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

Google drops a bombshell on Microsoft

Reading through the Chromium blog this morning I noticed this post "Google Chrome Frame".

This is effectively showing Microsoft in a particularly bad light and they have been caught with their proverbial pants down. If you think about it for a second, what Google are saying is that Microsoft are unable or unwilling to become standards compliant, so we have done it for them.

The implications for corporate IT departments is potentially far reaching , if they embrace this technology which extends extensively what the old IE warhorse can achieve. It is also nothing more than insatlling a browser extension, which is something that corporate IT departments are well capable of doing easily.

To use Tim O'Rielly's expression - Web 2.0 technologies - can now be rolled out to the corporate desktop, which is where I believe this move is squarely aimed.

Anyway, have a look at the video and make your own mind up.

Google's next generation search engine Caffeine

I have started playing with the new search engine that Google is offering, "Caffeine", which has improved speed which is impressive for a service which was already very fast.

I have set this as my default search engine in Chromium on Ubuntu to give it a good test, and so far it works without an issue.

It has to be worth taking it for a spin to see if it helps with your search's.

You can test it by simple clicking on this link.

Googles "Caffeine" search engine

Here is the setup to make this work in Chromium.



To install this search engine within Firefox, just visit this site and click on the download button and select ok when asked.

Google Caffeine add-on for Firefox

Community Chromium and Google Chrome on Eeebuntu Netbook

As I have mentioned before I'm testing these two browsers alongside each other to check what , if anything will change between them, and there are a few things that have become apparent. The downloads of the Google version are significantly smaller that the community version, almost half the the size. Why? I can only conclude that they must be removing some parts of the code or using a more efficient compression.

The second thing is that the community version is always ahead of the Google verision, and is offering more features more quickly. This is because the Google version is based on the community Chromium version, so not that surprising, but it means the community version is more interesting.

An example of this is in the current releases - Chromium 3.0.190 and Google Chrome 3.0.189 - I can change my default search engine in Chromium but not Google Chrome, which means I'm using Chromium to type this while in France, but with Google Chrome I would have to be doing it in French. For those who don't know, Google detects what country you are in and without asking you , puts all you Google apps in that countries language. Not very useful when you travel around Europe a lot, but need to work in English. I have had the same problem with Firefox, but you can work around this by installing another default search engine from mozilla.org.

I have to say on an Asus 1000 running the latest version of Eeebuntu 3.0, that both versions absolutely fly along. This can not be underestimated as an extremely useful feature on a netbook. They are much quicker than the version of Firefox 3.5 I'm also testing which is itself much quicker that version 3.0. The Chromium interface also suits the netbook genre very well, which is why I have made my installed version of Firefox look very similar.

Unfortunately neither of these versions is feature complete yet, so no flash etc, but they are great for a whole host of other functions, like typing on my blog so I will use both of them alongside each other until Chromium fully comes of age.

Native Google Chrome (Chromium) pre-alpha release

Well I'm going to take the Chromium teams advice, and not make any silly rash claims about this release, apart from the fact then when installed from PPA repositories that it works fine with Ubuntu 8.10 - fully patched.

There are ,as the team tell you from moment one, many things that don't work, and it is nothing more at this stage than a proof of concept , and to show how far along the trail the developers have come, a big thank you by the way to those guys.

To show just how raw this is, when you have installed the browser, a terminal window opens in the background, so you can see any/all the errors as they happen, obviously for debugging.

The one overriding impression is just how fast this is, it is worth trying just to look at for this reason alone. Many buttons don't work, as don't the tabs, but then you were warned, and it is pre-alpha, and should not be judged on any of these issues.

Give it a test run, just to see were it is at, and look at the speed , and ignore the issues , which are there.

Simply add these lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list

# added for Chromium support

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main

Then add this repository key to your software-sources

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: SKS 1.0.10
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=a6Gh
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

Then just run these commands to install.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

Have fun ;-)

Googles new browser shows potential - but is it just the start of something bigger?

I suppose a lot of people were caught off guard with the launch on Monday of Googles' new Chrome internet browser. There have been rumours coming out of California for a while about projects they were working on, a Linux OS being the loudest , outside of the published labs site, but this caught me by surprise.

Unfortunately for someone who only uses Linux on all of his machines, I had to dust off my VMware virtual machine with windows XP , to install this beta. Google have told me that they are working hard on the MAC and the Linux versions and they will be delivered soon, but we shall see. If you go to the download site with a Linux browser you can register your email address to be updated when it is ready. Register for Linux version

The install was very painless, and because every person in the office had downloaded the beta, the install executable was already in the networks proxy cache, so it was almost instantaneously retrieved. Installing it was a matter of closing the browser you originally used to download it, so chrome could grab the bookmarks etc, and that was it. As an aside I would recommend reading the comic book introduction to chrome as it does contain some very interesting information on how the browser fits together. I especially like the sandbox security segregation of each tab, and the fact the whole project is open source, and based on the great work of the KDE developers in the form of Webkit.

The first thing that really hits you is the speed of the browser, especially as I was running this in a virtual machine. As this is an early beta it can only improve over time, and must be a real concern for IE8 which is already getting a reputation as being bloated and slow. The interface is uncluttered, which I liked, and the trusty old combo of Ctrl-T gives you a new tab. These tabs are easily moved around , and can be dragged into new windows if you want. The ability to look at the resources that each tab is using is very handy, just by pressing Shift-Escape. You can then click on the nerd button to have a look in more detail. The chrome configuration options offers the usual settings, including the proxy you use, SSL certificates etc.

There is an incognito tab selection, which means that once you kill that tab, all browsing history gets destroyed, and Google says that you might use this for buying flowers for your loved one, I'm sure there are other uses no doubt.The new single URL bar does indeed work well, with anything you type bringing up previously loaded web pages or Google searches. It also remembers searches you did while on Amazon for instance, so they also will appear when you start typing in the bar.

At the time of righting there didn't appear any easy way to install extensions, RSS feeds or manage bookmarks, like Firefox allows, but I'm sure this is coming. Adobe Flash installed easily enough so I can't imagine the guys at Google have left this out of their plans. You can also set-up web application launchers from the options menu, so you can have one-click access to Gmail for instance. This is very similar to Mozilla prism, so not that ground breaking

This is just a first look, and once it is available on Linux, and there are a decent amount of extensions I will take another look and see how it compares with Firefox 3, which to be fair is still a fantastic browser, and the browser I will continue to use for the foreseeable future.

I do think though this raises some very interesting technical and strategic issues. This browser has to be one of the most powerful and technically advanced yet delivered by anyone, and it would not take that much effort to put a small virtual layer underneath it to offer a full solution for SaaS or webapps. This would then create an environment that does not need a monster Intel PC to run on, and could use an Eeepc 1000 or a Dell 910 Inspiron for instance. Could this be one of the pieces with Google Gears that needed to fall into place for Google to offer an extremely lightweight Operating System with embedded Browser? I for one will be watching this part of the potential development space very closely.