The REST vs WS* wars get ever more interesting, with Dare Obasanjo from the Windows Live team announcing (or confirming) his conversion to RESTful ways, and Project Astoria demonstrating that Microsoft is now building REST services into ASP.NET and ADO.NET (see here for further comment).
Microsoft is still committed to WS*, but equally seems to recognize that much of the world wants to do REST. I’m glad that pragmatism is winning over dogged determination to stand by technology choices.
I’ve read the blurb, downloaded and read the manual, and watched the video. Here’s my first reaction.
Let’s take it on trust that Kindle, Amazon’s new eBook reader, is light and compact, easy on the eye, simple to use, has long battery life, and is highly readable in low light or bright sunlight. That’s no small achievement, but even if that is the case I have reservations. Here goes.
Here is what Kindle can read:
So what do you do if you have a Word document you want to transfer? Answer: you send it to Amazon, which converts it and emails the result. It’s a free service unless you want it emailed direct to your Kindle, when there is a small charge. What can Amazon convert:
If you have a PDF you are out of luck. Not even RTF is supported, which is bizarre since it is a subset of .doc, which is supported. Don’t bet on your CSS-formatted HTML converting nicely.
Note: you can connect your Kindle to a computer and transfer documents. So there is a way to grab existing text documents such as those at the Gutenberg project and transfer them for free.
But it’s just plain text. Fine for novels, but not too good for other kinds of content. The .AZW document type on the other hand supports formatting. What is .AZW? I am guessing, but let’s consider three things:
Looks like Amazon did a deal with Mobipocket.* That’s good, in that you can download a free document creator from there. You can also convert documents (including PDF) to .MOBI using the free Mobipocket reader. Maybe if you change the extension to .AZW it might still work? Perhaps I’m too optimistic, but you never know; it’s not a big issue since the Kindle reads .MOBI anyway.
How about books you purchase from the Kindle store, are they DRM-protected? My guess is yes, but I’ve yet to confirm. I don’t see anything in the manual about reading your .AZW documents on your PC. (Update: Yes they are DRM-protected).
Personally I will not consider purchasing a book from the Kindle store if I cannot read it on other devices as well. No matter how great the Kindle is, I may be out and about with just my laptop, or just my Smartphone. I may be at my desk and want to read my Kindle content from a desktop computer. If it is similar to Mobipocket, that may be possible to some extent, but there is all that activation/DRM stuff to deal with.
*Update – Amazon actually owns Mobipocket. So why is it not using a single format with compatible DRM (or better still, no DRM) throughout? Curious.
Even if Kindle fixes things like daylight reading (which I believe Sony has also fixed), there is still an issue with design. I was convinced by a session at Mix07 that design is a huge issue for bringing print content to the web or other electronic formats. Kindle is at a disadvantage because it is currently monochrome. Further, I’d encourage anyone to have a play with the Times Reader to see how this WPF-based application makes for a better reading experience than PDF, which is essentially an on-screen rendering of print design and combines the disadvantages of both, or even HTML.
Is an .AZW book good value at $9.99? That’s not a bad price, but when I picked one at random (Musicophilia) I found that I could buy the real book for $15.60 (free shipping) or second-hand for $11.60; a lot less than the $26.00 the Kindle store claims. If I buy the physical book, I can sell it or give it away when I’m done. The deal is more marginal than it first appears. If the content is locked to the Kindle device, that’s a deal-breaker.
What if Kindle goes colour in future, as is hinted, and better Kindle editions appear as a result? Will I be expected to buy the same content again?
Using Kindle you can subscribe to a blog for $.99 per month at the Kindle store. As a professional writer and blogger, I must say I like the idea of folk paying a subscription to read my stuff. As a user, I hate it. Why should I pay for what I can get for free on any other web-connected device? Further, my blog isn’t a “Kindle blog”, and I’m not sure how I can get it on the list.
Never mind, Kindle also has a web browser:
Your Kindle comes with an Experimental application called Basic Web which is a Web browser that is optimized to read text-centric Web sites. It supports JavaScript, SSL and cookies but does not support media plug-ins (Flash, Shockwave, etc.) or Java applets.
So you can browse to http://www.itwriting.com/blog and read it anyway. Hmmm, why would I pay for a subscription if I can browse to the blog for free? Just for offline?
Especially as the blurb says:
No monthly wireless bills, service plans, or commitments—we take care of the wireless delivery so you can simply click, buy, and read.
So Kindle has free mobile data access? Now that really gets my interest, especially if it goes global. Just wait for some hacker to convert Kindle into a free wireless modem for your laptop.
I’m longing for convergence. I’m fed up with carrying a phone, a laptop, a camera, an MP3 player. We are seeing some convergence – better cameras built into phones, Apple’s iPhone which is also an iPod – but it is early days. Unfortunately Kindle is the opposite: yet another gadget to carry. I don’t mind the existence of the reader, but Amazon needs to support other devices too (as Mobipocket does) so that the convergence dream is not lost.
Now we see another facet to Amazon’s music download store. The company wants to be your one-stop online shop for downloadable content: music, periodicals, books, the lot. Note that Kindle plays music too.
Will it work? I have huge respect for Amazon; it has the infrastructure, the customers and the vision to make something like this work. At the same time there seem to be some awkward gaps in this initial release, and to date the public’s enthusiasm for electronic books has been limited. I doubt that Kindle 1.0 will change that. Kindle 3.0 maybe. Even so, I can’t wait to try one.
Tech Ed Barcelona has been a low-key affair in some ways, with little in the way of exciting news; yet I was impressed with several pieces of technology which I had not looked at closely before.
I found it curious that the keynote made so little of these. In particular, I’m thinking about Silverlight 1.1, SQL Server 2008, and Project Astoria (also known as ADO.NET Data Services).
SQL Sever 2008 is a big release, though it is easy to get confused over what is part of SQL Server, and what is part of ADO.NET. I will be posting more on this subject, following my interview today with Michael Rys, Principal Program Manager of SQL Server Engine, Relational and XML (don’t try to say that quickly). One of the points of interest for those who follow Microsoft technology is the new FILESTREAM data type – in fact it is not strictly a data type, but another way to store blobs. This is a way to store unstructured data under SQL Server control, giving you the benefits of transactions, SQL Server security, backup, etc, but with the performance of the file system. In fact, each blob is stored as an individual file though you are not expected to find it using Windows Explorer. Using the SQL Server API you can get a WIn32 file handle to the blob, and there are no size limits other than those which the file system imposes. Result: faster access to the data.
Another piece of the puzzle is that full-text indexing is now fully integrated into the SQL Server engine. Right, so now we have indexed, queryable, high performance access to data in a transactional file system. Remind you of WinFS?
This will also give Sharepoint a significant performance boost in some future release, and Sharepoint is of strategic importance for Microsoft.
I’m also interested in Project Astoria, an easy to use a REST API into your database. This makes huge sense in the context of AJAX and Silverlight, and if you want to do mashups with other web services. I got the impression that Microsoft is being deliberately low key about this, pending an announcement at some future date. My guess is that it will be released at the same time as SQL Server 2008 – June next year? – but it is only a guess.
I fear much of this passed by many of the Tech Ed delegates. Talking to them at the party last night, I found that several were in the early stages of moving from .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0. There is a substantial time lag between release and real-world adoption.
Plane about to leave so I’ll wrap up here. I do have more to post from Tech Ed, so check back soon.
Kim Cameron has an amusing post on the aftermath of his blog being hacked and defaced over the weekend.
The reason for the hack: a security bug in WordPress. More proof of the problem posed by millions of apps out there on the internet with no update mechanism in place. Security fixes are made available, but not applied. WordPress has improved this somewhat by introducing an alert when you log-in to an out-of-date installation, but it needs to go further and provide something more automated. Personally I recommend the Subversion install, for those with command-line access; I used it for the 2.3.1 update and it worked well.
But I digress. The amusing part of Cameron’s post is his link to the comments on a news report describing the defacement. I believe in the value of comments, but some of the leading news sites are afflicted by knee-jerk commenters with time on their hands, who twist every post into another salvo in the OS wars. An news item about a Microsoft “security” expert being hacked seemed an ideal candidate (though I don’t believe identity is the same as security). “This is a shining example why you should host on Linux + Apache,” says one comment.
As Cameron observes, his site and blog is hosted by a third-party and runs on FreeBSD + Apache.
Conclusions? First, the thoughtless commenters on this kind of site are doing the community a disservice, by discouraging others with more interesting contributions.
Second, it shows what some have to put with just because of their association with a particular company.
Third, keep your WordPress patched.
It doesn’t quite add up, at least that how it seems to me.
I’ll explain. There are a number of places on the internet where you can exchange your unwanted CDs, DVDs, or other items, for others that you might like better. A while back I wrote a brief review of hitflip, a cd swapping site. I didn’t much like it. Someone commented to my post that SwapShop is much better. I tried it and found it was true: SwapShop is a better deal for users. The main reason is that while hitflip charges you a fee for each item you acquire (currently 79 pence), SwapShop is a free service. Furthermore, on my brief inspection SwapShop has better “stock”, the stock being items that users have posted as available. I’ve also seen the site recommended elsewhere, such as on the money site fool.co.uk. I like SwapShop and have made several successful trades.
However, there is something curious about the business model behind these sites, especially the fee-free SwapShop. A quick word of explanation. These sites do not really manage swaps, which would be inefficient. Instead, you exchange your items for credits, received when another user confirms receipt of an item you sent. These credits can then be used to “purchase” items from other users. But what happens if you would like to acquire an item, but do not have sufficient credits? Easy, you buy credits from the site:
If the item you want costs more than the Swap Points you have, you can wait to send more items to build up a larger number of points to spend, or you can buy points by going to the Account tab. Swap Points can be purchased for £1 each via PayPal.
This gives the the company running SwapShop some income, to supplement what it can get from Google AdSense and Amazon affiliate links. It’s not just SwapShop; other sites have a similar arrangement including PeerFlix (see here) and the aforementioned hitflip (see here).
Sounds reasonable – or does it? The success of the site, and the value of your credits, depends on the availability of items you want. In other words, it needs a balance between items offered and items received. But if somebody buys credits, that person acquires an item without contributing to the stock of available items. Put another way, and please correct me if I am wrong, the company selling credits is in effect selling stock that belongs to its users.
Consider a simple case. Let’s say the site is just starting, and ten people each offer a CD. They start browsing the CDs on the site, when an eleventh person comes along and buys all ten using purchased credits. Result: ten unhappy people, with credits but nothing to spend them on.
Provided the site is busy, this effect might not be noticed for some time, especially if users are happy to maintain accounts that are in credit. I’m puzzled though: other things being equal, isn’t this inevitably going to dilute the value of the site, potentially leaving users with valueless credits?
Other things might not be equal. For example, the company could counter this effect by purchasing stock with its income, and offering it in exchange for credits, or there might be other safeguards I’m not aware of.
If I’m right, selling credits for cash is a doubtful practice on this kind of site, unless users can also cash in credits (they can’t on SwapShop). A better approach would be to run it on a community basis, or get by on per-transaction fees, or let the advertisers pay for everything.
Isn’t my question about the business model at least a reasonable one? I can’t find it covered in the help page.
I put my concerns to Paul McDonnell, founder of SwapShop. He confirmed that money paid for credits is “a contribution towards the cost of running the site”. Isn’t that in effect selling items that belong to other people? “It’s a drop in the ocean, a tiny amount of money,” he told me, emphasizing that it was primarily for topping up credits for items you cannot quite afford. “It’s a benefit to the users. It’s just not an issue.” What would happen if, over time, this leakage resulted in a shortage of items to acquire? “I can’t imagine it happening,” he said. He referred to a recent questionnaire completed by thousands of users, none of whom raised the issue.
Point taken; McDonnell seems a decent guy and SwapShop users seem happy. Still, the nagging concern won’t go away.
Here’s what Ian Wright at Hitflip told in an email reply to my query:
We are already monitoring the proportion of flips vs. worth of available items in our system via several internal reports. If an inflation of flips will be evident, we will buy items and insert them on hitflip.
Hmmm, it would interesting to know what those internal reports say, and what proportion would trigger the injections of items into the system. Still, it’s good that the problem has been considered. Hitflip is theoretically in a stronger position than Swapshop, since it has fee income.
In July this year the House of Lords reported on personal internet security. I read the report and was impressed. I don’t agree with all of it, but I found it well-researched and mostly sensible. You can download it here [PDF]; I recommend it if you’ve not yet read the actual document.
The UK Government’s response [PDF], on the other hand, reads more like a series of excuses for doing nothing (or perhaps I have watched too much Yes Minister). So I guess that is that.
See Richard Clayton’s blog here (he was one of the advisors to the Lords committee), and this Register article.
Here’s a good offer from UK Voice over IP provider Voipfone. Call any number from a mobile at landline VOIP rates. The potential savings are huge, especially as the service works internationally.
The deal is described here. The first one aims to make use of included minutes on contract phones, for calls that otherwise would not be included in the bundle, like international calls. Voipfone customers dial a UK access number, and get a dial tone. Dial the number you want and get connected.
The deal for pay-as-you-go users is more cunning. Customers call a special number, which is never answered: you get an engaged tone. Voipfone calls you back and you get a dial tone. You dial the number you want and pay the cost of the VOIP-to-mobile call, currently around 14 pence per minute, plus the cost of the VOIP call, say 1.1 pence per minute for a call from the UK to the USA. For international calls that is likely to be a big saving.
Hmm, don’t the big mobile providers have small print about schemes like this? Still, I’m right behind it. Mobile call costs are a disgrace, and the profits from them subsidize a horribly inefficient and non-Green contract system which encourages users to trade their perfectly good phones for new ones every time they renew. Voipfone says:
We think that mobile telephone calls are not only far too expensive but also priced and sold in deliberately confusing ways. In particular, calls to and from mobiles and all international calls are wickedly expensive.
Can’t disagree there. Now, how about a scheme to make data transfer more reasonable as well? I have a phone here with all sorts of neat Internet features which I can’t afford to use.
Seen the reports of a major file-sharing site getting busted? You should also read this post from a musician and it seems a former Oink member, DJ/ Rupture:
About a week after I shipped out orders of the first live CD-r Andy Moor & I did, it appeared on Oink. Someone who had purchased it directly from me turned around and posted it online, for free. I wasn’t mad, I was just more stunned by the reach… and usefulness of the site.
I don’t doubt that Oink breached copyright laws. However it appears that the powers that be have been misleading the public in some respects. It particularly irks the Oink community that the site was widely described as “extremely lucrative” – in the BBC story this is part of a remark made by “A Cleveland Police spokesman” – when in fact it was an enthusiast affair.
DJ/ Rupture comments on the new economics of the music business:
My library metaphor for Oink makes more sense than economic analogies: for digital music & data, there’s lots of demand but no scarcity at all, which either requires that we rebuild an economic model not based on supply & demand, or start embracing commons analogies. I like living from my music but I also like libraries, the ideas behind libraries…
Personally I have long believed that only an all-you-can-eat subscription or license makes sense for legal music downloads and sharing, if indeed people will pay at all. The success of iTunes seemed to disprove that, but debate has reopened, following the opening of Amazon’s DRM-free music store, and Radiohead’s whatever-you-want-to-pay experiment. I appreciate that neither of these alternatives is an all-you-can-eat subscription, but the possibilities seem wide open again, and I still think that is where we will end up – something close to the library concept described above.
I enjoy the SmoothSpan blog but I’m not convinced by this article on Microsoft’s rift with the web.
Bob Warfield says:
Ever since their spat with Sun over Java, Microsoft has been on an increasingly proprietary path called .NET.
I am not sure why .NET is “increasingly” proprietary. Why is it more proprietary now than it used to be? Arguably it is less so; Mono is more advanced; and in addition Microsoft is going cross-platform with the CLR, by bundling it into Silverlight. That does not make it less proprietary in itself, but means that it is less closely tied to Windows.
Warfield does not quite say, but strongly implies, that .NET is failing in the market:
It’s symptomatic that you can find about 18 million Google hits on “SQL Server” but there are 77 million hits on mySQL. There are 2+ billion hits for PHP and 135 million for Java. C# gets a modest 15 million hits.
Right, so by the same logic PHP is vastly more important than Java. For some reason, I get different results on MySQL, which reports 171 million hits. Just for fun I tapped in Oracle, which gets only 105 million, inflated by all sorts of non-database references, so we must conclude that MySQL is far more important in the Enterprise than Oracle.
No, this sort of Google-diving is lazy analysis. Sure, the results are interesting, but they are skewed in all sorts of ways.
I am not suggesting that .NET is bigger than Java. Nevertheless, it has been a success story for Microsoft, particularly on the server which is the focus of Warfield’s comments. So too has SQL Server; in fact if I remember rightly, the server side of Microsoft has been showing healthy growth versus the more stagnant Windows/Office side of the business.
Look at what Netcraft is saying: in its October 2007 web server survey it show gaining market share for IIS and implicitly .NET technology, and has done for several months. Don’t take the Apache drop too seriously; Netcraft’s figures are skewed by the decision to remove Google’s servers from the Apache figures. Nevertheless, Microsoft seems to be growing its web business on the server side.
Jobs? I track these from time to time in the UK, and C# has shown remarkable growth since its introduction, partly at the expense of VB, but also versus Java. Yes, Java is bigger, but you would expect that.
Why has C# succeeded despite Java? Ease of use, productivity and tools. All of these can be debated; but there is some consensus about the excessive complexity of JEE, which has benefited Microsoft. I’ve also noticed innovations in C# being quietly adopted in Java. Given its false start with Java in the early days, I think Microsoft has done well to establish its new language.
Now, I do partially agree with Warfield. Microsoft is an island and I notice strong polarization when I attend conferences and the like: there is a Microsoft crowd and a non-Microsoft crowd. And I agree that the open source community builds largely on open source technology, within which Java is more widely accepted than .NET. However, the .NET island is relatively large and so far has proved resilient.
Should Microsoft drop .NET and embrace Java or PHP, as Warfield kind-of implies? No. There is no technical need for it, because .NET works well. It is not really a rift with the web, because it is server technology and actually plays pretty well with others, through web services for example. The key thing on the web is to be cross-platform on the client. Writely, acquired by Google, was a .NET product. Did anyone care? No; in fact I doubt many were even aware of it. Now Google has incorporated it into Docs and I should think it has been rewritten in Python or something. Few care about that either; but if it did not work properly on a Mac or in FireFox we would all hear about it.
I don’t mean to minimize Microsoft’s problems. More than any other company I can think of, Microsoft has difficulty in balancing the needs of its OS and desktop application business with the migration we are all making to the Web. Further, it has big PR and image problems, and poor market acceptance for Vista must be a headache. Yes, there is a Microsoft crisis brewing. I’d suggest though that the company can succeed best by building on .NET, not by abandoning it.
I am just back from Adobe’s MAX Europe. The previous Macromedia/Adobe conference I attended was Macromedia DevCon in 2002. Remarkably, the gold sponsors at the earlier conference included Microsoft, there to promote .NET technology to Dreamweaver designers. Such a sponsorship seems impossible now. Back in 2002, the big product announcement was Contribute, and its competition was FrontPage. Today, it’s war. Adobe is talking “platform”: hosted services, web applications, desktop applications, and none of it dependent on Windows; while Microsoft has suddenly got the cross-platform habit with its own Flash-like browser plug-in called Silverlight. On Adobe’s side, an amazing, ubiquitous, graphically-rich runtime that just works. On Microsoft’s side, huge resources and armies of .NET developers.
Max Europe was a good conference. There’s a buzz around the products, and I didn’t meet any disappointed delegates, although there was a little bit of concern that strong designer content was getting squeezed out by the new focus on developers. The Adobe speakers seemed very approachable, and I appreciated the willingness of senior executives to talk to the press. In fact, the company has retained something of a small company feel, at least among the ex-Macromedia team which seemed to dominate at MAX. Adobe also has a clearer focus than Microsoft, which comes over as more bureaucratic and internally conflicted.
Nevertheless, it is possible that some at Adobe are under-estimating Silverlight. One speaker assured us that it only runs in one browser (false). Flex Builder is slow and awkward in comparison to Visual Studio. Adobe does have a big advantage in mobile devices – Nokia was at MAX and is putting Flash in all its high-end phones – but I am not yet convinced of the merits of Flash Mobile.
Mac count at MAX: about 50-50 with Windows on a very rough estimate. That’s proportionally fewer Macs than at FOWA earlier this month, which was maybe 80% Apple.