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Simon Phipps's personal commentary

Distant Friends

First, I'd like to wish all of you reading this a very happy Christmas in addition to whatever other festival you may be celebrating.

I hope one or two folk will be free to iChat later today. Like Tim Bray, John Perry Barlow and others I've discovered the delights of casual and relaxed conversations with friends all over the world using iChat AV. Australia, California, Germany and more have been extensions to my room. When I travel I try to find a hotel with in-room ethernet so I can just leave the connection to home live while I read or work, and it's not unknown to chat with good friends in California that way too, just living life in each other's company for a bit.

I'd been familiar with this before, of course - back in the early 90s I worked on an IBM product called Person to Person which included video conferencing (as well as desktop collaboration, and was lucky enough to have ISDN and a conferencing unit at home. It was clear then that if enough people had the technology, the net effect would kick in and a culture-changing 'massively connected' phenomenon would take place.

Is this it? Well, I'm not sure. Apple have shunned any support for the telephony-era protocols used by existing conferencing apps. That has the good side of ensuring all user experiences are good ones (I have yet to demo iChat AV and not draw gasps of surprise at the quality) but the bad side of limiting the scope of the net effect and leaving room for a nimble competitor to fill the gap. If they are smart they will soon introduce a Windows client and rescue us from the fate of having the sort of low-cost half-baked solutions that appear to compete with the iPod.

posted at 1:08 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Orchard Online

Warmest greetings to my former IBM colleague David Orchard who's joined the blogerati...

posted at 1:19 AM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Press Freedom

I visited MSNBC last year (I think) to be interviewed and was surprised to discover that to reach it I had to go onto the Microsoft Redmond campus and check in at a normal Microsoft reception desk - that was the first hint I had that there may be more oversight than just ownership involved. A recent development confirms that MSNBC can't be considered in any way independent.

While it's not editorial control that's being exercised, MSNBC.Com has decided that non-Windows users are no longer welcome on its site - their technical help tells you that "MSNBC video is unable to support the Macintosh or other operation systems (sic)." Now, Windows Media 9 actually plays just fine on my Mac (as does Real and Quicktime) and I have no problems with other sites like the BBC, so all I can assume is that MSNBC is being used as another weapon in the fight to protect the Windows monopoly.

posted at 5:13 AM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

How to misunderstand JDS

A long but fascinating article in Consulting Times considers not just Java Desktop System but the whole Java and Linux competitive dynamic. Well worth taking the time to read, much here that I agree with.

posted at 2:50 AM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |