| Opinion: Having Microsoft Office available on Mac OS gives Apple needed credibility with customers. But it also gives Microsoft the ability to suddenly pull the plug if it ever so decides. | |
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The concern isn't that the typical Macintosh "consumer" customer requires MS Office for digital photography or their iPod. But home Macs are generally used at least occasionally by someone who has Microsoft Office running on Windows at work. The thinking goes that, at some point, Office compatibility figures somewhere into the purchase of most Macintosh hardware. And nothing says Office compatibility quite like a real, honest-to-goodness version of Office for the Mac—even if Microsoft has for years crippled the Mac version in such a way as to make it unattractive to "real" (meaning Windows) Office users. Even today, there is no Outlook for Mac, just a program called Entourage that is only barely compatible with corporate Exchange servers.
The deal that saved Apple included Microsoft's promise to keep building Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer for five years. That deal ran out in August 2002 and was not extended, despite pressure from analyst Rob Enderle and myself to keep it alive. At one point, Microsoft even agreed to make a new agreement, though I think there was a side agreement between the two companies that Apple wouldn't ask for one. Since that time, Apple has introduced its Safari browser, Microsoft has ditched Internet Explorer for Mac OS, and life on earth has continued to flourish. Microsoft also has released two editions of Office for OS X since the end of the development agreement. Many people believe the current Mac Office is the company's best Office, regardless of platform.
Now, with the rumor-fueled run-up to Macworld has come speculation that Apple will announce its own office suite. The basic elements are already in place. MacOS X already comes with a calendar, address book, mail client and synchronization utility. The AppleWorks suite is available for OS X, though it hardly compares to Microsoft's "MacOffice" 2004. Apple today does not offer a real Outlook competitor, but it easily could. Of course, to be really useful, such a product either needs to talk to Microsoft Exchange servers, or Apple needs to offer an Exchange-like server capable of supporting Outlook clients on Windows machines. Though an interesting topic for speculation, such a server, if not beyond Apple's technical capabilities, is beyond its level of interest in the business customers it would support. That Microsoft's Office for Macintosh 2004 is a better suite than the Windows version is a topic for another column. In its most recent release, the program isn't nearly as crippled as previous versions were, all in ways that would make Windows users not want to buy a Mac and Mac users unable to easily connect to Exchange servers. But you know the saying that a government big enough to give you everything is big enough to take everything away? Insert "Microsoft" for "government," and you have Apple's predicament. |
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Can the Mac Do Without Microsoft Office?
Windows Lags in the User Rights Movement
| Tech Analysis: Mac OS and Linux handle privileges more sensibly, but Vista could change that. | |
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Among the challenges that enterprise administrators face when attempting to properly lock down the Windows machines in their care, managing the laundry list of operating system functions that require elevated privileges is a chore that looms large. Making matters even worse are Windows' anemic facilities for allowing rights-limited users who are out of reach of IT support to access these functions, without granting them full administrative rights. The primary client alternatives to Windows XP—Apple Computer Inc.'s Mac OS X and most of the prominent Linux distributions—manage user privileges more smoothly than XP does. But eWEEK Labs believes that Vista, which will replace XP sometime next year, demonstrates that Microsoft Corp. is about to catch up. Mac OS X When talking about the various functions of their beloved operating system, Mac stalwarts are fond of remarking, perhaps a bit smugly, that the Mac "just works."
But when it comes to appropriately managing user permissions, Apple's OS X definitely merits that phrase. In fact, the Mac boasts the best user rights management of any operating system we've tested. Mac OS X offers separate user and administrator privilege levels and, more importantly, includes effective facilities for prompting users when rights elevation is required. For instance, when a regular user attempts to drag something to a restricted system folder—such as when one installs a Mac application by dragging it to the applications folder—OS X refuses to complete the action, but it does offer the user the option of authenticating with admininstrative credentials to complete the operation. Beyond its simple, effective rights elevation facilities, OS X, when paired with OS X Server, offers good tools for controlling the applications and options to which users have access. This makes the Mac a very good system for lockdown overall. Linux Linux offers good user rights separation and elevation as well, but the specific way that this is implemented depends on the distribution you're using. However, in most popular Linux distributions, such as those from Red Hat Inc., Novell Inc.'s SUSE or the Debian families, regular users receive prompts for root password authentication for operations that require administrator rights. These distributions use the command su to become root and allow users to run arbitrary commands. In addition, Linux distributions usually ship with a handy application called sudo, which enables administrators to grant users permission to run particular commands with root rights by authenticating with the user's own password. Sudo thereby makes it possible to regulate what users do, as well as to generate an audit trail—very useful capabilities when locking down a system. SELinux also boosts rights separation by mandating more specific permissions over what users and applications are allowed to do on a system. At this point, however, SELinux is mostly server-oriented and will require more implementation polish to be effective for client use. Vista We've all heard quite a bit about the flashy hardware-accelerated, three-dimensional features that will accompany Vista when Microsoft's new client operating system ships sometime next year. However, Vista will also include some long-overdue updates to Windows' tools for regulating user permissions, enabling the operating system to do so more appropriately than Microsoft has done in any of its Windows releases so far. We believe that these bits, rather than the flashy user interface, will have the biggest impact on IT upgrade decisions. Like Mac OS X and most Linux distributions, Vista will prompt users who are running with limited rights to enter administrative credentials when those permissions are required. Vista will also run Internet Explorer in a reduced-rights mode by default, which will limit the damage that could be done if (or when) the new IE were to be subverted by malicious code. Finally, Vista will include support for virtualized, per-user system file locations and registry entries. Virtualized file locations and registry entries are intended to enable applications to function properly even for users without administrative rights. We're intrigued by the virtualized-system-files concept, and we'll be keeping a close eye on how this potentially useful, potentially confusing feature shakes out as Vista nears release. |
Watchdog Probes Samsung's Apple Deal
SEOUL (Reuters)—South Korea is investigating a flash memory supply deal between Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Apple Computer Inc. over pricing, officials at the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said on Wednesday.
South Korean manufacturers of digital music players have complained Samsung is offering the chips used in Apple's iPod MP3 players at an unfairly low price, putting them at a disadvantage.
News of the probe came a day after Apple said it would prepay Samsung and Hynix Semiconductor Inc. $500 million and $200 million, respectively, to secure flash memory chips for its market-leading iPod music players.
"We are investigating whether Samsung has been unfairly supplying flash memory chips to Apple at cheaper prices than applied to domestic music player makers," a FTC spokesman said by telephone.
A Samsung spokeswoman declined to comment on whether the chipmaker has been offering lower than usual prices to Apple.
"The deal hasn't breached any laws so we believe there will be no problem," the spokeswoman said.
Another FTC official at a team in charge of the investigation said there had been no formal complaint filed with the watchdog over Samsung's chip deal with Apple.
Samsung shares were up 2.54 percent at 605,000 won by 2158 EST, outperforming the broader index, which rose 1.57 percent.
Podcast Chaos Be Gone
Two new search engines offer to do for podcasting what Technorati does for blogs by letting users search podcasts by keyword to single out audio that suits their interests.
Podzinger and blinkx scour audio content for keywords by translating the audio into text and creating an index for quick searching. It's a significant step above traditional search engines that identify only keywords in a podcast's metadata, such as the headline and introductory notes describing the audio file's general content.
See also
Podzinger, in beta until mid-December, lets users jump to the spot in a podcast where their search term appears, rather than forcing them to scan an entire program for pertinent parts as blinkx does. Its minimalist design has an uncluttered search page, à la Google. And Podcasters can link to a searchable index of their content in order to sell sponsored links to text in the index provided by Podzinger.
Both Podzinger and blinkx include information about the source of the podcast and excerpts of text translated from the podcast with the relevant search terms highlighted. But Podzinger's information is more extensive and the results include a counter indicating where in the podcast the snippet is located. And Podzinger allows users to click on the Play button to hear the excerpt and determine its relevancy before clicking on a link to download the entire podcast.
A third search engine, launched last spring by TVEyes and called Podscope, searches podcasts but scans only for the sounds of syllables rather than full words. AOL recently announced plans to integrate Podscope into the portal's search page.
"The (podcast) world is exploding," said Alex Laats, president of the business division of BBN Technologies that created Podzinger. "The problem, though, is that ... it's very difficult to find what you want to find in podcasts.... Google proved that relevance of results means almost everything. But our view is that without the words you can't get the relevant results."
Podzinger is based on speech-recognition software that BBN, a Massachusetts-based research and development firm, created for U.S. intelligence agencies. It was intended to help analysts translate and scour foreign television broadcasts and other media for topics and speakers of interest.
Laats said the analysts' tool focuses mainly on Arabic-language broadcasts, translating real-time feeds from the Al Jazeera network, for example, and highlighting names, places and other words of interest to analysts. The software also can track a speaker's unique voice so broadcasts of Osama bin Laden tapes, for example, can be singled out and tagged.
BBN plans to roll out similar tools the public can use to search online video and radio content, but is focusing first on podcasts because of their recent popularity boom. According to Laats, an estimated 25,000 to 50,000 podcasts are currently online, of which BBN has so far indexed about 14,000. The company plans to work with affiliates like CNN to index their podcasts and online video.
The blinkx service is a bit more extensive. It scours more than 45,000 podcasts and already offers search for 1 million hours of TV news video and the content of academic lectures and guest speakers at the nation's top universities.
Podscope has operated a keyword search engine for video and radio broadcasts since 1999.
Gary Price, news editor of Search Engine Watch, said the concept of searching audio is not new. He points out that HP Labs was one of the first to produce audio keyword searches when it launched an experimental web-based tool called Speechbot in 1999. The tool cataloged more than 17,000 hours of multimedia content for everything from National Public Radio to Scuba Radio before HP took it offline earlier this month.
Price said the translations weren't always perfect but they were good enough to be effective, and he hoped that increased competition in the search realm would mean improvements in speech-to-text translations.
The plethora of new engines, Price said, means that "the spoken word is now becoming as searchable as the printed word has always been."
My Style Inside THE ALL NEW MSI NOTE BOOK
Micro-Star International (MSI), one of Taiwan's largest manufacturers of motherboards, graphics cards, portable entertainment devices and personal computers, has launched its latest lightweight notebook, the MEGA BOOK S270. With a 12.1-inch viewing screen, the MEGA BOOK S270 is one of the best and lightest in the market and this ultra-slim notebook weighs a mere 1.9kg. Despite its slimness and lightness, it offers a wide range of astonishing capabilities to give mobile executives and frequent travelers maximum mobility and versatility.
Based on the new AMD Turion 64 processor, the MEGA BOOK S270 is specifically designed to deliver optimum performance for demanding applications as well as built-in support for future 64-bit applications. With the AMD Turion 64 processor, users can enjoy outstanding performance on PC software including productivity and entertainment.
The system is built to maximize the advantage of efficient integrated Wi-Fi connection, which is essential for executives and students that need access to the Internet, email and corporate resources from remote locations. In addition to wireless networking capability, the MEGA BOOK S270 is powered by Lithium ion battery delivering up to 2 hours(the standard 4 cell battery pack) of battery life.
The MEGA BOOK S270 is loaded with special functions including a complete video and data input/output interface, integrated 4-in-1 card reader and DVD combo drive. You can transfer photos with ease from your digital camera to the MEGA BOOK S270. The 4-in-1 card reader accepts popular types of memory cards such as MS, MS Pro, MMS, and SD, thus there is no need to buy an additional memory card.
An excellent choice for a work assistant and partner for personal entertainment, the MEGA BOOK S270 is a full-featured notebook which has a complete range of connectivity ports, including an IEEE 1394 and USB 2.0 ports, which give users a multitude ways of transferring music, pictures and data to and from electronic devices.
MSI MEGA BOOK Bluetooth module is designed to provide a solution for Bluetooth connectivity. It extends your notebook up to 7 Bluetooth device notes. It also fully supports Wide Range Self Power Mode for USB 2.0/1.1/1.0 Devices. A wide range of compatible profiles enable Bluetooth Star Hub to communicate with Bluetooth mouse/ keyboard/ game pad, and exchange your favorite photo/music files with Bluetooth embedded cellular phone and handheld device.
With a complete and developed product line including laptop, PC system, server, wireless communication, optical storage and Internet appliance, MSI is slowly being transformed into a versatile IT company providing high-quality IT solution. To meet the needs and requirements of the consumer market, MSI won't stop innovating but will deliver more and more cutting-edge products.
The Most Extreme Gaming Graphics Card
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The MSI RX850 series & MSI RX800 series feature ATI's all-new CATALYST™ Control Center, the award-winning application that is revolutionizing how users interact with their graphics software. CATALYST™ Control Center delivers the industry's most stable 3D acceleration control software, providing exceptional graphics performance and breathtaking visual quality.
Road to Expo: Reborn Mac mini set to take over the living room
By Ryan Katz, Senior Editor
November 29, 2005 - Apple's Mac mini will be reborn as the digital hub centerpiece it was originally conceived to be, Think Secret sources have disclosed. The new Mac mini project, code-named Kaleidoscope, will feature an Intel processor and include both Front Row 2.0 and TiVo-like DVR functionality.While the specific model and speed of the Intel processor in the new Mac mini is unknown, sources are confident the system will be ready for roll-out at Macworld Expo San Francisco, in line with other reports Think Secret has received that Intel-based Macs will be ready some six months sooner than originally expected.
The new Mac mini is also said to sport a built-in iPod dock, a feature that was scrapped from the Mac mini Apple first introduced one year ago. Other hardware specifics are unknown, such as whether the Mac mini will feature video recording out of the box or whether an add-on will be offered for those looking to employ the Mac mini not as a second computer but as their living room command center.
It is similarly unknown whether Apple will scrap the 2.5-inch hard drive currently featured in the Mac mini in favor a standard 3.5-inch hard drive, both to boost storage capacity that heavy media users demand and to trim costs; such a move would undoubtedly result in a larger Mac mini.
Specifics surrounding Front Row 2.0 and Apple's DVR application are limited at this point, although sources with knowledge of the project have dubbed the latter a "TiVo-killer." The moniker might not be without some bias, however, as sources report that talks of an Apple-TiVo deal recently fizzled, prompting TiVo to independently announce this month that it will soon offer customers the ability to copy stored content to a video iPod.
While Apple surprised watchers when the company delivered Front Row alongside updated iMac G5s recently, Apple's media center intentions have become startlingly clear in the past year since Apple first delivered the Mac mini and customers first started connecting the system to home theaters and installing it in automobiles. Sources have hinted that additional media announcements will further propel Apple's strategy, and with the hardware, software, and iPod sales behind it, Apple now seems poised to firmly plant its footprint in living rooms.
Analyst sees Intel PowerBook in January
"We are becoming more convinced that Apple will introduce its first Intel-based PowerBook at Macworld San Francisco," analyst Richard Gardner said in a research note sent to clients.
The analyst believes Apple plans to introduce the professional laptops sooner than expected in order to help minimize the risk that it would end up with an inventory buildup of its current non-Intel laptops as customers anticipate the new models.
Earlier this month, reliable sources also pinned the PowerBook for a January introduction, saying that Apple is working feverishly to complete a noticeably slimmer 15-inch model for a possible Macworld introduction alongside an Intel-based iMac.
Along with his product predictions, Gardner raised his target price on Apple stock to $71 from $51 and boosted his earnings forecasts for the next two years.
For the current quarter, Gardner raised his revenue estimate to $5.5B and earnings-per share estimates to 60 cents, up from $4.8B and 47 cents.
He also raised his 2006 revenue forecast to $20.4B and $2.16, up from from $17.6B and $1.72.
In 2007, Gardner expects Apple to generate revenues of $24.3B and earn a profit of $2.61 per-share.
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Microsoft Must Evolve to Survive
| Opinion: If the computer giant doesn't move towards true innovation, it could become a dinosaur. | |
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It's clear Microsoft executives know what the primary challenges are for the company: innovation and growth. Both were (perhaps not so) coincidentally highlighted in this week's BusinessWeek cover story on what's ailing Microsoft. This is not a new problem. The company has always touted innovation as a key value driver, but its particular brand of innovation is more accurately described, by Steve Ballmer himself, as "learning from others."
It's an old story. Microsoft didn't invent the graphical user interface or the Web browser, it merely exploited and perfected them. Most of what Microsoft considers innovation consists of adding improvements and new features on top of its core products, Windows and Office. Real innovation, such as that being delivered by Google or Skype, and which fundamentally changes the way we work with technology, may have passed Microsoft by. The company either has become too big to react to change, or it has run out of ways to turn the Windows and Office building blocks into next-generation services. This reorganization will have to change that.
Curiously, the reorganization announcement does not mention a word about search—Google's version of Windows, if you will—though it does say a lot about creating and enhancing the software and service "experience" for the customer. This is the key to the growth problem. Microsoft thrived on the tech build-out in the 1990s, but now that all that infrastructure is in place, the growth has to come from the services the platforms will enable. Microsoft has long enabled developers to build those services, but revenue from services offered by Microsoft is small compared to what Windows and Office bring in. The biggest news here is that Jim Allchin, who has been the main figure in all of Microsoft's Windows and .Net technologies for most of the past 15 years, will be retiring by the end of next year.
Allchin will step down after the next version of Windows, Vista, ships next year. His will be big shoes to fill. The biggest task, which falls to Kevin Johnson, will be reforming the product development cycle to enable new features, services and patches to be incorporated into Windows on an ongoing basis, rather than having the industry do the Long Wait every four or five years for the next revision. It seems absurd to say that a company like Microsoft, so entwined in the world's economy, could be in trouble. But it will be if the company cannot react quickly to the changing landscape, a landscape that was once Microsoft's, but is now Google's. Bill, Steve & Co. have been able to reprioritize on the fly before. Whether they can do it again will determine the real legacy they will leave behind. |
Linux Desktop Keeps Getting Better with KDE 3.5
"The improvements made in the past year show how mature the KDE Project is. KDE is the most powerful desktop environment and development platform in the market, Stephan Kulow, KDE release coordinator, said in a statement.
KDE is one of the two most popular Linux/Unix graphical desktop environments, GNOME being the other. Like GNOME, it comes with a family of KDE-compliant applications ranging from a Web browser, Konqueror, to an IM client, Kopete.
Recently, however, KDE has faced trouble hanging onto the business Linux desktop market. Novell Inc. briefly planned to stop supporting KDE on its business Linux lines—Novell Linux Desktop and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
In the face of protests from KDE users, both inside and outside the Linux company, Novell shifted course and announced that it would continue to support KDE in its commercial Linux products.
This new version will give users of Novell SUSE, not to mention other KDE-friendly Linux distributions like Mandriva Linux and Kubuntu, more reasons to be happy that KDE is still advancing.
KDE 3.5's many improvements start with the interface itself.
The Kicker, KDE's desktop application-launcher menu bar, has been greatly improved. It now allows users to add applets to the bar. Users also can set the Kicker and pager, which enable users to switch from one virtual desktop to another, to display in one of three modes: elegant, classic and transparency.
In addition, the pager now shows you the application icons of each window to help distinguish between them. Users can drag and drop applications and windows from one virtual desktop to another.
KDE's combination default Web and file browser, Konqueror, has also been improved.
Click here to read more about Novell's earlier choice of GNOME over KDE.
Like Mac OS X's Safari Web browser, Konqueror has now passed the Web Standards Project's "Acid2" CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) compliance test.
Konqueror also now only displays the appropriate options for users depending on whether they're browsing the Web or looking at local or network files. On the Web side, the browser also has an ad-blocking feature.
The revised browser also includes an optional search bar. This gives users the power to select a search engine from a dropdown menu.
Kopete, KDE's IM client, includes improved interoperability with Microsoft Corp.'s MSN and Yahoo Inc.'s IM services. Moreover, it includes better audio and video device support for IM-borne videoconferencing.
Microsoft Drops the Office Open Standard Ball
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When Microsoft announced a week ago Monday that it had decided to open up its Office 12 XML file formats and had submitted the formats to be considered as a formal open standard by ECMA International, Alan Yates, the general manager of Microsoft's Information Worker Strategy, said, "The new license that will accompany the Open XML format with the standards organization will go well beyond traditional standards licensing and will be very positive for the vast majority of developers, even open-source developers." This new license was to have been released last Wednesday. Instead, all that Microsoft did was to release its Patent Protection Covenant for its Office XML formats. Attorneys and analysts assumed that this would just be a building block for the new license. We now know that the covenant is the be-all and end-all of the new license. According to a Microsoft representative, "The covenant language is what was referred to as the updated 'license' for the Open XML formats that will be submitted to ECMA International for the standardization process." The only difference between Microsoft's November 2003 open and royalty-free license for the Office 2003 Reference Schemas and today's Office 2003 license, according to the company, is that "Microsoft is offering a covenant not to sue for the Office 2003 Reference Schemas." Microsoft also said it "will also be offering this same covenant with respect to the forthcoming specifications for the 'Office 12' schema specifications. More information about this program will be forthcoming at or before the time of the commercial availability of 'Office 12.'"
This change does not address the issues that open-source advocates have voiced previously against the license. Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation and the author of the GPL, said in July that the current license governing the use of the formats is "designed to prohibit all free software. It covers only code that implements, precisely, the Microsoft formats, which means that a program under this license does not permit modification." In addition, simply not suing developers for possibly violating Microsoft's patents doesn't address the issues that many analysts, developers and attorneys have about the "openness" of Microsoft's XML formats. | ||
No Vista Beta 2 this year
The second beta of Windows Vista will not come until next year, Microsoft said Tuesday.
The software maker did not give a time frame for the release of Beta 2 of the operating system, and said only that it would have more to say next year. Microsoft had not said when Beta 2 will come, but some had expected it might come in December or January.
Microsoft did say it still plans to release the final version of Vista in the second half of next year.
"First and foremost, we are still on track for general availability in the second half of calendar year 2006," said Amitabh Srivastava, a corporate vice president in Microsoft's Windows unit.
Microsoft also said Tuesday that it will end the monthly schedule for interim Community Technology Preview updates of the Vista code. The third CTP release, planned for November, now will not happen until December, it said.
In other news:
The company offered up the first of the community technology previews in September at its Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles. Monthly updates were promised, and an updated version was released in October. A more traditional test release, Beta 1, was issued in July.
Microsoft has not used CTPs with past operating systems, instead relying on a couple of beta releases. The software maker has used CTP releases with other products, such as its Visual Studio developer tools software.
Srivastava said that the feedback Microsoft is getting from the CTP releases makes the timing of the next beta less critical. "The Beta 2 is still an important milestone for broad customer testing, but it is less urgent," he said.
He added that by shifting away from a monthly CTP release schedule, Microsoft hopes it will be able to more quickly add in new features. "The changes we are making will provide a feature-complete Windows Vista to our customers sooner," Srivastava said.
He reiterated that Microsoft plans to continue having frequent, if not monthly, CTP releases. "They are going to be often."
Microsoft also reiterated its plans to deliver the server companion to Vista, code-named Longhorn Server, in 2007.
Sony plans parental controls for PS3
If you're a parent concerned about the kind of material your children are exposed to, you should be resting a little easier today.
That's because, says All Headline News, Sony has decided to implement parental controls on its forthcoming next-generation video game console, the PlayStation 3.
That device is expected to hit North American shores (and stores) sometime in the fall of 2006. And it appears like it will have a toggle of some sort giving parents the ability to restrict the games their children play according to the Entertainment Software Association's rating system.
All Headline News writes that Microsoft has already implemented such a parental control system for the Xbox 360, which launched last week. The publication also said that the ESA has promised that Nintendo will similarly give parents control over content with its own next-generation console, the Revolution, which is expected next year.
All in all, this is good news for parents. Their only concern now should be how quickly the hacking community figures out ways to cut through the controls so that little Johnny can watch and play whatever he wants on his new machine.
Sunday, November 27, 2005
New smoke detector technology can save lives
Though valuable, changing the battery in a smoke detector is only one step in ensuring that this live-saving device does its job to protect your family and home from the threat of fire.
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