Has the Sun set on Apple?

Posted on October 6, 2011

Late in 1984, as a spotty year 10 student, I found myself in a city computer store fooling around with a computer unlike any other. I’d already had a few years cutting my teeth on Sinclair’s ZX81, and my local high school’s solitary green-screen Apple IIe. But in front of me was the combination of three amazing concepts: a graphical user interface, an integrated, non-computer-like box, and the weirdest thing of all: a mouse. That computer was the first Apple Mac. It was intoxicating. Apple’s pricing precluded ownership, but it was clear that the accessibility and function of this little box was going to allow us to intuitively work on tasks, rather than having to remember keyed-in mantras. That experience firmed my resolve to be a part of the IT industry, and so it came to be.

IBM’s personal computing – very much focussed on business functions rather than the artistic user, would take 4 more years until Microsoft’s Windows 2.1 would bring the natural interface benefits of GUI and mouse to its users – and herald the PC – and Windows’ – meteoric rise.

Meanwhile, times were dark at Apple. Still believing it had something truly unique in its intuitive, natural interface, its small scale meant the computer maker had to cut a lot of corners to get its hardware to a competitive price point with IBM PC clones – and they were still at a huge premium. The board decided Steve had to go: in 1985 he resigned to continue influencing ground-breaking, if not popular computers at NeXT. Working at Mitsubishi Electric’s Human Interface labs in Japan, I spent much time working on the NeXT cube, with display postscript and 8″ WORM disks. It was truly unusual and ground-breaking, if under-appreciated.

It wasn’t until Steve returned to Apple in 1997, with the buyout of NeXT, that the tide began to turn for the beleaguered Apple, itself having gone through a few professional, if not visionary, CEOs. Reading about Apple’s new jellybean interface styling and embracing Unix as a basis for a new Operating System, I felt that greatness could return.

But it was Steve Jobs’ master stroke of focussing on an untapped market – portable music players – that allowed Apple to reach and convert millions of new users to its brand, while the continued refinement of OSX, ported to Intel-based custom hardware with a unique design gave those fed up with Microsoft a truly alternative platform.

It’s clear from looking at the trail of inventions Apple released over the Jobs years, that his influence, perfectionist nature and driving ambition to bring usable computing to the masses drove the company’s product line, strategy, and vision.

I remember buying an iPod in 2004 (coming somewhat late to the party), an iPhone 2G (never released in Australia), 3G, 3GS and 4, MacBooks and an iPad – and never experiencing buyers remorse. Those who don’t get the great leaps in computing interface design and usability this company has made would call the Apple followers fan-boys – but we don’t care. Steve’s often smug attitude, faith in his team’s creations and undying fanaticism for a great product experience focussed on the user remain unique in the landscape.

With the release of the somewhat underwhelming iPhone 4S, albeit with iOS 5 and iCloud, the period of Steve’s influence coming to a close is starting to be evident.

Steve: you were great, you inspired millions and you really did bring computing to the masses without the dagginess. You will be sorely missed. RIP.

We can hope for more, but we have to accept it: the period of huge innovation and vision has gone with the ending of the life of a difficult, driven genius.

Posted in Desktop Software, General, Mobile Computing | Tagged | Comments Off

Driving Cloud up the Adoption Curve

Posted on September 7, 2011

I attended VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas last week. As a first-timer, the spectacle of Vegas and the size of the event seemed well matched, even though a few thousand folks from the east coast didn’t make it. “Only” 19,000 attended Paul Maritz’ keynote from a previously-suggested 25k. My take on the keynote was that VMware have twigged the game is up: the early adopters in the fast-moving x86 server and software market are in a cloud of some sort, and most are using VMware. (Homework: add up the percentages the major vendors claim as theirs – more than 100%?)

The problem now seems to be getting the core of medium to large business’ workloads into the cloud or at least onto cloud-enabled internal deployments (read: more VMware licenses). The reasons for this challenge include risk profile (large organisations can’t afford a critical system to fail a migration; and currently tend to use the cloud for bursty, non-critical test/dev workloads), and the fact that larger application and database stacks are already very well optimised to the platforms they run on – aside from the small matter that they mostly don’t run on x86 platforms.

The buzz around cloud isn’t lost on these mid-market vendors though: IBM, Oracle/Sun and HP all provide RISC processor-based virtualisation and workload splitting already (and have done for years before VMware came along). To me, the challenge seems to lie with VMware compelling the mid-tier apps to be rewritten for the x86 platform and thence take advantage of virtualisation and the cloud; or for enterprises to migrate their needs to cloud-based software offerings that do the same job, cheaper and more flexibly.

Enter Platform as a Service. Though considered very early stage, an environment that leverages cloud technologies to provide an environment for applications to run and scale seamlessly without having to consider discrete servers is seen as increasingly attractive. VMware’s own CloudFoundry framework aims to provide a ready-to-roll toolkit for providers to set up a software platform that allows developers to bring their codebase and run it straight out of the box; no concept of compilation or library incompatibility – it “just works.” They also have a hosted solution to allow the application mobility nirvana to come to fruition.

The thinking goes that if the larger scale business applications can survive a port to newer languages and frameworks, or be supplanted by software components that co-exist and leverage one another in a Platform-as-a-Service environment, the underlying platform will become irrelevant and level the playing field.

I wonder: are the application tower-builders such as Oracle ready for this wave?

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How will the nerds vote on Saturday?

Posted on August 19, 2010

Two things never to discuss with your hairdresser: religion and politics. Why? Probably because our opinions are hard to justify with logic or facts, leaving only emotion leading to passion, leading to punch-ups. In the race to the bottom this campaign, what started out as the least relevant policies for the average voter have suddenly become very topical: Broadband and The Filter(tm). While the two major parties have gravitated towards the centre on major policy, and used scare campaigns about illegal immigrants and trustworthiness to sling mud, and generally ignore the environment, it’s only in the last week or so that suddenly the NBN is being seen as a differentiator between Labor and the Coalition.

On the filter, Labor can see the horse’s carcass but isn’t ready to put down the stock. Meanwhile both the Coalition and Greens favor what all but those with other motives for a centralised filter support: voluntary end-user filtering technology programs. Both have vowed to kill the filter when the vote on policy comes. It’s really only Conroy who still believes in the filter, but Gillard doesn’t understand technology worse than him, so she’s happy to give his rampaging the smile and nod of a mother watching a toddler ‘pat’ a dog.

Meanwhile, there is a stark difference on the NBN. While stones are being thrown at Labor’s Crystal Palace – its cost will blow out, it’ll get mired in bureaucracy and it’ll take too long to deliver – the Coalition’s idea that it’s a very expensive way to build an asset of rapidly diminishing value is probably fair. Which is exactly where their theory that private enterprise will build broadband of its kind any time soon falls down. It also begs the question – if no-one else will build the NBN, then surely the Government should build and own it? Government’s role isn’t to make a profit, but to provide infrastructure the country needs and private enterprise can’t get a reasonable return from. The Coalition’s alternative hodge-podge of OPEL reanimated is laughable, and the Chaser’s take is the best so far. Seriously, is a guarantee of less than half the current ADSL speed max for all Australians going to be enough?!

But, in the end, how we vote on Saturday probably won’t make much difference in the short term to ICT policies. The Filter won’t come up until late in the next term of a Labor government, and not at all for a Coalition one. And when the NBN contracts get the proper read-through by the Coalition, quite a lot of infrastructure will have to get built before that supertanker runs aground. Telstra shareholders probably won’t be too happy with unwinding its deal with NBN co., either.

Single-term thinking is at odds with infrastructure investment and policy reform: you just can’t achieve much in three years, unless you rush things, stumble, waste money and cop a lot of flack. Whichever way the cards fall on Saturday, we will look back on this government as a turning point in a number of policy areas after thirteen years of slow-moving conservatism – and we still probably won’t want to discuss it with our hairdressers.

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When paternalism goes wrong

Posted on May 27, 2010

In November 2007, Australia voted to change the party that runs Federal Parliament. For many of us, there were some promising, if not particularly radical, platforms that Kevin Rudd and his new front bench would take as a mandate for their government. One that was barely fleshed out and not laboured much was its policy on Internet Censorship. In short, the plan is to make ISPs provide a ‘clean feed’ Internet that automatically blocks access to web sites that are ‘refused classification’ by Australia’s media watchdog, the ACMA.

Despite the technical bent of this blog, rather than dwell on the technical unfeasibility of an all-knowing Internet Filter remaining as prominent as ever, I want to focus on how the ALP failed to properly engage the Australian online community and ICT industries in reviewing its policy and thinking practically about the implementation.

It all started out when in March 2006, the ALP released its policy on Internet filtering:

Labor believes that the Government should do all that it can to protect Australians, and particularly, Australian children from harmful and inappropriate internet content.

To this end, in March 2006, Labor announced its ISP filtering policy. Labor’s ISP filtering policy will require Internet Service Providers to block access to websites that-are listed as by ACMA as containing prohibited content such as child pornography, acts of extreme violence and X-rated material.

ISP filtering under a Rudd Labor government will be applied to all households (unless they choose to opt-out), schools and public internet points accessible by children, such as libraries.

What reasonable and responsible adult would disagree with the motive to protect children from inappropriate content in their lives? But not long after the change of government, the interpretation of the perceived mandate by Stephen Conroy started to look less like a policy and more like a dogma:

Telecommunications Minister Stephen Conroy says new measures are being put in place to provide greater protection to children from online pornography and violent websites.

Senator Conroy says it will be mandatory for all internet service providers to provide clean feeds, or ISP filtering, to houses and schools that are free of pornography and inappropriate material.

(ABC online, December 2007)

You’ll note that between March 2006 and December 2007, the opt-out component of the policy had been quietly removed. This was in part to satisfy the Christian Right in federal and state Labor; aside from the fact that governments that purport to democratically represent the free will of the people shouldn’t have secret veto over what they say and do, some folks started to smell a religious agenda taking the reins of the ALP policy.

In 2009, disquiet at Conroy’s plans started building when the ACMA’s process for adding sites to its secret list – to be used as the basis for the ‘clean feed’ – was aired on popular enthusiast site Whirlpool, an event that affected Bulletproof. The entire list was then leaked by Wikileaks – something that may be linked to its founder’s recent passport confiscation by the AFP. Independent stories indicate there are all manner of sites on the ACMA’s secretive list, with no way for any organisation to know if they’re on it and no formal process for removal (if, for example inclusion on the list is in error).

The debate started getting into the mainstream. People started asking questions and wanting more detail, such as on an episode of the ABC’s Q&A program, where Joe Hockey’s uncharacteristically level-headed view and opposition to the plan stood in stark contrast to the paternalistic diatribe of Tanya Plibersek on the issue.

In February this year, Kate Lundy – a bastion of proper representation for the ICT community in the ALP – sensed the rising unpopularity of Conroy’s plans, and tried to get caucus to amend the legislation to revive the long-lost opt-out component. Meanwhile, Kevin Rudd and Steven Conroy remained unrepentant, vowing to push ahead with the unworkable system anyway.

In March, Conroy started to take prime time heat on his plans on the ABC’s Q&A program, fielding some excellent questions before the conversation steered in another direction. Later, the ABC’s Four Corners also covered the issue, giving Conroy enough rope to hang himself with more belligerence in the face of almost certain defeat. But the horse had bolted anyway – even Conroy had admitted there was nothing legally stopping anyone subverting the filter.

Next came international ridicule, with the US State department and the US ambassador taking Australia to task on its plans, citing concerns over freedom and stating that, “We have been able to accomplish the goals that Australia has described, which is to capture and prosecute child pornographers … without having to use internet filters.” China is holding up Australia’s Internet filter plans as positive reinforcement for its own draconian measures which recently lead to Google’s exit from that market.

This month, the Government finally knew the writing was on the wall – the Internet Censorship policy wasn’t going to be popular, and the rising tide of bile meant there was only one option – despite initially denying it - to shelve the legislation until after the next election.

So, what went wrong? Simply, in my view, the lack of proper consultation and the arrogance and paternalism displayed by Conroy and others gave ammunition to the opposing parties to throw mud at the ALP approach and to raise the ire of a great many people. I believe the ALP underestimated the Australian public, now a relatively advanced and savvy online community. You threaten to take responsibility for controlling what they and their kids see from them at your peril. Perhaps it’s a sign of the times that although this issue has been around the block many times over the years, this is one time where the average person realised it would affect their every day work and play online, and they weighed in and said “I don’t have enough information, and I don’t like the sound of what you’re trying to do. So I’d rather you do nothing for now.”

It will be interesting to see whether the issue is revisited anytime soon – but for certain this isn’t over yet.

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Social Networks’ double-edged sword

Posted on May 7, 2010

The other day, one of our kids asked if they could have a Facebook account. “But everyone else has got one and they keep asking me to join!”, was the response to my inevitable answer. Kids are different from employees (or are they?), but the naivety with which many use social networking sites makes the average IT security officer cringe.

While the Business world is trying to work out how to grapple with the Social Networking phenomenon, with a range of responses from a total ban to embracing them as a marketing tool, the landscape of social networking is shifting underneath our feet. Businesses are trying to evaluate the risks of popular networking sites, seeing where the boundaries lie, trying to fit the obvious security scares into the IT landscape.

LinkedIn has long been the staple of the business professional, allowing contacts to be made and maintained, while treading carefully and tastefully in leveraging the network for business. There are countless sites and books that help with the process of doing this the right way, and a stringently enforced etiquette that mostly keeps the rubbish away. Monetizing the LinkedIn user base has never been a problem because it was always part of the design and an accepted approach to the business.

At the other end of the spectrum, Facebook launched without much of a clue on monetizing, grew like mad, and is now trying to tame the beast and rearrange the mess to turn it into something that pays. In the process, the underlying precept that what you put on Facebook belongs to them, not you, is coming as a surprise to many.

Facebook’s ever-changing privacy policy and endless maze of privacy settings mean that only one in four of its 400 million users try and tune to restrict the flow of data. They recently had a serious information security leak through the chat facility, and a bug that was secretly adding apps to your profile. Other privacy issues abound, such as publishing your interests, even if they’re private. Facebook’s cavalier approach to users’ privacy through policies and faults is resulting in a growing disquiet and backlash, with articles, posts and even a FTC submission that calls for many of the changes recently made to be reverted.

Twitter seems to sit somewhere in the middle, though a recent article showed that it is used in over 85% of cases to publish news – as a news aggregator it works well. Some people are amazed by twitter’s success, but it appears to be growing up as a business tool with a proper business focus, for example allowing the purchase of ‘promoted tweets.’ When combined with its purpose of spreading news that people want in the public domain anyway, they really seem to be on to something.

An opinion piece, comparing privacy settings and features of Facebook and Linkedin, had Linkedin marginally in front, but not by a huge amount, which is worrying when you consider the woeful score Facebook got. Of all the various public sites, only Google seems to have the transparency of where your data made visible (whether you look is another story) – check out the Dashboard to see what data you’re giving to them.

The true danger of information leaks on social networking sites is only just starting to show, and you’re going to want to revisit the way you use social networking sites. My recommendations are as follows, and they are as applicable to LinkedIn as to Twitter & Facebook.

Don’t:

  • make announcements about where you’re going
  • fill in details about your date of birth, star sign, photos or other personal details
  • add Interests, because these have to be links now, and are therefore public to all
  • put up photos of your family, your house, your kids

Do:

  • remove all your personal data
  • promote your business or cause through your friend networks
  • keep the personal posts to a minimum
  • un-tag yourself from photos when you get tagged in them
  • send direct messages or even private emails, rather than comments or wall posts
  • watch out what you ‘like’ – if you don’t want the general public to know

And as far as kids having a Facebook page goes, the answer is going to remain “No way!” until a few things change radically over there.

Update: After reading this article I got even more concerned about Facebook. But I figured, instead of running away, I would refine my privacy settings.

As an example, here’s what I did, broken down by privacy section. Some of the default settings here are eye-opening. If you think this minefield of settings is tricky for someone partially Internet-savvy, imagine how shy the regular user is going to be, even if they know they exist.

  • Profile Information: set everything to Only Friends, also allowed Friends to post to my wall; edited individual photo albums, changing all except profile pictures to Only Friends. There are pictures of friends in these photos, some of them tagged. I don’t want their photo and name getting into the wrong hands.
  • Contact Information: Hometown and Add me as a Friend are set to Friends of Friends; everything else (though there is no address or other private data in there) is Only Friends.
  • Applications and websites: Edited What your friends can share about you to ensure I’m comfortable with the information that’s checkboxed being completely public and even stored anywhere on the Internet; set Activity on applications and games dashboards to Only Friends; then went in made sure the instant personalisation pilot is turned off.
  • Search: Set Facebook Search Results to Friends of Friends. It means random people can’t find me on Facebook, but so what? Went in and clicked Preview my profile to see what my profile looks like to non-friends. For Public Search Results, I’m happy with the preview information going public, so I left it checked.
Posted in Security, Social Networking | Tagged | 2 Comments

‘Pad’dling to a new shore

Posted on April 7, 2010

If you wanted to allow people to get from one side of a river to the other, you could provide boats, and teach them how to use them or build a bridge, and let them walk across – something they already know how to do. I first heard that arresting analogy at a presentation in 1991 given by one of my favorite Human Interface experts, Professor Bill Buxton. I bring it up now because I want to offer my perspective on one of the most hyped technology stories in the last few years: the arrival of Apple’s iPad.

For us HIF wonks, Apple represents one of the purest interpretations of good interface design done right. If you smile when you see horizontal handles on the side of the door you push, and vertical ones where you pull, then like me, you appreciate it when someone takes some time to think about a problem from the perspective of the user. Apple started doing this way back when they took the amazing work done at Xerox PARC to put a weird little box alongside the keyboard of an Apple Lisa. They called it a mouse. That revolution in interface design led to the Mac in 1984, and all the imitators that have made that relatively clumsy extension of the human hand the norm.

A more recent example is the iPhone. Although Apple would say they rewrote the book on portable music with iTunes and iPods, the iPhone represented a meaty challenge – can you take the PDA to the masses by making the features truly accessible? Let’s face it, the features are not anything flash; under-average camera, not as fast as other devices, and yet so much more popular. The clincher for me was this weekend, at a family gathering. As the family nerd, I’m expected to have the latest and greatest – a year ago, the iPhone was just that. This year, everyone in the family has pretty much got one. Whether they use all the PDA power locked inside doesn’t really matter – it’s that they’re easily able to access more than you can on a phone, and feel natural doing it, that tells me Apple have absolutely succeeded at their goal of changing the game for the PDA industry.

With the iPad, they are not trying to rewrite the game for the Netbook market. They’re just bringing their same interface design brilliance to the problem that Netbooks have failed to solve – truly powerful mobile computing that is greatly more accessible than a laptop. It’s a mistake to think of this as just a good looking ebook device. It will allow many computing tasks to break free from the desktop (and the laptop, since that’s just a desktop you can move around easily, really) and force them to be simplified and distilled down to only what you really need to do.

Because Apple has elegantly delivered a few sorely-needed functions in the one box, I feel that it’ll help a few games change quite quickly: information delivery such as news (see this excellent story for more); bigger and more useful versions of existing iPhone apps (banking, web browsing, email); virtual desktops – since the viewer isn’t that powerful, but very portable; applications in the cloud.

For me, the track record of Apple’s delivery on their vision tells me that while the iPad won’t be the cheapest, or the most powerful, or the most feature-packed device in this space, it will be the most popular because it brings the right mix of function (plus a few gimmicks that make you say ‘cool!’) and design to deliver something where you can get on with the job at hand, rather than always thinking about how to do it.

If you believe the rave reviews that are coming out, we could be in for a big leap forward in how we compute. I’m excited!

Posted in Mobile Computing | 1 Comment

Taking the brain outside the box

Posted on March 22, 2010

Let’s say you’ve given yourself the job of thinking into the future of IT. You want to know the strategic technologies and trends within IT that you’ll have to be across to stay ahead of the game. I’m not talking about next week, next month or even next year. Try 5 – 10 years from now. Would you even dare predict things so far out?

Very few predictions on technology have been particularly accurate. The apocryphal, oft-quoted “640kb ought to be enough for anybody.” of Bill Gates highlights how wrong they can be, if nothing else. Where predictions are mostly wrong is in the fine details; essentially the underlying trends are relatively well picked, even if the timing is out. By the late 90′s, most people had cottoned on that the Internet was going to be something really big – but who could have predicted that along with delivering crucial business tools like email, it would result in such phenomena as musically-accompanied ChatRoulette while providing tools for the new-age schoolyard bully? The Utopian Internet of all machines interconnected has lead to the huge range of outcomes we chaotic humans can dream up.

On the assumption that the Internet is going to foment innovation, either directly or by driving it in other areas such as virtualisation and cloud computing for the foreseeable future, what is going to be the next disruptive technology that will provide fodder for the constant reinvention that is IT? It’s fair to say that the access will continue to evolve as mobile computing improves and throughput to the wider web increases. Likewise the Internet will usher in a new wave of thinking around applications. But to me, these are just more of the same, delivering old things in new packages, cheaper and faster. What have you seen out there that makes you think: “this is really on the edge – it might bomb, it might take off, but it’s going to be interesting to watch.” What about if we think really big, and try and dream up what the next Internet-type phenomena will be?

I’ll meet you back here in a week or so and we’ll compare notes.

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Slowly, slowly, catchee monkey

Posted on March 8, 2010

Okay, so the last weekly post was 3 months ago. Where does the time go?! I have excuses, but they are lame. Instead of letting me bore you with them, read on…

Google’s recent acquisition of DocVerse seems like a fairly innocuous feature-add that lets folks who are stuck in desktop software land, imprisoned in the Microsoft Office, collaborate with one another via Google’s own cloud-based Google Apps service. Let’s face it, Google’s own apps for document editing and other office-like features doesn’t blow the hair of your average Microsoftie back very far; yet as the popular press are saying, the above feature would appear to beat even Microsoft’s own sharing capabilities in the upcoming Office 10. Or, could it be that once the process of sharing and collaborating using the Microsoft tools is entrenched via DocVerse’s clever tools, the process of migrating to just using the Google Apps themselves will be that much easier? It would be strangely magical for your intrepid Microsoft Office user to be computer-less, need to make a small change to a document they’ve been working on, and be able to use a web browser and Google Apps to modify the file, just this once. And then one day, maybe your intrepid user would forget to go back to using MS Office at all…

As Google seeks world domination, ‘inconsequential’ purchases like DocVerse can cast strange shadows.

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Cloudy, with a chance of chaos

Posted on December 14, 2009

With this so-called “cloud computing” stuff, the theory is, if you want to do something, you “do it in the cloud.” The prospect of having your data, applications, life, beaming magically “up there somewhere” to be fetched from anywhere is kind of liberating. It’s a realization of a promise from the early nineties, when the interconnectedness of all the computers on earth offered up a world of possibilities and captured our imagination.

I’ve found there are some facets of our digital life that work well “in the cloud.” Without realising it, services like Picasa are cloud services which were around before that term was trendy. For newer stuff, I’ve become an instant convert to online file backup services like DropBox – they seamlessly bring the cloud into our computers and we take comfort that a copy of our data is “up there” and kept in sync with the “real version” on our laptop.

But what about calendaring, contacts, etc.? The advent of smarter PDAs has meant that in theory, at least, you can keep your life organised and in your pocket. Microsoft Exchange and all your traditional Mail servers have been a kind of cloud service for email and calendaring for ages. With the advent of PDAs came the complex nut of keeping things in sync. It was easy when there was a wire, but then you really only had 2 copies – one on the PDA, and one on your laptop or the exchange server. If you kept them both in your bag, and your bag went missing…

I’ve been trying to achieve the dream of separating my work calendaring from my non-work; do calendar sharing with my work colleagues (for the work one) and with my wife (for the non-work one); have the calendar, contacts and task data synced between my iPhone and laptop; and keep a backup of each of these in at least one other place – in the cloud.

If you have an iPhone (and like me, a Mac), your world is simple and you don’t mind paying, you can just use MobileMe. It even has its own version of file storage in the cloud which can extend to your iPhone with a free app – iDisk. But I use an Exchange server – actually it’s Zimbra -, Google Calendars (because they’re the easiest to share and they’re free, for personal use), an iPhone and a Mac.

As I searched for ways to make this all work, I found the choices are almost infinite. Where should the data “reside?” Which device or service should be the “authority?” The epiphany came when I realised you have to think of your iPhone and the Mac as viewers of data out in the cloud. The cloud copy is the authority, and your apps (iCal on the iPhone and Mac, for example) modify the data in the cloud when you interact with them. The piece that’s missing is what happens if the copy in the cloud gets corrupted or goes offline? At the moment I don’t have an answer, but I’m working on it.

So on the Mac, I setup Google Calendars using Caldav and also set up Zimbra using the same. On the iPhone, Zimbra works natively as an Exchange server, so that part’s easy, and from 3.0 onwards you can setup Google using Caldav, too – which means you get to modify events and do everything natively from your iPhone. The final trick was to enable the subscribed calendars from Google to show up on the iPhone as well, using this less well-known info. It all looks easy now, but it took ages of Googling, trial-and-error, losing appointments, duplicating all my contacts, and other fun to make it fly.

My next challenge is to find a web interface I can use in the unlikely event that I don’t have a Mac or an iPhone handy that lets me see all calendars together – and despite my best efforts, I haven’t found one yet. Google’s apparent ability to view a read-only version of the Zimbra calendar works in theory, but it doesn’t show up – so go figure. It’s not a major problem but if anyone else has solved it, comment away.

Ok, so here comes the point of all this rambling: if I had to go through all this jiggery-pokery to get the cloud to work for something simple like calendars, what hope does your average busy enterprise worker have of using all the great apps the cloud has to offer without losing data, keeping it all in sync, and not going mad? As all the apps move from the desktop to “somewhere out there” will they communicate? Get backed up? Meet the business requirements that were solved with the shrink-wrapped stuff? Does anyone else smell chaos ensuing?

Posted in cloud computing, Desktop Software | 1 Comment

Hello, world!

Posted on November 13, 2009

Okay, I’ll admit it. I’m new to blogging. Just when I get the hang of it there are so many other ways to communicate with your ‘followers’ out there. I’m already on Facebook and Twitter (see my tweets to the right…) – but for those of us with real lives, how do we find the time to constantly document our lives? And, more importantly, do all those time-poor friends of ours have time to read it all? Or care?

So why am I new to all this stuff? Have I been under a rock? Well, sort of. About nine years ago I started company number two – focused on building the plumbing that all this wonderful web content flows through – and I haven’t popped my head up since. Check it out at www.bulletproof.net.

My aim is to post as often as I can (about weekly, I reckon) on my exploits and thoughts about technology, its part in my downfall, and my part in its downfall. :)

Send comments, let me know what you think. If you have time…

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