Monthly Archives: November 2005

Quite Writely So

I read an article in Business Week, which discussed the Microsoft announcement of MS Live “We’re going toe-to-toe with Google”. Mentioning that Google was probably going to come out with hosted office software (word processor etc.) it referred to a web site, writely.com, that already offered a hosted word processing service. So I went there.

To be more precise, while sitting in the Analyst area at CA World last week, I teamed up with Gary Barnett (Director de investigación de Ovum and l’escargo fou) and we tried it out. Not only can you create documents with images and web links etc., you can also actively collaborate on a document. So we traded insults over the web and demonstrated to ourselves that this is actually a compelling service. So compelling indeed that I now use this web site to write my blog and to collaborate with Judith Hurwitz.

It is only in Beta and it’s not a perfect service but it’s good enough for most word processing needs. It even has a spellchecker. What it does well is share documents and it is easy enough to use. Go try it and if you have problems using it, click on help. (Microsoft take note—this is what is meant by “ease of use”; it’s about being easy to use). Someone has done an excellent job here—so excellent that I would not be surprised if Writely.com gets to be very popular. It’s not just the word processing, it’s the collaboration.

This is going to take off, whether Google does something similar or not.

Posted in IT Trends | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Applications of the Mobile Revolution

One of the initially unexpected events of the mobile market was the unexpected and extraordinary explosion of SMS messaging. Current figures indicate (2004) that the number of SMS messages now being sent world-wide is above 10 billion per month. This is an astonishing figure given that it approximates to 2 messages per month to every person on the planet. Of course that doesn’t give a clear picture of what is going on. What appears to be happening is that young mobile phone users, in the age range 15 to 25, are using SMS capability extensively sending each other messages at a rate of over 10 per day (10 percent of which, according to reports, say nothing more than “phone me”). On top of this, some web sites are providing SMS capability and sending messages giving news, sports scores and so on, directly to mobile phone numbers. This accounts for the traffic figures and their 100 percent growth over the last year.

When we try to identify the applications that drive major revolutions in computing, “killer applications” so to speak, we home in on useful capabilities that might become pervasive. At the beginning of the PC revolution, the killers apps were word processing and spreadsheets. Later the graphical capabilities of the GUI added presentations, desk top publishing and drawing to the mix. With the Internet revolution the killer applications were email, search engines (like Google and Yahoo), news and informational web sites and entertainment. In the latter category came pornography, which acted as a larger incentive to get onto the net than most people would like to admit.

So what has happened so far with the mobile revolution. Quite clearly as the SMS traffic shows, the early driver is messaging, which began as a paging capability but has quickly become “email by other means”. The reason for its popularity is simply that it is fast and gets to the individual, rather than to a device – or at least it will do if the individual carries a mobile phone around all the time as most users do. It is quite obvious that one of the next moves with messaging is its extension to have all the capability of email: sending messages to lists, adding attachments and so on. In addition, voice capabilities will be added, merging email and voice mail.

The other killer wireless applications are likely to come from the unique capability of the new medium, which if you ignore the fact that voice is central to the user interface, comes down to the fact that the mobile phone is carried around and can be used in most circumstances. Clearly this means that the mobile phone will absorb the capabilities of the PDA, as one or two models of phone have already done to some extent, but we can think of this in a different way.

Check Your Pockets
Examine everything that you carry with you on your person or sometimes carry with you. Most of these things can become mobile applications. Here is a fairly comprehensible list of examples:

  • Watch: Consider a digital watch, which also acts as an alarm clock, gives world time and can be used as a stop watch (but rarely is). The mobile can easily do these things and using GPS could automatically adjust to local time.
  • PDA: Addresses, calendar, expenses, email, alarms and all other PDA functions including data synchronization are possible.
  • Keys: Given that locks are electronically controllable and wired to the internet, the mobile device can become a key to open any such lock using a personal key. With infrared or bluetooth an appropriately designed lock wouldn’t even need to be wired. This is a huge area of application.
  • Remote devices: The mobile could easily usurp the role of the remote control for televisions, videos, sound systems and any other device with such an interface. This development would encourage other household goods (cookers, washing machines, etc.) to have such interfaces.

The contents of the wallet: In truth the whole contents of a wallet can be swallowed up by the mobile, we can consider them by category, as follows:

  • Credit/Debit Cards, Money: Mobiles could implement or even usurp such payment mechanisms. Once electronic cash gets going it could store it and use it to make payments and could do so in any currency.
  • Driving License and other ID Documents: This could include photograph as well as the usual information. A passport would also be possible on the same basis and also recording visas, entries/exits to/from various countries and other data that passport and customs authorities like to collect.
  • Loyalty Cards: Clearly if it can do credit cards and passports, it can also do loyalty cards from airlines, supermarkets, petrol stations and so on.
  • Membership Cards: Similarly it can store membership cards for professional associations, sports clubs, nightclubs, etc.
  • Tickets: It could store tickets for theatre, cinema, trains and boats and planes or anything else for which tickets are used.
  • Business cards: It can hold business card information and transfer it from one person to another.
  • Receipts: It could be used to collect receipts for business expenses and for tax purposes.
  • Personal effects: Other personal effects, such as photographs of wife, children, girlfriend, or whatever could be stored on the mobile device.

Naturally, all of the information items mentioned above would be protected by duplication somewhere on a secure server, but the mobile device could hold copies of them and present them in the appropriate situations.

Many of these items, keys, ID and payments in particular, are killer applications and would make the mobile device a vitally important and indispensable item in daily life. Notice how distinctly different these applications are from the killer applications of the PC or the Internet era. That is why mobile technology hails a revolution, and isn’t just an extension of the Internet.

Posted in A Day In The Life | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Leap Of The Leopard?

As regards the move to Intel, I think Steve Jobs simply concluded that he was now in a position to take a much larger share of the PC market and he could only do that with Intel hardware. With the move to Intel the “it ain’t compatible” problem melts away.

I read some article on the web this morning suggesting that Apple will eventually drop OS X in favour of Windows. It’s rare that I get to read anything that is so dead wrong. There’s not a chance in any of the circles of hell that Apple will drop OS X. The article also suggests that Apple is NOT attracting Windows users to OS X. Facts suggest otherwise. Apple converted a million or so Windows users last year, including me. Almost everyone I know in the professional space is considering Apple for their next PC. (Some won’t move, some will, but the point is that Apple has become credible. It didn’t use to be.)

And let’s not forget that 2006 is the year of the Leopard. Steve Jobs fully intends to launch Leopard, the next version of OS X, at about the same time that Microsoft brings Vista to market. As of this week Vista became a known phenomenon. The version Microsoft just released is “feature complete”. Leopard is a completely unknown phenomenon. Steve Jobs would not be organizing a head-to-head OS release if he didn’t have something up his sleeve.

What I’m guessing we’ll see in Leopard (and I am guessing) is this: Leopard will let you run Windows-in-a-box in the same way that under Windows you can run DOS-in-a-box. It will be sold for Apple Intel machines in a form that is “Windows enabled”. You will be able to install Windows (any version) if you want to-and if you do, you’ll be able to install Windows applications and run them in-a-box directly from Leopard. The OSes will live in separate partitions but the file system will be shareable and OS X will be the primary OS. With such a version of OS X, all the reasons not to use Apple (other than price) simply disappear. And Apple’s potential market increases dramatically. The number of Windows users moving to Apple will just grow.

Posted in Apple | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment