Innovation in Software

One of the problems I sometimes have when heading up a developer team is just getting the right kit in the right hands. I have a project now where I need to get an iPhone and a Blackberry 8900 Curve to a developer, but we’re blocked.

I speak to teams occasionally that need to get iPhones to developers but don’t want to take on contracts, nor do they want the devices locked to O2 for ever more (or even in the first place). You can buy them online, but at around £650 for each 32GB 3GS, kitting out at a team of just a few developers can be painfully expensive.

Sometimes I’ll see a team come together that needs a pile of development kit just for a couple of months to see a project through. I’ve even heard of one team buy half a dozen Mac Minis at the start of a project, bill it to the client, and then come the end of the project they had no use for the machines any more. Talk about waste!

The logistics of this stuff is scary. Managing cashflow, sourcing equipment, it all just takes time.

When I see something that is taking a developer away from getting product shipped, I wonder to myself “isn’t there a better way?”. And tonight, I realised when it comes to sourcing hardware and software for development teams, there is. Vagueware could, if people wanted, help.

We can source kit, (including legitimate and factory-fresh unlocked and SIM free iPhones), for considerably less than you can pick the same equipment up for on the high street or eBay. Need 20 machines by Monday? With Photoshop installed on 5 of them? And XCode or Visual Studio ready to roll on the rest? We could do that, quite easily thanks to knowing enough guys on the wholesale side of the hardware business.

In essence, I’m thinking about offering hardware/software bundles for developers – custom packages, tailored for projects – priced at wholesale prices. Even renting out kit if that’s what people need.

I’m just floating this as an idea right now, if the feedback is good, I’ll look into making it happen.

Intel are going down the path of smaller and less power-hungry chips in future. Or so it would seem from the “as live” write-up Jon Fortt gives on his blog of the opening keynote at the Intel Developer Forum.

There also seems to be a concentration on mobile, which is sensible given that laptops are due to outnumber desktops as the preferred computing platform in the home and office by 2009. WiMax seems like it’s a technology Intel are excited about. Given that the OECD think it’s pants is very optimistic of them.

I have to appreciate these planned advances in hardware Intel lay out here. Better hardware makes better software possible. In recent years people have suggested that current hardware is “good enough” and we no longer have a need to persue Moore’s law and to add even more performance.

To those cynics, I say phooey.

Integrated graphics chipsets capable of teraflop performance, integrated WiMax and the ability to offload Blu-ray and HD processing to hardware opens up new avenues of development. Richer, more responsive, more useful environments can be built. It’s not that the hardware is “too much” but that we developers have imaginations that are too small, our thinking is too rigid. Stuck in a desktop/folder/document metaphor that is now out-dated, we seem to have resigned ourselves to not pushing boundaries.

Johnathan Schwarz announced something yesterday that at first sounds quite dull until you read through his justification and where he’s heading with it.

Basically they take the UltraSPARC T2 blueprints, the core design files and test suites and then they release the whole lot under GPL online

It’s a gutsy move in that it completely breaks the model of what you’re meant to do with R&D expenditure in the computer industry. He already has experience of this with OpenSolaris of course, but to do this with hardware is unprecedented.

The impressive figures he quotes in his justification for opening up UltraSPARC also pricks my ears:

You’ll recall we followed this path with our software business – decoupling Solaris from its exclusive focus on Sun hardware. That experience validated the obvious: the market for Sun’s innovation is always larger outside of Sun, than inside. When we opened ourselves to the market, our business grew faster (Software grew 13%, year over year, faster than Sun overall). Now we’re following that path with our microelectronics business.

Let’s make this clear: he opened up Solaris open source, allowed it to run in more places, and the business grew 13% year on year.

It seems counter-intuitive: give something of value away, watch the value of your business grow. But that’s how software works as a commodity. License keys have no value, user base has value. Keeping a little team of ‘rockstar developers’ in-house to develop code has no value – having thousands of developers passing ideas through you does have value.

How you monetise that needs to change based on the area you’re sat within, but the argument that open source is not a valid business model increasingly seems to be looking to be a myth. Arguing the only way to make money is to charge for everything you do ignores the fact you can probably make a lot more by allowing other people to do it for you, on similar terms.

I really like the idea of this Zonbu machine even if the revenue model seems to be based on reselling Amazon’s S3, which I still don’t trust as a platform as my main data backup, never mind my primary data space.

This is a fanless (i.e. noiseless) 1.2 MHz system that uses Linux and stores all your files on S3 so you can get them from anywhere where you’re online. It uses very little power and is designed with ease-of-use in mind. Whether it really is “as easy to use as a Mac”, time will tell, but it’s definitely an interesting piece of hardware.

This kind of box is going to be all over the place in a very short space of time. I was talking to somebody at Sun the other day who suggested they’d love to find a way of getting something like this out in a form-factor that made sense within the home, and with the innards of a Sun Ray and the right platform, it could be a real revenue stream for them quite quickly. They just need to partner with the right people.

A few years ago I made a prediction that when broadband got affordable at speeds over 8Mbps (the minimum speed you’d need to throw Freeview-quality digital down the line at real time, no downloads or extra compression needed), we’d start to see a new generation of devices that would offer full video-on-demand, with a move to put archives of content out there, ad-free, in return for micro-payments.

We’re seeing the broadband, and the video-on-demand is starting to roll, but they’re being cautious with it right now. The BBC Archive (due to launch in beta in the next month or two, apparently) is a step in the right direction, but it’ll take a while for commercial companies like ITV and Sky to realise they can make money from their archives without relying on adverts.

The Zonbu is a great little device that provides an alternative direction for the market – a functional Linux PC connected to your TV. Connecting computers to TVs is a great way to get devices out into people’s homes – look at what happened in the 80s with the micro revolution. If Zonbu can somehow integrate a video-on-demand service down the line, they could really make some headway into some interesting markets. One to watch.

Either way, I think we’re about to see a whole new generation of users get connected in the next two years in Europe and the US through decent set-top devices (not like the lousy first-gen boxes from a few years back). That new demographic, coupled with the proliferation of mobile Internet over Africa and Asia, means we’re going to see an underlying shift in how the Web is used, how it operates, and what expectations of the next generation of technology is going to be over the next 5 years.

Personally, I can’t wait.

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For the last year, I’ve been running pretty much everything off old hardware I had lying around. It did its job – and still does it very well – but it’s time for an upgrade.

I’m now in the fortunate position that for the first time in about two years I actually have a small amount of spare cash to hand. Well, when I say “spare”, I mean “not immediately needed to pay a bill anywhere”. This means I have choices.

The first thing I need to decide is whether I want to stay with Apple or not. OS X has been my primary desktop for the last 2 years, and whilst it has a few features that make it stress-free – decent WiFi and phone synch support out of the box, combined with the integrated address book – there isn’t anything I couldn’t replicate in open source without a bit of tinkering. And I do miss running an entirely open source system. There’s also the fact that Apple hardware is ridiculously expensive for what it is. Component for component, even the cheapest Macbook can be had by a generic laptop supplier for nearly half the price.

I also need to decide on the level of portability I want or need. About six months ago, my laptop’s screen got fallen on (aka “The Guinness Problem”), and I haven’t got around to fixing it yet. That means it’s been anchored to an external monitor, keyboard and mouse for the last six months. There have been perhaps three occasions in all that time where I could have done with it being a laptop again, instead of a very quiet and power-efficient desktop. I anticipate in the next 3 months a total of five occasions – all of them “get around”-able – where I could do with power on the road and so I have to ask whether the premium for a laptop is worth it. I’m already planning on an E90 Communicator when they hit the market, so my “ssh whilst in the coffee shop” problem is taken care of. It’s whether I need something portable I can code on that is the issue.

This last one has led me to a rather philosophical point. The reason I am naturally resistant to getting a dream-machine dual-head, or even triple-head desktop setup, is that I don’t want to feel that moving from Manchester would require a great deal of thought. A laptop has the feeling that I could just pick myself up, pack a bag, and head anywhere in the World and still be in business. That feeling is perhaps immature, but I’ve been reading Steinbeck’s “Travels With Charley” in recent days and I’m not convinced it isn’t just that I’m in need of spending some time on the road. Either way, I know taking root in a way that closes that choice out would make me feel a little peculiar right now.

All this results in me now trying to decide what the right hardware to buy is, not on technical specifications or pipedreams of how technically superior I could be if I bought “X”, but a much deeper philosophical perspective: what do I want out of life? Do I want to be here in Manchester? Do I want the hassle-free existence of OS X, or the unbridled freedom and moral authority of a completely open source system?

Stupidly “Big Questions” to be asking of a technology purchase. Especially when the answer might just be a couple of a Mac Minis or a Stinkpad.

Will writes about his life in computers as part of another meme that seems to be spreading. My life in computers is indicative of quite how poor my family were when I was growing up – a bit painful in places, alas.

I remember my first experience of a computer at home was my elder sister’s Vic20. I don’t remember ever getting a chance to do more than play games on it when I was about 5 or so, but I remember looking at the source code for BASIC programs and thinking “I wish I could do that”. Occasionally my Dad (at that time an accountant, he later became a systems analyst working on AS/400 systems in California) would bring home an Apple or IBM system to take a look at.

At primary school we regularly got to work on a BBC Master, mostly working in a language called LOGO that was meant to teach us about angles, recursion in geometry and the basics of algorithms I suppose.

When I got to secondary school, I started to teach myself during lunch breaks in the computer room – by borrowing a book from the school library on BBC BASIC and taking up the computer teacher’s offer of letting us use the computer suite for our own projects during Lent in return for a donation to CAFOD (I went to a Catholic school), I got to understand the basics.

For several years I didn’t have access to a computer at all at home. I would spend my evenings writing out programs on paper at home and dry-running them before going into school the next day and typing them in and seeing how I fared. This meant I developed a real eye for syntax that I’ve since lost in lieu of “Save, tab over, run” – something I need to get back, perhaps.

At the age of about 12 or 13 I managed to get an Amstrad CPC 6128 at home thanks to my Dad swagging it from my now step-Mum for a few week’s pocket money. I should point out that this was at a time when most of my peers were coding on Amiga 500 and Atari ST machines – I was fully a whole generation out – and it would be like giving somebody an Amiga today. Even so, I was loved it and was grateful for the chance to write code at home. It had the same 3” disk as Amstrad PCW machines, it’s own green monochrome monitor (CPCs didn’t plug into TVs) that used to give me headaches and my mother would complain if I left it set up in the living room for more than about 15 minutes.

Around this time my Father then donated to me an original twin-floppy IBM XT. It also had a dedicated green screen and was at the time I got it approximately 7-8 years old. It didn’t have a graphics card and had serious problems running contemporary software, however it did introduce me to MS-DOS and the ‘Microsoft way’ of doing certain things. This machine died when I took it around to a friend’s house a few years later, and I have a horrible feeling my step-dad eventually put the enclosure in a bin – something I deeply regret now for the environmental consequences as much as the fact I would love to have kept it for sentimental reasons.

I also seem to recall a BBC Micro coming home around this time that was pretty much DOA despite it costing a considerable amount to purchase from one of my school teachers. That little lesson taught me a lot about who to trust and how to check out a machine completely before purchasing – a boot-up is not the same as a functioning machine. I don’t know where that machine ended up.

I mostly however begged, borrowed and paid for computer time – my hometown of New Mills was the first place in the UK outside of London to get a cyber-cafe, and so I spent a lot of time hanging around there and the computer suite at the sixth form college I ended up attending (The Ridge) using Internet access as and when I could and coding up stuff in QBasic and occasionally C. At University I was regularly in the computer labs, almost moving into UMIST’s MSS J9 and Sackville cluster at times. I was working full-time in the suite in Kilburn building in the summer of 1997, and spent most of time trying to work out how to get around the various systems admins had put in place to prevent me from doing useful things (like, for example, run a decent compiler).

It wasn’t until I was about 20 years old that I actually ended up owning my own system that could reasonably be argued as being ‘up-to-date’. Prior to that, it had always been somebody else’s hardware or a generation or two out of date. That first machine was a cheap Taiwanese import laptop with an AMD processor bought from Morgan Computer on Piccadilly approach. I carried it through a mob of rioting Millwall fans and Police horses outside Piccadilly station to get it home.

Since then I’ve owned a whole variety of machines, mostly bought off eBay because I hate paying showroom prices and know what I’m doing. The most noted of these machines amongst friends being my Thinkpad 240 (nicknamed ‘Stinky’) which I infamously took to pieces in the middle of the pub during a BSDUG because somebody had a screwdriver handy. My most recent self-build was a Shuttle XPC that now serves my sister, brother-in-law and niece at their home in the Peak District: it is considerably faster and better equipped than any machine I could have ever dreamed of owning as a teenager.

I’m writing this on an iBook G4 which has been my primary machine for the last year or so. I have with me an old Celeron desktop I use for the occasional journey into Windows, a pile of older hardware I keep because it deserves a good home (a Sun IPX, a Vax, various old laptops that served me well over the years). It’s time for a major round of upgrades though.

I’m currently thinking through my choices on my next purchase, planned for June or thereabouts. Currently I’m thinking a 15” Macbook might be a good fit because I need to be able to run Linux, OS X and Vista and one machine to do all three would be a good fit. Staying portable gives me some flexibility as well, although the price premium for Apple hardware is really bothering me – I might just abandon supporting OS X and go for a cheaper x86 machine that is better equipped.

Busy, busy week this last week. Insanely busy, especially as my company’s year end is coming up December 31st, and I want to close my 2006 books and file my accounts very early in 2007.

Thankfully, things are on track for me to be able to pretty much shut down from the 17th December through to the 15th January, during which time I won’t be dealing with client work but will instead be retiring to my laboratory and tinkering on the mad, wonderful new inventions I have planned for release in 2007. If I get my planning right, by the end of 2007 I should be able to drop my client work entirely and move over to supporting my own products, which is where I wanted to be this time last year.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy client work, it’s just not what the company is about – I have absolutely no desire to work as a freelancer for the next 40 years, and I enjoy owning my own projects to take where I want. Client work doesn’t give me the freedom, challenge or the level of profitability that my own projects hopefully will.

Anyway, until I have some products to talk about here, it’s business as usual. Here’s some Sunday afternoon/Monday morning links:

I’ll find the time to post a full review next week, but I got an early copy of Designing the Obvious a few weeks back, and am very impressed with it. For somebody like me who needs to work at understanding design from a usability perspective it was a welcome dose, just in time for some major projects in the New Year. Like I say, next week there will be a full review with a run-down of what it covers but in essence, it’s all about making sure that we remember the humans who will be using the applications we make, and building interfaces around them.

For those of you unlucky enough to be working with Windows machines, you may want to know that Vista won’t be too bad once you get rid of all the cruft Microsoft was too busy ignoring to remove for you.

Whilst they only seem to be shipping the Nokia N73 right now, Three have announced x-series pricing which is very, very reasonable. I shall be grabbing one of these before Christmas, just as soon as a Sony Ericsson phone becomes available on those tarrifs. The only downside is that although they describe it as ‘unlimited internet usage’ what they mean by that is 1Gb/month data transfer, 10,000 MSN messages a month, 80 hours/month of Slingbox/Orb and 5,000 Skype minutes/month. Even so, that’s still a lot better than existing tariffs and when O2 and Vodafone step in with better offers, the deals will get better.

I owe Andy at Liquid Bronze a thank you for the heads up on this, but it would seem that if you know where to look and you’re in the market for an Apple this Christmas but want to spread the payments out, you can get 0% APR over 6-months on Apple hardware between £500 and £10,000. Unfortunately it’s individual customers only, and I need to splurge my money through the business so I’ll be taking a hit in January on my new hardware, but I noticed that their refurb products list has some pretty good deals going – slightly out-of-date Macbook Pros at 40% off, for starters.

When I get a few spare hours of free time in the coming weeks, I intend to spend a lot more time playing online chess. For those new, the comments section to this post on Feld Thoughts offers some good options. Feld himself settled on a site called Red Hot Pawn the name of which indicates just how young and cheeky the chess crowd is getting these days.

More ‘normal’ articles due up next week, until then comrades…

I found this rather entertaining ‘review’ of sorts earlier today, and it made me think about my own relationship with Apple. There’s no doubt they’ve raised expectations of what consumers are expecting from their computers these days, but I have had a love/hate relationship with their machines going back over a decade.

It all change a couple of years back however, when I was running FreeBSD on all my machines at home, and where I could, at work. A lot of people involved in FreeBSD at the time were switching to Apple, and it became clear that a lot of them weren’t coming back. See, under the skin of OS X – Apple’s newest operating system – is a Unix that is based in large part on FreeBSD. One of the first to move over was Jordan Hubbard, who started the FreeBSD project and is, to my knowledge, still head of release engineering at Apple on the OS X product. He has been followed professionally by many people, and in terms of users, I don’t know of any local BSD guys who were knocking around a few years ago who don’t own Apple hardware yet.

My reaction to this at first, was somewhat… well… judge for yourself. On a FreeBSD mailing list, somebody asked if anybody had any tips for a BSD’er starting on OS X. My reply, below, aptly represents my attitude at the time (and yes, I did used to be this aggressive nearly all the time, jerk that I was):

My advice is that you sell your over-priced fashion-victim toy with it’s Fisher Price Unix installed, and use the money instead to buy yourself a top of the range Thinkpad. It will outperform it, run FreeBSD, not look out of fashion next season, has been built by a company that is truly committed to the open source movement and whose execs don’t patronise you by assuming you travel to work on a skateboard in cargo pants or worse, pander to your girlfriend’s idea of what a computer should be.

In addition, you’ll be able to easily and cheaply upgrade parts of your laptop, built as it is on commodity hardware with 3rd-party suppliers being plentiful. You’ll find either the manufacturer’s support much better than Apple’s, alternatively you won’t have to travel 300 miles to find your “local” dealer as pretty much any computer store in the country will be able to carry out any repairs you need. Spares will be cheaper, labour will be cheaper, and you will not be without your laptop for 3 months whilst a replacement TFT screen sits on a boat from Korea slowly plodding it’s way to you, thanks to a ridiculous spares and repairs policy.

In addition, you won’t be contributing to the “brain drain” that Apple has caused on the Open Source movement, will understand more about how your computer works as a result, and won’t spend half your working day fighting bouncing icons, “helpful” software that constantly tries to break into every WAP point within range and a user interface that was specifically designed to be helpful to 5-year olds and your technophobic mother. You’ll instead get to use an OS and an interface designed for somebody who understands computers, not have to put up with one that assumes you are a 6th-grader with learning difficulties.

Plus, brilliantly, people won’t point at you and laugh when you get your laptop out on a plane or in a cybercafe for spending thousands of dollars on a laptop that isn’t as powerful as Intel-based competitors just because you think it “looks neat”. You will be considered by your peers to be a man instead of a boy, a leader instead of a follower, and you won’t get any more snide e-mails like this when you post to a FreeBSD list for help with your hardware.

Hope that helps. Sorry it was you that suffered my rant on Apple kit, but you are, to my knowledge, the first in a while.

I will now don the fireproof suit.

You know what the really ironic thing about that is? Two weeks later I needed to buy a new laptop. I didn’t want to go through the pain of configuring a load of drivers and just wanted a laptop with supported bluetooth and WiFi out of the box, with some reasonably familiar BSD-style Unix. At the time I was working for a University and qualified for Apple’s educational discount. Price wise, I couldn’t get a similar spec Thinkpad – or indeed any other laptop – to compete with the iBook G4 I’m typing this article on right now. Yes, I switched. I am a hypocrite. After blasting a guy with all that, I went out and bought an Apple.

I am now at a point where within a few weeks I will need to buy some new hardware, and once again I am considering the value proposition of an Apple box. They aren’t cheap, but given that it’s a FreeBSD userland under the skin, and they now have a decent processor inside, it’s starting to look tempting to drop a couple of thousand quid on a Macbook Pro.

The problem is, when I bought the iBook it made me a bit of a radical. Now, it just makes me the same, but a different kind of sameness. When I had a coffee in my usual place in town this afternoon, I noticed 4 people using laptops – all of them Apple’s of one flavour or another. They all looked like they should be using Apple machines: they didn’t look Unix types to me, more “I don’t know how to use my mobile phone properly” types.

Whilst Apple were able to leverage the fact that Toshiba, Dell, Sony Vaio and Acer laptops were all a bit ‘samey’, the problem they might now face is that Macbook and Macbook Pro hardware now signals to the nearby people in the know that the buyer doesn’t really know what to buy so just bought something ‘easy’. There is much more variety in the non-Apple laptop market than there is within Apple’s range, and its starting to feel like a severe and horrible weakness on Apple’s part.

What’s more, whilst Apple produces a pretty decent operating system, it’s not perfect. I do prefer the power and adaptive configurations you can push a ‘real’ Unix into, even if that means I don’t get to run various commercial applications. I can now get a cheap laptop with similar high-speed Intel hardware inside to a Macbook Pro from a variety of other manufacturers and roll out Ubuntu, OpenSolaris or even my old ally in times of war, FreeBSD, with relative ease: driver configuration has improved leaps and bounds.

Oddly, by buying a Sony, or even a Dell, I would now actually mark myself out as being a little bit different once more. I’d save money, and get all the advantages of cheap servicing I mentioned in my post above. The one thing that might make me stick with Apple? I think I might have subconsciously become an Apple Fanboy. It’s not that I want to lick my Apple hardware, but I like not thinking about it, and maybe the kids in the coffee shop are onto something: who wants the pain of thinking about hardware when all you want to do is write, produce videos, mix music, write software, whatever?