Steven Levy, in writing for Wired, gives the world perhaps the first detailed look into Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's Chief Software Architect since Bill Gates stepped down. Interesting, fascinating, but ultimately entirely uninspiring if you're an investor in Microsoft.
Upfront disclaimer: the opinions expressed in the post below are solely my own and do not reflect the opinion of my employer or any other company or group I am affiliated with.
While Levy's piece is excellent and as promising as it may be to see what kind of attitude and atmosphere Ozzie brings to the stuffy Microsoft, one can't help but notice that there is something still inherently Microsoftian about his plans to make the company relevant again (or still relevant going forward, depending on your point of view). There is a single keyword hidden between the lines of the article and which is embedded within Microsoft's—including Ozzie's—actions and plans. That keyword is "dominate."
Take this particular phrase, written by Levy and not necessarily in line with Microsoft's own view but emblematic of them nonetheless:
… a top-secret set of initiatives designed to make Microsoft as dominant in the cloud era as it was in the days of the desktop.
Microsoft seems to operate, still, on the mantra that they need to dominate a market in order to consider themselves successful in it. This is where their ideology is inherently flawed in today's technology culture: a word like "dominate" made sense in the 20th century, but these first 8 years of the 21st century have shown that there is a new keyword rendering the old ones obsolete: empowerment.
If you look at the most successful technologies of today, you'll find that empowerment is their common denominator no matter what kind of technology it is. You may need to stretch your imagination a bit to consider the fuel-efficiency of a Hybrid car an empowerment, but it actually is: monetarily.
The culture of empowerment is most prevalent in online services though; Flickr, Youtube, Google Search, Amazon: all of these empower the user more so than any other service has done prior to them. Yet to this day, empowerment does not seem to be word you come across very often in Microsoft culture. It's hard to imagine that somehow, their strategy will pay off in a world of empowerment when their products are founded in ideologies from the last-century world of power and domination.
Perhaps with Ozzie at the helm of software technology, they'll avoid making technology mistakes like they did with Vista, yet even in that scenario it seems that, at best, they'll be doing all the right things—but for all the wrong reasons.
Excluding John Hancock's signature, the US Declaration of Independence is 1337 words long. Further proof that the founding fathers were well ahead of their time. Ahem.
Yesterday, John Gruber linked to a new piece by Microsoft tech pundit Paul Thurrott, insightfully titled “$500 million in advertising??? Did I use the Jump the Shark joke already?” Herein Thurrott once again fails to intelligently relate facts to logic and reason when conveying a message to his audience. Let’s translate from Thurrott-speak to logic and reason.
Upfront disclaimer: the opinions expressed in the post below are solely my own and do not reflect the opinion of my employer or any other company or group I am affiliated with.
Apple has spent the last 2+ years mocking Windows Vista in advertising. God knows what they’ve spent on these ads over this time, but whatever.
I have the figures for Apple’s advertising budget here but I’m going to feign ignorance to inflate them in your mind first.
Microsoft, to their detriment, failed to respond to these ads for almost two years. They did, however, spend this time improving Vista, most notably with Service Pack 1 (SP1) and the many other updates that shipped before and since. It’s worth noting, too, that the biggest problems with Vista were caused by third parties in the Windows ecosystem, but whatever.
Microsoft failed to figure out why these ads were a success while their own attempts failed one after another. I’ll also blame the third-party developers for Microsoft’s ineptitude.
This year, finally, Microsoft decided to respond to Apple’s ads—many of which made untrue claims, by the way—with their own series of ads.
Apple’s advertisements weren’t 100% true and this deeply offended me, but The EmpireMicrosoft Struck Back!
These include The Mohave Experiments ads,
…with a controlled experiment painted off as scientific which really just reaffirmed that one needs a personal Microsoft expert to help you make sense of Vista.
the Gates/Seinfeld series,
A few ads with a celebrity that totally failed to restore their image despite only tangentially touching upon this subject.
and, of course, the excellent I’m A PC ads, which celebrate the diversity of the one billion plus PC users worldwide and what they accomplish every day with Windows.
And, of course, the highly uninspired copy-cat I’m a PC ads, which celebrate the diversity of the one billion plus PC users worldwide and what they accomplish every day despite Windows.
These latter ads, especially, make the Apple “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads look arrogant and out of touch. Because they are.
Politics have shown that if you just accuse your opponent of your own flaws often enough, you may get people to believe you.
Apple responded, as only they can, with more “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads. (Hey, stick to what you know.)
Apple responded by making more of the ads that have thus far proven to be extremely successful, and I want you to think this is somehow a stupid move on their part.
These included some ads that focused, inexplicably, on Microsoft’s advertising campaigns and how the software giant should have spent that money—$300 million, supposedly, though Microsoft has never confirmed that number—on “fixing Vista” instead of advertising. As noted above, Microsoft had “fixed” Vista a long long time before the ads appeared.
Microsoft says that Windows Vista’s Beta period is over with the release of Service Pack 1 so Apple’s ads are no longer true, nyah nyah!
And as I noted at the time, too, maybe Apple itself should have fixed its own incredibly buggy recent products—MobileMe, iPhone/iPhone 3G, and Leopard among them—instead of hypocritically and falsely calling out a competitor.
(The Apple Way, incidentally, is ship first, ask questions later. Apple customers are all beta testers. It’s the reverse of how tech products are typically developed.)
Unlike Microsoft and its Windows Service Packs, it’s Apple that releases products that are in beta. Totally not like Microsoft. Vista SP2 anyone?
Well, guess what?
Guess what? I had the numbers all along!
Apple spent $486 million on advertising last year, $467 million the year before, and $338 million in 2006.
Ahahahaha.
I’m about to point out that Apple’s advertising budget last year was about half of Microsoft’s but first I want you to think that this is a really big number.
Here’s the thing. Microsoft and Apple both spend a ton of money on advertising. They’re both big companies with big reach. Of course, Microsoft has more reach globally while Apple plays mostly in the US and other rich nations, which actually puts the numbers in even better perspective. But if the notion of Apple actually producing insider ads—in which it rags on a competitor for, get this, advertising—ads that, by the way, the typical consumers who seem them won’t even get—didn’t rile you at the time, they should now that we know how much it spent.
Microsoft is a bigger company and has more products and advertises in more countries around the world and I’m going to butcher this sentence by using two em dash-separated interludes stuck together and wahhhh, Steve Jobs said my favorite company sucked.
BTW, Microsoft spent $959.5 million in advertising last year. But then they’re considerably bigger than Apple, compete in far more product segments, and are in far more markets worldwide. So that makes sense.
Oh and just by the way, Microsoft spent twice as much on advertising but it’s okay, they have more products to talk about and not get any mindshare for. See, they have to compensate for all that lack of interest in their products with more advertising. It makes sense.
And let’s be clear: That budget is for all of the company’s many products but didn’t include any Windows advertising at all.
And to confuse you entirely I’m going to make a completely outrageous claim or simply fail to tell you that what I actually meant is that there’s a separate, unmentioned advertising budget for Windows only that even further skyrockets this nearly-one-billion-dollar figure.
If Microsoft did spend $300 million on advertising Windows this year, that was a first.
I don’t know how much Microsoft spent on advertising Windows but I’m sure it wasn’t much at all.
And it must have spent about, what?, $17 to $19 (not a typo, just a joke) advertising Windows Mobile and Zune combined in the past year. Those are the only two other Microsoft products that compete with Apple products.
The Zune and Windows Mobile have failed in the market only because Microsoft didn’t spend anything advertising these products, instead it spent all that money on, uhm, fixing them. No wait, they weren’t broken. It’s just the lack of advertising.
So. Apple spent more on ads over the past three years at least than Microsoft did on its competitive products. And it was Apple, not Microsoft, that then released ads mocking the other company … for spending money advertising.
I’m cherry-picking words to completely fabricate the truth and make it look like Apple actually outspent Microsoft on advertising even though it didn’t.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
Male cow. Feces. Me.
Many thanks to Paul Thurrott for providing a good laugh on this cold Monday morning.
I love Twitter and I love my iPhone, yet I don't really love a single one of the available Twitter iPhone applications. I do love (and still use most) m.twitter.com, which is not even an iPhone-optimized site; it's simply Twitter's mobile site from pre-iPhone days. Where do all these Twitter iPhone apps go wrong?
I sat down for coffee with @Piemonte last night and had to explain why I still preferred m.twitter.com over any of the available iPhone apps. I realized then and there, thanks to having to explain my reasons to someone other than myself, just what exactly it is I want out of a Twitter app or (web) client when I'm using my iPhone. It's three things: speed, features and tweet density. The last one is most important, but let's start with the first two.
By speed, I mean that the client needs to be extremely responsive; flicking my finger must result in an immediate scrolling of the screen. If it's a client that has multiple views, for instance a Replies tab, Direct Messages and so forth, then switching from one to the other has to be quick. If it's slow enough that I start looking away from my iPhone while I'm holding it and using your client, your client is too slow.
Features are also important. Access to your Direct Messages is almost a no-brainer when it comes to features your app or client should have, but it's something I find remarkably easy to live without. Perhaps it's because I have Direct Messages sent to my phone as text messages, which essentially shifts that feature into the iPhone's SMS app no matter what client I may prefer. Still, when it comes to features, other things like Replies, Twitter Trends, support for multiple accounts, Location-based enhancements and the like are all valuable additions to any Twitter client or app, but they are not necessarily deal-breakers.
For instance, Tweetsville is one of the more popular clients of the moment and its threaded view of Direct Messages (essentially splitting up who you get direct messages from much like how the SMS app does it with different numbers) is definitely a better implementation than Tweetie's, but I still prefer the latter app.
The point is, features on an application are great but unless they're absolutely critical for the main purpose of the app itself, they merely add value at the cost of interface simplicity. Those features are exchangeable when it comes to comparing different apps of the same kind, but none of them will make yours the killer app.
Lastly, there's tweet density. This is where we find out why I will instinctively reach for mobileSafari and m.twitter.com on my iPhone when I want to check my Twitter stream, rather than any of the Twitter apps I have installed.
Typically, if I'm using my iPhone to check Twitter it's because I'm waiting in line somewhere, in a dull moment at a meeting while people fiddle with cables getting the projector to work, something like that. It means I have just a matter of seconds, maybe as much as a minute or two, to check Twitter on my phone without it being a problem. In those precious few seconds, I need to be able to process as much info as I can possibly muster. In other words, my small iPhone screen needs to show as many tweets as possible with as little as possible clutter. Let's look at how some of these apps match up against one another.
From left to right: m.twitter.com, Tweetie, Twitterrific.[1]
Here we see the tweet density of m.twitter.com, Tweetie (my personal favorite) and Craig Hockenberry's venerable and oft-compared-to Twitterrific. This is after scrolling each of them to show as many tweets as possible on the screen; just for comparison's sake I've also uploaded a picture showing the three in starting position, although Twitterrific's is the same (the only difference it has is the Deck ad, but that's only in the Lite version).
The results:
m.twitter.com shows 7,5 tweets, but one of which is a massive 5-liner
Tweetie shows 3 tweets, and the 5-liner has become a 7-line tweet here, filling almost 50% of the screen
Twitterrific shows 5 tweets
Quite clearly, when it comes to scanning through tweets as fast as possible to see that one particularly interesting tweet, m.twitter.com has no equal: the density of its tweets vastly surpasses that of other apps, allowing me to process batches of tweets easily twice as fast using m.twitter.com than I can with anything else.
There are, however, two distinct differences between m.twitter.com and the Twitter apps that are worth mentioning: first, m.twitter.com only shows the usernames and not whatever they have entered as their display name. This can be a downside if you have a hard time remembering everyone's usernames as opposed to their real names.
The second difference is the lack of avatars on m.twitter.com; I actually really like this, but I can understand that many people may not. To me, avatars are a prettification but since I have a lot of people I follow and many of them change their avatars fairly frequently, memory muscle is more or less made useless in relying on avatars to quickly identify people's tweets. Usernames change only very rarely (if at all), and I don't often misread or mis-identify one username as another. That's not the case with avatars, where many of my friends have an avatar that looks and feels very similar to someone else's, especially when scanning quickly.
Another issue with showing avatars is that they slow down rendering and scrolling, which leads back to the first point I made about the app having to be ultra-responsive. If I flick the screen down and your app is still loading up the avatars, they've lost their purpose entirely as now I'm just seeing placeholders for everyone. Still, not a single app I know of has offered me to disable avatars, sadly.
Now, you may say that you prefer a more beautifully designed or aesthetically pleasing interface, and that's fine. To me, it's like this: I'm holding one of the most inspired pieces of electronics in human history in my hand, so my need for aesthetics and beauty has been met already. What I care about at this stage is the efficiency with which I can do what I need or want to do, and only m.twitter.com meets the primary requirement to my level of satisfaction.
So here we are. iPhone Twitter apps are becoming better and better and we're seeing some great ideas being implemented in this space.[2] Nonetheless, I'm desperately hoping for one to offer me a completely bare-bones view or theme that is similar to m.twitter.com's display: no avatars, just usernames; everything as compact as possible. That'll let me scan through tweets at the same speed I do on m.twitter.com and thus the app would become of tremendous value to me; if you then add extra features like the ones Tweetie has, it'll be the killer app for using Twitter on my iPhone.
So far, all I know is that Tweetie is working on a minimalist theme so I'm already looking forward to its next update. Anyone else out there?
Closing note: for those who are interested, you can of course follow me on Twitter if you don't already.
I'd have included Twinkle, were it not for the fact that it refused to let me use the app without granting it access to my Location, and it forced me to have a Tapulous account just to see my own Twitter stream. I tried creating one but it told me that username was already in use. It helpfully offered me to "Add this device" to that account, but that, too, just made the modal dialog pop up endlessly. Suffice to say, Twinkle is now uninstalled and on my Strongly Discourage list. ↵
Speaking of, when will any of these Twitter clients offer a Filter & Highlight feature, allowing you to filter out or highlight tweets based on keywords you can add and remove within the client? Why wait for Twitter to implement groups when a lot of the benefits thereof can be done client-side with something like Filter & Highlight? ↵
There's a reason I bring my camera everywhere I go: it's so that I can capture beautiful, highly fleeting moments such as the shots found in this set of 10 pictures, taken while driving from Oakland into San Francisco.
The election of Barack Obama to be the 44th President of the United States of America was a joy of joys for millions, both here in the U.S. as well as all around the world. However, in California the victory was bittersweet: Proposition 8 passed, consequently banning gay marriage (again).
This was a deeply saddening step backwards at a time when the nation as a whole took a giant leap forward in electing its first African-American President. So what happened?
The simple fact that Obama did win proves, pretty conclusively, that tolerance in this nation has been on the rise and it’s unlikely that it will go back again over time. It’s also very unlikely that racism was somehow replaced with homophobia amongst voters, which leaves us with the simple but harsh reality that the gay rights community and the No on 8 supporters (myself included) failed to run a good campaign against Proposition 8.
The vote on Prop 8 was a close call, with the proponents edging out the opposition by a relatively slim margin. For a state like California that’s especially significant, as it could reasonably be expected to have overwhelming pro-gay voters; San Francisco is the official gay capital of the world and Los Angeles county is largely very gay-friendly. Right? Turns out, L.A. County isn’t as gay-friendly as one might’ve thought.
So here’s some things that I think the gay community could’ve done better; while it’s too late to convince more people to vote against Proposition 8, it’s never too late to fight for gay rights as that fight will continue until the day that all gays have equal rights all across the world.
Location, location, location
I saw tons and tons of No on 8-campaigners out on the streets… of San Francisco. I don’t know if there’s a correlation between gays’ love for singing and them preaching to the choir, the point is that I saw Yes on 8-campaigners out in the South Bay and No on 8-people in San Francisco.
If you look at the county-by-county vote outcomes on Prop 8 (you’ll have to manually set it to show Proposition 8 results), the map shows that SF’s neighboring counties were vastly against Prop 8 as well, so even the majority of through traffic was part of the choir. Yet, in Santa Clara county where I noticed most of the Yes on 8 people, the gap between Yes and No voters is significantly smaller.
Another example is the post-election protest marches in SF and other cities around the country (not just California!): big cities are generally okay with their gay communities, it’s the people outside in the more rural areas that need convincing the most. If the gay community wanted to have a real big impact with their protest marches, they should’ve run them through those small towns — and since it wasn’t merely gay people in the protests, the straights among them could serve as indicator of the fact that despite our differences, we can all live harmoniously together.
The location argument is closely related to the next one:
Increase the exposure
One of the most treasured things in my own life is having grown up in the diversely populated Netherlands and being surrounded by different countries just a few hours drive away, each with their own language, people and culture.
The exposure to people of all races, of all preferences, of all natures, has given me what I consider to be one of the most valuable things that any human being can possess: an open mind.
Exposure is the key to developing understanding for one another. We don’t easily understand things we feel estranged from; be it people from another country or people with different sexual preferences that you only really hear about but don’t really know. With understanding comes tolerance, and while it may not happen overnight that someone exposed to gay love (and then hopefully realizes the harmlessness of it all) may vote against something like Proposition 8 the next day, it’s the first step that needs to be taken.
Take cues from Obama’s campaign
Barack Obama led a very successful campaign, probably the finest in American history. He leveraged not just every bit of technology available to him to get his message across, he also very strictly defined that message and then made sure to send people out into areas where he didn’t already have strong support.
Define your message clearly and succinctly and make sure to have either key phrases or key words. Obama had Change and Hope as key words, for instance. Some central talking points for him were bringing change to Washington, that John McCain had voted with Bush 90% of the time; the gay rights movement needs a few of such key talking points, information that distills what’s at the heart of it all, and then make sure to repeat those as much as possible.
And make sure to repeat them in areas where people don’t already know all about them.
Create compelling arguments
Here’s some examples; I’m sure you can think of even better ones.
Your love doesn't hurt anyone
Your love doesn't take anyone else's rights away
Your love doesn't threaten anyone
Your lifestyle doesn’t try to impose itself upon others
There are plenty of arguments to make here; you could also play off the fact that there are no 50% and upwards divorce rates among gay marriages; it's a strong case against those who talk persistently about the "value of traditional marriage" yet so rapidly diminish its sanctity through divorce after divorce.
Create compelling stories
Stories take the world by storm; they make a stronger impression on someone than straight-up facts and they linger for much longer. A story can be retold easily; facts need to be remembered in precise detail and, often enough, people tend to forget a detail here or there which dilutes the value of the facts dramatically. A story can be tweaked, adjusted, retold and yet its core message will most likely survive if not get even more powerful.
A story is also a good, friendly, easy-going way to start up a discussion about the importance of gay rights, the values they treasure, the feelings that were shattered by Prop 8's passing. Knocking on a door and telling a story goes over a lot better than knocking on a door to present people with a bunch of facts.
The story of Harvey Milk is a great example. Find other stories that will resonate with the less understanding crowds, perhaps stories from more recent days. I’m sure there are plenty.
With Milk’s story having been made into a movie, you have a powerful ally you can work with: ask people in rural areas if they’ve seen Milk; if they haven’t, there’s your opener to tell them a story or two. It allows you to talk about how this is not a matter of preference, but instead civil rights and completely unfair and unequal treatment against you.
But never forget: in the end, it is not their story that’s at stake here. Their story has been told; now and in the future, it is your story, and the rest of the world gets to decide whether your story will be like Harvey Milk’s or Barack Obama’s.
Sean Bonner nails it on the head about Qwitter, a Twitter-oriented (but not affiliated) service that informs you whenever someone stops following you:
My biggest problem with Qwitter, and the one that covers all the bases in one shot is that is creates drama and negativity from something that should be innocuous. Can you imagine if there was a service out there that notified you when someone you know chose to move an e-mail you sent them from their inbox to their archive folder, or worse to delete it?
To me, there is and has only ever been one useful purpose for Qwitter that doesn't create drama nor negativity: knowing who you can no longer send Direct Messages to. That problem could be easily alleviated though if Twitter itself would just inform you when you try to send a DM to someone that's not following you and your DM gets lost in a black hole.
There's a saying we're probably all familiar with:
It's better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. — Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam:27
At many times in my life do I disagree with this. Having loved and lost (not by death but, ultimately, by distance more than anything), I sometimes encounter situations where I can feel the void of someone missing to share the moment with, and at those times do I think to myself, how is this easier?
For those of you who have had their hearts broken, perhaps also multiple times, I'm sure you know this feeling. It's the emptiness you feel when you experience something so wonderful, yet there is no hand to reach for and clinch in your disbelief of what you're seeing, hearing, feeling or tasting. It's the empty air besides you that you instinctively turn towards with a smile, only to creep out a complete stranger who wonders what you just did.
How can this possibly be easier than what we had before?
Mankind's ability to imagine things is extremely potent, but is it so powerful as to convincingly match the pains felt from this very real void that those of us, who have loved and lost, feel?
I doubt it.
But then, the emotional torment, the stress and the need to find different motivators, different things to occupy your time in life with so that you don't linger on the past… I must admit, it is pretty powerful stuff, too. Powerful in that, for me at least, it has inspired me to do great things, to write, to educate myself more on life itself. It has driven me towards self-improvement time and time again, in ways I probably couldn't have had before my first true love in life.
So maybe there's some truth after all to Alfred Lord Tennyson's words. Perhaps it is about the foresight to acknowledge that the hurt you have from losing love is what ultimately makes you stronger than anything you could become without it, without that experience. For to truly love is to love with all your heart, so much that you surrender yourself to love itself. Losing that is losing something greater than yourself in life, and recovery from that by its very definition means coming out better, greater and stronger than you were before.
Only one thing I know for sure: once you've loved and lost, there's no going back.
