Category Archives: google

adobe, google, internet, microsoft, Uncategorized

What’s coming in Buzzword – and Live Writer as Word for the cloud

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Interesting post from Lisa Underkoffler’s on what’s coming in Buzzword, Adobe’s internet word processor. She mentions named styles, which I would enjoy since I use these all the time in Word; though I was surprised that it is frequently requested; most people seem happy to apply specific formatting and don’t worry about the structure provided it looks right. Maybe this is Adobe’s strong presence in the print and publishing world showing through.

It prompted me to make a quick tour of the competition to see who already has named style support. Nothing I could see in Google Docs.

Zoho Writer doesn’t seem to have them either.* Zoho’s site also seems a bit temperamental this morning. The connection kept failing which meant a long wait while, perhaps, some AJAX operation was not completing. Zoho froze IE completely; I switched to FireFox but it remained slow. I wish the Zoho folk would stop adding features (even named styles) and focus on performance and reliability for a while; perhaps it is better in the USA.

ThinkFree has them, and they seemed to work (more or less) once I had downloaded its gargantuan Java applet. The company seems to be shifting the emphasis to a downloadable application with online storage, perhaps because the applet is too big for casual use on any old computer. I tried the downloaded application as well. Curiously, after I saved and re-opened the document, my named style disappeared from the list of styles. I think something is not quite right here; I also had a few performance issues.

If you are happy to run a desktop application, Word plus Live Mesh makes a decent and familiar alternative. Just save your document to the Mesh, and open it from anywhere. Main snags: no Mac or Linux support yet, no online editing.

I’ve actually fallen into the habit of using Live Writer plus WordPress as a kind of cloud word processor. Writer has a feature called Post Draft to Weblog. Your document is saved to your blog, but not actually published. Usually I do this for posts that will be published later; but sometimes I use it for notes that will never be published. I can open the draft later from another PC using Writer; or use the online editor in WordPress if Writer is not installed. Another option is to save the draft locally, handy if you are offline; Live Writer will synch it with the online version later. Not recommended for confidential documents, but for casual use it is a powerful combination.

No named styles though. Never mind.

*Update: See comment below: Zoho does support CSS. So if you have a CSS stylesheet set up, you could use these styles in your document. Good idea, though I’m not sure how you go about using this if you are not a skilled web developer.

google, microsoft, search, yahoo

Now it’s YahGoog

Yahoo has signed up for Adsense:

By offering Google’s industry-leading technology to Yahoo!, the whole system becomes more efficient, and everyone benefits.

This is efficient in the same way that having everyone run Windows is efficient. Hmmm.

Google observes that the deal is non-exclusive; Yahoo can still sell its own ads, etc etc. I tend to agree with Om Malik, who says:

In my opinion, with this deal, Yahoo has publicly acknowledged that Google is superior to them when it comes to search & contextual advertising.

Yes. But how much does that matter? Outsourcing what you are less good at, in order to concentrate on core competencies, can be a smart business move.

The snag here: advertising is Yahoo’s primary business activity. Here are its revenue figures for the first quarter 2008:

  • Marketing services: $1,818 million
  • Fees: $245,milion

Outsourcing the core of your business is bad PR.

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adobe, flash, google, microsoft

Adobe’s Acrobat.com connects with online storage, collaboration

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Adobe has launched Acrobat.com, a free collaboration service now in beta. On the site, you can store up to 5GB of files, create documents with the Buzzword online word processor, share documents either with the world or with specified email addresses (the recipient must sign in with an Adobe account), and convert documents to PDF online. The PDF conversion is a trial limited to 5 documents, unless you subscribe to an online service, or buy Acrobat 9 and convert on the desktop (of course, there are plenty of other ways to convert to PDF these days). There is also an online conferencing application called Connect Now, which you can use for meetings with up to two other participants.

Connect Now is brilliant; I’m now yet convinced by the other services. Don’t get me wrong; 5GB of free online space is a fantastic offer, though it happens to be the same as Microsoft offers in Skydrive. However, everything is implemented in Flash, and this can be annoying. I find myself trying to right-click items to get a context menu; this doesn’t work, and I just get the Flash player settings menu. Right-click works OK in Google Docs, which also lets you create spreadsheets and presentations online, not just word processor documents. What is the compelling reason to use Acrobat.com, as opposed to these other services? And what is the business model – will Adobe go full tilt at the online productivity market, and offer Acrobat.com subscriptions for the Enterprise? And finance the free consumer/small biz services with advertising? I guess that is likely; but it is not good enough for those kinds of moves yet.

Connect Now on the other hand is a great conferencing system; Flash makes sense here, because it removes much of the friction that I’ve seen with other systems. You get chat; whiteboard with elegant drawing tools; webcam; shared notes; and screen sharing. The application can run with within or outside the browser. I presume it a cut down version of Connect Pro, formerly Breeze. I can see wide take-up for this; useful in its own right, and a good taster for the full version.

Screen sharing is a powerful feature, though I had a few problems on my first attempt, pretty though:

 

My second attempt worked fine.

google, microsoft, open source, software development

Google App Engine line endings snaglet exposes Windows/Unix disconnect

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This amused me:

In case you can’t see the image, it shows the release notes for the Google App Engine SDK, which I’m trying right now. The notes say:

Fixed behavior with source files that have Windows line-endings or missing line-endings.

With a nice self-referential touch, the notes reveal the very problem they are describing. On Windows, a line ending is usually encoded by two characters (carriage return and line feed), whereas on Unix (and similar systems like Linux and Mac OS 10) a single line feed character is used. Notepad is the default viewer for text files on Windows, and displays these Google release notes with scrambled formatting. A programmer’s editor like CodeWright1 understands both conventions and the file displays fine.

It is a minor annoyance, but exposes a deeper problem. There are two factors at play here. One is that the open source world has tended to use Unix-like operating systems (maybe because open source operating systems are Unix-like); the other is that the favourite client OS among Web 2.0 geeks is the Mac. It’s likely therefore that most or all the folk working on App Engine do not use Windows and do not see this issue. They have taken the trouble to support Windows, but the Windows platform is just a little alien. The poor experience you get when double-clicking a readme is a symptom.

Another example is in the notes describing the options for the dev_appserver.py script, used to run the SDK. It says:

–datastore_path=PATH      Path to use for storing Datastore file stub data. (Default /tmp/dev_appserver.datastore)

What was that default again? There is no /tmp directory on Windows. I am sure the script uses a sensible default on Windows; but it will be different from what these notes say.

Let me add that the Unix directory structure is generally nicer to work with than Windows, with its archaic drive letters; and that I see little sense in the carriage return character being needed to end a line (it’s a throwback to the typewriter). Windows is also more wrong that right about using the backslash as a path divider (all IBM’s fault, apparently).

As a developer, I perceive these things as a small nudge that I might not be using the best OS for the task in hand. That’s unfortunate for Microsoft, and I’m not sure how it can fix it – though getting Notepad to respect Unix line endings would be a start.

1CodeWright is/was an excellent editor that was acquired and killed by Borland; unfortunately it does not work properly on Vista though I still find it handy occasionally.

google, security, web authoring

Google Gears support in WordPress – is this the road to plug-in hell?

Interesting to see Gears support in WordPress 2.6:

The patch adds all static files used in the admin interface to a single offline storage. That speeds up page loading a lot, as it serves virtually all requests for static files from the computer’s HD instead of the network. So instead of 50-60 requests to the server on some pages, there are only 2-3.

Very simple, very effective. A user blogs the experience here.

So is Gears taking off? Maybe. There’s Zoho; there’s Google itself, there’s MySpace, which uses Gears for searching and sorting messages. Note that Gears is still in beta; it’s curious that major sites are willing to use it in that state, but that’s the Internet for you.

I have reservations about Gears. There’s the security angle. More seriously, there’s the question about whether this is the right way to extend the browser. Google is doing its own thing; so is Yahoo with BrowserPlus; so is Adobe with Flash, and Microsoft with Silverlight. All of them swear that they love browser standards, and in some cases (like local storage) there may be consolidation towards a standard API – see here for a good discussion – but there is real danger of plug-in hell.

Security is bound to be an issue as well, since the more browsers and their plug-ins interact with the client (which is the purpose of these extensions), the more potential there is for compromising the client.

google, internet, microsoft, search, yahoo

Microsoft: forget the Live Search Cashback, just improve the engine

Microsoft is paying users to use its search engine with a new search cashback scheme. Looks like an affiliate scheme where the commission is paid back to the customer. US only.

I think Microsoft should focus on improving its search engine. This morning, I needed to call a local electrician and figured that search would be quicker than using a phone book. I entered the name of the retailer and the town. For some reason, this stymied Live Search: the result I was looking for was not on the first 10 pages. Identical search on Google: the first four results matched, and the address and telephone number were at the top of the page with a little map.

In a poll last year 51% thought Google delivered the best results for an example search, while 35% preferred Live Search and 31% Yahoo. That’s an inconclusive result, and this is not an exact science; but personally I find Google almost always delivers better results, sometimes (as in the case this morning) dramatically so.

If Microsoft managed to reverse this I would switch to Live Search in a heartbeat.

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google, salesforce.com, search, Uncategorized

Running a business on Salesforce.com plus Google Adwords

At the Dreamforce Europe party this evening I took the opportunity to chat to some Salesforce.com customers. Most were traditional CRM customers (and seemed happy on the whole), but one person I spoke to used the platform more extensively. His business repairs domestic appliances. The entire booking system runs on Salesforce; and they use a mashup with Google Maps to inform their engineers of upcoming jobs.

I was told that Google Adwords is the most effective advertising they do. They have done some fine-tuning in order to get the best results. If potential customers search for upmarket brands, the wording of the ad might emphasise professionalism, whereas for budget brands the wording might focus on value for money. They analyzed the results and have proved the benefits of these adjustments. They do not use the content network at all, as they only want to target customers actually searching for something related to their business.

Another twist: they like being able to switch off Adwords temporarily when they have too much work.

All of this has been achieved on a low budget, mostly by configuring Salesforce rather than writing code. Interesting.

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.net, google, internet, salesforce.com, web authoring

Marc Benioff: Google deal is aimed at a common enemy

Here at Dreamforce Europe, I asked Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff about the company’s agreement with Google, in which Salesforce becomes an OEM for Google Apps. We saw this demonstrated in the keynote. You can start a email via  Gmail from within a Salesforce contact. When sent – provided you click the Salesforce send button and not the Gmail send button – the email is added to the contact history. A similar feature lets you attach a Google document to a Salesforce record.

It’s a useful feature; but long term, will Salesforce.com and Google be competitors rather than partners? It is a natural question, since both companies are promoting their services as a platform for applications. Salesforce has the Apex programming language, while Google has its App Engine. According to Benioff, App Engine is primarily for Python developers, while Salesforce.com is a platform for enterprise applications. This struck me as downplaying Google’s likely ambitions in the enterprise market.

I therefore asked Benioff whether the agreement with Google included any non-compete element, or whether Google might be a future platform competitor. He did not answer my question, but said:

The enemy of my enemy is my friend

The identity of the enemy is unspecified; but given that Benioff used Microsoft .NET as the example of what his platform is supposedly replacing, and that Google docs competes with Microsoft Office, and that Benioff makes constant jibes at the complexity and expense of developing for Windows, I guess we can draw our own conclusions.

For sure, it did little to allay my suspicion that Salesforce.com and Google will not not always be as warm towards one another.

As an aside, there are ironies in Benioff’s characterization of .NET. Microsoft launched .NET as a “platform for web services”, which is exactly what Salesforce.com has become. Microsoft was a key driver behind the standardization and adoption of SOAP, which is the main protocol in the Salesforce.com API.

.net, google, microsoft, silverlight, software development, web authoring, windows

Live Mesh: Hailstorm take 2?

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So says Spolsky, in a rant about both unwanted mega-architectures, and the way big companies snaffle up all the best coders.

Is he right? Well, I attended the Hailstorm PDC in 2001 and I still have the book that we were given: .NET My Services specification. There are definitely parallels, not least in the marketing pitch (from page 3):

.NET My Services will enable the end user to gain access to key information and receive alerts about important events anywhere, on any device, at any time. This technology will put users in total control of their data and make them more productive.

Swap “.NET My Services” for “Live Mesh” and you wouldn’t know the difference.

But is it really the same? Spolsky deliberately intermingles several points in his piece. He says it is the same stuff reheated. One implication is that because Hailstorm failed, Live Mesh will fail. Another point is that Live Mesh is based on synchronization, which he says is not a killer feature. A third point is that the thing is too large and overbearing; it is not based on what anyone wants.

Before going further, I think we should ask ourselves why Hailstorm failed. Let’s look at what some of the people involved think. We should look at this post by Mark Lucovsky, chief software architect for Hailstorm and now at Google, who says:

I believe that there are systems out there today that are based in large part on a similar set of core concepts. My feeling is that the various RSS/Atom based systems share these core concepts and are therefore very similar, and more importantly, that a vibrant, open and accessible, developer friendly eco-system is forming around these systems.

Joshua Allen, an engineer still at Microsoft, disagrees:

All of these technologies predate Hailstorm by a long shot.  There is a reason they succeeded where Hailstorm failed.  It’s because Hailstorm failed to adopt their essence; not because they adopted Hailstorm’s essence …. the “principles” Mark’s blog post cites are actually principles of the technologies Hailstorm aimed to replace.

but as Allen shows in the latter part of his post, the technology was incidental to the main reasons Hailstorm failed:

  1. Hailstorm intended to be a complete, comprehensive set of APIs and services ala Win32.  Everything — state management, identity, payments, provisioning, transactions — was to be handled by Hailstorm.
  2. Hailstorm was to be based on proprietary, patented schemas developed by a single entity (Microsoft).
  3. All your data belonged to Microsoft.  ISVs could build on top of the platform (after jumping through all sorts of licensing hoops), but we controlled all the access.  If we want to charge for alerts, we charge for alerts.  If we want to charge a fee for payment clearing, we charge a fee.  Once an ISV wrote on top of Hailstorm, they were locked in to our platform.  Unless we licensed a third party to implement the platform as well, kind of like if we licensed Apple to implement Win32.

Hailstorm’s technology was SOAP plus Passport authentication. There were some technical issues. I recall that Passport in those days was suspect. Some smart people worked out that it was not as secure as it should be, and there was a general feeling that it was OK for logging into Hotmail but not something you would want to use for online banking. As for SOAP, it gets a bad rap these days but it can work. That said, these problems were merely incidental compared to the political aspect. Hailstorm failed for lack of industry partners and public trust.

Right, so is Live Mesh any different? It could be. Let me quickly lay out a few differences.

  1. Live Mesh is built on XML feeds, not SOAP messaging. I think that is a better place to start.
  2. Synchronization is a big feature of Mesh, that wasn’t in Hailstorm. I don’t agree with Spolsky; I think this is a killer feature, if it works right.
  3. Live Mesh is an application platform, whereas Hailstorm was not. Mesh plus Silverlight strikes me as appealing.

Still, even if the technology is better, what about the trust aspect? Will Mesh fail for the same reasons?

It is too soon to say. We do not yet know the whole story. In principle, it could be different. Mesh is currently Passport (now Live ID) only. Will it be easy to use alternative authentication providers? If the company listens to its own Kim Cameron, you would think so.

Currently Mesh cloud data resides only on Microsoft’s servers, though it can also apparently do peer-to-peer synch. Will we be able to run Mesh entirely from our own servers? That is not yet known. What about one user having multiple meshs, say one for work, one personal, and one for some other role? Again, I’m not sure if this is possible. If there is only One True Mesh and it lives on Live.com, then some Hailstorm spectres will rise again.

Finally, the world has changed in the last 7 years. Google is feared today in the way that Microsoft was feared in 2001: the entity that wants to have all our information. But Google has softened us up to be more accepting of something like Live Mesh or even Hailstorm. Google already has our search history, perhaps our email, perhaps our online documents, perhaps an index of our local documents. Google already runs on many desktops; Google Checkout has our credit card details. What boundary can Live Mesh cross, that Google has not already crossed?

Hailstorm revisited is an easy jibe, but I’m keeping an open mind.