I’m not going to ask you to render a verdict in yesterday’s court case that involved a Texas judge telling Microsoft it’s not allowed to sell Word anymore because it violates a Canadian company’s XML-creation patents. Judgments on particular cases are most pertinent when they’re made by people who have read all the evidence in question and have an in-depth knowledge of patent law…which most of us haven’t done and don’t possess. We civilians are, however, allowed to have gut reactions to the the condition of the U.S. patent system, and whether pricey, long-running court battles (like the Word case and this one and this one) help or hurt the cause of innovation in this country. So that’s the topic of today’s T-Poll.
Author Archive | Harry McCracken
5Words for Wednesday, August 12th 2009
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Microsoft Office for Nokia phones.
Unknown Apple product diner shoot.
One comment
What If All Web Ads Were Blocked? Ten Speculative Scenarios
Last week, I blogged about a post over at Windows IT Pro that posited that all browsers would include ad-blocking as a standard feature within five years, and that it would be turned on by default. My post inspired some interesting debate both on this site and off it. I also included a poll: A plurality of the people who took it thought ads should be blocked by default, and a majority said browsers should include ad blocking as a standard feature.
I still don’t see any scenario under which the companies behind today’s widely-used browsers start blocking ads automatically. Google is the biggest company in Web advertising, Microsoft is spending a fortune to take Google on in that field, Apple is a major consumer advertiser, Mozilla and Opera make millions of dollars a year from the searches performed on their browsers’ home pages. They all simply have too much to lose on an ad-free Web.
Of course, something unforeseen could always happen. Maybe all these browsers will lose favor to one or more from one or more companies not so profoundly invested in Web advertising. Let’s engage in a bit of Twilight Zonesque speculation about what might happen if ad-blocking did become the default state of the Web. (At least for most folks–in a world in which some people will still be using IE6 in 2014, we’re not going to get to 100% ad blockage no matter what happens.)
As the proprietor of a Web site that’s mostly supported by advertising, I can’t claim to be a dispassionate bystander here…but I hope that at least some of the scenarios I outline below (not all of which are mutually exclusive) make clear that I’m not trying to prove a particular point.
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Court Bans Microsoft From Selling Word
In the latest apparent case of the U.S. patent system run amok, Judge Leonard Davis of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas issued a permanent injunction on Tuesday preventing Microsoft from selling versions of Word that handle custom XML in the form of the .DOCX, .DOCM, and .XML file formats. Which would mean that Microsoft is now forbidden from selling Word 2003 or Word 2007. And since it also forbids Microsoft from testing such versions of Word, there would seem to be implications for Office 2010 as well.
The ruling responds to a suit brought by Toronto-based document management company i4i in 2007. Microsoft says it’ll appeal the ruling, which appears to require it to pay a total of $277 million to i4i.
I stuck an “apparent” in the first sentence of this story because I believe in the idea of patents, acknowledge that I’m not a patent attorney, and am willing to accept the possibility that a product like Word could indeed indeed violate a small company’s patent even though its removal from the market would cause massive headaches for millions of folks who didn’t violate anybody’s intellectual property. But the 1998 patent in question appears to be exceptionally broad, and XML is an open standard; if a company can prevent Microsoft from selling a word processor that uses customized XML to store documents, you gotta wonder if the company could use the precedent to kill off XML, period. Which would be simply nutty.
Of course, Word isn’t going away–not any more than BlackBerries vanished from the market as a result of the endless patent dispute between RIM and patent firm NTP earlier this decade. Microsoft has a 60-day window before sales must stop, and it could come up with any of a number of possible Hail Marys to resolve things–in fact, Computerworld’s take is that sales aren’t going to end at all. If Judge Davis’s ruling somehow sticks all the way to the Supreme Court, Microsoft would sign, grumble, and pay i4i a few cubic acres of cash to put the lawsuit behind it. (Actually, it would surely do a deal earlier in the process, and that’s presumably the outcome that i41 is hoping for.) That’s assuming that Microsoft can’t somehow rejigger Word or its file formats to preserve functionality and compatibility without patent problems; given that the suit was filed in 2007, it’s had plenty of time to work on that technical challenge.
In the short term, though, even a brief period of suspended Word sales is going to present massive hassles for vast numbers of businesses and consumers. What everybody’s going to do, I’m not sure–older versions of Word would XML capability wouldn’t be taboo I guess, nor would a version of Word 2007 with the XML features turned off. I don’t know enough about this stuff to know if WordPerfect and OpenOffice (both of which use XML) are at legal risk.
Me, I have a paid-for copy of Word 2007 and do much of my wordslinging in Google Docs and WordPress these days anyhow. But if PowerPoint (which also uses XML) is pulled off the market, I’ll panic…
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RealDepressing: RealDVD Loses a Round in Court
The New York Times’ Brad Stone is reporting that U.S. Federal District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel has ruled against RealNetworks in the lawsuit filed by the movie studios against RealDVD, its software for copying DVDs to your hard drive. Judge Patel granted the studios a preliminary injunction against Real selling the software, which seems like kind of a formality given that she stopped Real from selling it almost as soon as it went on sale last September.
RealDVD isn’t a tool for pirates. Actually, it adds an extra layer of copy protection to prevent you from doing anything except copying a movie to one hard drive for viewing on one computer at a time. (You can’t even put the movies on a shared drive to watch them from multiple computers on one network.) The court is apparently inclined to look askance at even a fundamentally hobbled (albeit easy-to-use) DVD copier.
Meanwhile, tools like Handbrake let large numbers of people copy DVDs without any of RealDVD’s measures against sharing the digital copies with friends or tossing them onto BitTorrent for the world to download. I also remain unclear on why Telestream’s Drive-in–which is, basically, a Mac version of RealDVD except that it also comes in a multi-user version–is still around when RealDVD is apparently too dangerous to be let onto the market while Real waits for a final ruling. Maybe it has something to do with RealNetworks being a relatively large company that might actually succeed in getting ordinary folks to use its software?
Meanwhile, the RealDVD site lives on in forlorn limbo, complete with a woman gamely smiling on the home page and a guided tour of the product. The site says the app is “temporarily unavailable” and that Real “will continue to work diligently to provide you with software that allows you to make a legal copy of your DVDs for your own use.” I hope that means that the company will soldier on with both this case and the countersuit it filed against six Hollywood studios on antitrust grounds. Whether or not you ever use RealDVD–or even if its limitations would drive you a little bonkers–any victories it scored in court would be great news for consumers. And if it loses, the message will be that there are absolutely no circumstances under which law-abiding consumers can make a copy of a DVD they’ve paid for in order to enjoy it in a new way.
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Phil Schiller is Listening on iPhone Issues. That’s a Good Start.
Last week, Apple marketing honcho Phil Schiller dropped a note to Daring Fireball’s John Gruber on issues with iPhone app acceptance. It said, basically, that Apple isn’t perfect, but its intentions are good and it tries to learn from its mistakes. The e-mail didn’t resolve any outstanding issues, but it was encouraging to hear an acknowledgment that problems existed and Apple intended to do better.
Now Schiller has been heard from again: He e-mailed Mac developer Steven Frank, who is so disgruntled with Apple’s iPhone policies and practices that he’s boycotting the phone. Schiller told Frank that Apple’s listening to his feedback, and that rumors of a sweeping ban on iPhone e-book readers were false.
Strangely enough, I somehow forgot that I engaged in a conversation about iPhone App Store approval with Phil Schiller myself. Back at the iPhone 3.0 special event in March, I asked him a question during the Q&A about the controversy over app approval–which hadn’t yet peaked–and what Apple’s response was. Here’s Brian X. Chen’s liveblog summary from Wired News:
Harry McCracken asks if Apple will give developers clarity about what apps get approved or rejected.
Phil Schiller says, we have a lot of apps, we also want customers to feel comfortable about the quality of the apps they get. 96% approval rating is tremendous. There are some things we need to check and filter for. Simply that it technically works well.
That things don’t crash. Other things: we watch for profanity in applications. pornography. Things that try to violate a customer’s privacy. Those are things customers want us to watch out for. That’s in the developer’s agreement. There’s also stuff about content suitable for children. Parental controls will help manage that.At the end of the day with 25,000 apps we have a great solution that’s working and we’re constantly making it better.
Basically, Schiller was courteous and made some reasonable points, but didn’t even address the controversy enough to sound defensive about it. His response now is quite different. The best way to judge Apple’s intentions is, of course, through its actions–let’s hope that the Schillergrams hint are a sign of things to come.
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Tr.im Lives
On Sunday, Nambu said it was shutting down Tr.im, its URL-shortening service. An uproar and offers of help ensued. Today, there’s sort-of-good news: Nambu says it”ll keep Tr.im running indefinitely while it considers its options. (It has strong opinions about what should happen to the Tr.immed URLs if someone else takes them over, though–for instance, it isn’t interested in selling out to someone who’d insert ads or otherwise frame the URL that Tr.im pointed to.)
Nambu’s decision sounds more like a stay of execution than a pardon– “indefinitely” is, by its very definition, a fuzzy term. The world can do just fine without any new Tr.immed URLs being created, but one way or another, I hope all the ones created to date get saved. And hey, “Tr.im” may be the best name anyone ever gave a URL-shortener; if I were in the biz I’d be interested in saving those URLs for the name value alone.
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Is Apple Building iSocial? Sounds Good to Me.
Rumor on the Web this morning has it that Apple plans to add new social features to iTunes and maybe even launch some sort of social application, both of which would hook into popular social networks. There are even some fuzzy, could-be-real-could-be-fake screenshots showing the last.fm radio service and a “Social” playlist within iTunes. I don’t know if there’s any truth here, and don’t even have a gut reaction as to whether this stuff sounds likely or not. But this is the type of scuttlebutt that’s fun to ruminate on whether or not it leads to anything.
Apple has a huge group of passionate, engaged customers that every other tech company on the planet envies. (There may be far more Windows users than Mac ones, but there’s no comparison when it comes to the passion-per-user quotient.) Yet the company itself is a loner by nature, one that’s inherently cautious when it comes to participating in stuff it doesn’t control The company has largely opted out of the social aspect of the Web–it doesn’t blog and it doesn’t tweet. (It is dabbling in Facebook, at least, but iTunes only got an official Facebook page in May.)
The company’s social-media caution extends to product design. There are certainly social aspects to some of its apps–every time I use hotel broadband, I’m startled anew by the fact that iTunes’ library-sharing feature lets me see the music of random fellow guests. And the iPhone has become an extremely social beast thanks to third-party apps like the official Facebook one and the surging sea of Twitter clients. But I can’t think of any examples of an Apple product including built-in support for someone else’s social network except for the Facebook uploading that the company added to iPhoto ’09.
If Apple does decide to dive into social networking feet first, it would be cool. Building features into iTunes to let listeners share playlists, songs, and other music-related items across various social networks would be a relatively minor first step. As for the rumors of Apple building a social application of its own–well, being able to update statuses across multiple social networks is pretty mundane, and I have trouble believing that Apple would make that the core feature of anything it would bother building.
But…
All the apps in iLife, from iPhoto to iMovie to Garage Band, are about creating stuff. When people create stuff, they want to tell their friends about it. So it might well make sense for iLife to add an application–let’s call it iSocial–that serves as a central hub for telling friends, family, and random strangers about things you’ve created and put on the Web (as well as music you’re enjoying) via the major social networks.
More often than not, Apple’s iLife updates are on an annual schedule. (Although it’s usually been unveiled at the Macworld Expo keynote that won’t happen next January, so it’s impossible to pin even a tentative date on when the next version might show up.) Here’s hoping that the new version of iTunes that will almost certainly be announced in September and the next iLife turn out to be definitive signs that Apple is no longer a social-networking skeptic or dabbler, but a full-fledged enthusiast.
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I’m Hosting a Small Business Security Webinar
Do you run a small company? I’m tickled to announce that I’m hosting a Webinar I created on small business security on Wednesday, August 19th at 2pm EST. (It’s a topic that’s near and dear to my heart–in part because security was consistently the single most popular topic when I worked at PC World, and in part because I run a small business myself these days.)
I’ll cover real-world security tips and strategies, especially those that can help prevent problems from happening in the first place. I’ll also field questions from the audience. (In fact, if you have any questions now, throw them out in the comments, and I’ll try to answer them during the event.)
The Webinar will happen at Verizon’s Small Business Center, and if you can’t make it on Wednesday of next week, it’ll be available in prerecorded form, too. Here’s a page on the Small Business Center’s program of Webinars, and here’s the registration page for mine.
Hope to see some of you there!
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Should Microsoft Kill IE6?
A few weeks ago, a blog post at Digg talked about Internet Explorer 6, the challenges Web sites have in continuing to support it, and the declining-but-still-meaningful percentage of Web users who run it–often because it’s still the browser provided at work. IE honcho Dean Hachamovitch responded yesterday at the official IEblog: “The choice to upgrade software on a PC belongs to the person responsible for the PC.”
Of course, it’s not that simple. Microsoft, like all software companies, eventually terminates support for previous releases of its products. That don’t force you to update, but it provides a gigantic incentive to do so, which is presumably one reason why software companies do it.
Later in his post, Hachamovitch says:
The engineering point of view on IE6 starts as an operating systems supplier. Dropping support for IE6 is not an option because we committed to supporting the IE included with Windows for the lifespan of the product. We keep our commitments. Many people expect what they originally got with their operating system to keep working whatever release cadence particular subsystems have.
Or in other words: Microsoft doesn’t want to stop supporting part of a product, and therefore thinks it should support IE6 until it stops supporting versions of Windows that include IE6.
If I have this right, even the newest version of XP, Windows XP SP3, includes IE6. Microsoft officially ended “mainstream support” for XP on April 14th of this year, but “extended support” is scheduled to continue on until April 8th, 2014. Which would mean that Microsoft’s official policy would be to take no steps until then to murder IE6, although usage at that point would likely be tiny.
(For the record, about seven percent of visits to Technologizer are made via IE6, and I’m guessing most of them come via PCs under the control of conservative IT people.)
Anyhow, here’s today’s T-Poll