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Last night I was at a studio recording at the BBC for a pilot of a new comedy show. I recognised a lot of the audience which makes me sound like such a social butterfly (Northern Ireland is a small puddle) and even spotted Brian O’Neill of Fresh Ideas, a blog I read.

One secret handshake in the Crown Bar later and we were yammering on about selling online, the serious lack of Outlook for Macintosh and what he should do about his iPod which has a slightly dodgy battery (in other words, take it to these guys).

Afterwards I retreated to the safety of a stolen booth where the women in our group talked about shoes and the men pretended to be remotely interested in football, as is the done thing.

Football. I honestly don’t get it. I don’t understand the make-up, the T-shirts, the hanging round in gangs, the going to specialist shops, the spending a fortune chasing their chosen pantheon around. If they were trekkies, then they’d be considered weird.

Technorati Tags: blogging, mac, weird

Dave Winer, soon to be ex-blogger, comments on why he thinks Bill Gates is stepping down from the helm at Microsoft. He displays a stock graph which shows the stock in freefall (though if you examine the key it’s not a dramatic drop). The big drop is only in the last month though – previous to the announcement of Bill’s departure (though may be timed close to the latest in a long series of “When Vista is coming” delays.

The impression we get from talking to geeks, those pre-Chasm adopters, is that Microsoft has lost all but the most faithful and Bill is deserting so he can say “Well, that ship was sailing when I was in charge!”

Dave also expounds on the idea that Microsoft’s current fortunes are based on pre-2000s code. That they’re just rehashing old code in Office and Windows and making cash off that. That’s a much easier pill to swallow considering that they’ve been selling XP for five years now with nary a significant change.

The question he leaves us with is something that bothered me. If you’re leaving, then leave. Why announce that you’re leaving in two years? The tongue in cheek response is that they’ve forgotten that Bill leaving is not a “new feature” – that they’re treating it like everything else they announce at Microsoft.

Coming Real Soon Now: Bill Leaving!!!

Wanna lay bets that the ship date of THAT feature will slip?

Technorati Tags: vapourware

Of course, by “infinite“, we mean “never“. This article, highlighting some incidents from the career from Microsoft’s new superstar, Ray Ozzie, mentions this in passing.

“no small company can afford to develop multiple products that never reach the market – there aren’t the resources to do that.”



The article says that Ozzie left DataGeneral in order to join a company where products would actually reach market. When I was at Nortel, the engineers there worked on some REALLY COOL products that were canned because the market wasn’t ready for them. We’re talking about 10 years ago but some of the products would still be cool and innovative in broadband-soaked 2006. Eventually Ozzie found himself at Lotus where he developed Notes. Now he’s the big Kahuna at Microsoft. Funny how things work out eh?

We certainly can’t afford to be creating products that will never be sold. Or at least, products that will be ignored (because we don’t intend to SELL everything. Some things will be free…). I can see how demotivating it would be to the team here if that was the case with anything. I know how galling it can be to have wasted even a nights work.

Technorati Tags: products

Macworld UK has an article on Mac Game Piracy. As someone who owns 3 copies of Halo for Mac and one for PC, I think I’m more an oddity than a normal gamer. The author of the article states that downloads from MacGameFiles outnumber sell-throughs by a factor of 10 and this is news. Um, no, mate. This ain’t news. Downloads will always outnumber sell-throughs by an order of magnitude. Put it another way, I downloaded the DOOM 3 demo and then bought the boxed game. I very very seldom buy games supplied online because I have no desire to play Fish Tycoon, Puppy Luv or Teddy Factory.

Aspyr Media’s Director of Development Glenda Adams didn??????t have much better news. She sees the industry inevitably heading towards more copy protection systems like Steam, a scheme created by Valve Software, makers of Half-Life 2. Steam requires players to have an online connection to validate their software each time they want to play.

Frankly, I have no problems with this. After all, internet access is nearly ubiquitous. If an internet connection was required once a week, I think that would be a reasonable compromise.

This piracy is driving game developers to develop for consoles where it is harder but still not impossible to steal games. That sucks because the only “gaming” machine I carry is my Mac. I’m not enthralled by the PSP. I’m not in awe of the DS Lite. It’s all nice hardware but what does it do other than play games? Hence, to me, it’s a gimmick. I know lots of you love your gaming gadgets but….well….they don’t do anything for me.

A model I’d support would be similar to STEAM. Steam allows you to play offline once you have downloaded and validated the game with their servers. I’ve always maintained that I’d like Mac game makers to start a scheme like Steam – mainly because finding games to buy here in Northern Ireland is hard enough. We have to resort to Mail Order which removes a lot of the impulse buy. An online download system would put that impulse buy back in.

Also, there are games which are really a lot of fun at a LAN meet. We tend to play games which have reasonable licensing (Halo doesn’t but we really wanted to play it.). This means looking at games which permit “spawning” like Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo, Myth. Games which permit one licensed store-bought copy to allow a multiplayer install to use them as a server.

I think that the Mac game market really need to look at iTunes for inspiration. Not the DRM but the model. iTunes is not designed to compete with the many Microsoft-WMA also-rans. It’s designed to compete with online music theft. If game developers started to look at the problem of game piracy and the reasons why people attempt to steal games, then they might gain some headway. I think they need to get in bed with Scott Kevill of GameRanger and see if there’s a way validation can be added. It’s notable that games which permit multiplayer demos are in the top 15 games being played over GameRanger. With 230 000+ members and 81 games played in the last hour, it seems ripe to exploit further and yeah, it might make Kevill very rich if it worked. It just seems there’s a disconnect there….(pun intended). ???

Technorati Tags: mac, piracy, gaming

Gavin Shearer, a Seattle Microsoftie who is, you know, partial to a Mac or two, comments on the recent “Get a Mac” adverts which are riffing off the Switch campaign from a couple of years back.

He says that the Windows folk are now seeing the Mac as a real alternative for once. This is kinda cool because the Linux/BSD folk have been seeing the Mac as a real alternative (for the laptop/desktop) for the last five years.

I think BootCamp goes further though. Steve Jobs, at the fateful “war is over” speech nearly a decade ago, was unerringly accurate with his prophecy (though it’s hardly prophecy I suppose as he is the director and tailor of his destiny). Microsoft is not the enemy as BootCamp proves. The enemy is [insert any PC manufacturer here]. This means there is zero chance that Apple will license Mac OS X to Dell. Sure – it means Microsoft will lose some people to Apple’s OS, but there’s also the chance that there’ll be a couple of million more Windows sales in the near future. Spooky to think that the people driving Vista sales in the next couple of years are more likely to be Mac users than traditional Windows users. Spookier too to see the report from Intel that working with Apple is making them take heat/performance/portability concerns a lot more seriously!

Gavin finishes off revealing someone at MS’s TechEd conference did their presentation on a 15″ MacBook Pro running Windows XP. We have been seeing this with the Linux crowd. Is it uncharitable to say that Windows people are 5 years behind them in technology adoption?

Technorati Tags: bootcamp

I think there need to be a serious change in the way PR and branding companies work.

Traditional PR speaks to me of Press Releases, champagne receptions, dead tree mailshots and funny little pointless desk accessories emblazoned with our brand and logo.

Seriously. They spoke to me of this.

I can’t think of how much out of our plan that would be. Our business cards are the only dead tree products we plan to produce. We’re intending to be 100% Bedouin so desk accessories would be useless. Mailshots? For an internet company? Sure we intend to have a SyncBridge launch party but that’s more to do with being the only Mac software company in Northern Ireland and wanting to do something with the local MUG involving an all-new branch of CocoaHeads as well as my friends in Mac-Sys the only Apple Authorised Service Provider in the province. Yeah, sure, that’s closer to traditional PR but the people turning up I consider to be my friends!

I read a couple of PR blogs. One I recommend is Piaras Kelly: Public Relations from an Irish Perspective and I also read Guy Kawasaki’s Blog for extra inspiration. There’s a couple more but these ones are always worth a look.

The Scobleizer, arguably the hottest tech news this quarter, speculates Microsoft holds traditional PR in unreasonably high esteem and they should be paying more attention to the grassroots. He cites Apple and Google as companies which have ensnared the grassroots.

I think it’s deeper than that, of course.

Microsoft has lost the Alpha Geeks. In their place they have trolls like Dvorak, Thurott and Enderle who spend a lot of time thinking of ways to rile up the Mac and Linux crowds who are still not wise to their tactics.

I know some smart people who swear by Microsoft and sometimes I wonder if my faith is misplaced.