iPhone 2.0 Makes a Virtue out of Lockdown Vice

Back in March, when Apple unveiled the details of its eventual iPhone 2.0 upgrade, I opined that the firm was on its way to seizing a slice of an enterprise smart-phone market in which the BlackBerry and the Treo currently reign. Now that I've tested the 2.0 firmware myself, I do still believe that the iPhone will become a popular enterprise device.

However, as with all Apple products, embracing the iPhone means relinquishing to The Steve some of the control and flexibility that organizations are accustomed to expect. Treos and BlackBerry devices come with carrier and device options that mirror the diversity of the PC market, standing in contrast to the locked-down, single-source rigidity that marks the Mac side of the market.

What makes iPhone 2.0 different than the Mac, however, is that while Macs offer up more or less the same functionality as do PCs, only wrapped in a sort of leather bucket seats veneer, the new iPhone balances its locked-down aspects with something unique and worthwhile: the App Store--a software management framework that's absent not just from Treo and BlackBerry devices, but from Macs and Windows PCs as well...

Microsoft Must Address Windows' Pains

Last week in this space, I criticized Microsoft for continuing to burn cycles on superficial add-ons, such as multi-touch support in Windows Seven, while more significant pain points for Windows customers remain under-addressed.

As I see it, Microsoft is busying itself tacking up fanciful moldings around its flagship product while the Windows through which millions of paying customers access their hardware devices and software applications remain smudged and, in some places, cracked.

The best example of this misplaced focus relates to the undisputed No. 1 reason why organizations and individuals continue to choose Windows above all other platforms: access to Windows' massive software catalog...

Measuring Office Format Fidelity with Acrobat 9

When considering alternatives to Microsoft's Office productivity suite, one of the most important issues to evaluate is that of the success with which Office rivals such as OpenOffice.org can handle Microsoft's ubiquitous binary file formats.

While the phrase "small formatting inconsistencies" sums up the situation fairly accurately, organizations and individuals out to bring the open-source suite into their application mix could use a more rigorous means of measuring OpenOffice.org's handling of MS Office formats.

That's why, when Adobe briefed me on Acrobat 9, I was particularly interested in Acrobat's new "compare documents" feature, which analyzes two PDF documents and parses out all of the inconsistencies between them...

Microsoft: Scratch the Surface

If you asked a thousand people what Microsoft could do to Windows to improve the product, would even one of them describe a yearning to use his or her fingers to move objects around on a Windows desktop?

And yet, as demonstrated at the recent D6 conference, Microsoft has chosen this feature, multitouch support for the Windows shell, as the seed from which excitement about the forthcoming Windows Seven is supposed to grow. In the near future, Windows users will be able to use multiple fingers to move items around on their desktops, spin their family photos and play an on-screen piano. Super.

Rather than train all of its attention on chasing Steve Jobs and churning out dim shadows of Apple's products (the same goes for the pursuit of Google online), Microsoft must refocus on the reasons why millions continue to choose Windows, and set about honing that value proposition.

Things like printer drivers may not be as sexy as multitouch (depending, I suppose, on what you're printing), but no one is buying Windows for sexiness. We're over here trying to get some work done. I suggest that Microsoft leave the candy coatings to the aftermarket, and get back to business...

Microsoft OOXML: Dead Format Walking

When Microsoft, some time in the first half of 2009, makes good on its recent pledge to roll full support for the OpenDocument format into a second service pack for Office 2007, my reaction will be, "It's about time."

Since most Office users would be happy to continue using Microsoft's old binary formats, and since those for whom open standards are important would probably prefer ODF or PDF formats anyhow, I won't be surprised if OOXML quietly dies before the first OOXML-supporting iteration of Office ever sees the light of day...

Net Radio, Save Yourself

A couple of days ago, my colleague Andrew Garcia forwarded me what seems like the 20th plea I've seen over the past couple of years to call or write my representatives in Congress to Save Net Radio. This latest plea came from Pandora.com, a fantastic Internet-based radio station that holds more claim on my online hours than any single Web purveyor this side of Google.

I find it too audacious to hope that Congress will get around to right-sizing our country's runaway IP regulation regime any time soon, so if the businesses that run Internet radio stations and the listeners who frequent them want to see this form of enjoying music continue, they should begin marshaling their (in Pandora's case, considerable) resources toward solving the problem themselves.

Fortunately, there's precedent that given the presence of friendlier options, restrictive licensing schemes can be made to bend through market pressure ...

Do You Need Open-Source Indemnification?

The idea that companies and individuals might risk lawsuits for running applications that infringe on copyrights or patents gained popularity when SCO began threatening to run down Linux end users in retaliation for secret (SCO refused to detail them) upstream IP violations.

The story was (and still is) that since open source licenses explicitly declaim liability for SCO-style attacks, and since most open source software projects don't have the resources to pay on lawsuit judgments anyhow, open source software is riskier for companies than proprietary software would be.

Unless, of course, your open source software provider was an IT titan with a big sack of patents (and lawyers) slung over its back.

Is open source software indemnification a necessary defense for a real threat, or isn't it?

My Bug Is Pidgin's Feature

Today while trolling around on Slashdot I came across this open-source development flareup tidbit:

Slashdot | Pidgin Controversy Triggers Fork "Pidgin, the premier multi-protocol instant messaging client, has been forked. This is the result of a heated, emotional, and very interesting debate over a controversial new feature: As of version 2.4, the ability to manually resize the text input area has been removed; instead, it automatically resizes depending on how much is typed. It turns out that this feature, along with the uncompromising unwillingness of the developers to provide an option to turn it off, annoys the bejesus of very many users.

Last week or so, I'd read about this Pidgin fork, somewhat lamely named Funpidgin, and I even visited the project's Web site to take a peek. I skimmed over the project page, didn't understand the point of the fork, chalked it up to wacky open-source developer intransigence and moved on.

As it turns out, I ran into Pidgin's new No-Input-Box-Resizing-for-You "feature" a few weeks ago while testing Ubuntu and Fedora. I was annoyed that I couldn't resize the input box as I'm wont to do in Pidgin, thought it was an obvious bug and ignored it, expecting that the issue would be fixed by the time that Ubuntu 8.04 and Fedora 9 shipped.

The Pidgin developers should listen to their users, plenty of whom have weighed in against the pointless resize-restriction. As for me, it's been a little while now since I've used Pidgin regularly, since I've taken to instant messaging through Gmail.

Gmail's IM interface isn't great--there's no per-buddy or per-group status-setting, it limits me to Jabber or AIM networks, and, just like Pidgin, it won't let me resize my input box. Unlike Pidgin, however, my chat logs get to live in the cloud, where they're accessible (and searchable) from wherever I am. Lately, I've prized that convenience over the customization options that a fat IM client affords.

Pidgin's newest "feature" tips the fat vs. thin calculus further in Gmail's favor.

Move Over, Vista: XP SP3 Lives

Now that Windows Vista Service Pack 1 has enjoyed a few weeks in the limelight in which to entice the "wait-for-SP1" IT shops to jump to Microsoft's latest and greatest client operating system, it's time to introduce the OS upgrade we've all been waiting for: Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for Windows XP SP3.

XP SP3 is a rather modest upgrade, one that falls much more in line with XP's first service pack than with the security feature-packed SP2 release, but the new service pack stands as an important reminder that while XP will soon leave the retail channel, the operating system on which most organizations have come to depend is still very much supported by its maker.

Two Weeks with Fedora 9

Recently, I came across a blog post about how to install a LiveCD version of Red Hat's upcoming Fedora 9 release onto a USB stick, leaving space on the stick for data to persist between reboots.

Impressed by the persistent USB LiveCD fun and partition encrypting installer improvements, I chose to throw caution to the wind and load up Fedora 9 Beta on my main notebook, replacing the beta Hardy Heron install I'd been running--quite stably--for several weeks.

Read on for the testing details, but the bottom line for Fedora 9 is more or less the same as with previous Fedora versions: Fedora can indeed be used for anything, its primary purpose is to serve as a leading-edge development platform for Red Hat's initiatives. As Red Hat confirmed very clearly last week, providing a mainstream desktop/notebook operating system is not one of their product goals.