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Microsoft owned the desktop computing space (for while at least) with we now call the “ecosystem”. That is to say, they didn’t just produce Windows, but they produced Windows as a platform. Good developer tools, good office tools, all of this led to them owning that space. Users chose the Microsoft way because the Microsoft way became the only way that really made sense. There’s a lot of really unethical and evil stuff that Microsoft has done and continues to do to keep from losing that space. Windows and Office are their core products.

Everything that Microsoft does (except for, strangely, X-Box, though I’m sure they have a reason for that) is directly tied into Windows. Even their keyboards have a Windows button. Zune, Windows Phone 7 (what a truly awful name), Windows Live, Bing… it’s all built to keep people using Windows. To keep that pipeline of money going directly in Microsoft’s pockets. The chief threat for Microsoft is that people will be able to easily move away from Windows, taking their data (and their money) with them.

Google on the other hand, isn’t building products to protect a platform. After all, you can use Google anywhere. Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, you name it. You don’t need a particular set of software or hardware to use Google search and be served up Google ads.

The threat for Google is a bit different from the threat for Microsoft. Where Microsoft is afraid their captive audience might slowly drift away, Google is afraid their mostly self-chosen audience might not be able to access Google search. Microsoft’s platform dominance was built on an ecosystem, Google’s search dominance is also being extended through an ecosystem with (and this is crucial) Google by default.

Any time Google is faced with a challenge to their search dominance, they enter that market. Google isn’t the default on your phone? No problem, Google will make software to run on your phone. Google isn’t the default in your browser? No problem, Google will write their own (better, imho) browser. Google isn’t the default on your operating system? No problem, Google will release an operating system.

Defaults are terribly important. Microsoft defaults to Bing. Not because they love search or are even (by a very long shot) a search company or even an internet company. No, Microsoft defaults to Bing because they want to keep you hooked into Windows. Search revenue is incidental. Microsoft’s offerings, such as Bing and especially Windows Live exist specifically to hook you to Windows and keep that cash baby alive. They don’t want cross-platform accessible data freedom. No, they fear that more than anything.

Google on the other hand wants you to default to Google. Not because they want to protect their platforms. The revenue from their platforms is incidental. Google’s offerings, such as Chrome and especially Android exist for no other reason than to keep you searching with them.

And this is why you see Google and Microsoft competing in the same spaces so often. Their operating philosophies are completely different. Microsoft isn’t particularly know (to its detriment) for its whimsy, for example. But they enter the same spaces to do the same thing: Protect their core product. No other reason. They are protecting very different things, and are very different companies, but that’s why they’re there. Make no mistake. Everything Google does comes back to search. Everything Microsoft does comes back to Windows. And so it goes.

When I look at my data usage, I specifically want to see my data usage in a certain billing period. I want to see if I’m at my cap. If you can’t be so kind as align my billing period with the actual month, at least let me easily look up my usage within your wonky billing period.

I just found out I went over my cap last month by like 10mb. It’s a very charge, but it’s still a charge.

By the by, I own the HTC Desire, and it’s a fantastic phone. The only things I don’t like about it are the camera and the limited internal storage. The camera is pretty shitty no matter how you look at it, and I find myself bumping up against the insanely low internal storage at least once a week. I think I have something like 14mb left. Now, I’m running CyanogenMod 7rc2, and I’ve moved all the non-essential stuff onto the SD card (browser, google apps, reader, etc), even a few system apps, but still. An SD card just doesn’t cut it for system internals.

Other than that? Absolutely fantastic. Plus I dropped it on concrete once and it didn’t shatter. I consider that a bonus.

I’m sick to death of evangelists. They’re the worst examples of every faith’s pushiest and showiest and emptiest people. Yes, I’m working from a stereotype. Deal with it.

I’ve been evangelised by Jehovah’s Witnesses (the worst of the religious lot, because they bring their crap to your door), Mormons, Muslims, Fundamentalist Christians, and Open Sourcerers.

All of these people hold pretty important ideas about God, life, freedom of information, morality, and other important topics. There’s something worth discussing (if you wanted to, which I don’t) there. How you see God can change your life. Information and the freedom thereof can change an entire culture. Your morality can change your actions. These are Big Ideas, worth of discussion, debate, and furious examination.

Then there are the worst of the worst: Apple zealots.

Where religions like Buddhism and philosophies like information freedom contain important ideas (whether you agree with the ideas or not, at least agree that they’re important), Apple zealots have a shiny toy that makes them happy. They’re like children with a new colour of block showing it off to all the other children, unaware that it’s just another block and they’re just a bunch of blockheads.

There’s this pseudo-religious quality to their conversion experiences. Their Stockholm-Syndrome-like devotion to a company run by people who rightly deserve to be called a bunch of assholes.

That would all be okay (people like things and that’s fine up to a point), but when I’m having a conversation about technology and you interrupt with your HAY LOOK I’VE BOUGHT AN IPHONE ITS SO GRATE IT HAS GAMES LOL, or your MY MAC NEVER CRASHES OR GETS VIRUSES AND IT CURED MY GOUT AND ENLIVENED MY SEX LIFE, I feel justified in comparing you to one of those retarded little yappy dogs that won’t. ever. shut. up!

Look. I understand great design can make people feel marginally better about things. I understand that being part of the club makes you feel good. I get it. I really do.

But it’s just a thing. A THING. Not a religious experience, not a drug, not a miraculous life-changing device that will forever alter your destiny. It’s just a thing.

If it makes you happy, okay. No problem. It’s a little weird that you like a thing that much, and you should probably re-examine your crass, materialistic worldview, but whatever. Just don’t make it my problem by yapping about it in public as if you had done something important like cured AIDS or made world peace (both of which I could probably tolerate you evangelising, thankyouverymuch).

You went to a place, bought a thing, and now you’re telling people about how it changed your life. Let’s go all C.S. Lewis for a second here. Either you’re lying, in which case you’re pathetic for trying to lie about something so trivial; or you’re crazy, in which case you’re pathetic because you’re crazy; or you’re telling the truth, in which case you’re pathetic AND your life is pathetic for being changeable by such a tiny, worthless item of merchandise.

Here’s the takeaway: Keep your electronics fetish to yourself. Keep your life-changing bull-hockey on the other size of your teeth. Don’t reveal yourself in all your misery to those who are able and willing to mock you.

The internet is a pretty harsh place. If you’re a large site, you’re going to get flamed and spammed no matter what you do. If you run a new site, your most vocal readers, who are by far the most polarizing–and let’s admit it, downright idiotic–can really get out of hand. They can make your comment section look like a public washroom wall. Not pretty. And of course you want to clean it up.

Okay. But you need to ask yourself a question first. What do you want your comments to do?

If you just want a place where people can respond with brief messages of congratulations, or with additional information, a standard non-threaded comment form should be just fine. Registration need not be required. Just have good spam filters, you know?

If you’re a new organization, you’re probably looking for members of the public to discuss & debate with the added goal of keeping it sticky and rolling eyeballs to your advertisers. Nothing wrong with this: You get to turn a profit like everyone else. Large news organizations are odd fish because there are additional liabilities to be considered, but I think there’s something to be said for approaching trolls head-on in this situation. Let the reporters roam within the comments instead of weeping quietly to themselves when their work is unfairly attached by axe-wielding peasants. You’d be surprise how much more civil and pleasant even anonymous people are when they know someone is reading and someone is replying to their comment. Of course you’ll always have trolls, but you can learn to distinguish pretty quickly. Always have your finger over the delete button.

If you’re an aggregator, you’re probably looking for a great deal more discussion than a news site. Slashdot, Lifehacker, and (to some degree) Boing Boing are aggregators. They don’t create content at all. They exist as a layer in between content producers and content consumers, a layer that accumulates content in the form of discussion. (It’s a pretty slick way to make money, actually; you don’t have to do much but build a cool site and scrape the web and let people talk and click.) If you’re an aggregator, you want lots and lots and lots of discussion.

Slashdot is really good at this. It’s an ass-ugly site and there’s tonnes and tonnes of trolling going on, but the karma system works fairly well. It’s not perfect and it does promote groupthink, but it turns the whole site into a sort of game, and there’s nothing more sticky than a game. They’ve tried to de-emphasize this in recent years, which I think is wrong-headed. But between threading & moderation, Slashdot does a pretty good job. The downside of this system is that it’s fairly complex. Add the metamoderation layer on top of that, and there’s maybe a tad too much moderation going on. This is okay for technical types, but not really user-friendly for your stupid uncle.

Boing Boing is a site that has succeeded despite its commenting system, in my humble opinion. From needing to be moderated before a post appears (maybe they had a bad experience with wide-open posting in the past or something) to the complete lack of threading, the comments are usually a mess. There’s no conversation or debate to be had there. Every comment seems isolated. They could add at least a level or two of threading and some simple community moderation.

Lifehacker has a balance of both. There’s not a lot of threading going on there, but there is a bit of moderation. By default only approved commenters appear (the commenters with stars beside them), and you can view the rest of the discussion if you with by toggling a link. This works because once you have a star you’ve gained a level of trust and of status and you don’t want to lose it. You’re chosen for your quality posts and you want to go on making them. There’s enough threading to make discussions make sense, but not so much that it breaks tables. I think they’ve got a pretty good thing going there.

So riddle me this, my dear blog readers: Do you know of a site that does comments really well? Do you have an idea? Disagree? Hit me up in the completely open, non-moderated comments.

I was having some trouble with the latest Thunderbird releases on Windows. From 3.0 Betas and up I was having strange interface freezes where the program just wouldn’t respond and I couldn’t get any work done.

As soon as I started up the program, it would be particularly non-responsive. After a day of being open, it would be nearly usable. I thought it had something to do with the new indexing engine, the speed of my relatively ancient computer, and a host of other things. I changed settings, I compacted folders, I did this and that and nothing worked.

Until I though… hey. I have Microsoft Security Essentials installed here. I installed them and TB3 at approximately the same time… could this be the problem?

I excluded the Thunderbird binary from MSSE (Open > Settings > Excluded Processes), and lo and behold, stability!

MSSE is pretty rough on Thunderbird, it turns out. I don’t know if this is deliberate or not, though it certainly wouldn’t be out of character for Microsoft. It’s also pretty rough on Firefox, as soon as Firefox tries to download something.

In any case, this isn’t the safest thing in the world unless you’re behind some pretty good spam filters and firewalls, but it’s really the only way to make Thunderbird usable on Windows. Exclude the binary, uninstall MSSE, or use a different mail program, I guess.

I would like a few things.

• Move the “Create a New Filter” link to toward the top of the page. I end up with a lot of filters and I don’t really want to scroll down all the way to the bottom just to make a new one. Or put a link at the top and the bottom. There’s no reason it can’t be in both places at once.
• Under the “Reply” pull-down box, place a link to make a filter from that sender. This is a lot easer than, say, copying the email address, going to filters, making a new filter, pasting the email address, etc.
• For Google Apps, could we perhaps get a “Global Filter” type page or something to mass-manage email? There are quite a few message types I would prefer no-one receive, and I don’t have time to modify each account.

Thanks!

I want to plug a DVD player directly into a monitor. Anyone have any experience with this sort of thing, any product recommendations?

I don’t want to predict the future. It turns out I’m pretty bad at predicting the future and chances are so are you. But I do want to delve into a possible future, one that could develop if certain things go a certain way and certain other things do not go a certain way.

Imagine a world where people stop demanding a faster, more awesome computer, simply because they don’t need one any more. Imagine a world where the pendulum swings back to where it came from and remote servers are the big deal and local terminals are essentially (but not totally) dumb.

This would be a surprising (and frightening) world to both the founders of IBM with their big iron and the founders of Microsoft with their big desktop iron. They would both be wrong at least a great deal of the time. Even in those places one might expect big iron there are simply commodity machines connected together. In those places where one might expect big desktop iron there are simply a bunch of web applications. This would be the miracle of the network. This would be the Cloud at work.

Maybe something will come along soon to make this possible future extremely unlikely. I have no doubt that is possible. The web, the big network connecting the small networks, is that sort of disruptive technology. Note though that the web first developed over existing infrastructure: Telephone lines were the first transport technology to support the internet. Now the internet is drawing that infrastructure into itself. It’s not that strange to imagine that the internet will be the infrastructure that draws all the separate infrastructures we know and dislike (telephone, cable television, etc) and unites them. This is happening right now. The internet is the One Ring, if you will.

But my point is not to state the obvious, but to point out that the infrastructure that replaces the internet as we know it will probably (barring any truly disruptive technologies; keep in mind that I don’t claim this is a necessary development but merely a likely one) use the internet as its infrastructure and gradually subsume it. Anyone who has coded a AJAX application is praying desperately for that day to come, and soon.

I can imagine a world where Netbooks (or whatever you like to call them: I choose Mark Shuttleworth’s term because I happen to admire him) are essentially access points to the Cloud. Certainly specialised hardware exists: No one wants to edit video on something just larger than their palm. But small laptop like devices become at least one of the dumb(ish) access points to the internet at large. This, also, is already happening.

It’s entirely possible that Moore’s Law will stop functioning. It’s not a physical law, after all, and it is a meme entirely subject to physical impossibilities that require a great deal of ingenuity and expense to circumvent. It’s also entirely possible that Moore’s Law will become irrelevant as computers become smaller, more ubiquitous, and less visible. It’s hard, for instance, to fit a heat sink in your shoe; it’s easier to simply make a smaller program and use a processor with less processing power.

Perhaps soon processors themselves will become obsolete. Who knows.

I know this post has been long and taken many un-needed detours but let me interject some personal thoughts on personal computers: Good riddance and could you please give me my fish back. I am so sick to death of overpowered computers that need to be constantly upgraded to do (essentially) the same thing. I could run a word processor on my 486 that did almost everything that the word processor on my P4 does (namely, process words). There are really very few applications that deserve the sort of processing power we’ve got idling in our living rooms. Video editing, sure. Audio processing, sure. Graphic-intensive games? Absolutely.

Instant messaging? Web browsing? VoIP? Creating text documents? No way.

I’d rather like a future where I could buy a box as I needed it. Not tailored to a one size fits all Swiss Army Knife approach (I’m looking at you, Windows) where every five years brings a new chance to upgrade to a shiny new (and despicably slow) operating system with shine new (and despicably slow) hardware. I want something I can purchase and use and throw away when I’m done. I want something disposable.

Imagine if the only options you had when buying a car were Porches, MacLaren F-1s, and Jaguars. Would that make sense?

So my challenge (ringing loud and clear to about five people) is this: Make my future fast, inexpensive, and disposable. Make my data live out in the Cloud so I don’t have to tie it to a piece of physical hardware. Please. For the children.

I don’t get file extensions. Okay, maybe they were needed thirty years ago when the first rudimentary file-systems were created, but we have meta-data and the ability to read file headers and all sorts of neat things like that. Why do I still have to name something .whatever?

(Yes, I know this doesn’t apply to *nix, shut up.)

I have a question. Consider serial cables and data cables for a moment. We have SATA, Ethernet, FireWire, USB 1.0, USB 2.0, PS2, Serial ports of all kinds of stripes, etc. Each of these has its own plug design, its own specification, and in many cases its own internal bus. In some cases, there are variations on the plug design: see USB. In some cases (I’m looking at you, hard drives), there’s a data cable and a power cable; in other cases they’re both in the same cord (USB, power over ethernet).

Why can’t we have just one cord with two or three plugs? Certainly the thing that would send information and power to a hard drive could do the same thing for your digital camera, your screen, your video camera, and your network. We could have on kind of plug for removable devices, another kind for semi-permanent devices, and a small version of both for compact devices.

Am I missing something here? Why can’t this be done?