Microsoft’s Vision of the Future is not Science Fiction

This is Microsoft’s vision for the future:

I think that the OfficeLabs tried to make up some science fiction, about how the world could be one day. Science Fiction is not something that is very realistic in short term, but sci-fi usually tries to be realistic enough, given some time and scientific breakthroughs. To get my point, try to think of some science fiction you know.

Sci-Fi

One example that comes to my mind because it’s the last sci-fi book I read is “The Forever War”. Here in a not too far away future, humankind has gained the ability to use new found “singularities” in outer space to effectively teleport themselves to another point in the galaxy, making long-range space travel possible. The great thing about good science fiction is, that the author usually thinks of all the implications of the world he’s imagining. For example, if Microsoft Labs would have made up this dream, the whole galaxy would be colonized in a few years and everything would be awesome.

Joe Haldeman, the author of the book, tries to keep everything as scientific and real as possible even with the assumption that these singularities can do the teleportation of a spaceship. For example, people have to travel to these singularities in very high speed, which takes months and and puts a nearly unbearable gravitational force on the passengers during the first half of the flight, when the ship is constantly accellerating as well as during the second half, when it’s constantly decellerating. Then humankind meets another spacedriving species, which they don’t understand and cannot communicate to, which leads though unfortunate events to an interstellar war. The story of a soldier in this war is depicted, who comes back after his one-to-three-year-long missions while 30+ years passed on earth after each mission due to the effects of relativity. Every time he comes back, society has changed, the people the soldier has known are dead, and wars have occurred because of the lack of resources on earth.

This is not Sci-Fi

Microsoft doesn’t put bad things, or even new things in it’s visions. It imagines that electronics can work without physical circuits and the energy sources are weightless and/or invisible. Not even Star Trek puts things in such a utopian light. This is not science fiction, it’s more a fantasy movie, and I don’t see magic becoming real in the next 100 years. Also, why don’t they think of something new? Everything in this clip is just an extreme unrealistic version of things we already have today.

For example, I don’t understand why they didn’t think that in all the time this magic energy source will need to be developed, there won’t be a brain-machine-interface that will make the shiny UI and the speech input they dream of completely irrelevant? For example, why should I need all those low-power holo-emitters that seem to come to everyone in the wold at no cost, if all the info can be known directly, though your brain connecting to a network?

It’s also not thought through. If we have holograms, and computer-recognized speech input, then what are these glass-iPhones for? Why isn’t all the UI that flys around on the glass thingy in some no-power-smart-clothes computer? Then why all these gestures? Since minority report, many studies have found that working with gestures with hands and arms is extremely tiresome and will never become reality. And Usability? How are people going to know that they need to move their hands together from up and down to narrow the graphics in one of the holograms around them? Okay, I guess you could also say “Computer, narrow down the profit predictions from x to y”,

All that Microsoft depicts is that they think that there will be no problems anymore in the future. I believe every kind of science fiction should try to be as realistic as possible, even if the author picks some kind of science that has advanced beyond the today’s. The other What Microsoft’s OfficeLab produced is not science-fiction, it’s fantasy.

Marketshare and Winning and Religion

Each war is different, each war is the same

As I listened to the podcast Hypercritical with John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin lately, they discussed why we always give so much credit to the marketshare. Siracusa’s point was, that “we geeks” always feeled that the best operating systems on computers had “lost” to Windows, and that since this time we always were confronted with the PC-users who told us “Why use Linux / Mac? Can’t you see that everyone uses Windows?” even if it wasn’t the best platform (in our minds). (Well in this quotation, I’m not one of us, but one of everyone as I always found Windows better.) Therefore, since the iPhone “won”, we were happy that Windows Mobile lost. Since Android “won”, we were happy that Apple looses. If WindowsPhone7 should win, we’ll all be unhappy again – because it’s Windows again.

I never had this opinion. I would always look at how easy an operating system lets me fulfill the tasks I need to fulfill, including the initial learning curve, therefore I chose Windows on computers and iPhone on smartphones. I hate having to configure stuff all the time. I hate how the Android OS makes me click on way too small buttons and phone makers try to combat this with bigger screen sizes. I hate when I have to make way more clicks or text input to get anything done. And I really don’t like when the web browser stutters or I doubletap on a paragraph and it zooms to the sidebar. All pretty small things (yeah, rewriting the UI elements isn’t really a small thing), but if this were different, I’d definitely chose Android. And if Windows Phone gets more powerful and easier to use than iPhone, I’ll choose that one. I really don’t care about religion. And I never advised anyone to pick an iPhone “because everyone does” or “because it won”, and this is my only plea in this whole post: when you’re advocating for Android, please don’t mention that more copies were sold, as this has nothing to do with the quality of the hard- and software.

photo credit: kevindooley

As this post might have religious comments, here’s a disclaimer: I like iPhone best among smartphones, so in your opinion I’m a fanboy – no need to mention that again. I also love customization in my phone from time to time, so I’m jailbreaking – but I also didn’t miss it much when there wasn’t a good jailbreak available. And for the pricing: since here in germany the T-mobile monopoly fell, iPhone is not too pricy anymore – so leave me alone with “I can’t pay for it” – if you can pay 500€ in two years, you can also afford 600€.

The Command Line

So as I was confronted with “you should learn to use the command line” again, here’s my opinion on this invention. The command line is the prompt where you can type in commands and those get executed by the operating system. It what Linux people need to use a lot, Mac people had to resort to when nothing else worked and Windows people didn’t need to use ever – as the command line never was very powerful on Windows.

In my opinion this is also what directly impacts the platforms distribution. Windows 85%+, Linux 1% and the rest is Mac. But why should the distribution of a platform be directly connected with the platforms use of the command line? The first barriers seem to be easy to overcome.

First, you need to be able to type and grasp some basic concepts, like the way the file system is laid out, which types of other stuff in the operating system is mapped into the file system, and basic usage principles. This alone is enough reason most users won’t bother with this ever. Typing is strictly not what most users want to do, they want to surf the web, listen to music, watch movies and when typing is only needed for messenging or typing in profile information in Facebook.

Well, normal users stink anyways, you say, and as a programmer you should be comfortable with typing on a keyboard too. So let’s look at the positive aspects of the command line: it’s all just typing, you don’t need to take away your hands from the keyboard to use a mouse and thereby it’s all faster anyways and also, there are so many commands with so many fine grained parameters that you can do basically anything using the shell.

This is true, and I don’t want to argue with anyone here. Surprise! I don’t think the command line is inherently bad. Instead, I think it’s an expert system. If you have invested years and years learning commands, parameters and when to use which parameter and which parameter won’t work with another one. The leaning curve is steep. You’ll need to learn the use of every single command that you’ll need for every single of the the most trvial of actions. You’ll need to know that there is this command, and how to use it, you’ll need to learn with parameters do what and you’ll ask yourself who decided on the defaults parameters or the absense of them and you’ll read man pages over man pages for that.

So if you did that, congratulations, you have aquired a valuable skill. At least as long as there’s no good GUI based solution for that. But there’re more problems with only working in text mode:

You type, the program executes and you get output. The sequential cycle of this dance has no possibility to give you additional information while you type or while the program executes. When it dumps a lot of text on the screen, you scan it for what you need to know, and then you type and wait again. For a lot of problems this won’t matter at all. Sometimes it’s even faster, for example when you grep for a certain file you’re searching for. But in the shell, there’s no mouseover, no intuitive visual design that could give you clues what to do and how to do it, no spelling correction when you mistyped a character in the middle of a three line-wrapping command. Type and execute.

Don’t misunderstand me here: I wish I would be a master of the command line. As the myth of doing command line magic is what let’s us admire those who can. The basic thought in every person who needs to use the command line is always “damn, this is hard” and “it’s take forever till I get all this” and “I guess I have to learn all this stuff”. This makes us admire those who CAN do all the stuff and know all the commands even more.

But times are a’ changing. The first really well usable wide-spread operating system that you could accomplish pretty much everything with was Windows XP in 2003. In all other systems you always had to be mastering the command line to be able to do what you really wanted to do. It’s 8 years since, and a lot has changed. GUI programmers got better at what they’re doing and they’re giving ordinary users the power to use the computer. Windows 7 is a very nice OS, and MacOS gets better with every release.

To me, command line commands are a basic foundation that you can base an operating system on. But commands are badly designed by default, and therefore you should never have users be dependent on them. Never ever. And as it’s not 2003 anymore, you cannot expect power users to know or even aspire to know the command line anymore.

I can do work in the command line when I need to, but I’m always very slow at that and I’d always rather have a GUI based tool at hand, that shows me instantly what to do and how to do it instead of Googling and guessing – and for my part if something cannot be done conveniently without the command line in an OS, I think the OS is badly designed and needs work.

I’d rather stay clicking.

photo credit: Robert S. Donovan

HTC Desire vs. iPhone Feelings

I played around with my father’s HTC Desire two days ago. The major differences I recognized in contrast to iOS on iPhone4:

+ There’s the possibility to create a WLAN. Yay!
+ Looking at the 2 year costs, it was about 30% cheaper, which is nice.
- Scrolling is much more unfluid. Makes reading on the web when scrolling is involved much more of a hassle.
- The browser loading times were not that good.
- There is no anti-smudge-screen. This actually makes a big difference.
- Sometimes reactions on pinching is stuttery or just too late.
- I never know which button I need to press if I want to get back.
- The camera sucked. The flash is much too bright and the pictures look like crap. To make a shot you needed to press the trackball.
- I didn’t understand the structure of the applications list vs. the widget screens. I guess the organisation was strange because my father made it so, but why are those two separated?
- The phone got very hot while just browsing and using google maps.
- The icons of the applications sucked.
- The few applications I launched looked kind of “not ready to deliver”.

photo credit: Jesus Belzunce

Get over your media collecting habits

In order to understand the problem I want to picture here, I need to tell you what I mean with media. I should also add that I don’t want to criticize collectors of certain media types – which is more of a hobby that not connected to the problem. This post might be a little mixed up, but if you know this blog you also know that I’m not the best writer in the world. Not yet at least ;-)

What is Media

You think media means music, videos, TV and the newspapers, and thats true, but there is a lot more out there that you oftentimes don’t recognize as media. Media is a either a more or less unlimited channel of content (TV, internet in general, radio, a library) or a set size of content (a music album, a book, a video, a videogame, a magazine, a blogpost, a newspaper). The “content” is what’s tickling your fantasy, mind, interests, thirst for knowledge, imagination, anxiety, … or just lets your brain consume stuff so it is freed from the hard work of thinking itself. You could even argue that other people talking to you are a stream of content and therefore media. All these contents influence you and your ways of thinking.

photo credit: dearsomeone

The Problem

Technically, oftentimes you’ll find digital media bound to storage like CDs, DVDs or a lot of dead trees (formally known as paper). I never understood people hoarding their music-CDs, and their videos, be it on tape, VHS casette or DVD ar BD – even if I know a lot of people who do that. As a kid (when you watch movies dozens of times) I might have liked that myself, but since the dawn of digital media, I don’t see the point anymore at all.

The advantage of having collections of media around is that you can show off what you have, and what you’re interested in. It’s like wearing a T-shirt or your favourite movie or band: everyone instantly recognizes that interest of yours – that you’re into something. The opposite is like saying you’re a fan of Star Wars without having action figures, T-shirts or lightsabres around: people don’t instantly know.

Books are media too. I also didn’t understand why to keep books around that you have read before, if it isn’t non-fiction books you might need to cite from or look up from time to time. Same thing with magazines. Nobody would hoard all of their daily newspapers, but some are keeping magazines. And with fiction books, its the same as with movies: you just don’t read or watch them more than once. And if you do, you would most likely get off cheaper if you rented them twice instead of buying them once.

The point of keeping books around that you might need for reference also diminishes quickly: you can keep digital versions of books and read them on screen, on your ePaper device or even your smartphone. Reusing music is common, but stories, news and movies are also not used much more often than maybe once or twice.

photo credit: jm3

Availability

Music is available through a multitude of services: either you rip them from your CD and keep it on a harddrive (or even in the cloud), sharing it with you game console and all your other household networked things. Or you buy them via iTunes and just stream them from there to anywhere. Or you use Pandora, Last.fm and all the other free music stations in the net, or the usual old radio stations which are all available digitally streamed.

Apart from music, nearly everthing else is available for download, be it in a paid version as with rented movies, music tracks or eBooks or in a free version as with a limitless source of information in form of blogposts or news. Having media bound to physical objects needs to to have them around in one place and to carry their weight if you need them somewhere else.

Prices

Buying movies on disc isn’t too cheap. If you get a cheap 3 for 1 BD box, you might be paying 20€ if you’re lucky, but usually it’s more expensive. As opposed to renting it in a video renting service for 2,40€ per movie you can rent a movie for 2,99€ via online renting (and therefore not paying for fuel and use less time to get it) in iTunes, Playstation Network or a lot of other services I didn’t even try out.
Buying music digitally is basically the same price as buying them in the real store. But here you can get the two songs you really like instead of the 12 tracks you don’t really want much cheaper. And you already have all the metadata included. I mean I don’t see too many people still walking around with “discmans”, so to get their stuff on their custom media player, they’d need to rip it and add all the metadata in a time consuming way.

(Many people say they’d miss the artwork and booklet on the digital thing. To me, this is stupidity. Yeah, I also read the booklets back then, but times are changing. Enter the World Wide Web. Just head to the artists website, we’re not in the eightees anymore. There you’ll find much more artwork than you can ever hope to fit into some paper booklet. Oh, and you’ll find the lyrics there too.)

Buying eBooks isn’t more expensive than buying a “real” book. Here the market still didn’t finish converting to the digital medium as often fiction books are still not avaible in open ebook formats, but you can see it happening faster and faster, and soon the rainforests can rejoice when all people have Kindles and iPads around and can easily obtain digital versions.
News and information basically cost nothing. You can of course buy well researched or well authored stuff, but those authors have to fight the free price you get though the free news websites.
Games are same price online or offline, if you can get them online. But games are a special case, because most of the publishers still stick to the old distribution model. If you’re looking at the Apple appstore, digitally distributed games might even be much cheaper than games bound to boxes, discs and paper, but that will soon be known when the Mac appstore becomes tested and when Microsoft copies the concept.
(TV and Radio was always distributed in a way that wasn’t bound to physical objects other than the receiving machine. Not much change there, other than the quality of non-paid TV broadcasts diminishes while paid services are like a flatrate for content.)

And there’s another price people don’t think about: either you spend time getting your analog media, or you pay for postage and packing that wouldn’t be necessary if you downloaded the digital versions.

Conclusion

Digital Media does not rot. After about 10 years, a CD or casette might even be unreadable and thereby broken. Digital media can be copied an infinite number of times and you can create as many backups as you want.

The main point of this post is that analog media is written on three dimensional stuff that just takes up a lot of space. For that space, you usually pay rent (or pay interest on loans in my case). Therefore, your media should pay a part of your rent. But it doesn’t. So please understand that media is about content, and not about collections of paper, CDs, DVDs and such. The digital versions are much more economic, overall cost less time and money to obtain and are better for the planet’s ecological environment.

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