I now have three “primary” computing devices: a MacBook pro, an iPad, and an iPhone. The gap at is immediately apparent to me, and that I think is an interesting opportunity is the disconnect of the user experience moving between each of the devices.

The individual devices have great UX. But as I move from one form factor to another most apps make the UX feel disconnected.

Example: I use an IM application on all devices. But if I start s conversation on my MacBook and then pick up my iPad to go into the living room, or my iPhone to run to the store my conversation is broken. The chat history does not follow me, and even worse, multiple devices will remain logged on so a new IM will register on multiple devices.

I think with all of the new and innovative form factors now finding adoption momentum, there is a good opportunity for frameworks to be built to support the movement of the UX in a seamless way across devices.

Pushing data into the cloud, or having a good sync system is a great start, and I’d love if my various apps had better sync capabilities. But can we sync the UX of applications. Can product developers break out of the paradigm of an application living in a single instance of a process. Can UX be elevated to it’s own entity with app instances being merely a view into the current session.

Should my word processor always start from zero when I open it? Or should it return to it’s previous state? If I’m editing a blog post on my laptop and I decide to move to my iPad, should I dare to expect to continue where I left off seamlessly?

It’s a hard problem to solve from a logic perspective, and its a lot of plumbing to write for app developers. Maybe someone will think through the business rules and create a framework we can all build on.

If you are that person, I’d love to talk with you and support you. What do you all think?

Microsoft and Google, two giants fighting it out for the future of software business. On the surface Microsoft and Google look similar. Both offer software, both have an online presence, both are technology companies. But their business models and revenue streams are nowhere near the same thing and that’s going to mean a lot for a long term competition.

What is Google?

Let’s look at Google. At it’s core, Google is a content company that derives revenue from advertisement. If you look at Google’s 10Q, 99% of their revenue comes from advertising services.

Google looks at online, desktop, and mobile software as content that can be offered free to users in exchange for advertising.Rather than having a blog, or a wiki, or a magazine, or pornography, or some other form of content, Google’s driving content is software. Software to search the web, software for email, software for editing documents, software for managing photos, software for getting directions, software for reading news and blogs. Google provides free web, desktop, and mobile software in exchange for advertising attention.

I’d like to note an exception to the above with Google’s business services, but that business unit is an insignificant revenue stream and has insignificant market share.

Google is best defined as a content producer, monetized by advertising. They are unique from what we would traditionally think of as content producers in that their free content is software and web services.

What is Microsoft?

Microsoft is a pure software company at it’s core. Microsoft designs, develops, tests, and packages software for desktop, server, mobile, handheld, tablet, vehicle, surface, and other devices. From operating systems to games to productivity tools, Microsoft is a company that produces licensable software across a breadth of industries.

Microsoft licenses software and sells support and maintenance contracts; targeting both business and consumer customers. Microsoft has the sales, marketing, and support infrastructure to back up a large software business.Gaming, media, advertising, consumer electronics, hardware, and other businesses Microsoft has extended into. Leveraging their software business they develop or advance new markets to sell software into.

At the end of the day, Microsoft sells software and has an ecosystem built around it for support, certification, maintenance, and development.

Winning the Consumer Market

Google is moving more and more into the consumer space. A space where advertising is a legitimate form of revenue generation. Google can continue to offer free software content to consumers and monetize through advertising. By offering software and services for free, Google is granted more leeway from consumers regarding the quality of the software… whether it be bugs or lack of functionality. Consumers are also okay with software being in a perpetual beta when the software is free.

For traditional software sales, Microsoft is maintaining it’s dominance. Despite all the bad talk in the press and blogosphere, Microsoft’s software business is still growing, as is the company as a whole.

Microsoft is cognizant of the intrusions into the consumer space by free software and web services from Google and other companies and is putting together strategies and making acquisitions for when the time comes that their software unit becomes flat. Today, there is still a lot of money to be made with traditional software sales, and Microsoft isn’t about to jump into the advertising for software content business until they’ve finished milking the software licensing cow.

Winning the Business Market

Today, Google doesn’t have the pieces in place to serve the business community. They have not invested in the sales and support infrastructure, nor have they invested enough in their business software offerings. Their business offerings are not as feature-rich, end to end, or functional as Microsoft offerings. Google does not have the world wide sales teams and support infrastructure that Microsoft has. Google has no certification program and a weaker partner network.

Google is a consumer facing company today, and from their investments it looks to stay that way for a long time. Microsoft is business facing and has leveraged that market to get to the consumer.

Recently, Microsoft has made investments and acquisitions in cloud computing and web advertising (including their recent $42 billion bid for Yahoo). Microsoft is in a dominant position overall and is getting prepared to compete when software goes more and more online. Remember, Microsoft still has a large web presence, a large IM presence, a large email presence, and a large social networking presence (especially in other countries). Microsoft is already ramping things up to take over when packaged software slows.

Google has a long way to go to enter domains Microsoft is dominant in. Microsoft has much less work to upset Google’s consumer web dominance.

I have been interested in the ideas of User Generated Content recently. Yes, I know it’s a concept that’s been around for a while and it’s being more and more formalized with the Web2.0 “thing.” But, let me try and draw some concepts out of it. Let me know what you think.

There is a scale of user generated content, and where your service is on the scale means different things. Here’s how I think of it.

Contributed content type.On one end of the scale is metadata on the other end is original content.

Metadata is about the categorization and ranking of data. Services like Digg, or StumbleUpon, or del.icio.us. The content is not generated by the community. The community provides metadata around the content such as ranking and categorization. The content being ultimately consumed is not generated by the community, the final consumed content is external to the community. 

On the other side is original content. This includes blogging in all its forms and services like Flickr, YouTube, Craigslist, and Wikipedia. Original content is where the target consumption is generated by the community. Often times, such as the case of YouTube, the community generated content also includes user generated metadata.

Dynamic nature of the content. Content generated by a community can be very dynamic or very static.

Static contentis characterized by content that is generated once and never changed. This includes most type of content that is generated by communities. Ranking systems, photo sharing, and video sharing. The target consumed content is very static, only the metadata is dynamic.

Dynamic contentis characterized by content that is in continual flux. A wiki such as Wikipedia is a great example, where the target consumed data is always changing through community modification. It can change slow or fast, but the target content changes. Potentially, some social networks can fit into this category as the target content to be consumed is a user profile and people are continually updating their profiles with new information and messages.

Governance of content and community.There are two sides to governance and control of a community. On one side is totalitarian, with a strong centralized administrative group. On the other side is community governance.

The overall trend is moving towards community governance. With user reporting systems and the ability to change content at the forefront of many new web applications. There is still a central administrator to most user contributed content web communities and that may never change. Craigslist is a great example of community governance. Even MySpace with the ability to report a message as Spam utilizes community governance.

Direction of communication.It is often said that Web1.0 is a one way conversation and Web2.0 is a two way conversation. User generated content follows a similar concept. With user generated content the conversation is characterized in two ways: One to many or many to many.

With user generated content the community is both the source and the consumer. Either it’s one user providing content to the community or it is a collection of users generating the content for the community. Static content is one to many, dynamic content is many to many.

The world of user generated content is exciting. It decentralizes the generation of content and provides inherent mechanisms for editing and governance. It empowers users to direct their own experiences. It can be the ultimate in democracy of content.

This is a nostalgic post for all of those who were in technology in the 90’s. I present a list of things that were great in the 90’s for me as a technophile. Leave a comment about what things you’re nostalgic about!

DJGGP, BBSing, War Dialing, Modems, Math Coprocessors, Coleco Adam Computers, Legend of the Red Dragon, and the Lynx portable; all items that evoke my nostalgia of being a youth discovering technology.

DJGPP	DJGPP is a port of the GNU development tools for C/C++. It included a compiler, various IDEs, and various libraries. Favorites of mine being RHIDE for the IDE and the Allegro graphics library. The web page is still here. These are the tools my good friend Tom and I used to learn C/C++ and develop some of our personal projects.
BBSing	Who here has dialed into or still does (gasp!) dial into BBS’s? Who here doesn’t know what a BBS is? Look at BBS on Wikipedia. Remember the days of discovering phone numbers with your friends, private messaging systems, file sharing, doors/games, and even access to the web throuhg a BBS? Those were the days, huh! I was even a sysop of a BBS I ran from my parents house at night over our primary home line… during the day it had to be available for voice, but at night… TGS BBS as alive! TGS=The Good Stuff.
Legend of the Red Dragon	If we’re going to talk BBSing then we have to talk about my favorite door. Legend of the Red Dragon or LORD by Seth Robinson, here’s the official page. For lots of fun with your friends, this was the game to play as far as I’m concerned. And remember when we got RIP graphics, for that matter, remember color ANSI! Oh man! BTW, my handle was HellSpawn.
War Dialing	This used to freak me out in middle school, dialing all those numbers that would show up on the phone bill. Fortunately they were all local. I did come across some unprotected Unix boxes though. Anyone still doing this? Anyone know what war dialing is anymore? Now do we all just use StumbleUpon to find interesting things to do?
Coleco Adam	This is a computer that my dad had in his office to word process with and for me to play Donkey Kong on. Countless hours wasted and princesses saved. Who remembers storing data on tape cassettes?
Math Coprocessor	With all the fast hardware acceleration we have today, especially evident in monster video cards, who remembers the math coprocessor? Remember with the Intel “DX” chips had the FPU on board? What is a coprocessor? Think of it as the first step towards the SLI nVidia cards you have running your desktop.
Lynx	I remember the first time I saw an Atari Lynx at my friends house and went nuts… so did everyone. Portable, color (the first portable with color), it could flip around, there was a surfing game. What’s not to love?
USRobotics 56K Modem	Well, I started with a 1200 baud Hayes modem that was some funky plug into the wall integrated thingie doohookie. Then we had the steps up and up and up. The fastest modem I owned was a 33.6K modem that got speeds of my friends 56K modems so I never upgraded. It was a nice external one. But, remember the ultimate in modems. That picture better bring up memories about USRobotics. I wonder what they’re up to now?

With all this stuff, I can’t say I miss the technology too terribly; messing with jumpers and IRQs, 100lb computers and 10lb cell phones, MSCDEX.EXE, HIMEM.SYS, and TSRs, and spending $400 for a 16MB SIMM. We’ve come a long way and things are very cool now. But, like my parents talking about the 50’s, these products remind me of “better times.” A time when things were simpler…. I do sound like my parents, huh! :)

Here’s to a time remembered, the 90’s, where we went from B.W.W.W. (Before the World Wide Web) to now, Web 2.0. And here’s to exploration, discovery, and the pursuit of knowledge: then, now, and in the future!

Looking to build a desktop for yourself? I was, and now I have one. I put in a lot of time and research to put together a high qualty, high performance device. If you’re in the market, this is what I recommend.

It’s been seven years since I’ve owned a desktop. I’ve been a mobile guy for a while with all the travel I do for work. I recently started a few development projects that are making my HP laptop breathe heavy. So, a couple weeks ago I bought some components from newegg.com and built a new desktop machine with component selection help from tomshardware.com.

If you’re looking to build a high quality, fast device for a good price, I highly recommend this combo. It was just over $1000 shipped (not including monitor), has been stable, and is sooo fast. I’m running Vista Business.

Here are the primary guts (minus the details like wireless network card, dvd writer, speakers, etc.)

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe 2.4GHz LGA 775 Processor Model BX80557E6600

  • http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/03/26/the_gigahertz_battle/

• ASUS P5K LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Intel Motherboard

  • http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/05/21/intel_intros_3-series_chipsets_with_fsb1333_and_ddr3/

  • http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/06/19/eight_p35-ddr2_motherboards_compared/

• CORSAIR XMS2 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model TWIN2X2048-8500C5

  • http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/09/22/corsair_xms2_dominator/ 
    (not the same product, but same maker)

• PNY VCG88GTS32XPB GeForce 8800GTS 320MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 HDCP Video Card

  • http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/05/17/performance_value_for_dx10/ 
    (not the same prodct, but same chip)

• SAMSUNG SpinPoint T Series HD501LJ 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive

  • http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/05/15/the_spring_hard_drive_guide/page5.html

• RAIDMAX SMILODON ATX-612WBP Black SECC STEEL ATX Mid Tower Computer Case 500W Power Supply

  • http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811156062

• Gateway FPD2275W 22″ Widescreen LCD 1680×1050 resolution

  • http://laptopmag.com/Review/Gateway-FPD2275W.htm

I’m glad I did so much research. I’m extremely satisfied, especially for the $1000 price point and I think you will be too! All the components, with exception of the case and monitor are reviewed by tomshardware.com.

This is the case I chose for my new desktop. It’s way more flashy than I’d like, but it has a 500W power supply, lots of space, lots of fans, great accessibility, and the price was right. I’d highly recommend it. It makes you feel like one of those 31337 hax0rs.

Leave a comment and let me know what kind of rig you’re running!