Category Archives: microsoft

google, microsoft

Office Web Apps: is Microsoft missing its big opportunity?

5 Comments

I have been found the technical preview of Microsoft’s Office Web Apps mostly disappointing. One problem is bugs. These are to be expected in a technical preview, but I have had more problems than I would expect in a widely distributed technical preview. PowerPoint has been particularly problematic. When I try to edit a PowerPoint document I now almost always get “PowerPoint Web App encountered an error. Please try again.” Once I get this error I am stuck with it for the rest of the session. On the Mac I am unable to open documents in Office 2008; I get a message that says “To open this presentation, your computer must be running a version of Microsoft PowerPoint and a browser that supports opening files directly from the Office Web Apps.” On Linux the edit features of the Web Apps seem to be disabled completely. When collaborating in Excel, you cannot see what the other person is editing, which can result in your work being overwritten. Trying to load an Excel sheet that included VBA macros gave the blunt message: “Excel Web App was unable to load the workbook that you requested”.

No doubt these things will be fixed, or at least the messages improved, but it raises doubts about whether the Web Apps will be ready in time.

The performance of the web apps overall is mixed: load times can be slow, but once loaded it is not so bad – scrolling through a Word document in the Silverlight viewer is fine. Performance seems to vary, which may suggest server load issues, and/or the effects of caching as a session continues. Anyway, it was weak enough that when I tried an experiment with a larger spreadsheet I did so with no great expectations.

Here’s what I did. I ran a script that reads every filename and writes it to a file, and ran it against a drive containing many files. I imported this to Excel (which coped without blinking) and saved it both as an .xlsx and a .xls with a little over 30,000 rows. I tried importing it to Google Apps, which says it accepts spreadsheets up to 1MB (my sheet was 883K). Google wasn’t having it, and gave me an error – maybe because an .xlsx is really zipped, and uncompressed the .xls was nearly 3MB. I cut it down to 100,000 rows, whereupon Google accepted it OK. Scrolling from top to bottom took around 15 seconds, or nearer 5 seconds in Chrome: impressive.

Next I tried Office Web Apps. To my surprise, it accepted the large sheet without protest; even the upload was quick. Better still, it was able to scroll from top to bottom in less than 10 seconds, faster once loaded.

I was impressed, though something is not quite right. I put a little calculation towards the bottom of the sheet and for some reason I can’t figure out, it isn’t working.

Still, it seems that Excel Web App is ready for workbooks larger than Google will accept. It’s a significant issue, since there are plenty of large spreadsheets in the world; and I can’t see any inherent reason why web applications should not be able to deal with them. Deep Zoom does a great job of dealing with large bitmaps, so why not spreadsheets as well, on the same principle that you only need to see a small portion at any one time?

The Office Web Apps build on Excel Services along with equivalent services that are being developed for the other Office applications, so Microsoft is in fact building a server-side Office. It is a huge opportunity given the dominance of Microsoft Office in business, with the potential to jump-start Microsoft’s efforts to establish itself alongside the likes of Google and Salesforce.com as a provider of online applications. The big question is to what extent it is willing to surface the features of server-side Office so that users can take full advantage.

The answer currently seems to be, “not much.” The editing features are extremely limited. Here’s what product manager Chris Adams told me when I asked him to describe the limitations:

Our goal is not to replicate the desktop software on the web. The web is a few years away from providing the same kind of rich, powerful experience that we have on the desktop. One of our goals is that cross-browser, cross-platform support. Without wanting to use extra add-ins to add functionality, it does limit us in some ways.

We’ve been trying to look at the key things people might want to do when they access a web app. Smart Art is an example. Smart Art was introduced in Office 2007 on the desktop. With the web app we’ll look to enable people to edit Smart Art, update some elements in it, but we won’t allow you to create new smart art.

We’re trying to replicate the right features and functionality for what we think users will want to do with the web version. This is the first time that a lot of people will get to use it, so the feedback starts now. What people tell us now will inform what we eventually end up with as a feature set.

My feedback here is that the web apps should be as full-featured as possible, so that you can do all your work without having to click that Edit in Office button – which is never going to work anyway in some scenarios, such as on Linux.

Despite denials, I am sure that Microsoft is deliberately limiting the editing options in the web apps so as to ensure that we still need desktop Office. I cannot make sense of what is on offer in Excel Web App, for example, in any other way.

It seems to me that Microsoft is choosing between two paths here.

  • On one path it makes the Web Apps as good as possible, and risks losing sales of Office licences as well as making non-Windows operating systems more viable on the desktop.
  • On the other path, it limits the capabilities of the Web Apps, and risks losing customers in their entirety as they realise that Microsoft is not serious about letting them work through a web-based system.

Not easy, but I’d suggest that the first option above is less dangerous for Microsoft than the second.

.net, linux, microsoft, oracle, sql, windows

London Stock Exchange migrating from .NET to Oracle/UNIX platform

3 Comments

The London Stock Exchange has agreed to acquire MillenniumIT, and will be replacing its TradElect and Infolect systems with the MillenniumIT trading system. TradElect is based on Windows Server and .NET,  and was created by Microsoft and Accenture. Microsoft used to use the LSE’s system as a showcase for .NET scalability, but while it proved that .NET can work for large systems, the LSE suffered an outage in September 2008 that was rumoured to be the fault of TradElect.

I don’t know much about MillenniumIT but note that the company is a partner with Sun and Oracle and that the MillenniumIT Exchange brochure [pdf] states:

Operating System: UNIX or Linux

Database: Oracle

As Brian Bryson of IBM/Rational observes, it is short-sighted to lay the blame on the platform. Nevertheless, considering the high profile of this system and Microsoft’s active involvement it is at least an embarrassment.

The mitigation for Microsoft is that .NET has less to prove these days. Even if running a system as large and performance-critical as the London Stock Exchange was a step too far, particularly for Server 2003 and (apparently) SQL Server 2000, that doesn’t rule out Microsoft’s technology for more usual workloads; and there are improvements in Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008.

Still, I’d love to know more about why the LSE is abandoning TradElect and what the lessons are for those designing and implementing systems at this level.

The problems with TradElect are thoroughly debated in the comments here.

Update: Microsoft’s LSE Case Study from 2006 is here.

I have also received the following statement from a Microsoft spokesperson:

Microsoft continues to support some of the most demanding, mission-critical environments in the world and is constantly raising the performance bar with new solutions.  Most recently, Microsoft completed three different proof-of-concept projects for a major international stock exchange that demonstrate Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft .NET can successfully support very low latency trading activities, in the 100 microsecond range using standard 1 Gigabit Ethernet.  With the addition of Microsoft Network Direct, that latency is further reduced by 50%, which is industry leading performance.

adobe, microsoft, silverlight, sony, xbox

Sony’s Flash advantage for PlayStation 3 vs Xbox 360

14 Comments

Sony’s PlayStation 3 includes a web browser and for some time it has been possible to view BBC iPlayer content there. The iPlayer is based on Adobe Flash. The attraction of this approach is that the console is already plugged into the home TV, so it is a relatively seamless shift from conventional broadcasting, provided you can figure out how to operate it using a game controller.

According to the BBC’s Anthony Rose, people are figuring this out big time, now that Sony has both enhanced Flash with h.264 support and full-screen hardware acceleration, and added an iPlayer icon to the PS3 menu (I should think the latter counted for more than the former). He’s revealed on the BBC Internet blog that:

… iPlayer on PS3 now accounts for a massive ~10% of all iPlayer viewing, overtaking Mac (8.5%) to be our 2nd most popular platform for IP-delivered content.

I find that impressive given that the PS3 is still marketed primarily as a games console.

The obvious question: what about Xbox 360, which is inherently more than capable of the same feat? The problem is that Flash is not supported on the 360, nor does it have a web browser. You can watch TV via a 360, by using it as a Media Center Extender, but that means getting quite a few other pieces in place in your digital home, including a Media Center PC with a TV aerial plugged into it – and even then, you are not getting iPlayer, just digital TV.

There are a couple of solutions that come to mind. One is that Microsoft could get together with Adobe and support Flash on the 360. The other is that Microsoft could get a move on with its Silverlight support on 360 and persuade the BBC to serve up iPlayer content for Silverlight as well as Flash. Both are technically feasible; the first would be easier for the BBC but embarrassing for Microsoft, which is promoting its own video streaming technology, while the second would be expensive for the BBC.

Another party which is likely to be watching with interest is ITV, which has its own catch-up service. This used to be based on Silverlight but now seems to be pretty much all Flash, perhaps because of quality problems or simply to take advantage of the wider deployment of the Flash runtime. Even though it does not have its own icon on a PS3, you could watch ITV Player via the browser.

Catch-up viewing is popular, and this sensible Flash-based development alongside existing Blu-ray support gives Sony’s machine a substantial advantage over the 360 when considered as a home entertainment device, rather than merely a games console. I’d expect this to be a significant factor as buyers make their choices in the coming Christmas season.

Finally, I wonder what other interesting potential there is for runtimes like Flash or Silverlight on a game console that is wired directly into the family home? Could there be a PS3 app store in the console’s future?

Update: A couple of informative comments below observe that there is a way to get iPlayer on the 360 via WMV download and Media Center; and that Sky Player is Silverlight-based and coming to Xbox. So it is not game over yet.

adobe, eclipse, flash, microsoft, silverlight, software development, web authoring

The desktop versus web application debate

8 Comments

I posted a piece entitled Desktop applications are dead which attracted the following comment:

Web apps have plenty of cons too. You seem to only be looking to the Pros.

There’s something in it; though the article is a little more nuanced than its title. There’s also another debate to be had around the question of what a web application really is. If thousands of lines of JavaScript are executing on the client, is it a web app? If it is running in Flash or Silverlight is it a web app? If it is running out of browser (Adobe AIR, Silverlight, JavaFX) has it crossed the border to become a desktop app? This last case is particularly interesting, since although something like AIR should probably be categorised as desktop, its programming model is normally that of a web application with an offline cache.

The semantic discussion can distract from the real issues. The ascendancy of web applications has a lot to teach software developers. The enforced simplicity, even crudeness, in the user interface of early web applications brought some surprising benefits: users generally liked the minimalist approach and ease of navigation. The page model, intended for documents, turns out to work for applications as well.

Another big lesson: users value zero-install extremely highly. The routine of go to the web page – run the app is easy to understand. Some find it easier than finding an application shortcut in the Windows Start menu, and that is after the potentially painful business of running setup.

Still, I am slipping into reiterating the advantages of web apps. What about their cons? What about the pros of desktop applications?

I still use desktop applications a great deal: Microsoft Office, Live Writer, Foobar, Visual Studio, Eclipse, all the things I listed in 10 Mac alternatives to Windows utilities. Doesn’t that prove that desktop applications are still important?

It does; but there is an important qualification. None of these are line of business applications of the type which occupy so much of the time of corporate software developers and contractors.

The real point: if there is a discussion about whether a particular project should be implemented as a desktop or web application, it is not the web application advocates who need to make their case. Rather, it is the desktop advocates who need to show the particular reasons (which may be good ones) why only a traditional local install will do.

It is also important to follow the curve on the graph. The list of things that can only be done by desktop applications gets shorter with every upgrade to the web platform – whether you think of that as HTML/AJAX, Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, or [insert your favourite web technology].

Ten years ago, a web version of Photoshop seemed an unlikely prospect. Today, here it is. Office and email is going the same way, even if it is not quite ready for all of us; Microsoft will have to accept that or lose its business.

I don’t follow Rich Internet Applications with such interest because they are cool, but because they are the future of the client – and increasingly the present as well.

microsoft, windows

Why you probably don’t want to buy Microsoft SBS 2008 Premium CALs

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I’ve been trying to figure out licensing for Microsoft’s Small Business Server 2008. It’s somewhat perplexing. There are two editions, Standard and Premium, but you can apparently use Standard CALs with the Premium SBS. The Premium edition offers two extra features over the Standard:

1. A second server license for Windows Server 2008.

2. SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition.

So what’s the difference between Standard and Premium CALs? First of all, price. A pack of 5 standard CALs is $385 full retail, while 5 Premium CALs is $945 – that’s 245% more, real money.

But what else? You would have thought that a Premium CAL would be needed to access Premium SBS, but this is not the case. The Pricing page says:

Microsoft offers several flexible licensing options to allow for complete scalability of your cost in relation to your usage, including various CAL quantities to suit your specific needs as well as the ability to purchase SBS 2008 CAL Suite for Premium Users or Devices for only those users or devices accessing the “premium” features.

OK, so what are the “premium” features? Does this mean anyone accessing the second server? Apparently not. The Licensing FAQ says:

The Windows Small Business Server 2008 CAL Suite for Premium Users or Devices should be purchased for only those users or devices accessing the SQL Server 2008 Standard for Small Business shipped as part of Windows Small Business Server 2008 Premium server software.

Now we are getting there. It seems that the “premium features” boil down to just one feature: SQL Server 2008 Standard.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that SBS 2008 can be used by a maximum of 75 users; and that Microsoft offers a free version of SQL Server 2008 called Express which is limited to using a single processor, 1GB RAM and 4GB maximum database size.

It follows that small businesses only need Premium CALs if they are running a SQL Server 2008 application that is beyond the capabilities of Express, and even then only for those users who access that application.

SBS 2008 Premium Edition comes with 5 Premium CALs and costs $1899 full retail, vs $1089 full retail for the Standard Edition. Real-world prices are likely to be less.

My conclusion is that Premium Edition plus Standard CALs is good value if you can make use of the second server, whereas Premium Edition with Premium CALs (beyond the bundled 5) is poor value for the majority of small businesses, who simply do not need those SQL CALs.

Microsoft could make this much clearer by striking out all the references to “Premium features” in its publicity for SBS 2008, and replacing it with “SQL Server 2008 Standard” – unless it is hoping to sell Premium CALs to customers who do not need them.

microsoft, windows

Microsoft’s confusing web sites

Scott Barnes draws attention to this study which compares the usability of the Apple vs the Microsoft web sites.

Some things are bad for so long that you stop complaining about them. This is one of them. Let’s acknowledge though that there are mitigating factors:

  • Microsoft is a huge organisation, has a vast number of products, and creating a coherent web presence that covers everything is a monumental task.
  • The goals and technical abilities of visitors to Microsoft’s web properties vary enormously.
  • Staying up-to-date is a challenge.

Against that though, Microsoft is in the IT business and supplies both web design and web server technology; it regularly talks up the importance of “user experience” and must be aware that potential users will judge to some extent by what they find.

I use “web sites” in the plural because there are many Microsoft web sites. Perhaps there should be one; but as the referenced study observes, there are numerous different designs. There are different domains too, such as Silverlight.net, ASP.Net and so on.

Take my experience this morning for example. My question: how many processors are supported by Windows Small Business Server 2008? My Google search got me to here, an overview showing the two editions, Standard and Premium. I clicked Compare Features and got to here, which says I have to visit the Server 2008 web site to find out more about the “Server 2008 product technologies”. I click the link, and now I am looking at info on Server 2008 R2 – only I know already that SBS is based on the original Server 2008, not the R2 version. It’s not clear where to go next, other than back to Google.

Some general observations, after clicking around various SBS sites (I had some other questions too):

  • It’s hard to get past the marketing blather to clear information
  • Too many links lead to menu pages with further links – sometimes it feels like an endless loop
  • I found lots of information in the future tense, clearly prepared before launch and not updated
  • Regionalisation is poor. You can start on the UK site but end up with pricing and availability information applicable only to the US
  • There’s a Technet site as well as a general site and the differentiation is not clear. I suppose the general site is meant to be more business/marketing focused, but there’s plenty of overlap
  • In general pages are too busy with each one offering a splurge of choices
  • Some things are just inherently confusing – like the CAL policy, which has four different types of CAL (user and device in combination with standard and premium) that can be mixed and matched: you can use standard CALs with SBS Premium if they are not used with “Premium features”. Whoever dreamt that up has never worked in a small business.

Clearly this is not a simple problem to solve. At the same time, it is hard to understand why it is so bad. It is a large company problem: maybe too much bureaucracy, conflicting kingdoms, little budget following initial launch, everyone knows it is a problem but nobody knows who should be fixing it, that kind of thing.

Incidentally, I think the processor limit is actually the same in SBS 2008 Standard as in Server 2008 Standard R2, and this chart shows it to be 4 sockets. In other words, you can have up to four physical processors and still benefit from multiple cores. Probably.

apple, blogging, microsoft, twitter, windows, windows 7

10 Mac alternatives to Windows utilities

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I’ve been spending an extended time on the Mac in order to explore Snow Leopard. As far as possible, I’ve done all my work on the Mac since its release. The trial will be over soon … but in the meantime I’m sharing notes on some of the utilities I used for tasks I normally do on Windows, in no particular order.

1 Capturing screenshots

On Windows I press PrintScreen or Alt-PrintScreen (for the current window), then paste into an ancient copy of Paint Shop Pro 5.0 for trimming and re-sizing. No, it’s not PhotoShop, but it loads in a blink.

For the Mac I use Ctrl-Command-Shift-3 (whole screen) or Ctrl-Command-Shift-4 (selectable area) which adds a screenshot to the clipboard. Then I use the latest Preview, which has a File – New from Clipboard option. I love Preview – it has tools for further trimming and resizing, and when you save it shows the file size as you select different formats. Since I often want to minimise the size for a web page, it’s ideal.

2 Secure file transfer

I avoid FTP for security reasons, so on Windows I normally use WinSCP for secure file transfer.

On the Mac I use Fugu, and of the two I prefer it.

3 Word processing

On Windows I use Microsoft Word. On the Mac I mainly use NeoOffice, which actually felt a bit nicer than its parent, OpenOffice. I also spent some time with Word 2008 (good for compatibility, but slow) and Apple’s Pages from iWork 09. One nice feature of Pages, for journalism, is the stats window that shows the word count as you type.

4 Web browsing

I used Safari, in order to get the most complete Apple experience. I’m getting to like the Top Sites feature, though it’s hardly essential, especially the way it shows at a glance which pages have changed.

5 Sound editing

On Windows I use Audacity. On the Mac I use … Audacity, though for some reason I found it slightly less smooth.

6 Playing FLAC

Apple is still stubbornly refusing to support FLAC in iTunes or Quicktime. My solution was Songbird, a great alternative, which supports FLAC straight out of the box, or rather download.

For converting to FLAC I used MacFLAC, though I found it less than robust. I missed dbPowerAmp (Windows).

7 Remote desktop

I find Remote Desktop invaluable for managing servers. On the Mac I used the official Remote Desktop client, which worked well though it falls slightly short of the Windows version (perhaps this is a policy!).

8 Twitter

I use Twhirl on both Mac and Windows, an Adobe AIR application. One oddity (getting picky): the font spacing is slightly better on Windows. In the word Blog, for example, there is too much space between the B and the l, but only on the Mac.

9 Email

I never thought I’d say I missed Outlook, but I did. The thing is, after much experimentation I’ve found a permutation that works really well on Windows: 64-bit Windows and Outlook 2007 SP2 in online mode (only for a desktop, of course).

On the Mac I use Mail, but I’ve found it less than satisfactory even though I run Exchange 2007 with all the required configuration.

10 Blog authoring

On Windows I use Live Writer, which is superb.

On the Mac I write posts (like this one) in the WordPress online editor. I don’t like it as much, but it does the job.

11 Bridge

Now this one is a problem :-). I find JackBridge ideal for those moments when I need a break from work. It won this year’s World Champion computer bridge contest.

The Mac is not so well served, but I have trialled Bridge Baron and found it not bad at all.

apple, microsoft, xml

Docx on a Mac: still rough without Microsoft Word

I’ve been living on a Mac recently, while thoroughly investigating the new Snow Leopard. One of the questions that interests me: how difficult is it to use a Mac in a Windows-centric environment? Once facet of this is Microsoft’s latest document formats, introduced with Office 2007: docx, xlsx and pptx. What if you get sent one of these, and don’t have Mac Office 2008 installed?

I downloaded a document on Azure blob storage from Microsoft – a random example. I opened it in four different applications: Apple’s TextEdit, which comes with docx support built-in; Microsoft Word 2008; Pages from Apple’s iWork 09, and NeoOffice, the Mac-specific port of OpenOffice. In the image below, Word is on the left, TextEdit on the right, and NeoOffice in the foreground.

Word 2008 opened it perfectly, as far as I could tell.

TextEdit crashed on the first attempt. On the second attempt it loaded, preserving the text but losing most of the formatting. Not a bad result, considering the scope of the application.

Pages was the best of the three non-Microsoft applications. It gave me a warning about paragraph borders being lost, but did not mention that the diagrams were messed up (Pages is on the right):

Image corruption in Pages with docx

NeoOffice made a fair stab at the formatting, but included some extraneous characters (you can spot these at top left in the screen grab) and omitted the pictures completely.

As a final test, I used Word’s Save As feature to convert the document to plain old .doc. This opened fine in Pages and in NeoOffice, though I have to say TextEdit gave a mixed result: the formatting was better, but the hyperlinked table of contents came out worse in .doc than in .docx.

Conclusion: don’t send .docx to Mac users unless you are sure that they have the latest Microsoft Word.

apple, email, exchange, microsoft

Apple Snow Leopard and Exchange: the real story

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Apple’s Snow Leopard (OS 10.6) came out last week, and one of its most hyped features is native support for Microsoft Exchange. Here’s what Apple says:

With Snow Leopard, the Mac is the only computer with built-in support for the latest version of Microsoft Exchange Server. So you can use your Mac — with all the features and applications you love — at home and at work and have all your messages, meetings, and contacts in one place.

What this means is that eager Mac users will be upgrading to Snow Leopard and expecting to be able to connect to Exchange at work with Apple-style “it just works” ease of configuration.

The truth is more complex; and I’m disappointed with both Apple’s publicity and the number of reviews that have simply reported its claims without investigation. That said, it is a tricky subject, and I have some sympathy with Apple, which is doing more or less the right thing at a technical level.

Configuring Snow Leopard Mail to use Exchange

The first thing to understand is that there are myriad ways of connecting to Exchange, including:

  • MAPI, which is Microsoft’s proprietary API
  • IMAP, which is a standard protocol for server-based email
  • ActiveSync, which is a Microsoft protocol used for mobile devices
  • RPC over HTTPS, effectively MAPI over SSL, enabling Outlook to connect from outside the network without VPN
  • Outlook Web Access, a web UI for Outlook
  • WebDAV, now deprecated
  • Exchange Web Services, which communicate using SOAP XML messages

Which of these protocols are actually enabled, and whether they are published beyond the internal network, is a matter for Exchange admins to configure.

The usual generic method to connect to Exchange from a miscellaneous client is IMAP, and this is exactly what Apple supported in Mail before Snow Leopard, and still supports. IMAP works pretty well in my experience, but it is only for email and does not expose any Exchange-specific features.

Snow Leopard adds support for Exchange Web Services (EWS), giving a much richer level of access to Exchange. First snag: EWS is only supported in Exchange 2007, which is why Apple says in its small print:

requires Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 Update Rollup 4

Second snag: even EWS does not all the features of MAPI, and some features (notably public folder support) were only added in Exchange 2007 SP2, which has just been released. This probably explains why Mail does not (as far as I can tell) support public folders.

The key thing to understand is that Snow Leopard is not using the same protocol as Outlook and therefore does not have access to the same set of features.

What works and what doesn’t

Let’s assume that you have Snow Leopard and Exchange 2007 SP1. What works and what doesn’t? Based on my experience so far:

  • You will be able to connect on an internal network or VPN, provided that EWS is enabled, which it usually is. You may need to install a digital certificate to avoid warning messages.
  • Mail, Calendar (iCal), tasks and notes in your Exchange mailbox all appear nicely.
  • When outside the network, you will only be able to connect over the Internet if EWS is published externally, which it often is not. You cannot use RPC over HTTPS.
  • There is no access to public folders (note that these are deprecated, but still widely used).
  • It is not possible to send from an email address other than the default.
  • You cannot use Exchange delegation features, such as accessing other mailboxes.
  • Mail will download the entire mailbox; you cannot set it only to download recent items. There is no “online mode” as there is with Outlook.
  • When offline, you can access existing items, but new messages have to be saved as drafts. This is unlike Outlook, which gives you full access to send mail, delete etc, and synchronises on re-connect.

Snow Leopard vs Entourage

You might imagine that Microsoft’s own Entourage product would do a better job than Apple Mail at connecting to Exchange. This is not necessarily the case. The problem is that Entourage 2008 doesn’t use MAPI either. In its first incarnation it uses WebDAV. This proved so problematic that Microsoft quietly released a new Web Services Edition that uses EWS, like Snow Leopard. Even this is a temporary expedient, as the Mac Business Unit has announced Outlook for the Mac. The implication is that it will be closer to feature-parity with Outlook on Windows, though it’s not clear to me whether this means MAPI, or EWS, or who knows what?

My view is that unless you need some specific feature of Entourage, or find that Entourage mysteriously works where Snow Leopard does not, you are likely better off without it. This presumes Exchange 2007, of course. The fundamental reason is that Mail and iCal are nicely integrated with the operating system, whereas Entourage is not so good in this respect; there have also been quality issues with Entourage.

It would be good to see a detailed technical note from Apple and/or Microsoft on Snow Leopard’s Exchange support, how to configure Exchange for it, and any implications for security etc. In the meantime, there is an interesting discussion on Apple’s forums which highlights the issues.

For all its (many) faults, Outlook on Windows remains a better Exchange client than either Snow Leopard or Entourage.

apple, microsoft, windows, windows 7

Apple Snow Leopard: why don’t we all use Macs?

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Last Friday I attended Apple’s press briefing for Snow Leopard, and I’ll be a Mac (mostly) for the next few days as I put OS 10.6 through its paces. For as long as I can remember, I’ve set up my desktop so that I can easily switch between Mac and Windows, so it is no great hardship.

Snow Leopard is a relatively low-key release, timed by accident or design to appear not long before Windows 7 makes its full public debut in October – though many IT professionals are already using the final build. In the unlikely event that you’ve missed the many reports, the headline new features are:

  • Many small refinements and speed improvements
  • Major applications re-written in 64-bit
  • Grand Central Dispatch – OS-level support for easier concurrent programming
  • OpenCL – standard means of using the GPU (graphics processing unit) for general processing, not just graphics
  • Exchange support in Mail, iCal and Address Book

The Exchange support is welcome, though unfortunately it is limited to Exchange 2007. It was already possible to access Exchange in Mail, though the older support (which still exists for pre-2007 Exchange) was based on IMAP, whereas the new support is based on Exchange web services and has richer features.

I use Exchange 2007, and found it easy to set up my account in Mail. Unfortunately I’m missing some Outlook features, such as the ability to choose a different Sender  address, and I’ve found it prone to a few mysterious pauses –  once it went into a sulk for over a minute when I marked a message as junk – but this might be a problem with Exchange web services rather than Mail, who knows? I also have some public folders which appear to be inaccessible from Mail or iCal. Then again – Entourage isn’t as flexible as Outlook either.

Still, I  expect the Exchange support will be good enough for many users, and this will make it easier to integrate Macs into Windows-based networks.

So, here’s a thought experiment. Let’s make an assumption:

  • Most people prefer the Mac operating system over Windows, and prefer the Mac hardware over most PC or laptop hardware.

If that is the case, why do we not all use Macs?  There’s a host of reasons which come to mind, starting with price. I looked at macwarehouse.co.uk and pcworld.co.uk, which are owned by the same group. The cheapest Mac I can find (Mac Mini + keyboard, mouse and display) is currently £536.96, vs £260.86 for a PC; and the cheapest laptop is £645.99 + VAT for a MacBook vs £216.52 for a cheapie PC laptop with Vista Basic. These differences are not small.

Note I am not saying that the Mac is poorer value; that is an entirely different argument.

A second big issue is application compatibility. Although there is no problem that cannot be solved with finding alternatives, or dual boot, or a virtual machine, it is all friction that impedes Mac acceptance.

Third, there is the greater manageability of Windows in a corporate environment based on Windows. This is a form of incumbent advantage, which is hard to break unless the incumbent messes up badly. Arguably Microsoft has messed up badly, though less in the business context than in the consumer context, and Windows 7 will pull back some lost ground.

The above leads me to believe that Snow Leopard is not likely to change the status quo significantly – understanding that the status quo is that Apple is gradually increasing its market share – even granting the assumption I made, which is somewhat controversial. On balance, I consider it more likely that Windows 7 will stem the flow towards Apple, though without a high degree of confidence.

More significant than either factor is the continuing migration towards the Internet. In this respect I’ve argued that Apple is like Microsoft. The Internet is a great leveller; it will reduce the friction of changing operating systems (helping Apple) but also make Apple’s UI advantage less noticeable (helping Windows/Linux/Google), and make it harder to sell expensive desktop software (Microsoft is the bigger loser here I think).

It’s fun to speculate; but I must add that so far Snow Leopard has been a pleasure to install and use. Technically, Apple hasn’t missed a beat with OS X since the first release, and that’s an impressive achievement.