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.

Windows 7 ludicrous upgrade policy

Using open source software has many benefits, including visibility of the code, security, community , reliability etc etc. The one thing that I really enjoy above all else is the freedom from the old days of license keys and license management.

It was always a pain when a new version of anything from Microsoft came out, figuring out what license you had, and how much you would have to pay them to get the software you really needed. They would argue that it's simple if you just buy a new machine, which is true, but not everyone wants to do that currently.

I then came across this chart posted on CNET, which to be fair has been slated as preposterous by even the worst Microsoft shrills. I did have a little chuckle though, when you think how easy Linux upgrades are.

In Linux land, if you want a different distribution that best fits your requirements, in either 32bit or 64bit release, burn to CD/DVD or USB and then install. Simple. When upgrading any Debian derived machine you just click a single button, and everything remains in place, just the latest releases of code and an improved environment.

Now look at the chart for upgrading to Windows 7 ;-)



All this just to get an Operating System with no applications installed in most cases, as you can't upgrade but have to do a fresh install. There is no doubt that looking at this chart that Microsoft is being run by committee's now, and it was like that in the bad old days of IBM, not a very exciting or inventive place to be.

I think I'll stick with Open Source thanks.

Ubuntu Linux is just so easy to use for new users

I have heard over the years about the reason that Microsoft has retained it's monopoly position in the IT market was down to how easy it is to use, and nothing to do with the ineptitude of legislators. I have never believed this, having worked with Microsoft products for decades, I know for a fact how hard they can be to set up, how unreliable and how buggy. Everyone forgets the amount of time they have had to invest in learning the sometime ridiculous things you have to do to get Microsoft software to do anything, like pressing start to shutdown your machine!

As an example, when I used to work for Freeserve, we had a Windows 2000 cluster that was used to serve up a woman's chat forum, and I used to have to sit at my machine keeping that cluster alive while it was going on, as under pressure the cluster nodes would constantly crash, and I would have to constantly keep moving the services around. As the London stock exchange has also recently found out, when Microsoft's software is put under any real pressure it just can't cope.

So, when I had another friend come and ask me to get him onto the web, as he had no computing experience up until now, I had no hesitation but to put Ubuntu Linux onto his IBM laptop. This has been very successful, and he is now another happy surfer, using the full power of the machine, and even demonstrated to me yesterday how he had uploaded his photos to his laptop with F-spot photo manager and then put them onto web with the Picasso.

I haven't had to worry him with machine crippling anti-virus, anti-spyware software, as the machine was an older Pentium 4 , and this would have made it very slow. Ubuntu on the other hand flies along, and all the machines resources can be spent on doing real work. I have also saved him a small fortune in software costs. Their is no need to pay for an Office suite, archiving tool, anti-virus, photo editing software and world class Firefox browser, they are all pre-installed and ready to use straight from the first install. Also in the next few months there will be yet another piece of world class software going to be delivered to Linux in the form of Googles Chrome browser, which will have a big impact on the Linux community

Another great new feature about modern software , is that all of the software he has started to use is cloud based applications like Gmail, Facebook, Twitter and Picasa. So the need for machine backups at the moment are zero. Once he starts wanting to use local applications, then I can set him up a cloud based backup site like Dropbox.

No, Linux has been ready for a large percentage of the population for a long time now, and it is only the constant lies spread by the Microsoft FUD masters that keep telling people how hard it is. I would definitely recommend using Linux for many people, as you can save your family and friends thousands of pounds/euros/dollars in wasted expenditure on software you just don't need to buy. You will be giving them a reliable, secure system that will serve them extremely well, for years to come.

It is also no coincidence that Google have selected Linux to base their operating system on, as they get an extremely good foundation to base their new flashy operating system upon. In the years to come there will be hundreds of millions of people who will be relying on Linux on a daily basis for their computing needs, so it makes sense to become part of the revolution sooner rather than later.

Linux is now very well served by browser apps.

Most users have been happily using Firefox version 3.x which came pre-installed with whichever Linux distro they happen to prefer. This is an extremely well written and capable browser, which has just been given a marvellous speed boost by the latest 3.5 release. Have a look here on my blog for a simple install guide with Linux.

There are however other good browsers now available for Linux, and these include Opera and Chromium. I know the later is still in development, but it is developing extremely quickly and should be out in a beta form shortly. Opera on the other hand , in it's 9.64 release is a very powerful, full featured browser, which can be used as a complete replacement for Firefox if you should like to, and the current stable release is significantly faster than Firefox 3.x, and on a par with Firefox 3.5 in real world usage.

I have also now downloaded and started to use Opera 10 beta, and this has also been given a face lift with more enhancements, like the ability to drag open all your tabs to get at the thumbnails of each page, it's really very useful.



The performance with this latest release appears on the surface to be slightly faster than Firefox 3.5, and not that far of Chromium on.

So the days of just taking the Browser you are given and having to be content are well and truly over, especially when you throw Konqueror and Epiphany into the mix. This is real and tangible evidence that the popularity of Linux on the desktop has never been stronger.

I would love to compare Safari and Internet Explorer on my Linux desktops, but unfortunately the companies behind these products are a little afraid of the competition so are sticking to their legacy systems for now.

What a week on the IT merry-go-round. Anyone for an IBMphone?

Being something of an old timer in the world of IT I thought I had seen pretty much all there was to see in the sometimes strange company interplays that are stuff of this industry. However, I was to be proved wrong, and I hadn't seen it all.

At the start of the week we have Oracle buying Sun for a cut down fee, and to put it mildly this opens up a can of worms with a lot of the technology that they have just acquired. Java, Solaris, ZFS, MySQL and of course all that marvellous new ZFS backed open source storage technology. I think this will take several months until anyone can have a clear picture of how all this shakes out, and just how much Larry Ellison has managed to annoy IBM.

Then we have the news today that Microsoft are really beginning to feel the full force of the Open Source revolution and the Netbook generation eating into their once great monopoly. I have posted often on all the causes for this change, which is unstoppable, and while part of their current problems are the disaster that is Vista and the economic downturn, there is way more to this story than that. Why did Redhat Linux and Apple Mac not suffer the same affects, given the exact same economic landscape? Having to bribe people with XP Home on netbooks at minimal mark-up, with zero chance of up-selling them any other products is a disastrous business strategy.

We also have the great news that Ubuntu have launched Jaunty today (version 9.04), and I'm happily upgrading from the Beta version to the full version as I type this post. Try doing that while doing an XP to Windows 7 upgrade ;) The beta has been rock solid and this is yet another fine release. All of my machines now boot/suspend quicker and once I have started to implement EXT4 everywhere, I expect to see even greater performance improvements.

We also had Ubuntu launch their updated operating system for the ARM processor, which is all part of the plan for the next generation of netbooks, which will basically completely exclude Microsoft from the market, as they can't compete on price, and they don't even have a version that will run on this processor.

After all these momentous happenings, lets hope that IBM don't start talking about buying a certain player in the MP3 and mobile phone market, anyone for the IBMphone or the IBMpod , with what has happened this week, anything is possible.

Using VMware Server to help save the Planet

I know that all the many new forms of Virtualization can be put to all sorts of tasks today, but I used VMware server 2 the other day to save having to deploy a screen and keyboard for a Windows application box. I have been using and looking at the latest KVM hypervisor in Ubuntu as this I feel will be the future of Virtualization on the Open Source roadmap, but for this implementation I felt VMware would do the job quickly, and without fuss.

The requirement was to set up a simple Windows machine to load the license manager for Mercury Loadrunner performance tool, which will only run on Windows. Now we could have just dumped this onto a lightly loaded windows server, if we had any, which we don't, so I decided to turn this into an XP virtual image.

Normally, this would require you to have the box setup with a screen and keyboard, which is a complete waste of equipment, and makes managing this single application box a real problem.

So as I try and Virtualize everything these days, I decided to Virtualize the XP instance, and install it on the same box , just with Ubuntu server 8.10 and VMware server 2.0 (latest build).

This now means I can stick that box in the server room with no screen and keyboard and manage it remotely with the VMware console and VNC , alongside all my other virtual images. That's because Linux allows me to run it without a screen attached.It will also benefit from all the backup services that are provided there and a computer monitor didn't need to be manufactured or ever powered on.

We can also use this virtual image for other small application requirements as they come along, so the effect will only be more positive over time. I have already thought that we can use it as a TFTP server for network equipment configuration file backups.

I did have some fun and games getting VMware web manager to work on this box, which was down to a miss configuration of the loopback network interface, but it now runs a treat. It would have been helpful to have more diagnostic output from the Java servlets, but that's another tale.

Peoples almost religious attachment to Microsoft

I have to say I do find it extremely strange the vehemence that Microsoft users exhibit when challenged with anything new. If you stop and think about it, they owe Microsoft nothing, all they have done is given that company money, and invest some time in learning their products. So why the blind allegiance? It is not a question I have the simple answer to , I have to admit, though I do have a few ideas.

Being a fan of Darwinian evolution, there are several parts of the modern interpretation of that theory that suggest that it is very important to human evolution, that showing blind alligance to an idea or concept can be beneficial. I could start down the path of a Machiavellian theory that Gates & Co were well aware of this, but I think that gives them way too much credit. I think the answer lies more in the mundane, that humans just don't like change. So once they are hooked on Windows with their first computer purchase, shame on the legislators for that, the likely hood is they won't change, or even know their is the possibility for change. Apple are very slowly changing this , and this could lead to more choice for the customer, which will eventually also include Linux.

I also think their is a human trait where fear of anything new is common, but why there is so much antagonism I do find odd. If you stop and think about what Open source is doing for software solutions is nothing more than offering a choice. You don't have to use it , and those who are too timid or frightened to try anything new, well you can just keep being spoon fed by Microsoft, and be happy.

I on the other hand prefer to look at new ideas, and although I have long been a user of Linux this does not stop me enjoying developments in Mac, Solaris and BSD. I think competition is good for all computer users. We don't have to look far for an example, just think how Mozilla Firefox has forced other Internet browser creators to up their game in the face of an incredibly powerful and useful new application. i

No, I think change is good, and the more Open Source forces other software producers to improve their products then everyone benefits.

I would also like to point out to Microsoft die hards, I enjoy what the Open Source has to offer, and no matter what Redmond produces, unless they Open Source it and make it freely available to everyone, then I will not move wholesale to it. I will of course use it where it is appropriate, and not be that bigoted not to use it, but out of preference I will always look for the Open Source option. You see it's not all about features, it's more fundamental than that.

I do see signs that governments are starting to get this, and once more people start to get the real an perpetual cost savings and freedom that Open Source offers they to will also start to change their buying patterns.

Microsoft's malaise

Unless you have just returned from Mars you will have heard about the massive drop in revenue for the once omnipotent software manufacturer, with the inevitable sacking of 5,000 staff and 15% of it's temporary/contract staff, my heart goes out to those guys.

I have be discussing this with friends for a long while, and this is not remotely surprising to me, just the length of time it has taken for the adjustment. I will caveat everything else I discuss here with the facts that in the last quarter, Microsoft still made 3 billion, so it is not even vaguely likely to be going bust any time soon, but the rate of descent is going to accelerate.

However, it has become apparent for several years that they have stopped innovating and are constantly late to the party with every product. Vista, was five years late, and what a mess, it couldn't have been more out of tune with the hardware paradigm shift that was taking place in 2008.People wanted greener, smaller, compact machines, that did just enough web stuff to make them useful, with excellent battery life. What were the people at Redmond doing to have missed an entire market that last year should millions of units, not very much obviously.

Cloud computing has been around for a while, and to be fair MS had a simply offering in the early days, namely Hotmail, but they just didn't develop it or move it forward at all in any meaningful way, so along comes Google and steals all their clothes. Again they are now trying to play catchup again. Where are all the bolt on apps and services that you now get with Google?

Internet Explorer, through it's monopoly installation on every machine sold, held a 95% market share once, that is now down to under 70% and falling rapidly as Mozilla,Opera,Safari and Google Chrome all take large chunks out of the pie. IE7 was a bad copy of Firefox, and people have just been moving away in their millions. According to spread firefox, today will see 800,000,000 downloads of the Firefox software.

They have released Office 2007 , without really talking to the customers and again there has been a lot of negative feedback about thee new ribbon look. Customers who use 10% of the functionality of this product have started asking why do I need a new version, what is it offering me for all the time and effort required to change. Many have moved to open office, and are now very happy knowing they will never be forced to upgrade.

Recently we have seen yet another round of nasty worms and viruses hit the base operating system, causing businesses lots of expenses on upgrades, checking their defenses etc etc. No operating system is free of problems, but if you use Microsoft products, the problems are relentless and continuous.

When you role all of these issues up, they do start to show the picture of a very large company who is starting to do things by committee, and all of these symptoms reflect that. As IBM before them, I now fully expect them to still be around but slowly move into the technology background. As many people have invested heavily in their technology, you are not about to throw that out, but they have become less and less relevant as a technology innovator.

The future is with the open source, and as more and more companies shift away from the Microsoft proprietary lock in, and the costs savings that spring from that. The cost savings with open source virtualisation being offered by companies like Amazon and Google show us clearly where and how the shift is happening in the cloud. With Netbooks costing £150 , why would you possibly want to spend £350 on Microsoft office? The desktops will go the same way, with massive energy savings and cost savings on applications. With the current economic problems, businesses will take no FUD while their competitors are making use of those massive cost savings.

The IT landscape is definitely changing and the role that Microsoft are going to play in that will change. The role for open source is increasing on a daily basis in every area, and that snowball is only gaining momentum.

Happy New Year Tux

I read a blog by a long time Linux supporter , Stephen J Vaughan, and he made a statement that in his opinion the year of the Linux desktop had already come and gone. Well I have been mulling over this thought for a few days and I have to say I agree with him.

I'm currently posting this from my Eeepc running Eeebuntu Linux, and I haven't used anything on my desktop/laptop computer since 1998 that wasn't a version of one kind of Linux or another. As I work in the IT industry and have to communicate with other people who use Microsoft, it is obvious that it is perfectly possible for them to co-exist, as I'm doing it on a daily basis.

I'm also a big user of virtual environments, and I have an XP virtual machine on my works desktop, but I honestly haven't powered that up in long time. I tend to use the virtualisation software, KVM at the moment, for testing new operating systems, like Opensolaris etc.

Yes I do agree with you Stephen,the perennial question no longer needs to be asked, it is as irrelevant as asking if this is going to be the year of the laptop.

I think a far more interesting question, is when will Microsoft deliver a decent and relevant operating system since the release of XP seven years ago? Linux is delivering today on a whole range of products, including multiple processor types. I can get the same command prompt on everything from an IBM z90 mainframe to my Google phone, seemless. Same Bash, same commands, no new interface to learn and assimilate.

I also use firefox, which is a great broswer, but more importantly it also runs on every operating system I need to use, again no need to learn another application, just because I have to work with Solaris today. Can you say the same about IE. Suddenly their technological silo concept looks very dated and very last century.

I think the ball is firmly in Redmonds court to deliver, the view from planet Tux is looking decidedly rosey.

So my new years question has to be , "When are Microsoft going to deliver anything Interesting".

Lenovo annoucement is hard to read

Having just read several articles on the fact that Lenovo are changing their strategy towards Linux , the reasons given just don't make any sense to me. The overall argument seems to be that the cost of supporting microsoft on their platforms has been an extremely heavy burden to bare, and they didn't want to duplicate that with another new system. Surely the argument to that is to stop supporting microsoft, and push those support costs back to where they belong, unless there are yet more illegal activities and arm twisting going on than normal. The other glaring hole in this argument is that with Linux you can push the support towards to the community, who will be more than happy to help, or more likely have already fixed any issues that a new user would experience. This appears to me to be very muddled thinking and not much of a strategy at all.

They have though simultaneously announced extra support for Linux across a range of products that will be available to large organisations, plus the launch of their new netbook. This netbook is to go head-to-head with the other Intel Atom suppliers in this ever expanding market, but they are only offering it to certain markets. This is again yet more muddled thinking, from them. Why would you possibly not want to sell units in Europe and North America, surely business is business? With Asus already telling us that they are on course for their 5 million units shipped by the end of the year, and Acer saying their sales are better than expected, it would appear they have got this wrong yet again.

I think the one thing that I can take from this information is that their Linux strategy is in tatters, and they are thrashing around to find a real vision for the future. There are many other companies that have a much better Linux strategy, and they would be the companies that I will be dealing with in the future.

This probably explains why I have never bought anything from this company, and probably never will.

Linux Mint is a great system to move friends from Microsoft

I'm sure if you have been helping out friends and family with their home PC's for any length of time you will have come across the same problems with any machine that has microsoft windows installed.

They will complain the machine has slowed down, and they can never get anything done these days, and their Internet connection is running so slowly. Especially when I found one machine had been completely cracked and was being used as an email relay for the planet. When you have a quick look at the box, you will find it is riddled with virii and trojans of various kinds. The registry is a mess and they have somewhere in excess of 52 panel tray icons that all start on boot.

The solution I came up with several years ago was to say that I don't support any microsoft products, but if they were prepared to open their minds and try something new, I would guarantee them a less painful web experience and I would support them.

I have done this now with over thirty people, including friends and family members, with the same positive , hassle free results. I started using Mandrake Linux, as it was easy to install, but have started recommending Mint 5 Elyssa as it offers the same features Mandriva Linux does today, it's based on Ubuntu and the developers have done good work with the user interface. It comes in various flavours, but I would recommend the main edition to start.

You can download a cd version to have a look at first, and to check compatibility with your hardware, and then install when you are happy.It comes with all the software you will need to get started, and very easy management tools to add software when needed.

You can also either install crossover office or wine for those one or two microsoft apps they can't do without, but I have found that in only a few cases, unlike an office migration I will blog about shortly.

I think anyone could use this Operating environment for an easy life on line, and for those who have to offer advice and support, why not just make your life that little be easier.

Microsoft's current software strategy is bad for the environment

Microsoft software development for as long as I can remember has seemed to work on the basic principal that computer hardware speed and performance will grow infinitely to accommodate their sloppy and wasteful programming techniques.

I have read article after article about the latest software offerings from Microsoft, which have all increased in installation footprint, but have only offered performance increases if you use the latest hardware. Vista is a particularly apropos example of a machine resources hog, with a requirement for at least a multi core processor and at least 2 GB of RAM and 10 GB of harddisk space, just to run the operating system.That is a computer that uses a lot of energy, your money, just to run the basic system that would allow you to do anything. The days of ignoring this are gone, just look at your fuel bills and you will see why. So these machines to run Vista are more expensive to buy , to run and cost the environment more in manufacture.

This seemed to be the way things have always been , and would continue to be, until Intel and Asus combined to create a whole new breed of PC, the netbook or mini laptop. This post is coming from an Asus Eeepc , and with the plethora of other manufacturers jumping on this hot bandwagon, you will be able to get one of these diminutive devices in laptop or desktop format. The intel Atom units have very good battery life, and consume little power compared to a 15" Vista Behemoth laptop.

This however is the crux of this post: The Intel Atom processor and it's VIA counterpart use a fraction of the power of the older generation processors, work perfectly with Linux, require far less internal memory to have the operating system to function properly, and work with solid state hard disks. They are basically green computers, and the more people who use them, the less the environment suffers. Microsoft has got it very wrong for the energy requirements of a modern IT departments demands, and is beginning to look like the General Motors of the software world, building products for a previous age. If I were a CEO of any large company, and my CTO was not investigating the use of low power workstations running Linux, I think I would be looking for a new CTO.

Apple saw this coming, thus the Apple Air and their new mini laptop, so why has Microsoft got this so wrong? I think it tells you a lot about the company, that they always seem to be on the backfoot, technologically, and it is only the lack of action by corporate buyers that keeps there money machine turning.

Microsoft has no software in this arena apart from it's five year old XP, so yet again they have been caught cold when a market changes quickly, and I doubt Windows 7 has currently been designed for this market segment either. I fully suspect that will change, or they may modify their mobile operating system upwards, but they will be playing catch up yet again.

You can also wonder why you might waste money on a super powerful machine, that you then need to spend a small fortune on software for, after your initial purchase, just for it to be vaguely useful. While you can get one of these new machines with everything already installed and ready to go for £250-£300. Yes there are games players and power users who will always need the extra power of a true workstation, but I suspect that 90%, if not more of net users just do not need that type of machine anymore. The prospect of cloud computing with all your applications being supplied on-line, will also drive this market.

So save the environment , do yourself a financial favour and buy a small energy efficient ,useful mini PC with Linux installed.