Why Vista Basic should be Microsoft's next big thing

It’s hard to believe, but the computer market was a much different place back when Vista was released. The cheap sub-notebook market had yet to be defined, and UMPCs were just being rolled out (to critical disdain). It was a world of power, with visions of mythical dual-core machines in every suburban home.

A year later and the whole market’s changed; the EEE PC is selling like hotcakes, a $200 desktop has just been released (with competitors on the way), and for a period of time even Walmart was selling a cheap linux PC in its stores (to disastrous results). All of these machines share a few traits: they use low-power CPUs, have small monitors, limited storage space, and they run Linux - despite the fact that their core market are people who think a Tux is a suit. None of these machines can run Vista, and even if they could the licensing fee would - in some cases - double prices.

Microsoft released Vista predicting the widespread adoption of powerful dual-core machines, when the reality was pretty much 180 degrees off. There’s a strong community of PC owners who did buy Vista boxes, only to find it too power-hungry for their machines. Companies such as Dell and HP are fielding requests to offer Linux support, and are starting to listen.

While the overwhelming consensus is that Vista sucks, most people will grudgingly agree that it works like a charm on a powerful enough system. The problem is that the OS comes with all this crap - DirectX 10, the Gadget sidebar, and Aero, for starters - that destroy weaker PCs.

In the midst of all this mess is the OS flavor that everyone forgot, Vista Basic. It’s designed for developing countries, so it’s cheap and built to run on lower end hardware; and because it’s built for developing countries Microsoft feels you shouldn’t be able to actually buy it in America (natch.) On the contrary, Microsoft, it’s the version we need the most. Despite the consumer reaction to the EEE, Linux is nowhere near a point where it can be used by tech-illiterate consumers; the consumer PC market is still a Windows dominated world.

When the next generation Windows 7 rolls out in 2010 Microsoft should swallow their pride and offer two versions: ‘Windows 7’ and ‘Windows 7 Light’. There’s a clear market for a feature rich, graphically stunning version of Windows. There’s even more of a need for a lightweight, dirt cheap version that works great on the kind of machine that would be considered slow back in 2004.

Vista is great, it just needs to stop sucking so much.

Advanced brake lights

A team of students at Virginia tech are working on brake lights that tell drivers behind you if your car is slowing down or how hard you’re breaking.

The thing that interests me the most about the system is that it had to be designed so that people who have never seen it before will be able to understand it within a matter of seconds. The team seems to have approached it really intelligently. Anyone who’s sat in front of a traffic light can identify yellow as “caution” and red as “stop”. Furthermore, we tend to associate flashing signals and brighter shades of color with increasing urgency. Both these common senses can be exploited to develop smarter break lights that even uninitiated people can understand.

I’ve got an entire folder in my bookmarks titled “why didn’t I think of that”. This innovation can proudly join its ranks.

Six degrees of wikipedia

Here’s a fun idea for a game

1. Pick a topic you want to arrive at (I chose Atoms)
2. Click on wikipedia’s random link
3. Attempt to arrive at your desired topic through the related links alone

I was able to do this on my first try. Tiny Russian province -> Russia -> healthcare -> chemistry -> atoms

Bonus points if you manage to do it in less then six jumps

Building on that Economist article i was just talking about.

Email by itself is not a good money making service. Social networks by themselves are not good money making services. IM tools like Meebo aren’t good money making services. But combine the data they can gather on users and you can get a stunningly accurate picture of an individual, and that’s worth something.

The future of social networking

The economist thinks that social networks are a fad that will never see the massive revenues enjoyed by Google and the like. They talk about the problems with social networks, and what the future holds for social interaction online. From the article:

“E-mail in the wider sense is the most important social network,” says David Ascher, who manages Thunderbird, a cutting-edge open-source e-mail application […] That is because the extended in-box contains invaluable and dynamically updated information about human connections […] an e-mail account has access to the entire address book and can infer information from the frequency and intensity of contact as it occurs.

There’s definite value to a social network that can track your interactions passively, but email isn’t the best platform to build it on. As immersive as email is in our lives, it is now only a piece of the puzzle in our daily interaction. Most of my conversations take place over IM, and more and more people are jumping onto Twitter or just communication with plain old fashioned cell phones.

A ‘passive’ social network will need to be able to plug into email, IM, voice, and aggregate user information from the rest of the web. When google released their gtalk IM service (and subsequent integration with gmail), no one really knew where they were going with the service. Now that they’ve started integrating the service with other platforms they’re starting to gain the ability to mine a vast majority amount of data on user interactions. Combine this with their recent purchase of Grand Central, and add a pinch of their excellent online alerts service with some clever text analysis and they can track all four major interactions.

I can’t decide if that’s really cool or really creepy

The stock market can be fun, too

File this under “why didn’t I think of that!”

There’s a hollywood stock exchange that lets you trade virtual cash on the success of actors, directors, and movies. Think Iron Man is going to be the next Spiderman? Put your (virtual) money where your mouth is at.

Damn, if I’d bet on this Ellen Page chick back when I saw hard candy I’d be worth millions by now…

GUIs vs CLIs

I like to use the keyboard as much as possible, but I never really gave much thought about why I like the command line more then a graphical interface when I’m doing serious work. This line in one of my textbooks felt like a slap on the forehead:

One of the benefits of command-driven systems, such as UNIX, is the ease with which [a sequence of steps] can be automated. GUIs make this phase more difficult when there is no way to automate or encapsulate the test.

There’s probably something you can build on to this, but I don’t want to think about it now. Time for a coffee

One is the loneliest number...

The wickedly sick portable dj system Pacemaker is doing something really cool. They’ve launched a new piece of software that lets you easily sort through your music and put together mixes, then paired it with an online service that lets users upload mixes, discover other djs, and talk about music.

Both Pacemaker and its online DJ community have separate business models, and both should do well. But by partnering both products under one banner they’re set to benefit from each other; when a dj visits the site they learn about the pacemaker, and when a dj reads about the pacemaker device they learn about the website.

Old Spice did something similar to this by having Will Farrell advertise both their deodorant and his movie, Jackie Moon; this one actually succeeds by being clever, though.

Leopard's doing upgrades right

Every major Apple OS release has been snapped up by an overwhelming majority of mac users within a matter of months - something I’m sure Microsoft would love to emulate.

I recently came across this quote from Will Shipley, of Delicious Monster fame:

“I would never switch Delicious Library 2 back to Tiger — not with CoreAnimation and Objective-C 2.0. The changes to Cocoa are so fundamental that I feel I’m learning to program again, at yet a higher level. Going from 10.5 to 10.4 would be like going from 10.4 to Windows — it’s just not worth any possible monetary gain.”

By adding a new pile of outstanding features for developers to Leopard Apple recruits them to promote an upgrade path; when all your day-to-day applications become Leopard-only within a matter of months, you have no option but to upgrade. That’s when Apple steps in and goes “hey, you want our latest and greatest? It’s only $100 - no multiple versions to sort through, no upgrade edition; just buy it, will you?”

A new way of looking at data

More and more people increasingly use multiple computers - an office machine, a home machine, a blackberry, and a laptop - and they find the need to juggle data between all three. I’ve maintained for a while that the biggest unsolved problem in computing right now is synchronization, but this post is about something else.

A lot of companies are starting to realize that it’s a good idea to ease up on the crazy proprietary storage schemes and walled gardens. Microsoft has (kind of) opened up .docx, XML is taking off in a big way, and any web app worth its salt has to have some kind of API.

I’d like to take a look at three really cool things that are pushing this envelope one step further - through what I call the why-didnt-i-think-of-that approach.

1) Markdown

John Gruber’s amazing markup language (basically - the stuff that tells your screen what gets bolded, underlined, and linked) is designed to make sense even if it isn’t properly formated. This really takes a demonstration to explain, so here goes:

Want to underline something? Just type _underlined text_ Want to add a bullet point? Type * this is a bullet point

Looking at a non-formated Markdown document, you can tell exactly what its supposed to look like; which makes it really, really easy and portable.

2) TaskPaper

This application takes the concepts pioneered by Markdown and applies it to a much neater format. In short, Taskpaper a pretty powerful to-do application. The twist is that it uses regular .txt files to store data. If you want to tag something, you just add a @tag to the end of the to-do. Once you finish a task, simply type @done, and Taskpaper crosses it out. This means that lists can not only be read outside of the application, they can be created and edited as well

3) Apple Mail

New to Leopard is the ability to track notes and to-dos inside Mail. The twist is that (you guessed it) instead of storing these files as some kind of unreadable file, Mail stores the data as standard email. Combine this with gmail’s advanced filtering and you can not only easily store and read your notes & to-dos from a web browser, but you can have gmail perform specific actions on them. Say you want to forward a copy of all your to-dos to your secretary - just have Gmail automatically forward any messages matching that value. They’ll even show up on her copy of Mail, because the app will automatically download them into her lists.

All three of these apps share one thing in particular - an open-ness that goes beyond an easier to adopt file format. They’ve all realized that a good old .txt file still holds an immense amount of power, even in this day and age.