Social contracts

Spotted on Hugh McLeods’s blog - “how does a software company make money, if all software is free?” - an observation about the difference between closed-source aka Microsoft and open-source:

It took me a while to figure this out, but what applies to Open Source, also applies to Microsoft.

When you buy a Microsoft product, you’re not just getting ones and zeros. There’s also a form of “social contract” implicit in the commercial transaction. You gave them money, this entitles you to certain expectations.

A few weeks ago, I met a young developer who worked in an IT department of a large insurance company. I asked him what kind of software did he use. Answer: About 75% Microsoft, 25% Open Source. I asked him why did he not use more Open Source? I thought IT people loved Open Source?

“If something goes wrong with Microsoft, I can phone Microsoft up and have it fixed. With Open Source, I have to rely on the community.”

And the community, as much as we may love it, is unpredictable. It might care about your problem and want to fix it, then again, it may not. Anyone who has ever witnessed something online go “viral”, good or bad, will know what I’m talking about.

Which is only true for a given subsection of the Microsoft user base. If you don’t have access to that level of support - and most organisations below a certain size don’t - then you’re thrown back on the exactly same type of community resources regardless of whether you’re using open or closed source. The difference being that the open-source model provides the visibility of the source code, and the potential for fixed that this presents.

Mobile green screen

In case there was any doubt why the iPhone gets all the attention, compare and contrast these screenshots from Twitter clients for iPhone and Windows Mobile Live Personal Client 2007 (or whatever it’s called these days):

First, PocketTweets (for iPhone)

Then iTweet (also for iPhone)

And finally, Twmobile. Guess which platform?

After six months of fighting with my t-Mobile MDA Vario II, I dumped it in favour of an iPhone, flogged the Vario on ebay and haven’t looked back.

Tragedy of the wifi commons

One of the gimmicks marketing ploys that National Express East Coast employed when they took over the East Coast rail service from GNER was to extend the onboard wifi service that GNER had introduced. Prior to the NXEC takeover, wifi onboard was free to first-class passengers, and a minimum of £4.95 an hour for those travelling in cattle standard class.

In the GNER days, the service wasn’t bad - the connection speed was generally slightly faster than you’d get using a 3G connection, and reasonably reliable. The technology behind the service was innovative, too, using a combination of GSM and 3G links to maintain a pretty robust connection in fairly hostile circumstances.

The downside if you were travelling in standard class was that you had to pay out for the service. When someone else was going to pick up the tab, I generally paid up - after all, £4.95 isn’t *that* much if you’re going to get something productive done as a result. In first class it was free, which meant that my Sunday night trips were usually productive - or at least less boring - ones.

Then along came NXEC, and threw open the service free for all. In the process, they took something which was pretty useful, and turned it into something which is actually worse than useless. Despite the increased usage, they haven’t increased either the backhaul bandwidth or the onboard infrastructure - which means that most of the time the throughput has dropped to single-figures of kbps, and ping times have increased to the point where the average is generally several seconds or more. And that’s if you can actually get onto the network in the first place - the DHCP scopes are often exhausted, and the authentication gateway regularly buckles under the strain and drops your connection, meaning you have to re-authenticate.

All of which means that travellers would actually be better off without the service at all, because of the time that gets wasted trying to get the connection working.

Technorati Tags: nationalexpress, nxec, trains

On Microsoft + Yahoo:

Microsoft’s web technologies are as unrelated to Yahoo!’s as the Dark and Light sides of the Force. Before you even begin your Comp. Sci. degree you’ve already made a decision to join one camp or the other. There’s no love lost between the two sides, and very few developers jump from one camp to the other mid-career.

Perl, PHP and Ruby developers carry PowerBooks with startup stickers on them, ride a bicycle and wear a tee and jeans. They are too skinny. They are more likely to have an iPod earbud in their ear than a phone. Microsoft developers wear chinos and a business shirt or collared tee, carry a black generic laptop identical to their coworkers. They are a little overweight, but only because they have a good wife at home who loves to cook. They have a full schedule of meetings and tasks always with them in their Exchange-connected phone, which they carry in a leather holster on their belt, with a blinking-blue Bluetooth headset always jammed in their ear. They think the Zune is “kinda cool” but like a quiet working environment.

iPod reboot

For some reason (probably a protest about my lousy taste in music) my Nano locked up - nothing short of running it under the wheels of a car seemed to be going to make any different.

After a bit of Googling, the following solution presented itself:

• Toggle the hold switch ON
• Toggle the hold switch OFF
• Press and hold the Menu and centre buttons together for about 5 seconds
• Err
• That’s it.

Nano is once more a happy iPod, and filled with dubious crap.

Testing a Pocket PC blog client

…so far, so good…

Apple are idiots (or possibly geniuses)

If you’ve missed the furore of rumours about the possibility of a forthcoming “headless iMac” then you’ve probably been hiding under a rock of late. The Mac community rumour mill has been grinding overtime ever since ThinkSecret - an Apple enthusiast site with a good track record of predictions - published details of what might be a stripped-down, low-cost iMac.

Over the last few days, mainstream media has picked up on the story, and it’s gone pretty much around the world. At which point, Apple have decided to fire off a lawsuit against ThinkSecret, alleging that the rumours contain Apple trade secrets.

Which leads me to two possibilities. Either Apple have a spectacularly clueless and inept legal department, who wouldn’t know brand-enhancing publicity if it fell on them - or they have an incredibly cunning marketing wizard pulling the legal strings to whip up the furore even further.

The chances of it being the second are quite frankly nil, because at a stroke Apple have positioned themselves as the neighborhood corporate thug throwing their weight around in the way we’ve come to expect of petrochemical giants. Which is doubly bizarre when you consider that they benefit from a customer base which tends toward zealotry at times. Although their products are now positively hip - not to mention increasingly cost-effective when compared with a Wintel-based platform - what’s kept them going over the years has been customer loyalty.

Compare and contrast this approach with that of the Evil Empire itself. Sure, Bill Gates is capable of coming out with comments that give the occasional glimpse into the heart of the convicted predatory monopoly, but the public face of Microsoft today has been transformed by people like Robert Scoble, sites like Channel 9 and a whole host of others who are now talking more-or-less openly about what they’re doing and why. You might not trust them or like what they’re doing, but you’ve at least got a clearer idea of what they’re thinking about.

So there’s the paradox. On the one hand, the open and increasingly-cuddly giant that everyone loves to hate, and on the other the secretive and knee-jerkingly litigious underdog that inspires devoted loyalty from its customers fans. Doesn’t make sense, does it?

Tablets in the news

Maybe Robert ‘Tablet Maven’ Scoble’s influence isn’t just confined to Channel 9 - Channel 5’s revamped Sky-powered news programmes feature presenter Kirsty Young toting a Tablet PC as a portable alternative to an autocue…

Harry Potter and the iPod of Misdemeanor

Neil’s must be bored: he’s written a Random Harry Potter Book Title Generator…

Gmail invites going spare

I’ve got six four three gmail invites to give away - if anyone wants one, drop me a line…