Several of us blogged that last year was going to be the year of touch. With resistive touch UMPCs, dual mode Tablet PCs, and then the iPhone, there’s no doubt this prediction came true.

Well, I think many of us are on board to make another prediction: This is the year of multi-touch. There’s the Dell Latitude XT Tablet PC with a capacitive/active digitizer which supports the pen and multi-touch, the announcement that Windows 7 will support multi-touch, Microsoft’s Surface Computer, and numerous one-of/homebrew multi-touch projects. Hey, even Google has a multi-touch library. Oh, and of course, there’s the iPhone (and other Apple products), with its multi-touch capabilities.

A New York Times article today lays out the case that we’ll be seeing more multi-touch systems in the near future too. As part of this trend they point to the iPhone, the fact that Windows 7 will support multi-touch, and the impact of new multi-touch hardware from NTrig and Wacom.

I have to say, though, that several things stuck out in the article that I think need some revisiting. First, in the caption to the Dell Latitide pictures, the NYT’s article says:

“A multitouch screen by N-trig, on the Dell Latitude XT laptop-tablet hybrid, responds to a pen as well as fingertips.”

Catch the phrasing? A laptop-tablet hybrid? Yep, OEMs don’t want to talk Tablets. The article clarifies the distinction in an even more confusing manner, describing the Dell Latitide XT as a:

“hybrid computer that’s smaller than a laptop but bigger than a tablet model”

Funny, isn’t it?

Anyway, as multi-touch spreads–particularly with the release of Windows 7–I’m predicting that Tablet PCs are going to be one of the early adopters. If Microsoft isn’t too careful here, it could wind up having its efforts lumped in with Tablets that no one wants to call Tablets. This is nowhere’s land and the start of a death spiral for Windows’ permutatation of multi-touch.

The other thing I think, which could cause a hiccup for multi-touch adoption, is Windows 7 itself. No one from Microsoft has talked about the implementation yet or the API, but if it’s not well done it very well may splinter and harm multi-touch adoption. Already we see NTrig go out on its own with a multi-touch SDK. Is this a harbinger of things to come?

Microsoft is also in last-place right now with its non-existent multi-touch SDK. There’s the iPhone, Google’s SDK, NTrig’s, and possibly one from Wacom when it launches its multi-touch digitizer later this year. And think about it, if Windows 7’s multi-touch is targetted to Tablet PCs, it may do no better than second place in adoption, playing second fiddle to the iPhone, which is on track to sell 40 million units this year. Tablet PCs are selling nowhere near that.

My point is that numbers of users and numbers of developers create a standard and if Microsoft’s multi-touch isn’t up to par, we could see so much splintering in the multi-touch market around Windows 7 to depress unit sales numbers, keeping the prices high, and the adoption rate even slower. Do we need another $2500 Dell-like Tablet with multi-touch? No way.

Wacom’s CEO hints at the pricing problem saying that for multi-touch to succeed “the cost is going to have to come down substantially.” Yep. This is a big problem. Pricing has been a problem with Tablets from the get go. And then there’s the whole UMPC overpricing. And if the Dell Latitude XT is any indication, we’re going to see price problems with any multi-touch, Tablet products too.

So here’s my take. For Windows 7’s version of multi-touch to really take off Microsoft needs to think more generically. It needs to think in terms of whiteboards and onscreen virtual instruments and onscreen keyboards and enabling multiple mice/users and multi-touch point of sale systems, and of course multi-touch on small, dedicated devices (phones being one of them) and so on. Microsoft has to think big and its implementation has to live up to the multi-touch dream.

And this leads to my last point about the NYT’s article and multi-touch in general: Living up to the multi-touch dream. As some of you may know I’ve been experimenting with a Dell Latitude XT over the last couple weeks, trying out the multi-touch drivers. And I have to say, the Dell Tablet doesn’t live up to the multi-touch dream. I haven’t had a chance to play with the NTrig multi-touch SDK, so I’ve been limited to the Flicks-like multi-touch gestures that NTrig provides. I’ll write another post that explains these gestures in more detail later, but let me say that more Flicks is not the answer. The feedback isn’t real time. It’s not smooth. It’s clunky. Apps like IE have to be tweaked with multi-touch in mind. If it’s not, it’s not going to live up to the dream. And is there anyone that thinks IE is going to be optimized for a multi-touch experience? Nope. It’s probably a safe bet that the iPhone is going to continue to lead the way here–for at least another development cycle or two–which is probably what, three to five years?

Don’t get me wrong: I’m agreeing that we’re going to see the influence of more and more multi-touch and I think the next 12 months are so is going to be a significant inflection point. However, will this period live up to the multi-touch dream? I think a big part of this is going to depend on what Microsoft delivers with Windows 7. This is going to be very interesting to watch. All eyes will be on PDC and the new Windows 7 Engineering blog, authored by Steven Sinofsky and Jon DeVaan blog.

Microsoft evidently is gearing up for a 300 million dollar ad campaign to shore up Vista. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that part of this effort will include giving Jerry Seinfeld 10 million dollars to help in the campaign.

All I’ve got to say is ugh.

Is this really the best way to spend money in today’s market? Not to me. We don’t need to give actors millions of dollars or TV networks more cash. Sorry. That’s yesterday’s world.

I’ll go back to some ideas I’ve talked about before that I think would help boost Vista’s image and do it more effectively.

Here, in no specific order, are some variants on how to market Vista better and still fit under a $300,000,000 budget:

1. 100,000 Tablet PC Get one, Give one Giveaway. Yes, give away 100,000 Tablet PCs at roughly $2,000 a piece, totalling about $200,000,000 over a ten week period. That’s effectively one Tablet PC every minute for 70 days. How do you give that many Tablet PCs away? Leverage the web and the gift of kindness. Here’s how it works: A person has to write a blog post or submit an essay on who they would give a Tablet PC to and why. It can be a person or organization. Your post/essay is then added to an aggregator that people can read and vote up/down on. Every two minutes a winner from this list is gifted a Tablet PC and whoever created the post is given one too. You can fill in the details.

2. 100,000 Tablet PC Live Search Giveaway. Like giveaway #1, give away 1 Tablet PC every minute over a 70 day period. To win, you have to use Live Search and somewhere on the page will be a winning link that you click on to accept the prize.

3. 100,000 Student Giveaway. In 4 weeks give away 25,000 Tablet PCs a week. How to do it? Any student adds a Facebook application that includes a chat Window in which a message pops up in which if you respond to and you win (or something similar).

4. Ultimate Silverlight Giveaway. Visit a page with a Silverlight app on it and win a Tablet PC or comparable by drawing something in the app. Drawings are voted up or down.

5. ???? Enter your own 300 million dollar giveaway here.

Of course, I know all of this is too late. But, you know, I hope it’s not too late for Jerry Seinfeld to do something nice with his money. It doesn’t seem right. Sorry, Jerry.

Robert Scoble writes a fairly long post about blogs and the PR industry and how the PR industry is promoting things the wrong way when it comes to tech blogs–or the blogs are getting pulled into their strategies. I think Robert’s trying to get at ways that can make blogs better and more interesting–possibly returning to their roots.

Here’s the thing I think Robert skips over: It’s not just the PR people that are disrupting classic tech blogs, the journalists are too. In fact, over the last few years, I’ve argued several times that much of the talked about online growth has been around journalistic endeavors. The writers and publishers have moved online. No problem here; they should have. However, it’s meant that with this transition there’s been money in the game and quite understandably people have migrated from being tech enthusiasts to journalists. Can’t blame people for moving to where the money’s at. But with this transition I think the flavor of tech blogging has gotten muddled.

In no particular order, here are my pet peeves about how this trend towards tech journalism has tainted some tech blogs–particularly the largest ones:

1) The journalists blog like journalists. What do I mean? They report what’s going on. OK, that’s fine, however, quite often their sources are another blog post from some other person journalistically blogging about someone’s comment or news leak. So what you say? Well, more often than not, the journalist blogger will repeat the key news (quite respectfully usually) reporting the key facts that the original blogger found. You know what? A tech blogger wouldn’t just do this. They’d simply say, “Look at this. So and so found out some info” and then provide a link to it. They might go on and add some commentary, but they wouldn’t think they’d have to lay out the whole story, which the original site did just fine. A journalist is going to repeat the whole story and effectively try to keep the reader on their site. A tech blogger will link.

2) Publishers of sites that want to make a living often do things to keep people on their site only. Tech bloggers aren’t as concerned with this. Ways of doing this are:

a) Link to their own articles rather than outside original sources.
b) Provide partial feeds so the reader has to go to the full site to see the full article.
c) Don’t link out, even if they credit another source. Big media blogs do this more commonly, but I see this enough to irk me more than I’d like.
d) And from the point in #1, journalists repeat news from other sites when a link will do.

3) A journalist’s mission is to report; a tech blogger’s mission is to spread their enthusiasm and knowledge for something. It’s not that a tech blogger is simply more benevolant. I don’t think that’s it at all. It’s just that a tech blogger knows they are biased–because they are enthusiastic about something–and shares it. A journalist focuses on reporting. (I will add that for some strange reason tech journalist bloggers seem to rant with some of the loudest. I don’t get this at all. You’d rarely see this in print media, though maybe on the radio or in video. Still, I don’t get it.)

4) Journalists like to point out the conflicts. Yes, tech bloggers will too. However, a tech blogger is just as likely to share info that resolves some conflict or problem. The reason? A tech blogger wants to nourish something. A journalist wants to get the next big story and attract readers and get clicks on their ads. Conflict keeps the click flow going–today. Archiveable information isn’t as much about clicks right now.

5) A journalist is more concerned about the number of readers; a tech blogger is more concerned about the richness of their community.

Yeah, this all is probably a bit of an oversimplification, but hey, I’m an engineer-minded, tech blogger and not a journalist-slash-analyst-slash-PR rep blogger, so I’m allowed. And, you know what, for some reason a smiley face just seems like a highly appropriate way to end this post :-).

The OLPC and original ASUS Eee PC have really shaken up the market so says Gartner. In fact, Gartner is predicting that in 2008 5 million of these diminutive PCs will be sold.

As Gartner sees it, these devices, which were originally intended for the education market have found a welcome audience in the consumer space. In fact, they think that 70% of the device sales will be to consumers. And Gartner sees people buying these as secondary devices, too. Not primary machines. Sound familiar?

Of course, what’s so hilarious about all of this is that these devices were exactly in the ballpark of UMPCs, which haven’t had the sales volume many would have expected. The reason? Price, price, price. Seems that if you take a UMPC, remove the $50 (if that) digiitzer, and add a keyboard, then that’s good enough to drop the price by 1/2. Amazing, isn’t it?

What’s also funny in a not so funny way is that UMPCs were originally intended for consumers, although for some mystical reason (probably because of their high prices), marketing switched to high-end or IT customers.

So here we are, seeing these low end PCs potentially increase in sales by a magnitude in what Gartner predicts to be 4 years. Simply amazing.

Now Gartner is including a wide range of screen sizes here: Anything from 5 inches to 10 inches. This doesn’t include MIDs. I assume it includes the good ole UMPCs though.

What else sets these devices apart besides their low cost? Gartner predicts most of them will have diminutive power to match their diminutive sizes. Makes sense. The online summary doesn’t say it, but I think this includes limited onboard resources too.

So here’s what’s even more interesting: For some reason, Gartner thinks that these devices will be accepted by consumers because of their ease of use. I don’t get it. What will make them any easier to use than any other device?

In fact, because of their limited resources, Gartner believes the provided OS will either be Linux or XP. Yep, no Vista here. Too big and too slugish for these small devices I guess. Of course, there’s no way XP is going to be selling into 2012–well I mean most people will have Vista on their primary machine so having a secondary machine running XP is going to get confusing, so I’m not sure what Gartner is thinking here. I’m guessing they are just seeing the XP/Linux trend throughout 2008.

To me, I don’t see XP being any easier to use than anything else. So I think this whole ease to use argument is not going to pan out. Low price, small screen, small keyboard, limited resources does not make something easier to use.

Now the Linux people have an opportunity here to show how to create a good secondary device. But I’m not going to hold my breath. It’s not going to be about five quick icons on the screen–although that’s fine.

I challenge anyone here. I don’t think I’ve see one company hit the ease of use sweet spot for secondary devices. As someone who wrote ShareKMC, which is about two devices working together, I can’t say I really understand what this behavoir needs to be, but I know it’s not there. I’ll put it this way, even the iPhone, which is a great little device and fairly easy to use, it’s not a great companion device. (I should add a link to EverNote here as a product that’s might help out here, if only it shipped with most of the devices.) My guess is ease of use isn’t going to be a shining feature of any of these devices, unless something changes on the software side. Crudely this would include a custom shell and maybe 4 to 5 really well tuned apps for the form factor. And NO, I’m not talking about an old fashioned media player with a 3D graphics shell. And to do it really well, I think there ought to be one or possibly two small tweaks to the hardware. I’m not going to go into details here, but I think anyone that really thinks about this stuff will see some really obvious things to do.

[Found via Gottabemobile]

I’ve been thinking a bit about how to make desktop systems a little bit more Tablet friendly. There’s no doubt that a digitizing pad (especially with a view of the screen) is a good way to go, however, there’s also no doubt that one more device on the desk creates a little bit more of a mess.

So I’ve been wondering what it might be like to place this technology not in a separate device, but rather within the keyboard.

Here’s the basic idea:

Imagine a standard sized keyboard with a multi-touch display-slash-digitizer. Rather than make the whole keyboard virtual and lose the natural feel of keys, instead just make the less used keys virtual. This would be the standard mode of the digitizer. You’d see virtual representations of the keys displayed on the digitizer and you could touch them just like you would a normal keyboard. You could even press more than one key just like a regular keyboard since the digitizer surface would be multi-touch.

A secondary view of the digitizing surface would show all or part of the display and work as a standard dual-mode digitzer, like that from NTrig. In other words, you could use a pen on the surface to handwrite or draw or you could use your fingers to gesture or control the windows.

Now I probably drew this too much in favor of portrait mode, but you get the idea.

If I had a keyboard like this I think I’d leverage the inking and handwriting capabilities on my desktop a lot more. Yes, separate devices are OK or even a digitizer built into the display, but from my experience I slowly stop using things if my desk starts to get too cluttered and when sitting at a desk I’m not so sure if digitizing displays is the most economical way to go–especially if the features are used let’s say only 25% of the time.

Oh, and while I’m at it, I’d also like to be able to magnetically dock my mouse to the keyboard (with either a magnet on the mouse or keyboard and a metal strip on both sides), not only to help keep my desk more organized while not in use, but also as a charging surface for a bluetooth mouse when not in use. I like this kind of idea, both helps with organization and provides a much needed charging connection. I hate it when bluetooth mice go dead.

Rob Bushway over at Gottabemobile brings up some interesting thoughts on the state of Tablet PCs.

I’m thoroughly convinced that Tablet features make a lot of sense–especially in one of my favorite areas to think about: education.

However, I’m also convinced that the numerous stumbles that Microsoft and its partner OEMs have made with the Tablet form factor have all but guaranteed that the era of Tablets as we know them now is nearing an end.

Yeah, yeah. Tablet sales are probably doing just fine. They may even be increasing for all I know. However, Tablets simply haven’t reached their potential and by virtue of the way the markets work, probably never will. Sorry. It’s unlikely Tablets as we know them now are going to just take off all of a sudden.

Here’s my working thesis though:

1) That we will see Tablet technology spread widely throughout more devices despite this “looming non-success.”
2) That the dream of Tablet PCs, like the original orange one that Bill Gates demoed at Comdex is still alive and well though the “dream devices” we all want may or may not be like this.
3) The dream devices of the future will improve our lives and will incorporate some, possibly many, of the core features we know now of today’s Tablet PCs.

In fact, I think we’re on the cusp of a new generation of Tablets. The iPhone being the first of them. It has excellent touch, good predictive typing via an onscreen keyboard, pretty good browser support for a touch device, and more. Yes, to me it’s a Tablet PC and a pretty good one at that. No to all of you skeptics a physical keyboard isn’t needed to make a great Tablet. The iPhone proves it.

But it’s not just touch that I think is key to making a great Tablet. It’s going to be about processors (Atom anyone?) and screen technology and other sensors (multiple screens with multi-touch?) and, yes, great software (simple, concise OS, with targetted apps). We haven’t seen enough of this from the Microsoft camp yet. Yes, Microsoft’s Tablet PC handwriting recognition is definitely beyond all others. No question. But the overall implementation of Tablets, well, uh. Let’s just say it’s not a bad start.

There’s more to do.

I’m quite excited by the possibilities. I’ve been thinking a lot over the last year about what kind of device might really make my electronic workbooks really sing for instance (see the header of this blog for sample screenshots). I’m convinced the right combination of technology will be quite enabling and valuable and make people smile.

So although Tablets as I dream of haven’t quite taken off in the way I think they should have, I’m still chugging away. The road ahead may be a bit uneven, and unpredicatable, and confusing, but I’m quite excited about the possibilties. It’s going to be an evolutionary, incremental process. I’m comfortable with that. Yes, I’m ready today for a killer Tablet. But I realize it’s going to take awhile longer. No problem.

It’s time to welcome the next era.

It’s time to face reality: Microsoft needs to stop what it’s doing and clone the iPhone.

After using the iPhone over the last year, I’ve come to realize that the iPhone and its browser (and now its 3rd party apps) are consuming more and more of my time. It’s even eating into my notebook/Tablet PC browse time. The iPhone model is winning.

Of course, I’m not really suggesting to clone the iPhone exactly. I’m just saying, that like with the original Mac, we’ve seen the future and what Microsoft has so far is not it. Time to bite the bullet and copy. They’re right; you’re wrong.

Here are some thoughts along these lines:

Dump IE. Don’t port it. We’re talking rewrite time. Safari is more appropriate although not ideal with its touch navigation and attempt at smart zooming. In addition, out of the box there ought to be live video, Flash, and Silverlight in the browser. These are musts.

There has to be live video support. Period. The built-in camera has to be top notch too. Done right, this isn’t going to be just a phone, it’s going to be the owner’s most used camera for most. Think simple. Don’t go overboard.

On the plus side:

Microsoft knows touch with all of its experiences with the Tablet PCs and UMPCs. It’s time to leverage this on a better, thinner iPhone like device.

I’m convinced Microsoft can make a better iPhone in part because it won’t try to do all on its own. There has to be an open and vibrant developer community, which is something Microsoft knows how to do much, much better than Apple.

Another huge advantage that Microsoft would have with an iPhone clone is that Microsoft can leverage its huge community base to give much better and richer feedback to minimize nasty bugs–which have plagued every iteration of the iPhone. Microsoft can do better here.

One bit of advice I’d give to Microsoft is to take every opportunity to improve the ease of use of the iPhone. For instance, if there’s public or known WIFI and poor cell phone coverage, the phone should transparently switch coverage. Dropped calls–especially when at home where you’re most likely to have WIFI–shouldn’t exist. Not on a good phone anyway. Whatever you add, it should be about improving ease of use, not simply blowing people away with coolness.

If Microsoft wants to differentiate more; one place to do so is with the built in apps. I’m not talking about scientific calculators here. I’m talking live weather radars, better traffic monitoring, flight tracking, and more. Make it a phone that people will use to make their lives better.

Oh, I’m sure Microsoft will also toss in a bunch of IT stuff too, but be cautious here. Don’t make things complicated for everyone else.

That’s it. Time to just do it.

I like the direction Stefan is taking over at the Media Computing Group in building a MultiTouch.framework in Cocoa for OS X.

As one of its features, you can use the multi-touch on an iPhone to control multiple touchpoints on a Mac. I’ve wondered about doing something similar to drive touch points on a Vista machine. It should work though the eventing would need to be specialized.

Check out the YouTube video below if you want to be inspired.

Along these lines, I’ve also thought about leveraging the accelerometer on the iPhone in a similar fashion to control apps on a Tablet PC, notebook, or desktop. Makes a lot of sense.

Lora says it’s time to update ShareKMC

[Clips shown from ink at Gottabemobile]

If you’re interested in iPhone development, by all means check out the live feeds from iPhoneDevCamp today (Saturday August 2nd):

https://admin.adobe.acrobat.com/_a295153/iphonedevcamp/?launcher=false

My niece is soon to start college with a brand new Dell Tablet PC…maybe. Being the lucky uncle with a little extra time on my hands I eagerly volunteered to get the Tablet all in order for her, so I was all excited this afternoon when it arrived via DHL one week early from the initial ship date.

I’ll post some box opening pictures in a bit, but for now let me write down a couple first impressions. The shipping box is rather large all things considered, which I guess is a good thing considering how much protection the extra packing gives you. The unfortunate part is that there’s a lot of empty space in the box, so guess what? One of the internal boxes opened up and things dumped out. No biggy. But it made me wonder if everything was OK. Fortunately, it was just the DVDs and the like floating around.

Another small slip occurred on our end: I guess an error was made in the order, since XP came installed. Again, no biggy. I have a retail copy of Vista Ultimate I haven’t used yet, which will work just fine. Supposedly there’s a Vista Business license included in the package, but for the life of me I don’t see where it’s at. Ultimate is better anyway.

OK, here’s the one thing I wanted to try out for myself on the Dell Tablet PC: The combined touch and pen support provided by the built in Ntrig Digitizer. Unfortunately, things haven’t been going well in the Tablet department when it comes to this Dell.

Update: I installed Vista and the drivers included with the package and it appears that the digitizer is working better. I also downloaded the multi-touch firmware update after installing Vista, so the two together may be making a difference. I’m running into a few false triggers in Vista, but I’m beginning to see the pattern and it’s probably how I hold the pen when touching the screen. (I’m using Dual Mode for the digitizer) I’ll blog some more about this later.

First, the touch feature seems to have a strip where touch all but fails–especially if the touch point moves too quickly. Other places on the screen work just fine. Likewise, the pen seems to false trigger when not even touching the screen and I’ve also run into situations where the pen wouldn’t detect at all. Further, the screen has a film on it that causes a squeeking sound at times as the pen slides across it. I’m sure there’s a way around this, but I haven’t even looked. I’m spending too much time on that gnawing sinking feeling in my stomach.

Yeah, so far I’d say at least this Dell Tablet PC is a dud. It might just be this particular machine, but from what I’ve read in the past about other issues people have had, I don’t think so. I simply think Dell is shipping a poorly tested product. Now to be fair, these are only first impressons. But in the PC market first impressions are important. I’d give Dell a C- up to this point. We’ll see if my impressions and experiences change as I work through any driver updates and the like. Maybe that’ll fix some things.

This week has had a lot of news about search engines. Cuil led the way with a slightly bumpy launch. And now Live Search has updated their search page with a pretty picture and graffiti-like hotsearches. Eh, doesn’t win me over at all. Search is the key not doodads.

I also did several quick searches of Live and at least to me the search quality has taken a step backwards. Yuk. Just try “Tablet PC” and if you know anything about this space you’ll know it’s so-so results. After all this time I would have thought the results would be getting better. These aren’t. Here’s the thing: the results are looking very product or commerce biased. I thought I’d never say it but Microsoft needs to acquire Mahalo and work on their search results for the first couple pages until they work out a better algorithm. They need as much focus on authority as commerce. Maybe it’s what I’m searching for. Web 2.0 doesn’t look so hot either. Oh well, I guess that’s why we need more search engines.

Hopefully these things are just little experiments that will fade away fast. This is complete idle spectulation, but it looks to me like the engineers are losing the battle here. Live Search is turning into mush right before our eyes.

OK, OK, in trying to get back to a positive, constructive tone, here’s my suggestion on how Microsoft can salvage this. Here’s the thing: Make the Live picture relative to the user’s domains of interest. For instance, if I’m into Tablet PCs, leverage photos about news or events going on right now that might be of interest. Maybe a chat with Dave Winer and some of what he’s learned about pulling photos down might be in order. Or maybe just show pictures on special occassions. Don’t try to gimmick Live Search to an extreme. Do I really think this all of this is really necessary? No. But at least it might make the pictures more relevant and maybe something I might click on. After all, isn’t that the game here–to try to get people to click once or twice more?

Microsoft has a new online ad campaign in which they get the impressions from various people about Vista, then show them the great new “Mojave” OS (which is actually Vista), and they get them to talk up the features they like. Like any good infomercial the results are positive.

It’s a clever enough idea–since what most people know about Vista is just what they’ve heard–and not much more. They don’t know what they’re really missing.

Over the last year I’ve been careful in who I recommend Vista to. If I can see potential driver issues, I’ve been doubly careful. However, as time passes and people upgrade their hardware–which most often has adequate Vista drivers–my concerns pretty much vanish. I do think if you take away the driver issue and you have a relatively new notebook, Vista is the much preferred OS. With SP1 it’s simply better. It has better WIFI management, sleeps better, and with a couple config tweaks I think runs better. In terms of security, it’s an incremental step beyond XPs massive security leap with SP2. All in all Vista is in the right direction.

One thing I would add here, is that for technical folks I usually go over with them technical reasons for the “bad” things they hear about Vista. For instance, if some says display drivers are a problem, I explain to them how Vista is a step forward with its compositing engine and securiy changes. For the most part it’s not Vista that messed up its the driver writers. The way I usually present it is to go back to Windows 95 or when the transition happened from 16-bit to 32-bit Windows. It was during this company-saving effort that Windows graphics engine was left behind. Although there has been progress with the graphics layer, I don’t consider any of the changes as great as the one from Windows XP to Vista. And as engineers we all know what transitions mean in terms of getting everyone on the right boat. Point is, what Microsoft did with Vista was the right direction.

I give a similar argument with stability or compatibility of apps and describe how Vista even bends over backwards to try to be compatible with things such as XORing bits on the screen. Point is, Microsoft thought through how to mitigate display problems. Face it engineers employeed clever tricks over the years and some of those tricks have been replaced by techniques that actually have a design about them. Again, Vista is going in the right direction.

Shutdown/startup is another area that has many changes in Vista. These were needed because quite frankly the old ways would not guarantee proper shutdown of apps if you put a notebook to sleep/hibernate. This had to be fixed. Unfortunately, as engineers we all know that whenever you change something you tend to open yourself up for bugs and incompatiblity issues. Sure enough Vista got hit here. Maybe a bit better beta testing would have solved these problems before release. Possibly.

Lastly, people complain about how things have been changed or moved around. I know what they mean. Changes for changes sake can be frustrating. However, after using Vista for awhile, I think most changes are good ones. They do increase my productivity or reduce my management times. I will admit though that I’m still getting used to everything.

On the change side, I always show my engineering friends the integrated search and the better WIFI management. They always get it, even if they are a bit skeptical at first.

So anyway, for the mass market this “Mojave Experiment” might be fine, but for the technically minded people I know I like to give them the technical scoop. They appreciate it. A lot.

I would ask, was anyone shown the Tablet features in Vista? Or once again, were these “premium features” ignored. Oh, when or when, will Microsoft just admit that the Tablet features are mass-market features and make them available to everyone no matter what version of the OS they have.

PS. Notice that the mojaveexperiment.com site is Flash based. That means I couldn’t view it on the iPhone. Sorry guys, plain old HTML would have been fine for this or at least they could have had a plain site for mobile devices. Yeah, and this means going with Silverlight wouldn’t have worked too.

PSS. I think this focus group test really points out how important early adopter, blogger, and press voices are in successfully marketing a big product. I hope Microsoft doesn’t continue to over-react to its past mistakes with Vista here when they go into talking more about the next version of Windows.

After watching JKKMobile have some much success at adding touch to Eee PCs, I wonder if someone is going to try changing the case and essentially making a ModBook. I guess that would be a ModEee? Sounds good to me.

Hmmm. I wonder if someone did this if they’d go with an active digitzer or maybe a dual active/capacitive sensor. That would get my interest for sure.

As I blogged the other day, I think the iPhone is the platform to develop on right now. I think it trumps all others. If a developer isn’t looking at the iPhone and how their product or service is best expressed on it, I think they’re not doing all that they should. That’s just me take.

With this being said, I see that Robert Scoble today is shaming those in the VC community, large companies and the like, for not taking the iPhone more seriously. Right now.

That’s OK, Robert. The fact that the established players are more cautious with something new like the iPhone is exactly why it opens up opportunities for others. So I don’t see this as a bad thing. It’s just the nature of changing markets.

I will add a key point that many industry people need to start paying attention to: I find more and more of my browsing migrating to the iPhone. Even with the display being too small, I find I check more things and read more content more often on the iPhone than I have with any other small device. Not only that, but the browsing time has eaten into my browsing time on my notebook or desktop. This is a point I’d pound into any VCs head that isn’t too sure about the iPhone as a different platform. The iPhone is not simply canabilizing other phone sales, it’s eating into desktop consumption. With better apps on the iPhone I only see this trend getting bigger.

One other key point I think industry players need to pay attention to here is how security is being expressed on phone like devices vs desktop OS devices. Put simply, security is going to kill the user experience in traditional OSes if they’re not careful. Here’s the thing. I can pick up my iPhone, wake it up with a click, slide the unlock gadget, and then without any further logging in, get access to the web, check the news, weather data, stock prices, etc, etc, etc. To get to other content or install an app, I might need to sign in. But generally, there are good things I can do just by turning the device on. Yes, I can set my desktop to do the same, but because of security reasons I don’t. It’s not that everything I have on my system needs to be locked down, it’s just that that’s the model desktop OSes have. I think the iPhone shows that either the desktop players are going to have to tweak their security models, or their market share is going to get eaten more and more by easier to use non-big-OS devices. I think part of the reason that more and more of my browsing is migrating to the iPhone is in part because of this.

For all my praise for the iPhone there are some things I think Apple and AT&T have terribly missed:

* WIFI-based calling. I don’t care what AT&T says, there are many dead or poor cell coverage areas–and when these spots are in a home with great WIFI, there’s absolutely no reason that the phone shouldn’t auto switch to VOIP. To do otherwise creates a poor experience. The iPhone is wrong not to support this natively and transparently. A great phone wood.
* The phone–actually mainly the apps, such as Safari–crash way too much. A great iPhone would not do this, at least not as much.
* Not only is the iPhone missing great travel apps as Robert points out (why can’t I track a flight easily?), there’s still not a great weather radar app, and I’m sure I could list a half a dozen other must have apps that the iPhone really should have. If these apps existed I bet, the iPhone would become mainstream faster than any competitor could come up with a great clone.
* The iPhone’s battery life is going to be an issue for quite a while it appears. Clever charging scenarios are going to be the workaround. These don’t exist yet.
* Free iPhone apps are good, but of course people need to make a living. However, what price should iPhone apps be? I’m thinking in the 99 cent range. Why? Because they actually are quite temporal. Developers need to get comfortable with 10x less expensive apps on the iPhone and potentially 100x more market size for their programs.

Those Apple Tablet rumors keep churning and churning. Today ABC News sums up what’s going on in the Mac Tablet rumor space. There’s nothing new here though. Just idle speculation and the repetition of rumors.

Like many, I’ve had some supposedly second and third-hand sources tell me an Apple touchish-tabletish device is in the works. But that’s only a couple people spread out over more than one year of time. In other words, Apple may be working on something, but who knows if it’s going to be released as a product.

My guess–and this is only a guess based on no tips or anything–is that Apple will make a larger iPhone-slash-iPod touch-ish like device and this may or may not be what people are hearing about.

Maybe Apple has something more revolutionary in the works, maybe something more Tablet PC like. However, I doubt it. It wouldn’t fit into Apple’s product line. I’d love to see one and I’d buy one in an instant, but I just don’t see it happening yet. Apple would need to dramatically improve its handwriting, gesture, and shape recognition. That wouldn’t be that hard to do, but I just don’t see it happening. Now maybe, just maybe, the education market is so compelling to Apple that they’re going to rethink their engineering efforts and build a notebook with integrated handwriting support. Maybe.

Anyway, even ABCNews.rumor.com isn’t enough for you, there’s always Jason O’Grady over at The Apple Core or MacRumors to keep the rumor mill primed.

Isn’t this fun?

One thing is predictably true here though: If Apple releases a Tablet–that’s even slightly close to the approach Microsoft has taken–the Tablet market will finally take off like we’ve all figured it would. There’s no doubt in my mind that Apple would release a quality product–whatever it does–and the arguments over whether a Tablet makes sense will all be over. Then it will turn into one of who has a Tablet that better matches your needs. For the sake of the overall Tablet market, I hope this is what happens.

By the way, same thing can be said for the MID market too, which at this time is owned by the iPhone.

Mary Jo Foley is reporting that Microsoft has “released to manufacturing the version of Windows XP that it has tweaked to run on the One Laptop Per Child XO computer.”

Cool.

Now maybe someone can sneak the Tablet bits in. Maybe if everyone looks the other way? Hehehe.

CNet is reporting that Microsoft and researchers have developed an algorithm that ranks search results not simply on link patterns, but on the browsing patterns of users. They call it BrowseRank. This is in contrast to Google’s PageRank algorithm that in part ranks search results on the links pertaining to content. You can read the original paper here: http://research.microsoft.com/users/tyliu/files/fp032-Liu.pdf

I think the researchers are wrong about their view that BrowseRank trumps PageRank.

Here are the key problems with this approach:

* BrowseRank is transparent. No one else but the people implementing the algorithm can see what the browsing patterns are. With links I can see within Google’s search results a bit of what’s going on. Links are public. Browsing patterns on the other hand aren’t. With links others can build and verify. How do we verify browsing patterns? All of the data would have to be public. No way does that make sense. I wouldn’t go for it. Links yes. Browsing patterns no.

* There’s a huge difference between taking content I select and showcase/post and collecting and organizing all my utterances (more akin to browse linking). The latter may be interesting–even to myself, but it’s not where we should be at right now in search.

* Imagine this algorithm implemented in China versus let’s say the US.

* If there’s one thing the web has taught us about public anonymity is that it is not to be trusted and BrowseRank is all about doing just this. What do I mean? Look at comments. Who do you trust more? A comment left and signed by Robert Scoble? Or one by “Anonymous?” This is exactly why services like Twitter and FriendFeed are finding more interesting conversations–because people attach their digital identities and reputations to them. If I put a link on my blog it’ll mean something because I put that link there. Other people can see it. Other people can confirm it (by linking) or not. If someone browses to a site, what does it mean? Is it a spam bot? An attack? A sign of agreement? Scoffing? Boredom? You’re going to have a trust ranking of the browsers. And where’s the archive of this behavior so it can be audited? And then who’s going to stand behind this? Will all Microsoft employees and partners make up this pool? Will all Slashdotters? Will it be opt in? See the problem?

* Browsing pattern analysis is like the Nielsen Ratings for websites. Leave it at that.

* With BrowseRank there is going to be spamming. It’s so obvious that spammers will develop bots and fake identities to taint the results. Just because spammers are going to design for it doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea, but here again, I’m concerned about the transparency of the implementation. The paper provides some details on why it thinks its algorithm can be used to prune spam, but obviously there’s a huge difference between applying an algorithm in vitro with one in the wild.

Now I have no problem with the algorithm being applied for marketing analysis or to Digg-like commenting sites and ranking their comments (comments written by people who really consumed the link content rise higher than those you just comment), or given a collection of XRank/Wikipedia content authors, just follow their browsing patterns and re-rank XRank. These are fine ways to use browse ranking in the wild. And then within contained environments (let’s say a company) it’s fine to rank content as I’ve blogged before by editing or consumption patterns. That makes sense. However, as a basis for all search results? Uhm.

I’m sorry, I don’t see how BrowseRank will scale well with human nature. In this alone, PageRank still trumps it.

News is spreading that Windows Live Photo Gallery is going to be including face recognition for “family members and friends.”

Seems like an interesting feature, however, Microsoft needs to be careful here. I’m betting they’re talking about matching among a current set of commonly familiar faces over a given period of time. In other words, train the system to let’s say five people as they look today and then match subsequent photos around this time frame with those faces. You’re probably not going to be able to go back much in time to match with these faces–even for the same people. Kids grow too fast. Distant relatives change too rapidly with regards to sparse frequency in which you take photos of them. And frankly, even with your own photos of those closest to you, you’ll have the largest number of photos over the greatest period of time and yet one set of facial matching criteria probably won’t work across all of them. People change.

Any useful desktop facial recognition software is going to account for this. Anything else will be a demo toy.

Now here’s the thing. There are perfectly good uses of facial recognition, which can design around these issues. In no way am I saying not to use facial recognition. What I am saying is that a great product is going to make sense with regards to how people use photos (and may I suggest webcams). Whatever Microsoft implements, I hope its design makes sense and is not just a college-grade, gee-wiz app. OK, OK, one more hint. Think about something called mesh. A real solution along the direction I think Microsoft is going is going to use this.

Oh, and one more thing. Microsoft needs to beef up its computer vision support across its OSes and devices. Where’s the .NET library for all this? Where’s the support for webcams in Silverlight? Or when you open up your brand new notebook for the first time that most likely includes a webcam, where’s the camera support in Windows? Where’s the virtual camera driver? etc, etc, etc. If you ask me, all of these are much more important to be spending resources on than something that will be shown in a demo and then that’s about it. Otherwise it makes Windows or Windows Live look more like a bag of stuff than a well designed product or service. If this helps anyone, think like Apple. Scratch that, just think.

It’s time to go beyond thinking of WIFI access points as single entities. It’s time to go the next step and leverage access points as part of a location-aware network.

Here’s the thing: Access points broadcast and receive signals omni-directionally. That’s fine for many situations. You want coverage in as many places as you can from a single point. However, drop by any apartment building or maybe even your own home or office, and there are sure to be lots of WIFI signals eminating from the area.

In these signal crowded areas even if you did supply an open network for visitors or customers, who would know which network to join? Good naming is OK, but the issue suggests a solution that partially solves the public network issues but also provides other opportunities too. It’s all about multiple access points working as a location-aware based network.

Here’s the idea in a nutshell: Let’s say you want to provide open WIFI to those in your store. And I mean inside your store. Not the store next door. Not those standing out front blocking the door. Just the customers indoors. You can’t easily do this right now. Yes, you can have public networks, but they can look like any other network. If instead we had location-aware public networks that our devices are tuned to, we could readily separate out the private from the public. And as long as networks spaces don’t overlap, you can only be in one place at a time, so you’re only going to be concerned about one network. Joining a private network will take an extra step. A public one shouldn’t.

Location is King. Not the signal. Especially in public.

Don’t misunderstand. This idea isn’t about creating the ultimate security feature. It would be defeatable. You could spoof location. However, for the baseline system it provides one more way to better manage public access. A doctor might provide one public network for its waiting area and let’s say another for current patients in a chemo room. Other office networks wouldn’t even appear, because by definition they aren’t open, because they’re not location aware.

And then let’s take something like a school room as an alternative twist. One room could have access turned on, another off. Same goes for an office building. Maybe open WIFI is only available in certain conference rooms or the lobby. Everywhere else it’s not available.

Notice how an approach like this changes WIFI usage from the user’s perspective. When you visit a store, you know the WIFI is coming from that store. When you visit a doctor’s office, you know it’s coming from that office.

When you walk into an area you won’t see a slew of WIFI networks that you don’t have the passwords for anyway and you may never be sure who’s providing what.

To me, it’s not just about easier managed public access. A location-aware system like this opens up new possibilities for all kinds of devices. How? By leveraging parts of this system we could have the backbone of indoor positioning systems that any WIFI-based device (ranging from cameras to Robots) could use to determine its exact location and heading within the access points.

We already have crude indoor positioning systems, but bring in the ability to measure a device’s location within inches and heading within degrees and you have some new possibilities with intelligently tagging content as I’ve blogged before. This could be a huge game changer in organizing indoor generated content and yes, search.

How would this work? I’ll defer to the EEs. To work well, it would require some changes to how the radios currently operate. But with the right silicon you have some very interesting and practical possibilities.