Monthly Archives: June 2007

Thoughts about Safari

Yesterday, as I’m sure you’ve heard, Apple announced a version of Safari for Windows and also revealed that Safari will be the platform for app development on the iPhone.

Josh Catone on Read/Write Web has a good summary.

Understandably there has been a mixed reaction to these announcements.

Here are my random thoughts:

Safari is right on the brink of becoming a browser that web developers need to care about. This might be enough to make that happen. That would take the tally to four (including IE6, IE7, Firefox). It’s like the 90s all over again, which will come as a bit of a shock to developers who grew up in the Internet Explorer dominated era.

Some people have questioned who in their right mind would run Safari on Windows? That’s an easy one to answer: all of the Mac fanboys who are stuck using Windows PCs at work will (cough Amnon, cough Tim) and, I suppose, all of the Windows developers creating apps for the iPhone.

I agree with Jason from 37signals. Creating a separation between the platform (the physical phone and the browser) and the apps which third-party developers create is a smart move.

What do you think?

In the last 12 months Safari has grown from 1.1% market share to 2.1%. This is a simple result of selling more Macs. According to this recent Bloomberg report Apple now has 7.7% market share in desktops and just under 10% in laptops, which is a lot more than I would have guessed. So, what does the future hold for Safari?

And, related to this: what will happen to IE7? As I noted yesterday, it’s grown quickly to ~30% in the first half of this year, but seems to have stalled there.

Let’s hear your predictions for the next 12 months.

We’ll come back to them in a year and see who was closest.

Web 2.0: fizz or substance

Marc Andreessen has recently started his own blog.

An awseome addition to the conversation I’m sure you’ll agree.

One of his first posts is about Web 2.0.

He doesn’t seem to be a fan:

“Web 2.0 has been picked up as a term by the entrepreneurial community and its corollaries in venture capital, the press, analysts, large media and Internet companies, and Wall Street to describe a theoretical new category of startup companies.

Or a ‘space’, if you will.

As in, ‘Foobarxango.com is in the Web 2.0 space’.

At its simplest level, this is just shorthand to indicate a new Web company.

The technology industry has a long history of creating and naming such ‘spaces’ to use as shorthand.

Before the ‘Web 2.0 space’, you had the ‘dot com space’, the ‘intranet space’, the ‘B2B space’, the ‘B2C space’, the ‘security space’, the ‘mobile space’ (still going strong!)… and before that, the ‘pen computing’ space, the ‘CD-ROM multimedia space’, the ‘artificial intelligence’ space, the ‘mini-supercomputer space’, and going way back, the ‘personal computer space’. And many others.

But there is no such thing as a ‘space’.

There is such a thing as a market — that’s a group of people who will directly or indirectly pay money for something.

There is such a thing as a product — that’s an offering of a new kind of good or service that is brought to a market.

There is such a thing as a company — that’s an organized business entity that brings a product to a market.

But there is no such thing as a ‘space’.

And, as far as startups are concerned, there is no such thing as Web 2.0.”

This all doesn’t bode well for Brenda, Phil and Che, who will be the negative team in a celebrity debate that I’m going to be moderating at the next Webstock Mini on Tuesday 19th June.

If you’re going to be in Wellington make sure you book your tickets today and get along.

We’ll see you there!

Browser stats for May

Sam sent through the latest Trade Me browser stats (for May ’07):

Browser Market Share
IE 6 51.3%
IE 7 29.9%
Firefox 2.0 9.2%
Firefox 1.5 3.9%
Safari 2.1%
Firefox 1.0 1.1%
Others 2.1%

It’s interesting to compare these to previous months: February ’07 and December ’06.

After growing from nothing to 30% market share in the first few months of the year IE 7 has now totally stalled. It seems that everybody who is going to get the new version via Windows Update already has.

IE 6 is hanging in there at around 51%. Presumably all of these people have either disabled Windows Update, work for somebody who has disabled Windows Update or are using an illegitimate copy of Windows.

Perhaps, as Robert McLaw suggested in a recent post about compromised web servers, Microsoft’s policy of not patching pirated copies of Windows is actually causing them more problems than it is solving?

In other browser news, the first beta of Netscape 9 was released last week. I was surprised to find there still was a Netscape, to be honest. I’m not entirely sure why they are bothering.

Whatever makes you nervous

“Here’s Michael Jordan’s move on the golf course: Some guy in the group asks if Jordan wants to play for money, Jordan says of course, the guy asks how much, and Jordan says, ‘Whatever makes you nervous.’ Works every time.”

From: Steve Rosenbloom

:-)

ZFS

Rumours last week suggested the upcoming “Leopard” release of OS X would use the ZFS file system.

I’d never heard of that, so I asked Wikipedia to fill me in:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettabyte_File_System

It turns out that ZFS stands for “Zettabyte File System” (a zettabyte is equal to one hundred thousand million gigabytes!) and was developed by Sun Microsystems.

It is a 128-bit system, and has been designed to have storage limits which are “so large that they will never be encountered in practice”, so large in fact that it couldn’t be filled up without literally “boiling the ocean”:

“The mass of the oceans is about 1.4×1021kg. It takes about 4,000J to raise the temperature of 1kg of water by 1 degree Celsius, and thus about 400,000J to heat 1kg of water from freezing to boiling. The latent heat of vaporization adds another 2 million J/kg. Thus the energy required to boil the oceans is about 2.4×106J/kg * 1.4×1021kg = 3.4×1027J. Thus, fully populating a 128-bit storage pool would, literally, require more energy than boiling the oceans.”
Source: Jeff Bonwick’s Blog

You’ve gotta smile!

Touchy feely

This coming week is the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in the US.

Expect the buzz around the upcoming launch of the iPhone to reach fever pitch by the time Steve Jobs takes the stage.

Check out this competition, where people had to make their own iPhone advert (via Michael Gregg). Amazing free publicity for a product which isn’t even released yet.

This entry is a bit wacky:

I could swear those are kiwi accents too. :-)

And so the anticipation builds.

Meanwhile, for those sitting on the Windows side of the fence (or for that matter Apple fan boys in NZ who will no doubt be waiting a while for the local release of iPhone) … no need to feel totally left out of all this touchy feely stuff.

Check out the just launched HTC Touch, which runs Windows Mobile and has a touch screen interface.

Sounds great in theory. But when you look closely at the photos of the physical design of the phone or see the user interface in action, it seems to lack the final 1% which makes the iPhone appear magical.

As Joel Spolsky wrote this week: it’s a games of inches.

Are the All Blacks winning more than ever?

I have a few hours to kill before the start of tonights All Blacks test vs. France. So, a rugby post seems appropriate.

If you’re a rugby fan you’ll already know about Inky.

Or, at least, you do now.

Here are two quotes from one of his recent newsletters that jumped out at me:

“Now that we have man-mountain forwards ourselves, with our all-round skills still in abundance we are compiling a higher win ratio than ever.”

“We will play rugby better than anyone else because we live and breathe its core principle of fourteen men working to put a fifteenth into space.”

A higher win ratio than ever? Really?

Here are what the numbers show:

When Played Won %
1900s 14 11 79%
1910s 10 8 80%
1920s 14 7 50%
1930s 22 14 64%
1940s 10 4 40%
1950s 30 22 73%
1960s 42 35 83%
1970s 45 27 60%
1980s 57 45 79%
1990s 92 68 74%
2000s 1 82 68 83%

So, yes, they are winning now more than ever. And playing more than ever too!

In the 20 years since the first World Cup in 1987 the ABs have played 193 tests and won 154 of them (hopefully 155 by the time many of you read this). That’s an 80% win record while playing more games than were played in the previous 80 years.

Here is how they stack up against quality opposition 2 in the World Cup era:

Opposition Played Won %
Australia 44 27 61%
England 14 10 71%
France 21 15 71%
South Africa 33 23 70%
TOTAL 112 75 67%

So even against the very best they still win twice as often as they lose.

Of course, the only problem with sustained exceptional performance like this is that it comes to be taken for granted.

Stats courtesy of www.pickandgo.info

(1) includes 2000-2007, up to and including last weekends test vs. France.

(2) that is, countries that have played in one or more World Cup final.

Is Computer Science dead?

Like Luke Welling, I suspect that reports of the death of Computer Science has been greatly exaggerated.

“The death of computer science was a fairy tale in 1987, and 20 years later it is still a fairy tale. More powerful computers are not replacing programmers any more than calculators are replacing accountants or power tools are replacing carpenters.”

Read the full post.

Yellow is the new black

Yellow Pages have put up a beta of their new website:

www.yellow.co.nz

As previously noted they seem to have dropped the “pages” part of their name.

As far as I can tell, apart from a bit of lipstick, the site is the same old site we all don’t love:

It’s still just an online version of the printed directory. Most listings contain only a phone number and an address, not even a description of the business. You actually get more information from the hard-copy where at least they allow graphics etc (although you can view the ad from the printed directory by clicking on the ‘view ad’ link).

There is so much more useful information that businesses could include in their online listing. Imagine, for example, if they allowed restaurants to list their menu.

They don’t cater for browse dominant users. To view the category hierarchy I need to click a link and then I end up in a horrible control which lists every leaf category alphabetically.

Their category hierarchy continues to be a complete dogs breakfast. There are too many leaf categories and consequently the structure is too deep and too fragmented. The structure is also unbalanced. ‘Business Services’ is a top-level category – covering everything from ‘Accountants’ to ‘Security Guards’. ‘Funeral Arrangements’ is also a top-level category, although it has only seven sub-categories which hare all leaf categories.

I can’t list a new ad online. Hello?

The search is still way more complex than it needs to be. Google allows me to find any page on the whole internet using a single text box. That should be the benchmark. Really, who is going to search for businesses “within 100 kms”?

They’ve added “My Address Book” functionality, but don’t allow me to add comments. I’m completely disconnected from all of the other people searching on the site. Where is the “other people searching for this found these listings useful” functionality?

Oh well. Maybe in the next version?

Chris Killen signs for Celtic

Living in the UK for a few years I got used to having the sports news totally dominated by football (I even learned to call it football rather than soccer).

Here it’s the other way around. Even when the All Blacks are playing a second- or third-string French side, which everybody expects them to beat comfortably, other sports still struggle to get a look in.

But tucked away at the bottom of the back page today was some interesting news:

Killen confirms move to Celtic

Celtic is a top club, so this is big news. Next season they will play in the elite Champions League. Chris Killen will be the only New Zealander in that competition.

Not bad for a fellow Rongotai College boy!

East vs. West

We “aliens” are sometimes quick to criticise Americans for thinking that the world ends at the US border.

However, the knife cuts both way I suppose.

I don’t really understand or appreciate the internal politics that dominates their thinking.

I never thought of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft as West-coast companies fighting an East-coast establishment before this:

The Rapid Rise of the West Coast Media Industry

Interesting.