Newest Industry

UPDATED: Impressions after the first month can be found here.

For the last 12-14 months, I have carried a Blackberry Pearl 8100 on my hip. And, as far as smartphones go, it served as a good, basic started phone. There were some issues though, including:

• No push email, due to limited corporate licenses for the Blackberry Enterprise server and an addition $30/month cost for Enterprise Support through T-Mobile. I did get my work email, but it was through a hack, and my work calendar and contacts had to be supported through Google Sync on the desktop and on the phone
• Poor camera. It was a 1.3MP camera. The quality of the camera varied over time, especially through various OS upgrades I put the phone through.
• Slow media support. Showing me the picture folder took up to 10 minutes, and got worse as more media was added

I was in the market for a new phone. The qualifications were:

• Better Camera
• 3G Support
• Active Sync Support
• Full physical keyboard
• WiFi (optional)

As a T-Mobile customer, the Active Sync and physical keyboard ruled out the new myTouch. The battery life on the G1 ruled that machine out.

Then I learned about the Dash 3G on Monday. It was exactly what I wanted.

Based on the HTC Snap, this phone is a serious upgrade to the old EDGE/GPRS Dash, which had always interested me. But, I was not willing to settle for EDGE/GPRS speeds. And though the T-Mobile 3G network may not be as built out as the AT&T 3G network, it is likely to improve over time.

Now, I have had the Dash 3G since Wednesday night. Comments so far?

• Moving contacts. This was sort of difficult, but it took only a few minutes once I had it sorted. Keeping my BlackBerry contacts synced with Google made this easy, as I exported my Google contacts, and imported them to Outlook
• GMail support. It’s done through IMAP, which is great, but it created a whole bunch of new labels in GMail that weren’t there before.
• Speed. Very fast, even when looking through folders of images.
• Camera. While 2MP is pretty low-end these days, it’s perfect for what I’m looking for.
• Ease of Use. Moving from one OS to another is always a challenge. But, Windows Mobile 6.1 benefits from being like Windows. And as much as you might disagree with that, it is a model that most of the world is used to.
• Battery life. Not bad, but I am always power-conscious. I only turn the WiFi on at home, and I haven’t fire up the Bluetooth yet. Using mainly the 3G network, battery life appears to be quite good. I plan to put it through a drain test over the next 36-48 hours to see how long the battery truly lasts.

Overall, through nearly 2 days, I am very happy with the new phone. If you are looking for a work-ready phone on the T-Mobile network, I highly recommend moving to the Dash 3G.

June is one of my favorite months. The sun returns (although in the Boston area there are concerned that it has been replaced by clouds and humidity), the kids get out of school (and get sent to camp), and the outdoor pool opens (and I actually swim in it).

In the US browser market, Internet Explorer 8 continues its slow replacement of Internet Explorer 6 and 7, finally overtaking MSIE 6 on June 11 [Stats courtesy of StatCounter].

The great news is that Internet Explorer 6 is slowly falling of the pace, relegated to large companies with proprietary code and a degree of inertia that impedes their movement to accepting new browsers.

The two-month trend does show some very dramatic changes, most notably with Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3.

While these changes appear dramatic, the lack of absolute values to base the StatCounter graphs on means that it’s very difficult to determine if these values are a result of a shift in the actual browser market, or a result in decreasing numbers of visitors to sites with the StatCounter tracking code.

Worldwide for June, the primary trend is that the decrease in Internet Explorer 7 is matched almost precisely by the increase in the use of Internet Explorer 8.

Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 6 remained almost completely unchanged through June, indicating that the US trend is very different than that seen throughout the rest of the world. The tracking trend indicates that Firefox 3 could have overtaken Internet Explorer 7 by the end of July.

Could have is used purposely here, as the release of Firefox 3.5 will fragment the market share for this browser, and it is not likely that it will match the stats for Firefox 3 immediately.

Despite all the claims that the browser war is over, and that applications have moved beyond the browser, it is highly unlikely that this dream will be realized in the consumer browser market until late 2010, when the effect of Windows 7 can be seen on the use of Internet Explorer 8 .

Overall, June 2009 was a month of substantial shifts in the US browser market, which will be further aggravated with the release of Firefox 3.5, and the slow and steady adoption of Internet Explorer 8 by consumer and business users.

UPDATE: TechCrunch has noted the ongoing shifts to the browser share market [here].

I will have been in the US for a decade as of July 27 2009. The first move saw me take my family 1,000 miles south to the Bay Area and then 3,500 miles east to the Boston area.

When I left Canada, I always assumed that my stay in the Excited States would be short. I was in the country to learn, grow, take advantage of the experience that the giant next door would give me. Then we would return to Canada and settle into a quiet life.

Ten years on, I have a Green Card (don’t ask about that nightmare) and when I come home to Canada, I realize how far I have wandered from the country that I still refer to as home.

Add to that the fact that most of the visits we make are to one of the fastest growing and most expensive cities in the country and every trip out to places I once knew brings ‘Where the hell did that come from?’ moments.

I wax nostalgic for this place, this city near the mountains, surrounded by the sea. It is the city of my young adult life, where I learned the skills I needed to get on in life; where I met my wife; where I felt at home.

What a difference ten years makes. We have placed our roots in another place, a very different place. A place that couldn’t be more different than here.

I joke that I am legally prevented from voting in two countries. As a transplant I will never be completely at home in the place where I live. The country of my birth is an interesting and lovely place, a stranger that I rediscover a little bit on every visit.

When we travel back to the country of my birth, I realize that the move to the US saved me, saved from being trapped by narrow goals and shortened horizons. But the move came with a price.

As someone who lives with a gardener, I know the value of a plant in the right place. Often you don’t discover that a plant is in the wrong spot until you have had it for a few years. Then, one season, you transplant it, and, with some more sun and a little more water, it blossoms, it thrives.

The gardener who does that is always pleased with the results, but is frustrated by the time lost by having a wonderful plant fight for life, wasting its its energy and effort to survive rather than to thrive.

To thrive, I had to leave. But I left a piece of me behind.

This week marks a momentous time in the history of the Internet. In the United States, StatCounter reports that for the first three days of the work week (Monday – Friday), Internet Explorer 8 usage is equal to Internet Explorer 6 usage.

Tie this to the trend of decreasing Internet Explorer usage noted late last week and the release of Firefox 3.5 RC1 and Safari 4.0 and Opera 10 in the last few weeks, and it appears that the balance of browser usage on the Internet is becoming more fluid.

Does this mean that standards will become more relevant? Can you truly count on limiting customers to one browser?

Will browser lock-in for certain applications continue to be considered acceptable?

I have been monitoring this trend for a couple of weeks to see if it remained constant, and it appears to be a real thing. Since the end of May 2009, Internet Explorer 7′s browser share in the US has collapsed, with a requisite increase in the use of Firefox 3.0.

This is a staggering change. Either this is an artifact of the way that StatCounter is capturing browser data or a very large organization(s) suddenly switched the default browser that it allowed its customers to use.

Does anyone have any insight into why this may have occurred?

There will be GrabPERF downtime on May 29-30 2009 as Technorati completes its colocation relocation process. [here] There is no set time for the outage or its length, as the machines have to be physically relocated to the new datacenter, and then integrated into the new network configuration.

I will be contacting the agent locations in the next few hours to update them on this maintenance.

UPDATE: GrabPERF returned to service as of 23:40 GMT on May 30 2009. Thank you for your patience.

Last Tuesday, I created a Windows 7 RC virtual machine for VMWare Fusion. As a fairly technical user of operating systems and the like, our internal IT department figured that I would be the right person to put this new OS through its paces.

Unlike a lot of people who are using Windows 7 and commenting on the new features and functionality, I am here to comment on how well it works with someone who is ingrained in a Windows XP workflow to get his job done.

As a virtual machine (2 processors, 1GB RAM, 40GB disk), Windows 7 is not as resource intensive as Vista threatened to be, and is just as responsive as my XP virtual machine is with the same machine configuration.

Subtle changes to the Start Menu and the Task Bar are easy to adapt to, and so far all of my applications run smoothly (I am using mainly Microsoft applications, so this should not be surprising).

My virtual machine doesn’t have an Aero compatible video card, so I don’t get all of the cool transparencies and visual effects, but frankly those are eye-candy. I need an OS that just works, and so far, Windows 7 lives up to expectations.

The most surprising thing is that there are no surprises. Building on 2-3 years of Vista development and improving the performance means that most applications already run efficiently. The only complaint I suppose is that the OS takes up a very substantial amount of the 40GB disk. However, as this is not the OS where I store media, pictures, etc., I am not as concerned as I would be if this was my primary computer.

That said, on an old Dell Latitude D610 (60 GB disk, 2 GB RAM, single core processor carved by cavemen) that I installed this the same OS on, it is running fine, except for a large amount of fan action that I didn’t hear when the same machine was running Ubuntu 9.04. As well, this older machine has no apps on it, other than Skype, and it has a large amount of the 60BG of disk still left.

Overall, as a day-to-day user of Windows, I am satisfied that Windows 7 is a giant leap over Vista, and I am looking forward to migrating my work permanently to this OS.

Since its GA release on March 19 and its addition to Windows Update in late April, Internet Explorer 8 has been gradually increasing its market share in the US. Based on the current growth pattern in StatCounter’s GlobalStats data, it appears that Internet Explorer 8 will overtake Internet Explorer 6 sometime in late May or early June.

In other parts of the world, the adoption of the new version of Internet Explorer is substantially slower, and affected by regional differences in the browser population. Europe is notable in this as MSIE8 has just overtaken Opera 9.6 in the browser population in the last week.

In Asia, Internet Explorer 8 has moved into fourth in browser share, but is a substantially lower percentage of the population than the top three browsers. In a frightening statistic, Internet Explorer 6 is the most popular browser in Asia, indicating that path to adoption may be longer in this region.

Overall the adoption of this new browser as a replacement for Internet Explorer 6 and 7 is slow and steady. MSIE8 does not appear to be significantly cutting into the Firefox population, but this could change as people begin to hear more about the features of the new browser, and Web sites begin to be designed to its features, rather than those of MSIE6 and MSIE7.

At CNet News today, the article What browser wars? The enterprise still loves IE 6 nicely sums all the reasons that Internet Explorer 6 is still in use in enterprise environments. The dominance of Internet Explorer 6 in the workplace is something I discussed a few days ago, supported by the pattern of higher weekday use of this browser during the work-week.

Limiting employees to a browser that is considered an ancient technology by Web developers poses an interesting dichotomy to companies. Internally, they are powering their internal applications with coal and steam, and turning the cogs of business with leather drive-belts. Externally, the customers get to see a site that is shiny, one that has all the gadgets of a rich-Internet application that require the computationally advanced capabilities of a modern browsers.

To some extent, the companies who use Internet Explorer 6 internally are saying to their employees that the Internet is simply another desktop application that they must use.

I am firm believer that the Web will be the home of many of the applications we use on a daily basis in the very near future [here and here]. My vision of this is that the Web application is designed to free the user, and lessen the workload for IT departments.

Most organizations continue to see the Internet as a negative, a threat to productivity, a necessary evil. So if they restrict their employees and provide them with a browser that doesn’t quite work properly on the Internet, they still have ultimate control.

I have had the benefit of working for organizations throughout my professional career that did (do) not limit my choice of browser or operating system, allowing me to find my own preference. I realize that this is rare in corporate Industrial Culture, and I consider myself lucky.

So, why is their still a need for Internet Explorer 6? Frankly, there is really no need for it in my opinion, and the CNet News article has a table from Forrester that supports that. That doesn’t mean that my browser idealism and utopian dream of “may the best browser win” will hold any sway over the IT decision makers in large organizations.

StatCounter still shows that during the week, Internet Explorer 6 holds 12% of the browser share in the US [here]. So, will this 12% of the browser world hold back the promise of the Internet for the rest of us?

While I was performing my standard Windows Update on my work virtual machine this morning, I wondered if the promised Internet Explorer 8.0 release to Windows Update had been dropped.

I switched to my test-bed, vanilla Windows XP virtual machine, ran Windows Update, and PING! Up it came. The masses of people who blindly do what Windows Update tells them to do will now be installing Internet Explorer 8 on their machines.

The interesting thing is that the only piece of software that Windows Update said was a critical Update was Internet Explorer 8.0. Given that it would be replacing Internet Explorer 7.0 on my virtual machine, how bad was Internet Explorer 7? Are they trying to push MSIE6 and MSIE7 out of the way ASAP?

Today should see a large number of new installs of Internet Explorer 8, either on purpose or inadvertently by those folks who install everything that Microsoft tells them to. I will be monitoring StatCounter’s GlobalStats over the next few days to see if there is a spike in, most notably, US installs of Internet Explorer 8.

Just as a sidebar, Internet Explorer 8, without the support of Windows Update, has increased from 3.5% to 6.28% of the browser share in the US (3.33% to 6.2% in North America; 2.65% to 4.4% Worldwide) in the April 1-28 2009 period. [Stats courtesy of StatCounter GlobalStats]

I can’t make a lot of comments about the quality of browsing experience in one version of Internet Explorer over another; I have been a dedicated Firefox user on Mac, and a Safari user on Windows (yes, that is weird) for a while. But the desire to move as many people as quickly as possible to a new browser speaks volumes to where Microsoft thinks the Web is going. And they realize that it is not going in the direction that its older browsers had been taking it.

Further Updates will follow.

UPDATE: A colleague forwarded me this article on the release of Internet Explorer 8 to Windows Update. Effectively, you still have to go through the Web interface and agree to download the new browser. It’s not being pushed down onto Windows users through the automatic update built into the OS, no doubt to placate the glacially-slow IT departments I mentioned here.