MS Office for the iPad 2

More thoughts on the topic:

If MS had confidence in their Windows 8 tablet strategy surely they'd hold out the port of MS Office for their own kit. Wouldn't it be the definitive tablet killer app? Maybe, maybe not.

It would be the first time that MS were producing a major product for a platform they didn't control (yes I know that office for mac has been available for years - but it hardly counts). Scary new territory.

MS Office for the iPad

A few posts back I speculated as to whether Miscrosoft would bring Office to the iPad. According to recent tech news Microsoft is indeed in the process of porting its Office suite onto the iPad. If true this is an interesting development. You would have thought that such a move was counter productive given that it could hold off and port Office directly onto the Windows 8 platform for both PC and tablets.

I wonder if they'll get round to doing an Android port?

You can't be sirious!

When Siri was launched at the iPhone 4S product launch it was dismissed by both Andy Rubin of Google and Craig Mundie of Microsoft. The initial dismissal was along the lines of "people don't like talking to phones" which seams a bizarre statement when you think about it.

Now Microsoft seems to have rethought its objections and is now running a series of TV commercials about the voice integration that currently is in place in the Xbox 360.

I'm not going to get into the semantics of Voice Control versus quasi artificial intelligence but Micrsoft's lame TV commercials really don't do anything to help their case.

Two trick pony

I've had the misfortune to be upgraded to Microsoft Office 2010. IMO it's a horrible piece of bloatware that tells you all you need to know about what's gone wrong at Microsoft. It somehow manages to muck up the casual and power user experience - which let's face it is no mean feat. However, what it does have on it's side is legacy, legacy more legacy.

If we accept for a moment that we're about to begin a journey in the the brave new Post PC world then we have to accpept that one of Microsoft's two big ticket items - Windows - will also wither on the vine. This will place extra pressure on the Office suite of products. So my question today is how long will Microsoft resist writing a native port of Office for the iPad?

When September Comes

It’s no secret, if you've read this blog, that I am a fan of the Cupertino based company, together with their inspirational CEO. I love the design of their products and the simplicity of their product range. At home I choose to use a Mac and I also own an iPhone and an iPad.

Does this make me an Apple fanboi. Probably. Am I embarrassed about that fact. Definitely as I'm wasy too uncool. Fanboi for life though? Well no I don’t think so.

My current phone, a 3GS, is getting a bit long in the tooth. Time will tell whether iOS 5 cripples it but even so it is two years old. Therefore I will watch to see what Septembers iPhone announcement brings but just in case Apple disappoints there are certainly plenty of alternatives out there.

One friend, who I still think secretly harbours a grudge about the iPod killing off the MiniDisc, has recently got a Nexus S. Whilst it may not be superior to an iPhone 4 it is certainly close enough and came on a very attractive plan. Another friend has ditched his iPhone 4 and is raving about his new Samsung Galaxy S 2. I must admit it looks good and he is really enjoying the ‘freedom’ offered by Android over the closed shop that is iOS. Another friend is even raving about his Windows Phone 7 device so maybe when Nokia bring out some new hardware that may be worth a look.

I must admit that there are times when I’ve even been tempted by low end smaller 3.2” screen Android handsets like the HTC Legend and Wildfire or even the HP/Palm Pre. The long and the short of it is that there is a lot riding for Apple when September comes.

Is that a computer in your pocket or are you .....

One of my New Years Resolutions was to use Facebook a bit more. My wife is a facebook junkie and whiles hours away on it sat in front of the TV. I just don't get it but each to their own. Having started to use Facebook a bit more my question for today is where is facebook's strategy for tablet computers. The mobile app is fine but is a cut down version of the browser experience so why no app for the iPad for example.

I was intrigued at Mark Zuckerberg's definition of mobile technology at their recent Mobile press event which simply failed in any way to acknowledge the tablet computer as a mobile device. So according to him PC's and smartphones are important but tablets are not.

Link that back to Steve Ballmer's quotes recently about everything being a PC (including tablets and smartphones) thereby all being candidates for Windows (God forbid) and also the recently cleared up confusion from Google about where Chrome and Android sit and we can see that the Cupertino tablet has really caught the competition on the back foot. It seems to me that Job's vision and strategy is the only complete one on the market today.

So back to Facebook. Not only should people be asking why there's no app for the iPad but more importantly is where is the Facephone or FacePad.

Back to the Future

Back in the post 'The IT Wars' I referred to an RDBMS war that was fought between Oracle and Ingres. In reality competition in the RDBMS space has always been a little more complex than that.

The Oracle/Ingres battle just happended to be the main one at play when I entered the fray. FYI - my first RDBMS was Ingres and I have to say that from the developers perspective it was a far superior product to Oracle. Ultimately it is recognised that Oracle won out because of superior sales and marketing prowess, although this simplistic argument undermines the fact that Oracle was the more reliable and scalable database (row vs page level locking anyone?).

In reality Oracle has seen off the following RDBMS competition over the years:

- Ingres in the late 80's
- Sybase in the early 90's
- Informix in the late 90's

Along the way the big O has also also gobbled up Rdb and MySQL databases.

The interesting thing is that when I worked for Larry in the mid to late 90's Oracle always saw the following two as being their major database rivals:

- IBM with DB2
- Microsoft with SQL Server

So it comes as no great surprise that with the acqusition of Sun Microsystems and the plans that Oracle has for its Database Machine that the likes of IBM and Microsoft are scathing in their response calling it a return to the bad old days of the 1960's.

So how does the combination of software/hardware affect the big players:

Microsoft - SQL Server runs on any platform so long as its Windows/x86 so no change there.
IBM - The various forms of DB/2 run on various hardware platforms - so long as they're IBM that is. Again no change.
Oracle - I'm struggling to see a downside here. Larry has picked up Sun at pretty much a rock bottom price and with the new capability can attack integrated hardware/software threats from IBM, Netezza and Teradata who have all espoused the integrated harware/software solution. The combination of hardware and software is not unlike that taken by Apple, but it doesn't preclude Oracle's regular business of selling database on pretty muuch every major platform out there.

He's also picked up Java which was the lynchpin of Oracle's development platform anyway and moved a long way to removing the potential threat from Open Source by picking up the most successful of the Open Source databases in MySQL. In short, it's a win win because it's unlikely that he will alienate any of the existing hardware partners as they know that they cannot ignore Oracle.

Does it herald a return to the heyday of the 1960's, however, or for anyone following this blog, does that mean that we can look forward to fully integrated corporate data model as I've referred to in a few prior posts. Not likely. When Larry refers to an integrated server platform I think you have to look deeper than the marketing blurb to understand that apart from improvements to the systems management space and perhaps better performance integration there really isn't anything new here. Im not saying that the Database Machine is a bad concept, but I'd be wary in thinking that it herald's a return to when life was simple.

Dark Days at 1 Infinite Loop?

According to some recent techpress articles it's been a week to forget for Apple. Firstly, Redmond launched what appears to be their first viable alternative in the mobile devices space with Windows Phone Series 7 (catchy title, eh?) and then the rest of the also rans (excluding Google, RIM, Microsoft and Nokia) in the mobile phone industry announce the WAC as an alternative to the App Store.

Take this into account with some lacklustre reviews on the iPad and should we be calling an end to the Apple Renaissance?

Well, time will tell whether the Microsoft gamble will succeed but many pundits are already writing it off just like the Zune. Steve Jobs has used the Wayne Gretzky quote 'I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.' and I think Microsoft as skating at where the iPhone has been.

And as to the WAC check out http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/16/app_stores_szzz/ for some thoughts. Also if the OviStore has to resort to giving away the Nokia Maps Application for free to get some traction then how will the WAC fare any better? Nokia reported that there were 3m dowloads of its Maps application last week. This compares to Apple's overall 3bn App Store downloads and 10bn iTunes downloads to put some context around these numbers.

The much more serious threat to Apple in the mobile space comes from Google with its Android platform, despite Eric Schmidt's low key address today at MWC. Android, and a plethora of mobile phone makers, could challenge the all-in-one hardware/software philisophy that Apple has today, just like like Windows and a plethora of PC makers did for the original Macintosh computer. However, there are real differences between the early PC days and the current smartphone wars. Namely:

- different pricing models are at play - Back in the 80's everyone agreed that the Mac was superior to the PC but cost twice as much. Most mobiles are bought on the back of network contracts so unless Android sets start significantly undercutting the iPhone then that doesn't apply here. Indeed given that the mobile phone is something of a status symbol a market awash with cheap Android clones may even be counterproductive.
- Smartphones are as much fashion statements as a utilitarian devices meaning that design of the handset, operating system and application softeware is crucial. Here is where I think Apple have the edge. The key principles at the core of Apple are superior design and controlling the entire end to end user experience.

Will Android overtake the iPhone - almost certainly, but will that be at the expense of Apple. I don't think so. I suspect that it will be Nokia, Microsoft and RIM have more to fear from this weeks announcements.

Object Blues

One of the key differentiators between Mac OSX and Windows, according to quotes attributed to Steve Jobs, is that Mac OSX is Object Orientated. He places this fact at the heart of a key productivity advantage allowing Apple to turn a major release every 18 month or so. Redmond seems to take a lot longer than that for Windows. It's also enabled them to turn out the respective iPhone and iPad OS's relatively quickly.

That's fine as far as it goes but I personally have always had a bit of an issue with OOP (Object Orientated Programming) in the real world in the fact that it isn't exactly consistent with the RDBMS view of the world.

- OOP is Function Centric whereas Relational is Data Centric

IMHO OOP works well when you're writing things that are function centric (like operating systems, flashy web sites, computer games, graphics packages) but is less successful when writing large data handling systems (like data warehouses etl's, high volume transaction systems).

When we have to merge the object and relational world together we have three options. The first is to use an Object Relational Bridge technology or secondly we store Object datatypes inside an RDBMS. Both of the represent the RDBMS is an OO friendly format.

Then of course there's the third way which is to use a OOP language (like Java) and write code that doesn't conform to OOP basics negating all the benefits of Object Orientation. Guess which option I've mainly seen in my travels.

Benson - 9th Generation PC

I was a huge fan of Paul Woakes' groundbreaking 'Mercenary' computer game, which is probably best remembered for its smooth 3D vector and polygonal graphics. What is perhaps less memorable about the game was that your character was guided through the game by a wiseass sidekick called Benson, a so called 9th generation PC. Benson would alert you when you were under attack, communicate with the locals (the Paylars and Mechanoids), etc. At the time I imagined that Benson was some sort of wearable PDA like device - maybe strapped to your arm, for example. I certainly didn't believe that a 9th generation PC was some beige box, screen and keyboard that you lugged around an alien landscape.

So this has got me thinking - what would the ninth generations of PC look like?

1st - Well a first generation PC is easy - your probably still using one on your desk today
2nd - That would have to be the laptop
3rd - I'm figuring that would be a PDA (Palm Pilots, Psions, Windows CE) or smartphone (iPhone, Blackberry, etc.) - If I'm honest these are pretty close to what I imagined Benson would be twenty years ago - only perhaps wearable.
4th - Is it the tablet? Time will tell.

What the 5th - 9th generations are still open for the likes of futurologists and sci-fi fans to debate, but here are some candidates:

I'm thinking that 5th generation PC's will be devices like an augmented reality e-paper displays as seen in the movie Red Planet. Alternatively they could be wearable PC's that display augmented reality information onto a HUD style goggles/spectacles, or as some have proposed, contact lenses.

Further afield is impossible to predict but if I had to have a stab at it then genrations 6-9 would adopt technologies proposed in many sci-fi movies (Firefox, Strange Days, Existenz, The Lawnmover Man, The Matrix, Johnny Mnemonic, etc.) which interact directly with our brains via some digital thought bridge, as scary as that might seem.

The one thing I can be certain of - that the existing first gen PC won't be around forever.

ROLAP smolap

One of the first ROLAP tools that I came across was Oracle's Discoverer product. As one of Larry's consultants I lead a Data Warehouse Team that delivered our reports using it when it was a brand new product. So new in fact that the client didn't realise that the paint hadn't dried on it and it was actually pre production software. They assumed that Discoverer 3.0 had been preceeded by versions 1.0 and 2.0. and there's another story in there about trusting Oracle Sales and Marketing, but I digress.

Some 12 years later I came across Oracle Discoverer again. To my suprise very little appears to have changed. The EUL and full client looked almost identical. I'm sure that under the hood there have been some changes for intranet, pdf's and web delivery but I'm still a bit amazed about the lack of innovation in the ROLAP world.

Business Objects finally seem to be getting things together with BOXI R3 and I have to admit that I haven't seen Cognos's stuff for a while so for them I can't comment.

The only real innovation I've seen in the last few years was ProClarity, before they were swallowed up by Microsoft, but that's OLAP and not ROLAP offering.

A few years ago I started to believe that the Reporting tools were stagnating and that cubes - whether OLAP or ROLAP weren't the answer. I hoped that the move into RIA (Rich Internet Applications) and tools like Curl would fill that gap but as yet nothing seems to have developed there.

Maybe new platforms like the iPhone and more importantly the iPad will spur the sleeping Reporting giants into a new series of innovation. I hope so.

Welcome to the Social .... (Social Security that is!)

When I started in IT the dominant player was IBM. It's mainframes were just starting to be challenged by the likes of AS/400's, also from IBM, Dec VAX machines and the UNIX upstarts from the likes of Sun, HP and, you guessed it, IBM.

Big Blue dominated the IT landscape in a way that is unimaginable in today's market. PC's were referred to as genuine IBM's or inferior clones. Disk was often called DASD (Direct Access Serial Device), Errors were referred to as Abends. Job ads like "COBOL retrain to RPG/400 or PL/1" were commonplace. All IBM speak.

So what happended? Well nobody came along and built a better mainframe so IBM's fall from the top perch wasn't through like for like competition. It dominance was eroded on all fronts by the arrival of client server computing whose winners were the likes of Microsoft, HP, Sun, Oracle, Ingres, etc. For the record IBM didn't die, it adapted and is still a very successful IT company - but it doesn't dominate IT like it used to.

Many portray Microsoft as the natural successor to IBM and to my eyes Microsoft has started is downward decent from Top Dog to Also Ran. It still dominates the desktop OS and office productivity suites but apart from this its hits are thin on the ground. It does well with its RDBMS offering, SQL Server and the Xbox has made them a few quid. Where it has failed spectacularly was its inability to leverage its market dominance in the internet and now mobile internet. Bing, Zune and Windows Mobile are hardly destined for greatness, are they? Microsoft's great cash cow has always been Windows and Office software, mostly sold by default on the back of new PC and Laptop sales.

My question is that if we accept my previous assertion that we are on the cusp of a new paradigm of mobile computing driven by smartphones and especially tablet computers then what happens to the PC. If it goes out of fashion, initially in the home and laterly in the workplace, then what will become of Microsoft once its cash cow is slain? I suspect this is the question is keeping the lights burning in Redmond right now. And Cupertino and Mountain View