A Suggestion for Microsoft

With the Windows Vista flop, M$ tried to position itself to compete directly with Apple on image alone. Undoubtedly, the Vista eye candy was in impressive display as are the animations of OSX. Having used a MacBook Pro for over a year now, I can tell you that I am less and less impressed by Apple by the day. Perhaps the biggest reason is that virtualised Windows under Parallels seems to run faster and more cleanly than all of the Mac applications. OSX I end up just using as a shell in which I run Windows. Everyone loves to slam Windows, but XP runs stably, quickly, and very easily. Compared to Linux, getting something to run just as you want it in Windows is a real breeze especially for the amateur. This has much to do with market share and demand, but some credit has to be given to good design also.

M$ is now aiming to compete directly with VMWare in the Virtualisation market. A wise move. By the way, VMW is a really good short and I am going to start buying Put options. I did not track the dot com era stocks much at the time, but this is a classic dot com irrational exuberance or simply a misinformed market. Dont get me wrong, they have a great product, but they also have much powerful competition right on their tails (Citrix, M$, Parallels). They are already giving their VMWare Server away for free. How could the market capitalisation then be anywhere near Adobe? Remember you heard it here first.

Back to M$. The one thing I still respect and cannot take away from Apple after all the pretty graphics and sexiness has lost its lustre: it is based on Unix, ie FreeBSD. It is therefore able to run any Linux application with an easy to use front end and the possibility to Virtualise or incorporate M$ products. In other words, it is a computing Superset. This flexibility alone makes having an Apple somewhat justifiable especially for scientists, quantitative researchers, and anyone in Graphics Editing.

M$ could close this gap and take back some market share from Apple by taking a few years to completely rewrite its OS this time with a Unix kernel following Apple's lead. I believe there are intelligent people in Redmond and working for M$ in India and China who still have much to offer humanity be it in OS, personal or industrial intelligent devices, other periferal software, etc. They yet could sell an OS which would be far less the disdain of computer geeks everywhere and which they actually might start to prefer above other Unices (OSX, Ubuntu, Fedora). It would be a bold and risky move to radically change course as I proposed. They should either do this and have hope of long run survival and even leadership, or they can suck out whatever is left from their current OS whilst pursuing something entirely different and dooming themselves to eventual irrelevance, hopefully still returning significant value to stockholders in the meanwhile.

As a closing thought, I used to think like one of those geeks unsatisfied with closed-source models of mediocrity, or perhaps just like an economist opposed to monopolies. However, M$ can no longer be considered a monopoly and their products, closed source though they may be, are much more stable than they used to be. I therefore have for the most part lost my disdain for them.

Linux, Peu à Peu

I mentioned before that given my disgust with M$ Vista, all future PCs I run would be Linux with a virtualised Windows Server 2003 Enterprise session. Despite my flirtations with Linux, Windows frankly works for every application I need personally or professionally and I cannot use Linux just as I cannot use OS X perpetually without a Parallels Windows session running inside. Do not get me wrong; I want to see Open Source Linux come to dominate computer operating systems, but in the short run it can only attract users by doing absolutely everything a normal Windows PC can do with the same level of convenience and full compatibility. Even some of the most enthusiastic Linux geeks I know have found themselves getting sucked back into Windows.

I have recommended Parallels especially for Mac users given the coherence feature. VMWare has some other advantages like hosting and remote connection as well as mountable bootable partitions rather than strictly virtual hard drives. VMWare Server is now free!

Finally, I have made this change for my personal PC which is set to Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn 32 bit natively with VMWare running WinXP32. Using this guide it was fairly straightforward as far as Linux installs go. Unfortunately for enterprise level 64 bit computing, the free VMWare Server does not yet cut the mustard. You need the multi-k$ version for that apparently. Peu à peu, we will be always running Linux. I am now doing it, and so can you.

Photosynth

Microsoft has an impressive 3D photo viewing and analysis software, Photosynth, currently under development. A presentation from TED2007. Via Crooked Timber.

Surface Computing

Popular Mechanics has an impressive demonstration of new human-computer interaction technology being developed with Microsoft.

Dell and Linux Take a Step Forward

Dell will begin shipping their computers with Ubuntu Linux installed. This is a great step forward for the OS since it will be well supported now by a major hardware vendor. I recently tried to convert my system to Linux, but I ran into some problems because I could not get my video card to function properly. Meanwhile, M$'s lasts advantage is as a former monopolist, they support almost all hardware, or to put another way, almost all hardware supports M$.

Dell is in a unique position to reassert its dominance in the hardware arena while at the same time lowering its variable costs by supporting free software. Dell should be aiming to better assert themselves into peripheral devices such as TVs and DVRs which also could be manufactured cheaply and run Linux (ie MythTV). They ought to be positioning themselves to partner with an Apple or a Google to produce high quality affordable computers with top notch user friendly software and once and for all crush the M$ abomination.

Unfortunately, the executives at Dell seem to be too ensconced in their traditional way of doing business and loathe to adopt or experiment with new ideas. They certainly cannot risk alienating M$ too much and loosing their lucrative OEM status but they should at the same time recognise that M$ is the Titanic and they had better have a lifeboat secured.

More on Virtual Machines

The new version of Parallels for Mac has a great new view called 'Coherence.' Windows and the Mac OS can be used as a single integrated environment with both the Windows taskbar and Apple Dock and Menubar accessible simultaneously. Additionally, the Apple Doc now contains all the programmes running within Windows as well as OSX. With a click of the mouse, the Windows or OSX desktops are brought to the front and accessible. One may easily drag and drop files between the Mac and Windows file systems as well. This software greatly increases the value, accessibility, and productivity of both the Mac OSX and M$ Windows desktops.

Another virtualisation software, VMWare, can run a virtual OS from a separate bootable partition.

M$ Vista

I have recently downgraded my PC from Windows XP Professional to Windows Vista. I say downgrade because not only do several hardware components like dual video cards no longer function properly, but even the basic selling point of Vista, its flashy graphics and new look, in fact just look completely silly and ugly. Whatever "artist" they chose to design their GUI should be taken out and shot. When switching I was almost tempted to think that Vista might be good enough to maintain my continued use of the Windows platform, but my short experience has disabused me of such a misguided notion. Any future PCs I use will run Linux with VMware or Parallels allowing a virtual Windows Enterprise session.