Author Archive | Harry McCracken

Will Windows 7 Win Back Defectors to the Mac? Probably Not. And That’s OK.

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 31, 2009 at 12:32 am

Windows 7 and Snow LeopardDaring Fireball’s John Gruber has posted a piece titled “Microsoft’s Long, Slow Decline.” As with most of what he writes, it’s both provocative and thought-provoking, whether you agree with all of it, some of it, or none at all.

Gruber writes about such matters as Microsoft’s recent lackluster financial results, the recent news of Apple’s utter domination of the high-end retail PC market, and the cartwheels Microsoft COO Kevin Turner supposedly turned in the hallways over Apple’s response to Microsoft’s “Laptop Hunters” commercials. He mentions Windows 7 and says:

But no one seems to be arguing that Windows 7 is something that will tempt Mac users to switch, or to tempt even recent Mac converts to switch back. It doesn’t even seem to be in the realm of debate. But if Windows 7 is actually any good, why wouldn’t it tempt at least some segment of Mac users to switch? Windows 95, 98, and XP did.

I haven’t heard anyone contend that Windows 7 will convince Mac switchers to come back, either. Then again, I haven’t heard anyone say it’s not good enough to change the game. But it’s an interesting question.

It’s also one that’s hard to answer just yet. For one thing, while Windows 7 looks quite promising, we don’t yet know what PC manufacturers are going to do with it, and there’s a real chance that at least some of them will muck up a respectable OS with demoware, adware, and various other forms of unwantedware. For another, Windows 7 will compete against Apple’s Snow Leopard, an OS which doesn’t go on sale until September and which–unlike Windows 7–has had no period of public preview.

Based on the months I’ve spent running pre-release versions of Windows 7, I think there’s a good chance it’ll have a meaningful impact on the whole “PC or Mac?” question. It significantly narrows the gap between OS X and Windows for usability and overall polish, and while it doesn’t eradicate OS X’s lead, it should leave Windows users at least somewhat less likely to abandon ship.

But Gruber wasn’t talking about whether Windows 7 will stop more people from leaving Windows; he was talking about whether it’ll convince Mac users to switch from Macs, and saying that if Windows 7 is really good, it will.

I’m not so sure. History suggests that people don’t like to switch operating systems and the most striking significant shifts in operating-system market share have happened when one OS has been on alarmingly shaky ground. Back when the exodus from Macs to Windows 95 and Windows 98 that Gruber refers to happened, Apple’s OS was floundering and it wasn’t clear that the company was going to survive. And Apple has made major inroads over the past couple of years in part because Windows Vista was such a mediocrity.

Apple is positioning Snow Leopard as an OS that’s very much like Leopard, except faster, sleeker, and more reliable. Unless it somehow turns out to be a less appealing Leopard, it’s going to be really pleasing. People tend not to dump pleasing OSes, even if there are also other pleasing OSes. S0 I’m not going to judge Windows 7 based on there whether are meaningful quantities of Mac users who are drawn to it…

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Take Back the Beep!

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 30, 2009 at 12:17 pm

My friend David Pogue of the New York Times is a man on a mission. He’s become irate over the time that cell phone company voicemail systems spend playing a recorded message telling you to leave a message, explaining how to send a page, and suggesting that you hang up when you’re done leaving the message. The messages are pointless little annoyances every time you hear them–and since they take fifteen seconds or so to play, they eat up the monthly minutes of the person who called.

David is trying to rally phone users to bury carriers in such a surging sea of complaints that they enter the 21st century by ditching these obsolete recorded messages. It’s a great idea. His post about all this includes instructions on how to tell your carrier you’re part of the crusade.

Of course, it’s not just that 15-second message that’s irritating–voicemail systems in general tend to sport the most aggravating user interfaces this side of automated supermarket checkouts. One of the nice things about using an iPhone and/or Google Voice is getting to avoid those convoluted menus…and David says that Apple insisted that AT&T eliminate the 15-second message for iPhone voicemail. Which proves it can be done–you know of anyone who’s called an iPhone owner, been bounced into voicemail, and gotten confused by the lack of instructions?

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Apple at CES? Not According to CES.

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 30, 2009 at 8:05 am

Apple CESIn a blog post reporting on a journalists’ dinner with Gary Shapiro, head of the Consumer Electronics Association, the Wall Street Journal’s Ben Charny reports that that Apple plans to attend the Consumer Electronics Show next January for “the first time in memory.” Big news! Except, as former Engadget editor-in-chief Ryan Block says, Shapiro said no such thing.

I was at the dinner, too, and there was much discussion of the question of whether Apple might ever exhibit at the show. But as Ryan says, Shapiro specifically said that the company hadn’t booked any space, and that it was too late for it to buy a large booth at next year’s show anyhow. If Charny found evidence that Apple is going to “attend” CES in any sense other than sending one or more staffers to Vegas to walk around the show floor and see what the competition is up to, it’s news to CES.

As for the WSJ’s headline–“Will Apple CEO Headline CES ’10?”–the answer would appear to be “It seems really unlikely.” Shapiro said that the CEA has invited Jobs to give a CES keynote for years, and that the Apple CEO has never expressed any interest in doing so.

I’m sure that CES would be ecstatic if Jobs suddenly agreed to keynote its event. But Shapiro said that CES likes keynotes which provide vision for the entire industry and which aren’t too self-promotional. Jobs keynotes, of course, are always profoundly Apple-centric (often snarking at other companies) and focused around products the company is about to release. And Apple decided to pull out of Macworld Expo in part because it didn’t like having to schedule product releases around somebody else’s trade show in early January.

As Apple said in its press release announcing it was saying goodbye to Macworld:

Apple is reaching more people in more ways than ever before, so like many companies, trade shows have become a very minor part of how Apple reaches its customers. The increasing popularity of Apple’s Retail Stores, which more than 3.5 million people visit every week, and the Apple.com website enable Apple to directly reach more than a hundred million customers around the world in innovative new ways.

That doesn’t mean that the chances of Apple taking a newfound interest in CES are zero. But they’re way, way less than those of the company spending the same money it would have invested in a major CES presence in its own event in the same general timeframe…

[UPDATE: The San Francisco Chronicle’s Ryan Kim, who was also at the dinner, not only chimes in but provides a transcript of Gary Shapiro’s comments about Apple and CES.]

[FURTHER UPDATE: The bit about Apple attending CES is now gone from the WSJ story, which now starts with a correction: “It is not clear whether Apple will attend the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show. This post previously stated that Apple would attend.” Seems to me that all evidence–such as Apple’s failure to book show space–still suggests that it’s not unclear, but unlikely, that it’ll be there.]

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Goodbye Windows Mobile, Hello Windows Phone?

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 29, 2009 at 8:14 pm

Windows PhoneThe Inquirer is reporting (in its usually snarky manner*) that the operating system currently known as Windows Mobile will be redubbed Windows Phone, apparently when version 6.5 comes out. Could be, although it seems kind of limiting, and I wonder if it’s a garbled misunderstanding of news that Microsoft announced back at Mobile World Congress in February–that Windows Mobile based phones would be known as Windows Phones, but that the OS would still be called Windows Mobile. (When Steve Ballmer announced this bifurcation, he looked a bit guilty, as if he knew it was lame even as he was explaining it.)

Whether the name change is happening or not, it does bring up an interesting question: Are we going to call these things phones forever? More and more, making voice calls is but one feature of devices that do a ton of stuff, and not necessarily the most important one. I’m prepared to believe that we’ll still refer to the descendants of today’s smartphones as phones decades from now. And as a traditionalist, I’d be okay with that–if Alexander Graham Bell is up there watching all this, he’d be pleased.

But I could also see that name going away in favor of something that more accurately describes all that these gadgets can do. How about PC? Maybe we can claim it stands for Personal Communicator…

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*I’m not sure if the whole “vole” thing was ever funny, but wouldn’t it be cool if the Inquirer quietly retired it?

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Two Very Brief Things About the Microsoft/Yahoo Deal

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 29, 2009 at 10:09 am

BinghooIt won’t be a truly done deal until it gets regulatory approval, but Microsoft and Yahoo have finally agreed to a partnership which, among other things, will make Bing the search engine on Yahoo and have Yahoo selling ads on Bing. The two companies’ explanation of why this is a good idea is summed up in the name of the microsite about the deal which they’ve launched: ChoiceValueInnovation.com.

Thing 1:

In Microsoft’s press release, CEO Steve Ballmer explains why this is a good idea for everyone concerned:

Through this agreement with Yahoo!, we will create more innovation in search, better value for advertisers and real consumer choice in a market currently dominated by a single company.

Setting aside the question of whether this’ll turn out to be good for consumers–it might–isn’t it bizarre to see the CEO of Microsoft arguing that a market being dominated by one company is bad for consumers?

Thing 2:

Back in 2004, Yahoo dumped Google as its search engine in favor of its own homegrown engine–the one it now plans to ditch for Bing. Back then, its press release explained the benefits thusly:

The combination of a world-class engineering team and proprietary search technologies, together with Yahoo!’s global reach, breadth and depth of content and leading network assets, uniquely positions Yahoo! to change the game in search.

That was Yahoo Senior VP Jeff Weiner. Here’s current Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz on the Microsoft deal:

This agreement comes with boatloads of value for Yahoo!, our users, and the industry. And I believe it establishes the foundation for a new era of Internet innovation and development. Users will continue to experience search as a vital part of their Yahoo! experiences and will enjoy increased innovation thanks to the scale and resources this deal provides.

In 2004, being proprietary was supposed to provide the scale and resources that would change search for the better; now it’s outsourcing search to Microsoft that’s supposed to accomplish the same results. Oddly enough, nobody ever issues a press release about a deal quoting an executive explaining why it’s a bad idea…even though many deals turn out to be disappointing. (McCracken’s third law of tech-company press releases: Any news described in any press release will always lead to increased innovation…)

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SugarSync Comes to Android

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 29, 2009 at 5:00 am

SugarSync LogoSharpcast is serious about putting its SugarSync file-syncing-to-the-cloud service on devices of all sorts. It’s already available on Windows, OS X, iPhone OS, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile–and, as of today, on Android. As with SygarSync’s other versions, the idea is simple and the implementation is elegant: You can use an Android phone to browse through folders and files on a Windows or Mac PC (even if it’s turned off, since SugarSync continuously syncs files to its servers) and download them. You can also upload files from the phone, and browse files stored locally.

I chatted with Sharpcast CEO Laura Yecies about the new version; she told me that she thinks Android netbooks will be a thriving product category (even if Google’s Chrome OS takes off) and that SugarSync will be useful on them, both for local file management and for getting at documents stored on a netbook owner’s primary computer.

SugarSync offers a free version with 2GB of storage, which is enough to give it a try; paid accounts start at $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year for 30GB of space.

Here are a couple of screen images from the new Android client:

Sharpcast

SugarSync

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Twitter Finally Explains Itself

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 28, 2009 at 6:46 pm

Twitter has launched a revised home page–one that replaces the one that the site has had for as long as I can remember in essentially unchanged form. It only appears if you aren’t logged into Twitter, and therefore is of most importance to people who aren’t Twitter users–yet. It’s where Twitter has the opportunity to tell newbies what it is and why they should use it.

Here’s the new home page:

New Twitter home page

And here’s the old one (which I pulled up in Google’s cache–hence the highlights):

oldtwitter

I’m struck my how utterly different the two explanations of what Twitter is are. The old home page says it’s a place to tell friends, family, and co-workers what you’re up to. The new one doesn’t mention anyone you know, or talk about treating Twitter as a personal status update. It says that Twitter is a place to engage in conversations with people you might not know who could be anywhere, on topics of all sorts.

The old home page did a good job of explaining what Twitter’s founders thought they had created back in 2006; the new one explains what Twitter’s users decided the service was. As with everything on the Web, it’s really the users who get to decide what a service does–in a real sense, Twitter was less invented than discovered. And it’s great to see Twitter finally acknowledge in a coherent fashion what it is today.

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What if…Microsoft Had a Windows App Store?

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 28, 2009 at 6:18 pm

Windows 95I continue to think of my iPhone not as a phone but as a personal computer. Which is why I continue to be so nonplussed about Apple’s barring of some applications on the grounds that they compete with its own apps, and others at (reportedly) the behest of AT&T. The moves may well serve Apple’s short-term goals. Long term, though, I think they’ll make the iPhone a weaker, less useful platform. That’s not in the interest of iPhone owners, Apple, AT&T, or (come to think of it) anyone except Apple’s competitors.

All of which got me wondering: What if an Apple-like App Store had been the been the only sanctioned way to acquire software for other major computing platforms? Like, for instance, Microsoft Windows? And what if, in this alternative universe, Microsoft’s policies and actions had mirrored those of Apple today?

It would have changed everything–and not for the better. After the jump, a speculative FAQ about the Windows App Store.

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