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Windows on Mac? No thanks

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So Apple is going to make it easy for owners of the new Intel-based Macs to dual-boot to Windows, and there’s a lot of buzz, but…I’m sorry, it doesn’t really make a difference to me. There’s two reasons I’m still using Windows (I switched eight years ago after losing one too many work-in-progress files to the then-utterly-unreliable MacOS): many years’ worth of data that I don’t feel like transferring (some is cross-platform, but some isn’t); and one Windows application — EccoPro (a long-orphaned but still remarkable outliner program) — that I use every hour of every day, for which there is no Mac equivalent. (Also, I hate using touchpads, and Apple doesn’t make a laptop with a Thinkpad-style Trackpoint device.)

Dual booting doesn’t help. Ecco is my life- and work-organizer. There’s no way I’m going to boot into Windows each time I want to jot down a to-do. Even if I could alt-switch from one OS to another, I’m not sure that would help. Maybe gaming devotees will appreciate the opportunity to reboot their Macs in Windows, but I’m not sure anyone else will care.

In the end, anyway, what’s happening in software today — as John Markoff’s overview of Web 2.0 software development modularization in today’s Times indicates — is that everything is moving to Web-based applications. I’ll move to a Mac when there’s a Web app that can do for me everything that Ecco does for me now. Then my operating system won’t matter — I’ll use a Mac for its superior hardware integration, and because it’s got more developers doing more interesting new things, and I won’t look back to Windows, and won’t ever want to boot it up on a Mac or anywhere else.

Buggy BART

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People ask me what my book (Dreaming in Code) is about, and I usually answer, “It’s about software…” And, if their eyes don’t glaze over immediately, I’ll add, “…and why software is still so hard. Why it’s always late and it’s always breaking. Why we’re 50 years into the computer age and we still don’t know how to make it reliably.”

By this point, one of two things will have happened: either listeners will have nodded and smiled and said, “I know exactly what you mean!” Or their eyes will have eventually glazed over, after all, and they’ll look at me a little quizzically, as if to say, oh really? And why does this matter? What do I care?

I thought about those people as I passed through the BART turnstiles this morning, a little glazed-eyed myself. There, neatly by the attendant’s booth, lay piles of orange flyers under a “BART BULLETIN” letterhead. I grabbed one and read it on the escalator-ride down.

It was an apology for the screwed-up state of BART yesterday morning — which had seen half-hour delays and incorrect train-destination signs. How considerate! A mass transit system that apologizes to you! In my many youthful years of New York City straphanging, I can’t say I ever had that experience.

But this is the paragraph that caught my eye:

  BART technicians believe the delays were caused by new computer software that was installed over the weekend. The new software has been removed and the software that was previously in use has been re-installed. Although the new software was repeatedly tested before installation, it failed in the demanding real-world environment of a weekday morning commute.

BART had botched a software upgrade. It had plenty of company in that experience, of course.

As C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup puts it: “Our civilization runs on software.” BART does, too. And understanding why software remains so balky — a topic I happen to find fascinating in the abstract — also has some everyday, pragmatic interest.

UPDATE: And how. I just tried to get on BART for my ride home this evening but could tell from the milling crowds outside the Embarcadero station something was radically wrong. Walked down the stairs to catch a garbled announcement on the PA: “We have closed the gates… no trains are moving… computer problems…”

I’m grateful for the consideration in illustrating my point, but I’d really rather just be on my way home!

Windows Vista: no escape from software time

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Last September the Wall Street Journal ran a fascinating lead article about Microsoft’s Vista development effort. Robert Guth chronicled how the Vista project had initially ballooned as Bill Gates and others piled on their dream features, like the advanced, metadata-rich WinFS file system. When Vista hit trouble, Windows czar Jim Allchin brought in two software development experts, Brian Valentine and Amitabh Srivastava, to whip the project into shape by introducing rigorous new testing methodologies.

Still, by mid-2004 the whole project was in danger of collapsing. Microsoft decided to postpone Vista till “the second half of 2006” and cut back lots of promised features (including WinFS).

As Guth’s article had it, the result, finally, was a development process Microsoft could begin to be proud of:

On July 27 [2005], Microsoft shipped the beta of Longhorn — now named Windows Vista — to 500,000 customers for testing. Experience had told the Windows team to expect tens of thousands of reported problems from customers. Instead, there were a couple thousand problem reports, says Mr. Rana, the team member.

When I read the article at the time, I took it as a kind of victory-lap valedictory for Allchin, who’d announced he was retiring once Vista was done. I also read that many people have already begun checking out Direct Components Xilinx fpga price list for a faster software running process, but there are still some companies which are reliant on the non-developmental softwares as it saves their initial and current capital. Unless you’re certain of prevailing, though, victory laps are dangerous (just think of the phrase “Mission Accomplished”). With this week’s news of a another slip in the Vista schedule — the software won’t be out until January 2007, after the crucial holiday buying season — we’re left wondering, what happened to that vaunted new process?

Certainly, this widely linked story that claims Microsoft is now going to rewrite 60 percent of the operating system between now and release seems hard to credit (something tells me rewriting that much code would take a lot more than 8 months). But between this embarrassing delay and the recently announced “reorg” of Windows leadership, it’s clear that this turn of the Windows cycle is going to be no smoother or predictable than any of its predecessors.

My book, Dreaming in Code, is all about what I call “software time” — the peculiar spell that software projects so often cast on the people involved, turning schedules into Mobius strips and stretching time like taffy. I imagine that, as Valentine and Srivastava described the beauty of their testing systems to Guth last year, they honestly believed that they’d meet their deadlines. They thought they’d cheated software time. That confidence doesn’t look too smart today.

UPDATE: Steve Gillmor wonders whether maybe there really is 60 percent of the Vista code that needs a rewrite — and much more. Adam Barr, on the other hand, offers some reasons why that notion might be far off-base.

[tags]Dreaming in Code, Microsoft, Windows, Vista[/tags]

What journalists can learn from software developers

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One result of the whole Washington Post comments debacle is that, as Jay Rosen puts it, “We’re going backwards in our ability to have a conversation with the Washington Post.” The Post circles its wagons against the barbarians; its online readers and critics storm off, convinced more than ever that the newspaper “doesn’t get it.”

The word “conversation” is at the heart of the ideals that so many of the brightest lights and most ambitious prophets of blog-era journalism embrace. It began this trajectory in the hands of the Cluetrain Manifesto‘s authors; today it represents the hope for a new kind of post-media world in which a vastly broader spectrum of voices can speak and be heard.

Observers for whom “blog” is synonymous with “political blog” are often skeptical of this vision, because the conversations in the political blogosphere have become so closed-ended, repetitive and intramural. Political blogging in the rigid partisan landscape of 2006 too often resembles the parallel enforcement of party discipline. (Yes, there are many exceptions, but it is sad that they are exceptions.)

But you can find exchanges today that model the possibilities of a post-media conversation — where the actors in a field talk directly to each other, engaging and challenging and correcting each other. One place you can find them is the software world. It certainly has its feuds and its entrenched patterns of provocative trolling (just drop an anti-Macintosh comment and watch the group-mind hive buzz on cue). But, in following this field, I’m amazed, day after day, to see rivals and competitors lace their barbs with friendly banter and honest efforts at persuasion, or to watch critics and their subjects take on the awkward but fruitful back-and-forth that can actually move readers a few notches closer toward the truth.

One little example from this past week: As the Post was shutting down its comments, a tech-industry blogger named Mike Arrington, whose TechCrunch has become a hot water-cooler for the Web 2.0 crowd, was posting a critique of Ning — the roll-your-own Web application factory backed by Marc Andreessen that launched in October. Arrington wrote, in Ning — RIP?: “The reality of Ning is that it’s lost whatever coolness it had, no one uses it and Ning is going to have a very hard time getting people’s attention when they finally do roll out better functionality.”

Diego Doval is a developer for Ning. Yesterday he responded to Arrington (I found the link via Dave Winer). The gist of his post is that Arrington basically got it all wrong — the facts and the spin. But Doval didn’t flame his critic; he just patiently walked through his points and thanked Arrington for inadvertently showing him and his company how much better a job it needs to do to get the word out about its product. Scroll down to the comments on Doval’s retort and the first one is from Arrington — thanking Doval for the great post.

Now just imagine how this sort of conflict would have played out if we were dealing with, say, a liberal blogger who mangled some facts and a conservative critic (or vice versa).

Of course, the emotions engendered by political debate are of a different order from those inspired by software development. But, you know, they’re not that different — there’s pride and ego and anger and passion about the future in both realms. What the software universe lacks (except, perhaps, on some old-line corporate campuses, in certain corners of the open source world, or in the extremes of Mac fandom) is the emerging tribal behavior patterns of the political blogosphere’s ideological camps. It’s a lot easier to have a real conversation when you aren’t looking over your shoulder at a crowd that expects you to toe a particular line.

Bel canto

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Opera, the Web browser I’ve happily used for the last five years or so, is celebrating its tenth anniversary today. (It’s just a couple months older than Salon!)

If Firefox had been around back in 2000 I’d probably have adopted it, but Mozilla, back then, wasn’t ready for prime time, Internet Explorer was a joke, and Opera was great. It offered deep and wide configurability, and tabbed browsing at a time when most people hadn’t even heard of it. It’s always been super-speedy. Since my mode of work often involves keeping open multiple windows each of which might contain a dozen or more open tabs, it’s long been important to me that the browser keep a good record of those open windows — so that, in the event that some other application crashes (Opera almost never does) or the machine freezes up, I can return to my universe of open tabs. Opera still does the best job with this — to get Firefox to do the same thing, you have to add a special extension.

I’m sure the tide of open source will eventually carry Firefox beyond where Opera is today. But there’s something to be celebrated about a small Norwegian software company that sticks to its guns, stares down the giants and keeps improving its product. Opera is normally free if you’re willing to see some ads on the screen, or you can pay a reasonably low fee to make the ads go away, but today, the company’s giving away free registration codes.

Google follow-ups

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In my enthusiasm for the advantages of browser-based application development in my post about Google and Microsoft yesterday, I neglected to include the necessary counter-truth known to all web developers (one I have some experience with from my work at Salon): that when you develop for the browser, you’re actually developing for a whole mess of different browsers, each of which behaves just differently enough to make your life miserable. This seems especially true with the new wave of Ajax-based apps, that rest on a variety of technologies implemented differently by each browser producer (and each generation of product). Thanks to David Czarnecki for supplying my forgotten caveat.

And over on her blog apophenia (look it up! add it to your vocabulary! I just did), danah boyd offers a parallel argument about Windows-only development, suggesting that “you don’t have the right to espouse open standards if you continue to only build on top of only one closed one… Openness isn’t simply about open protocols concerning one application, but about open choice to mix and match layers through and through.”

Google’s Windows-only world

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Jason Kottke’s intriguing review of the current status of the Web-as-platform question (are Web apps now good enough to threaten the primacy of a certain desktop operating system monopoly? will they ever be?) is only the latest in a long line of musings on this theme that stretch all the way back to Netscape’s heyday. The dream of rendering individual users’ choice of desktop operating system irrelevant by getting them to move all their significant work into the browser was what fueled all those death-march development cycles during the browser wars.

Microsoft cut off Netscape’s air supply — with plenty of help from its victim’s own asphyxiating mistakes — before the browser company could complete building all the parts of this new computing world. Java was supposed to be an alternate road to the same destination; it turned out to be good for some other things, but not for that.

So we lost a few years there.

More recently, the Web-app universe has come roaring back, as GMail, GoogleMaps, Flickr and other Ajax-based Web interfaces have provided users with something speedier and more interesting than the old, slow, click-and-wait world of Web computing. It is possible, today, to begin moving more and more of one’s work and data into browser-accessible stores and programs. This is all great, and it’s unfolding with a kind of inevitability.

For a while there, during the downturn years, it seemed like the Web-based future might arrive without any one company driving it. The new structure of our technology would simply be built by a swarm of lilliputian enterprises that would gradually overwhelm the Gulliver of Redmond.

Suddenly, though, it looks like we’re back in the land of corporate showdown. In a wave of media reports, Google is being cast as the new Netscape — reluctantly, to be sure, since Netscape showed how dangerous it is to say to a company with an effectively bottomless warchest, “Bring it on!” Rather prematurely, I think, a lot of people quoted by Gary Rivlin in this morning’s Times suggest that Google is already the new Microsoft — that the company with the “don’t be evil” motto has morphed into a new evil empire.

Wherever you place Google on this spectrum, there’s no other way to read Google’s latest moves than as part of a broad effort to bring users onto Google’s platform so that, one day, they can be moved off Microsoft’s. That day is doubtless far off. But not unimaginable.

Google’s decision to raise $4 billion more on Wall Street, timed almost certainly not coincidentally to coincide with its release of two new software products (a new desktop application and a new “Google Talk” IM and voice communicator), reinforces the message first sent by GMail: that, when Google defines its mission as “organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful,” “the world’s information” very much includes your own personal information.

Which leads us to the paradox here. There is one little weakness in the theory that Google is setting out to challenge Microsoft. For some reason, each time Google releases any software that is not browser-based — whether it’s Google Desktop, or Picasa, or the new Google Talk — it has offered only a Windows version of the product. No Mac versions, no Linux versions.

Maybe Google feels that the Mac already offers a rich software environment for geeks (with good desktop search already built into the latest OSX) and Linux isn’t a big enough desktop market. Maybe they just target Windows because, to paraphrase the old bank-robber line, “that’s where the users are.” Or maybe they’re targeting Windows users precisely because they want to woo Microsoft addicts on their own turf.

No doubt, it would take a lot of extra work to release editions of Google software for non-Windows platforms. Cross-platform development is enormously difficult: that’s a fact of software life. (Browser-based software is so attractive because you don’t have to worry about writing different versions for different operating systems; the browser makers have already done that heavy lifting for you.) I always understood this intellectually, but now, after several years of following the work over at OSAF for my book, I feel it in my bones.

But Google has assembled a vast reserve of computer-science horsepower. It is, if Rivlin’s story is to be believed, sucking Silicon Valley’s software brains dry. Surely, with all that coding prowess, Google could set aside some cycles to offer non-Windows users equal access to the cool toys it is providing. If the Googleplexniks are serious about that phrase “the world’s information,” they need to look beyond the realm of Windows. The world doesn’t stop where the “Start” menu ends.

Backpack

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Backpack is the latest Web-app info-management tool from the gang at 37 Signals (Basecamp, Ta-da Lists, etc.), and it is a winner, I think: I’ve already taken it past the “I’m playing with this to see if it’s any good” stage into the “I’m using this quite a bit and considering whether to move some part of my life into it” stage.

The 37 Signals approach involves not trying to do a million things but doing a few things really well. Backpack offers a smart, usable Ajax-style interface for storing random data in Web pages that can be loosely structured as lists and notes. You can (if you upgrade to a paid version) also store files and photos. You can flip a switch on a page to make it “shared” (essentially, public) and others can then not only read it but modify it (wiki style). The final, most unusual innovation here is email integration: No, it’s not an email client at all, but each page is addressable by email — you can send stuff to a page at its unique email address — and each page can be set to send out reminders via email. It’s a relatively small, contained application, but I haven’t even begun to explore all the possibilities.

Oh, it’s also been developed on the same much-buzzed-about software platform 37 Signals has used for its other products — Ruby on Rails. It serves as a pretty fine advertisement (in the best sense) both for that technology and for its company’s philosophy. Congrats, and thanks, to all involved.

Out, out, brief outline

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I’m an outliner devotee, and I’ve always thought that a Web-based version of my beloved Ecco Pro would be the best of all possible outlining worlds. Sproutliner is just a gesture in the right direction, but it’s a beautiful one — it’s got click-drag-and-drop, it’s got columns, and it’s apparently just beginning development. Its outlining design is more natural and versatile to me than the list-oriented approach of Tada Lists; it avoids the click-and-wait Web-app torpor of Forty Notebook.

It still needs user authentication, text wrapping, clickable urls, cut and paste… and on and on. I don’t know how far you can push the Ajax magic to mimic the responsiveness of a desktop application. But this is pretty impressive.

Fox blood on the tracks?

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A CNet columnist, Molly Wood, totally misunderstands what Firefox, and open source software, are all about. She’s arguing that now that Microsoft has said it will issue an update of its browser, we can write Firefox off:

“For a moment there, it looked like the tyrant IE could actually be overthrown. Those were heady days, weren’t they? Well, they’re over now… If IE 7 is even 50 percent more secure than current versions, the Firefox rebellion is finished. If IE 7 has tabs, Firefox will be destroyed as surely as the Hungarian uprising of 1956 was crushed by the Soviets… now that the sleeping giant has awakened, I think the buzzing gnat of the browser wars is about to be squashed flat.”

This is a prime example of one of journalism’s worst habits — a knee-jerk application of “who wins, who loses?” logic to situations where it doesn’t really apply. “Finished.” “Destroyed.” “Crushed.” “Squashed flat.” This is the language of pro wrestling, sometimes adopted by business writers who are desperate to paint the typically colorless corporate world in the bright colors and action-packed imagery of sports.

Yet the whole point of the open-source challenge to Microsoft is that it can’t be “crushed” like a small commercial competitor. IE 7 may or may not cut into the extreme growth curve of Firefox adoption; but the people who are building the open-source browser will happily continue to fix their bugs and add their plugins and improve their product whether their adoption rate stalls out or not. And Firefox has already achieved critical mass in the market such that responsible Web site designers can no longer take the lazy “everyone uses IE” route.

Naturally, everybody wants their work to be appreciated and their products to be used, and I’m sure the Firefox team are going to pay close attention to Microsoft’s competition — but I can’t imagine them sweating the way the employees of a commercial startup in their shoes would. Microsoft can improve its browser from now till doomsday — and if it does, we should applaud — but there is no way it can “cut off the air supply” of an open source project the way it could “squash” a company like Netscape. Firefox’s air is free.