Posts Tagged ‘Microsoft’

Yes, I said it. Look at all the Windows 7 launch day hardware. What do all those all-in-one PC’s with multitouch have in common? Well, looking at the photos quickly it would seem they all have glossy screens. Really!? As if having touch features on your primary screen wasn’t bad enough they had to make it glossy.

Example Dell’s Studio One 19.

While Apple and the Microsoft Surface along with other research has clearly sparked the entire multitouch movement. Right now is not the time for people to be going crazy and buying these PC’s. Apple is at least being smart about it and only adding it where it makes sense, handheld devices, touch pads, the Magic Mouse. You probably won’t ever see Apple add it to an iMac screen.

On the PC at this point I’d probably tell anyone who asked to fore go the expensive multitouch desktop PC’s and simply buy Wacom’s multitouch tablet.

It’s not even really that the features for multitouch aren’t there in software. Windows 7 and Snow Leopard both have awesome support. Right now at least the hardware just doesn’t match reality when it comes to usability.

Multitouch for desktop PC’s really isn’t going to get anywhere till we have real haptic input via a secondary display surface that can replace both the keyboard and mouse. A good start might be Senseg’s stuff. There was another thing I remember seeing but can’t find the URL at the moment.

Imagine just having a surface below your primary screen that’s a secondary display that replaces your keyboard and mimics the feel close enough. The feedback areas could easily change with what’s being displayed on the secondary display. To the right or left of the on screen keyboard could be an area for your entire hand to control and touch multiple pointers, see 10/GUI.

This is the sort of control surface that’ll replace the mouse and keyboard in time. It’s certainly not going to happen over night, but until the technology really gets to this point, multitouch displays in the primary vertical orientation just don’t make sense.

I honestly don’t know what’s with PC manufacturers, they just don’t seem to get what Apple clearly does. Here’s another example from Dell, their new Adamo XPS laptop. From the looks of it, a pretty amazingly cool piece of hardware. I’d love to know just much time and energy was spent on adding the ridiculous heat sensing strip. What real purpose does this serve? Speaking of strips that serve no purpose Dell yet again with their EdgeTouch on the Z600. Engadget has it right, “makes overcompensated CEOs out of us all”. Why the hell does anyone really need a touch sensitive strip on the right side of the laptop screen that’s going to require some crapware that undoubtedly causes more issues than anything else.

Dell isn’t the only guilty party. It’s not like Toshiba, Sony, HP, you name it have decently designed crap that isn’t just a bunch of plastic. Microsoft Hardware has done their fair share of stupidity as well. Compare the new Apple keyboards which are simple and refined to some Microsoft keyboards and you’ll notice a bunch of extra multimedia buttons those F-Lock functions, you name it. Then each new generation they change what’s included as well as the behavior. My original Natural Pro has a complete different set of buttons than my Entertainment 7000. I prefer the Natural keyboards over Logitech and Apple and just about anything else. Microsoft has an *amazingly* awesome sense for ergonomics far above Apple, that’s for sure (I’m looking at you Mighty Mouse nipple). But they’re far from perfect. I don’t really get why it’s so hard for everyone that isn’t Apple to figure out how to make decent hardware.

There’s probably 2 or 3 well designed and well made machines from both HP, Dell, Sony, hell some even like Lenovo laptops. But the bulk of the crap that’s put out by the industry is rehashed plastic crap that has bloat inside and out.

Jonathan Ive’s was right, it’s not about what you add but what you remove. This doesn’t just apply to the design of the products but the entire product line.

Grr. Now I remember my last USB MIDI experience… Last time was with XP in beta, even then it was the same deal. No bloody drivers because XP wasn’t released. Now 7, though its RTM’d isn’t out on the street yet; so no bloody drivers for the just unboxed Axiom Pro 49.

What gets annoying is when you have a phone call earlier in the day where a customer complains about crap not working that used to work or relatively new stuff not working. No drivers, bad drivers, whatever.

I mean come on, it’s not Microsoft’s fault. It’s not like Vista wasn’t in beta for 6 years and 7 for 2+. Hell Microsoft even helps people write their drivers. Still, we get crap drivers way too late which just pisses people off.

I’m not blaming M-Audio here. I’m just frustrated at the statu quo. I’ve not completed my search for updates bits yet so for all I know it’ll be working in 5 minutes. I’m a bit miffed it’s not just a simple plug and play. Or updated drivers off Microsoft Update. My philosophy would be to release early at every point of the process. It’s understandable if the stuff doesn’t work perfectly during the beta. But at least you won’t have customers out in the cold come RTM.

And I do have to say, Vista’s only failure was in its public perception. Yes UAC was overblown, yes they failed to deliver half what they promised at PDC03, but at the same time it was a huge improvement over XP. People will forget that XP was considered crap until SP2 made it what it is. Vista is the same deal. SP2 is amazing most of the time.

Now with Windows 7 people are finally saying it’s what Vista should’ve been, this is rather funny really because even with 7 being as awesome as it is, there’s still a lot left that was still promised and shown at PDC03.

Perhaps Microsoft’s priorities have shifted, for example multitouch wasn’t as huge as it is now. Perhaps Microsoft’s resources haven’t quite been allocated as well as they could be. Or maybe what’s actually being engineered is just a little more complicated than we expected.

I’m still thinking of that amazingly good demo from PDC03 with the millions of photos and albums shown in 3D that was completely fluid, all driven by meta data in a WinFS powered back end. The reality unfortunately is that despite what Microsoft is delivering in 7 and Apple has been delivering in Snow Leopard really doesn’t match up to demos.

Still, 7 is pretty awesome, it’s definitely the best OS Microsoft has yet to release.

You know, it could just be a consequence of trying to move technology so quickly. On both the hardware and software side.

Example, 1080p 56″ LED DLP about 3 years ago was about $3400. Now you could probably find one for $900. LED LCD purchased about two months ago, $3200, at a steep discount no less. Now, $2500, via Amazon.

That’s a pretty fast progression in both price and obsolescence. Maybe everyone just expects too much too quickly .

Maybe Michael Moore has hit on something with Capitalism, I’ve not even seen it yet but I get the feeling we in general have expected exponential growth but have the lack of widespread focus to actually get anything accomplished. And this is due to the current state of Capitalism in the US. It doesn’t seem like everyone is as focused on a singular task as they were when getting to the moon or fighting the Axis powers.

It’s not just technology either, where’s the focus on health, energy, and sustainability? I think Dawkins and Maher might agree that to some extent the lack of focus is exacerbated in part by the lack of reason and the divisiveness of US politics and religion.

But anyway, I just want to make some music damn it .

I’m not sure why, but I’ve grown to dislike the www. in front of websites. I think it’s because it’s pretty superfluous now. Sure one could just type coreygo and press CTRL+Enter and FF or IE adds everything in. But it’s nice to have a bit more control server side and ensure that everyone goes to the same URL. It’s also nice to prevent double entries in search engines and all that that entails.

If you’re using some LAMP type set up you could always just use mod_rewrite with .htaccess  and just do:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

IIS7 can actually import a .htaccess file and does a good job of converting them over. However if you just want to do the same thing from scratch the quickest way is to pop open the web.config for the website (you can create one if it doesn’t exist) and add the rewrite rules. Here’s my complete web.config as an example:

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
    <system .webServer>
        <rewrite>
            <rules>
                <rule name="Redirect www." stopProcessing="true">
                    <match url="^(.*)" ignoreCase="false" />
                    <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll">
                        <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" negate="true" pattern="^$" ignoreCase="false" />
                        <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" negate="true" pattern="^coreygo.com" />
                    </conditions>
                    <action type="Redirect" url="http://coreygo.com/{R:1}" redirectType="Permanent" />
                </rule>
            </rules>
        </rewrite>
    </system>
</configuration>

Just replace coreygo.com with your own domain and that’s it. I’ve got the bindings set up for this site so there’s just www. but this would also redirect blogs. if that was included as a binding. There’s a way to make exceptions and such but for that head over to IIS.net .

Below is an email I sent that I’ve modified just a bit to fit a discussion that’s been coming up pretty regularly. This email was in response to a thread that was started about how the Apple TV is doing, it was sent before the Boxee / Hulu removal announcement though that news doesn’t really change any of this post for me.

FWIW, I honestly think a lot of the sales this quarter were thanks to Boxee Alpha/Beta which quite frankly rocks on the Apple TV. I wouldn’t buy an Apple TV, but would now thanks to Boxee even in its early stages.

While Apple TV may only have ~400-500K units, I’m pretty sure every one of those users is using it as intended with a TV. On the other hand, Media Center has shipped what? 20M+ units last I remember seeing from the banners… But that’s just counting SKU’s that contained Media Center correct? Microsoft shouldn’t be concerned with that number when comparing, Microsoft should be looking at the number of users actually using the app and using TV. Usage data for the number of WMC PC’s connected to TV’s? Data for the number of unique guide downloads… IIRC it’s a heck of a lot closer to 500K than 20M .

Personally, when I moved to West Seattle I completely dropped all cable services and vowed not to pay Comcast again [except for my business Internet]. OCUR was great, it really was. Despite the royal pain the setup process was, thanks to Comcast’s inexperience with the technology, afterwards it was great and ran smoothly for me. At the end of the day though it just wasn’t worth the monthly service fees. And heck, I could only do OCUR because I was internal, not because I spent another $1K+ on a brand new PC. So the fallback would then become a tuner with NTSC/ATSC/QAM… Like many OEM’s are doing, I personally skipped over the TV Pack and went right to 7 so it’s only now that I could get digital content easily. Up until now though if I wanted to use Media Center as my TV source, as a normal consumer, I’d have to be using two clunky STB’s in combo with a dual tuner and the IR blasters and all that other junk. Not very elegant…

So like the growing few, I dumped the cable and bumped up my business Internet service speeds. $65/mo for 12/2Mbps… I use Hulu, Netflix, Joost, network sites, MTV, you name it. Combine that with P2P and there’s really no need to ever go back to cable. The one thing that makes me sad, really sad, is that Media Center doesn’t fit into this new TV ecosystem. It’s only now with 7 that it’s becoming a bit more compelling for users who don’t use tuners. Internet content through MSN and such is great but where’s the MCML from Hulu, Netflix, and all those? Where’s the rich metadata for my downloaded content? Where’s the social aspects as well?

One thing Boxee has done and done really well is create an experience around the way people use downloaded and online media making it incredibly easy to dump the wire. What really got me was when I loaded up Boxee the second day. I went in to watch some of the Arrested Development that auto downloaded via RSS. It parsed the share and sorted each show, then under that each season, then under that each episode. What’s more the thumb for every episode is perfect (see screenshot). Going to more for the episode pulls up complete metadata. All it had to go on was TVArrested Development310 – Fakin’ It.avi there’s no other metadata, no XML files, no album art in the folder. It does this for my MKV movies too, MoviesWALL-EWALL-E.mkv and sure enough it has the art and metadata, no DVDID.xml, no pain.

Yes Boxee is Alpha, no, it doesn’t have any of the amazingly hard work that went into making it compatible with the multitude of tuners. It has a lot of usability and stability issues, it’s not gone through as many iterations as Media Center so it’s not as refined. But man, for an Alpha it’s bloody awesome, I highly suggest getting the Windows Alpha asap and give it a honest go, set up uTorrent with RSS, see if you could make the switch to a cableless life and live on the bleeding edge.

Honestly, I’ve loved Media Center since the days when it was only Freestyle. I supported it as a MVP for 6 years, 3 years on the eHome beta team, and will continue to support it. I’m just a bit bummed out by the fact that Media Center has failed to deliver on features that have been asked for since 2002. What is Microsoft going to do to remain competitive when Boxee goes mainstream and releases STB devices like the Apple TV? I’m happy to see the start of Internet content via MSN but where are the third party deals with the providers that people use now?

When I was sitting for 4 hours in Las Vegas International for Snowpocalypse 2008 to allow my plane to arrive; I busted out the iPhone, connected to the free WiFi, downloaded Joost and started watching The Fifth Element for free. It wasn’t a big TV and it wasn’t HD, but honestly it didn’t matter. I had the content and the experience was awesome and easy. How is Media Center going to deliver that same grin on people’s faces when the predominant source of content is the Internet and third party services?

So there you have it… My little rant about why Media Center doesn’t fit me anymore. Writing this and discussing it further later made me realize that there’s actually nothing really wrong with Media Center at all, for your every day average person it’s great. Sure it could be a little simpler to get going like TiVo but as far as the ultimate experience, Media Center is definitely it. This will continue to be true so long as TV and movies continue to be delivered the way everyone has received this content for years. However I personally believe that as more people realize that dumping the wire is easy the trend to only use the Internet will continue. Plus to make things more interesting, analog broadcasts won’t necessarily continue from all the cable providers. They could very well move them over to encrypted QAM as far as I know. If this were to happen you’d need to rent a fugly STB for each tuner you planned on using. Even less elegant.

I realized that I’m just way ahead of the curve. I was watching TV on my PC with an old BT848 Hauppauge tuner back in 1997 then tried but failed to use WinTV. Then I used Media Center before it was Media Center, then OCUR came and went. Now I’ve completely ditched TV altogether and only stream with the Internet. If the past is any indication the wave should finally catch up with me in another 3 to 5 years, what I’ll be doing at that point is anybody’s guess.

Taking my last post a bit further… Sure any smart phone can pull up bus times. But had we tried this with my old BlackJack II with Windows Mobile 6.1 we probably would’ve been waiting till 9:45 for it to return the same results. Either that or I would’ve gone down stairs, waited for the laptop to come out of standby and then pull up the same results. I really loved my old Windows phone, but it just didn’t work the way you’d want it to. I could start the GPS at home, get to work and it still wouldn’t have a lock and that was with Google or Windows Live. I don’t think we would’ve even had been able to pull up the King County Metro site on that phone thanks to Internet Explorer.

Microsoft is really playing catch-up now. How the mobile team got so stagnant is beyond me. It really seems like nothing major has changed in their product for years. Unlike the Internet Explorer stagnation though this one goes way beyond that. Why? Well Windows Mobile has sold millions upon millions of units and gained a lot of market share. But for some crazy reason they’ve just let that go to waste and have let Apple jump ahead and lead the innovation party. Heck, it’s gotten so bad HTC has had to come up with UI to hide Windows to make the phone desirable. Of course there’s also Google now with Android, but I doubt they’re too worried about it. You know, at least not until more manufacturers jump from Windows Mobile to Android then Netbooks start shipping with WiFi and 3g with Android, then thin desktop clients…

Apple really does the entire end to end solution really well. Sure they force the Apple way or the highway but usually Apple’s way is pretty damn good. Google really does cloud services amazingly well. Sure they only really make money on the advertising but they’re not stupid. They’re building each piece of the puzzle little by little. At some point soon, they’ll be set to complete the picture and deliver something amazing that could potentially deliver a massive blow to Windows, Office, and Microsoft cloud services. Google has been combining pieces that’s just amazing.

The key difference between Apple, Google, and Microsoft? Honestly, I’m not sure, culture maybe, age in the case of Microsoft and Google. A dictator in the case of Microsoft and Apple. Who knows.

The thing I notice about Apple and Google though is that while Microsoft may have better business models to make more money on more things. Apple and Google are necessarily spreading themselves thin. Apple delivers a small product line really well and concentrates on a few things it can really deliver 100% on. Google makes strategic choices on where to concentrate resources to connect things. Neither company seems concerned with delivering products and services it really has no need to.

I mean I don’t see Apple going out to make their own maps service for the iPhone or their own stock service or their own search. Instead they partner with Google and Yahoo. When searching Google you’ll get links to 6 different services when searching for “stock MSFT“, you’ll get linked to a third party flight tracking service when searching for “BA49“. Or when you search for Led Zeppelin you’ll get an album listing with ways to purchase from multiple online stores and when you go to the song listing you’ll get linked to multiple lyrics websites.

When Microsoft does the latter what happens? Well first you go to live.com and get normal search results, if you click the first link for xRank you get to see some useful information and some search volume indicator thingy. Next if you want to dig further you click on the album but now you’re no longer on Live Search (or is it Windows Live Search), you’re on MSN Music (hello Mr. Butterfly). The option is presented to buy and download from Microsoft Zune which is good and multiple options are given to buy the CD from various online stores, also good. There’s even an option to compare prices. If you go to the track listing you can even hear samples, sweet… So what’s so bad about this?

Well, immediately this tells me there’s a lack of focus and execution. There’s a total of 3 products and services involved with that entire process, Live, MSN, and Zune. They all feel different and don’t share a seamless experience. Why is MSN Music delivering content that should be delivered directly by Zune?

There are so many places where efforts are duplicated, clear vision is lacking, and the execution is 20% off target. It’s frustrating to me as someone who really honestly cares and desires elegant perfection.

Microsoft has every piece of the puzzle needed. It can do amazing things when it needs to and definitely isn’t dead. What’s needed is a bit of a reset really. Time to refocus, clear the air, and start executing and connecting everything together in the right ways. I really just hope that it’ll happen soon.

MSFT has been flat for 10 years. What the company needs is a real renaissance and to deliver 100% on its innovations. Microsoft has been ahead of the curve thanks to many products that were ahead of their time and thanks to MSR. Microsoft has many times entered new markets and gained popularity only to lose them later by the lack of follow through and evolution.

The software Microsoft makes is amazing, there’s no reason why that can’t continue.