread or the next fruit juicer destined for the back of the cupboard?

While taking the Paris Metro yesterday on my way home from Bruxelles, I noticed there were adverts for the just released Apple iPad everywhere, and I fully expect to see the same on Tuesday while taking the Tubes in London. 

This form of computer device has been tried and launched unsuccessfully before by several major companies, including Microsoft , who have never seemed to catch the public's attention, that has now apparently changed. The mood for this type of device seems to be right. I think this is due mainly to the success of the iPhone and and iTouch before it, and people can now see the benefit of this keyboard-less type of device. They are by no means perfect, but they are a lot lighter than the netbook's or notebooks must of us use while travelling so they will potentially have a place in our luggage.

There is great news for people who don't use or want to buy Apple technology, as Google have released a competing technology call Android, which is currently having a massive success in the smartphone market and now just starting into computer tablets.

The device that has really caught my eye in this mushrooming new genre is the French made Archos 7 home tablet, not least because of the cost. They start at a very reasonable £129, which means that if it does not quite meet up to what I think these devices will offer, I won't have wasted £600, like most of my friends who can't wait for the latest gadget.

The screen is smaller than the iPad - 7" as opposed to 9" -  and the technical specification is a lot lower, but for what I want it for I believe it should do nicely. It can play video upto 720p, the usual music formats MP3 etc, surf the web via WIFI (but not 3G), reading books via e-reader plus access to thousands of other applications from the Archos store - not the Android store currently - but that is on the way. The Archos 7 Home Tablet.

I think one the key elements of these devices will be the web applications that are coming down the pipe from all of the major software providers. If these can all be made to embrace the touch screen input method, then this is going to be a real winner. Things will have to change though, as trying to use old legacy programs on these devices is just not going to work. It will be really interesting to see how they cope with things like blog posting and writing in general. They will be fine for chatting on all the social media like Twitter, as that works fine on my smartphone, but writing real articles is another matter.

Having used my Android smartphone for a while now, the touch system works well and offers so much. Unfortunately for me the screen is just too small for reading books or watching films, so I think this new device will fit the bill, time as always in these matters will tell and testing these features will be part of the fun.

Is cloud computing really that new and original

I have been working in IT for more years than I care to remember, but it seems that if you wait around long enough, technologies that I have used before, suddenly become the flavour of the month and re-appear with smart presentations from slick young people in nicely tailored suits to tell us all how different it all is this time.

This happened with virtualization, where if you are brutally honest , the only key difference to what IBM were doing decades ago, was that the technologists got it to run on the Intel architecture, with all it's horribly legacy memory management et al.

So to the cloud, which in essence is the ability to leverage the power and storage of a remote machine to achieve the task's that you were used to doing locally, sound familiar, it certainly does to me. Literally decades ago people used to share resources on an IBM mainframe to run their payroll or business finance systems, which would be physically a long way away - people couldn't afford their own mainframes - and people would attach via modems and dumb terminals.

This is exactly what we are moving towards with the concept of the "Cloud is the machine". The local device can become significantly less powerful as all the real processing of the services is done remotely. This leads to much cheaper consumer devices, whether they be phones, iPads or netbooks. The services that people also want to use today are also becoming more and more central service orientated, things like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Blogging, Email, Instant Messaging etc.

I now their are many new technologies like HTML5 and improved Javascript performance that will improve the ability of the clients to do some work locally, but they are not going to be over tasked. The new breed of Intel Atom and ARM processors will be more than powerful enough to cope with the enhanced new GPU's that are appearing almost daily.

There will always be some tasks that are best suited to having a large powerful computer locally as their are many tasks that don't virtualize well, but we are talking about a small percentage for many users who today in 2010 consider the net to be the reason for owning a computer in the first place.