awkward.org T & M - Thoughts & Musings

In a post Macworld interview with John Markoff of the New York Times Jobs is quoted :

 “Having created a phone, it’s a lot harder than it looks,” he said. “We’ll see how good their software is and we’ll see how consumers like it and how quickly it is adopted.” In seeking not to get locked out of the mobile phone world, “I actually think Google has achieved their goal without Android, and I now think Android hurts them more than it helps them. It’s just going to divide them and people who want to be their partners.”

This seems to repeat the assumption of many people that Google will make money from the applications on the platform itself, or from the simple increase in the number of web users (or hours of web use) and the associated likelihood of eyeballs seeing Google provided advertising on the new platform.

I disagree…

I think Google’s most likely stream of revenue from the phone is from delivery contracts with the mobile operators. Today mobile web browsing is a ‘OK’ but problems of poor wireless speeds are compounded by what is a somewhat inefficient approach to the movement of modern web pages, their graphics and the associated elements of the web experience. Google has a widely deployed (Internationally now as well as domestically) topology of data centers and the exceedingly fat pipes that link them. If Google is in a position to ‘own’ the software on the handset and is confident of localized connectivity between the handset and a nearby Google datacenter they can do many things to improve the handheld browsing experience :

• Localized caching of information
• Compression of certain elements above and beyond what’s already done
• Wholesale replacement of the HTTP protocol between the handset and the datacenter to further accelerate browsing.

These sort of things are services that a wireless operator would like to see to differentiate themselves from the competition, it’s also the sort of thing the operator would pay for directly with Google - a single large source of revenue. It can also be easily made part of any opensource project, indeed even done on the iPhone ! Since the real ‘magic’ is the datacenters, their performance and the smart software therein.

Don’t forget that the lead developers of the Android project are the folks from Android Inc. (an acquisition Google made a few years ago). This is the same team behind Danger and the T-Mobile Sidekick - a platform that has a significant service component for which Danger receives revenue from T-Mobile for operating, providing and upgrading.

This sort of thing is a great way for Google to leverage their widely deployed high bandwidth network and datacenters and start getting revenue to cover the cost of all the ‘dark fiber’ they apparently snapped up many years ago.

Posted under Apple

What’s VMware showing at Macworld ?

Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) Server in a virtual environment.

This is an ‘out of the box’ install of Leopard running in an early (preview) version of a future VMware product for Mac OS X - yes it’s based on Fusion.

I’m really excited to be able to contribute to this (though I’ve done nothing yet, I’ve only been there a week - and I think that lots of people out there are looking forward to being able to use it too !

Posted under Apple, Leopard, VMware

Sylvie’s been complaining of a ‘wobbly front tooth’ for a few months but it’s really not been that loose. However in the past 4-5 days it’s gotten visibly looser. I had expected that yesterdays sledding in the snow would have had enough trauma to knock it out. Which if it had happened would have been very traumatic for every one since we would have need to hunt through the snow to find it for the Tooth Fairy.

However it actually came out very calmly in school today - and of course she was very excited to tell me and show me when I got home. Right now she’s concerned that the Tooth Fairy won’t find it in the gold jewelry box beside her bed - so she wrote a note (to make sure the fairy didn’t need to wake me up and ask me where it was) and attached it to the box.

Posted under Sylvie

I’m writing this ‘live’ whilst I watch the stream of details from MacRumorsLive - I’ve not posted it until the end of the keynote though.

• Airport Extreme with Hard Drive (aka TimeCapsule) - reasonable product idea and the price seems OK. I really hope this means those of us with ‘original’ Airport Extremes can now use Time Machine to an attached drive (otherwise I’m going to be upset).
• iPhone update - looks nice, not a lot to say. Maps with location detection sounds good - depending on accuracy.
• Movie rentals - seems reasonably restricted, price is good too, less than my local movie store and on a par with On Demand pricing from FIOS. Hopefully the catalogue is fully featured.
• Apple TV Take 2 - this sounds like a new box ? Can I upgrade my current Apple TV in any way ? It’s physically capable of much of the listed features, like HD and Dolby 5.1 (though HD playback beyond 720p24 is not currently specified).  If the box is upgradable to the newer software this makes the iOnTV project even better since it can transcode to the HD formats now - just needs AppleTV to support the playback. Aha - apparently it’s a free update in a couple of weeks, and the price for the base AppleTV is cheaper now too, only $229.
• New MacBook Air - certainly thin and lightweight, as a programmer though I don’t think I’m in the sweetspot for this device (though I am looking for a new notebook). 13.3″ screen - larger than some, but probably still too small for me. Does have the multi-touch trackpad - could make for some interesting interaction behaviours - but as a developer would I want to develop and app just for this device (can you reasonably mix two control metaphors - multi-touch vs. mouse ?) Does have a hard drive though, that’s a little surprising since I know Apple has some serious brains looking at Flash based storage right now, aahhh but it has a 64GB Solid State Drive - that makes sense. Core 2 Duo processor, but a little slower than current MacBook Pros. Single USB 2.0 port, but no Firewire so you can add external optical drives (and hard drives), but you’re not going to be capturing video with this. $1799 for a machine with 80GB harddrive and 2GB memory, not bad - but I think the MacBook Pro fits my needs better even if it’s more expensive. I do see Michele looking longingly at this when she does her next notebook upgrade.
• Randy Newman is starting to look a little old - I wonder what song he’s performing (the MacRumorsLive feed doesn’t say) ?

Posted under Apple

I’m still trying various options for getting to my new job - recently I’ve been driving (which frankly sucks) but once I get back from vacation in a couple of weeks I’ll switch to taking the train (VMware covers the cost of the train or a monthly parking pass).

Of course if I do feel like driving I could perhaps consider something like this :

Remember Jeremy Clarkson is 6 feet 5 inches tall - he’s unable to sit in his favourite car (the original 60’s Ford GT40) with the doors closed because his head sticks out the top of the roof and the gullwing doors won’t close over the top !

Posted under Personal

Via Boing Boing I found R Todd Kings wonderful photos from the various snow and ice festivals that occur in Harbin each winter.

Harbin is a city in the far north east of China (Heilongjiang province), it’s actually further north than Vladivostok. I visited Harbin twice in 1996 when working in Hong Kong. My first visit was in April just as the city came out of deep freeze, but my second was in December (just a couple of days before Christmas) when the mercury was really dropping. If I recall correctly it was 10 to 15 degrees below zero farenheit (-23 to -26 degrees celsius), actually not too bad for Harbin winter temperatures and luckily not windy (it’s so flat around there that 30 - 40 mph winds are not uncommon and they really drop the effective temperature).

Unfortunately I wasn’t there at the right time for the Ice Lantern Party (probably a good thing - even 11 years ago it was popular enough to sell out all the tourist/business hotels in the city), and the snow and ice world didn’t start until more recently.

I’d like to try and go back sometime - I’m sure the city has seen some remarkable changes over the last decade (horse drawn carts were still very common when I was there, even though I was installing a multi-million dollar computer system for the local phone company). Harbin also has some fascinating architecture thanks to it’s Russian influences (most people in the street would try and speak Russian to me - it was more common to see a white Russian than a white European).

Posted under Personal

For some reason the poor weather this year seems to like to happen on Mondays ! I think this is the third or fourth Monday that we’ve had either snow or really bad icing !

Today’s Nor’easter is dumping several inches of snow in the Boston area - you can see some of my pictures here. It’s also of course a snow day for the children ! Even better Michele left last night for a trip to Europe (she ran out early to get ahead of the storm - she was supposed to leave tonight), so I get to clear the drive on my own whilst making sure the children don’t get too hurt sledding down the front garden.

The snow from the past storms had mostly melted - but there definitely still a few piles both on the edge of our drive and the rest of the neighbourhood. It’s supposed to stay coldish this week, and there’s another storm forecast for the end of the week - whether it’s rain or snow remains to be seen 8-).

Posted under Personal

The Mac faithful will all be watching San Francisco next week - to see what his ‘greatness’ announces.

VMware will be there too (for the first time I think). I doubt VMware’s announcements will rise to the same level of hysteria that will be associated with anything Apple announces - but there’s going to be some good stuff !

So if you’re there drop by the booth - unfortunately I won’t be travelling to the show, but there will be a variety of other VMware engineers involved with Fusion who will be there during the show.

Posted under VMware

Today was my last day at Avid.

On Monday I start my new job at VMware.

Avid has been a great 21 months - but VMware gives me an opportunity to do something a little different. It’s both exciting and a little ’scary’ at the same time. I’m still going to be writing software but no longer will it be products for creative people in audio, video or 3D - which was what I’ve been doing for the last decade.

The position at VMware gives me an opportunity to work on some technically very challenging issues and improve some skills (it’s not easy for me to say much at this point about precisely what I’ll be doing). It’ll also be interesting because I’m not moving back to California (VMware’s head office is in Palo Alto), Michele & I  and the children like it too much here to move again ! VMware has a pretty large office in Cambridge right across the street from MIT, in fact it’s literally across the street from Michele’s office at MIT. Although there are over 100 employees in the Cambridge location (and vacancies for more to join the rest of my team and my manager are in the Palo  Alto office which will be something new for me too. There’ll be some trips back and forth as part of my work - so people in the Bay Area I’ve not seen for some time (particularly in the valley and south bay) might get some visits !

I’ll try and blog some more about what it’s like starting a new job in the coming weeks.

Posted under Personal

We had a snowstorm yesterday afternoon. It started snowing around 1:00pm, by the time I got home at 2:30 we had 2-3 inches. Since I haven’t yet invested in a snow blower I went out again at 4:30 and cleared about another 3-4 inches of snow. It finally stopped around 9:30 last night. Measuring the snow on the patio table this morning it looks like we had 11 1/2 inches of snow in the 8 1/2 hours. Today’s a nice sunny day (cold this morning - but supposed to warm up).

Saturday night/Sunday morning is supposed to be another fairly large storm, and probably not so pleasant with a mix of snow -> ice -> rain and probably high winds too. Unlikely to be anywhere near so photogenic.

Posted under Personal